Show Your Work - December 2019/January 2020 - Creation Day 3

God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” and it was so. God called the dry land “earth”, and the gathering of waters, God called “seas”. And God saw that this was good. And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: seed bearing plants of every kind, and  trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.  [Gen. 1:9-13 New JPS Tanakh]

Biblical scholars note that one of the reasons for the precision of the Genesis chapter one story of creation is to differentiate Jewish culture, and its foundational stories, from the surrounding cultures.  In the Mesopotamian creation story, the goddess Tiamat (like the Hebrew word tahom - the deep mentioned in Torah) is killed by the god Marduk, who creates the earth from her remains. Human beings sprout up as the body deteriorates.  Our Biblical story is not only more focussed on the intentionality of the world’s creation, by a single divinity, but also puts forth a story of order, to counter the chaos that came before.  Each day has its specific category of creation, and the second three days echo the first three  - light on day one; sun and moon on day four; heaven and seas on day two, and fish and birds on day five; land and grasses on day three, and animals and humans on day six.  That one day builds on the next is evidence of order.  Order is evidence of planning and intention.

On the third day, plants are created - each according to their kind, and with their own seed included.  Each plant is created with the ability to reproduce itself.  There is no concept of evolution - necessary things come to be and then will always be, as planned at the beginning.  For people living in a chaotic world, order and intention are a comfort.  It is harrowing to imagine that planting a peach pit might yield an apple tree or a banana bush.  We want to know the end result, before we start off at the beginning.

We are so desirous of knowing the end of things, because life so often throws us twists and turns.  We may enjoy surprises - but really only good surprises.  We are much happier knowing there is a prize in the CrackerJack box, then imagining the fictional Harry Potter’s Bertie Bott’s jellybeans that may be delicious, or may be disgusting.  In a discussion the other day, an agnostic said that they were quite comfortable with not knowing the answers, and that trying to imagine God really existed was difficult.  I responded that God is the concept that we put in as the answer, for whatever question it is that plagues us.  We wish that, like our childhood math books, the answer is at the back, so that eventually we can just figure out if we are right or wrong.  The most annoying thing in math class was that our teachers always insisted that we show the work, when we just wanted to get to the end.

Perhaps Genesis teaches us a lesson - that God is not the answer, not the one missing piece which causes everything to make sense, but God is really in the messy scribbles that we make on the side of the page.  We would love for God to be the answer - let alone an easily accessible and understandable one, but we are closest to the Divine when we are doing the work of living, not trying to skip to the end.

It would be lovely if we knew that each thing we planted would reproduce the ideal that we had when we planted it; even that the recipes of our grandparents would turn out just like we remembered them.  Sometimes they do, sometimes they do not.  Sometimes, they even turn out better.  But, the love and memory is not found in that fleeting moment of consuming, but in the process of remembering and reconstructing.  When we imagine engaging in the same acts as those we have loved, they (and their memories) inhabit us, so much more so than at the end.

The Torah gives us the story of creation - not just a list of what has been created.  Our job is not to be impressed by the order, but to be inspired to do the work on our own.

The Sky's the Limit - October/November 2019 - Creation Day 2

God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.” God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse shamayim (sky/heaven). And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. [Gen. 1:6-8, New JPS Tanakh]

When I was in rabbinic school, my teacher, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, taught us that havdalah was not the only moment of distinction marked by Judaism.  Havdalah, which means “separation”, is our acknowledgement that Shabbat is different from the other days of the week. In the last prayer of the ceremony, we mark several distinctions - between Shabbat and the other days, between that which is kadosh - holy - and that which is ordinary.  This trimester, as we explain about lifecycle events in Judaism, we talk about how life might continue uninterrupted, if we did not stop to notice differences.  I asked our Religious School faculty (teachers and madrichim - high school aides) when they became, or thought they would become, adults.  As every time when I ask this question, answers ranged from going to college, moving into a first apartment/home, having a child, when a parent dies.  We create a moment of adulthood, or at least the beginning of Jewish adulthood, with bar and bat mitzvah.  The moment is special because we have decided it is so.  We make a distinction which allows us to celebrate a process that is much longer than one moment.

A lens to understanding Judaism is that it teaches us to discern things in the world - one day from the next; one week from another, one just act from another which may be unjust.  We must learn to distinguish difference before we can make choices.  The Torah teaches us that this knowledge began when our first ancestors ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but our first story of creation is all about separation and difference. The very concept of day is created after the first separation of light from darkness.  The second day consists of a separation which is difficult for our modern cosmology - the construction of a barrier between the waters; making waters above, and waters below, separated by the heavens.  For our Biblical ancestors, there was water underneath the earth (That’s why wells work.) and water above the earth (That’s where rain comes from.)  Without a firm barrier between them, all is water - as the flood story was not just about rain, but about the waters rising up from below as well; the firmament being removed.

The kabbalistic mystics influenced by Rabbi Isaac Luria imagine that before creation, God was everywhere.  God, being perfect and therefore unchanging, had to withdraw (tzimtzum) from a portion of the universe in order to allow space for the world. Let us think about that image.  All around the world we live in is our ideal, our aspiration to the Divine.  We are separated from that aspiration by the skies above, the heaven that we imagine.  On the one hand, how frustrating to be able see perfection, but be unable to attain it.  On the other, as the poet Browning said, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?” [Robert Browning, in the poem “Andrea del Sarto”]  There is no moment that we as human beings are satisfied that we cannot be better, do better.  Part of human nature is to be unsatisfied.  What better focus for that dissatisfaction than in striving to bring heaven to earth?

This year, as we mark another cycle around the sun, five thousand, seven hundred and eighty such spins, as our text counts since that first day of creation, we can look again to the firmament - the barrier that does not keep us from the ideal, but draws us forward and upward.  The waters have been separated, not to remove us, but to inspire.  Let us look up and be inspired.

Let There Be Light - September 2019 - Creation Day 1

[As there will be six issues printed of the Temple Topics this year, I thought it would be good to go back to the beginning, and focus each column on one day of the first creation story of the Torah.]

When God began to create heaven and earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day. [Gen. 1:1-5, New JPS Tanakh]

In distinction from our ahistorical ancestors, we believe that things change, that there is an arc of history, perhaps moving forward in knowledge and civilization.  If we take that backwards, there must have been a starting point.  Cosmologists believe that the universe began with a “big bang” - that there was nothing and then there was something.  Our Jewish understanding has several versions of how it all came to be - two of them prominently placed at the beginning of our sacred text, the Torah.  The first version posits an orderly creation - six days with a development from nothingness to the world that we have received.

At the beginning, all was potential.  That which was to change things from nothing to something, the Creator we refer to as God, waited and considered in that potentiality: What would be and how should that existence be created?  The first thing was to get things moving to create time, and thus: a first day.  Day and night are marked by darkness and light, so God created light - and by creating light, defined darkness as its opposite. 

We often define ourselves by our creations - our work, our family, the home(s) that we have owned or made our own.  Some of us create more tangibly with visible objects.  We also create with words - spoken or written.  The way that we treat those around us is a creates the world that we live in; the environment that we inhabit.  Judaism challenges us to imagine each new year as a unique creation.  It is colored by the year that has come before, by who we have been up until that point.  Yet, the High HolyDays tell us that we are not solely defined by what we have done - that we can resolve to be different, once we have made healing for what we have done. To say goodbye to our old selves, or at least the parts that we want to leave behind, we are instructed to take a self-inventory, and to make right for others the wrongs that we have done.  Then, without baggage, we can imagine who we would be in the new year.

If we do it right, the idea of the new year can strike us like the light of creation - illuminating the path forward.  Once we have our light, we can define darkness - that which we would rather not do. Only once we have taken the decision to move forward, can we understand where we should and should not tread.

In the end, if the path is well imagined, we are inspired to travel upon it.  Then, just as God said at the end of the first day, it will be good - good for us, good for others, good for the world.  Let us resolve in this new year to pause, to consider what we are creating, to prepare ourselves for that new world, and, illuminated by the light of purpose, do our best to do good.

Shanah tovah,

Rabbi Abraham

Pray As If It Means (Some/Every)thing - Summer 2019 - Liturgy #8

And may the worship of Your people, Israel, be always be acceptable - God who is near to all who call.
Avodah (R’tzei) - T’fillah section of the liturgy

Prayer is a tricky thing.  We spend a great deal of time at the Temple teaching children the correct forms of Jewish communal prayer - the right pronunciation, tune or chant, and choreography.  Recently, we have begun to go deeper, and help them find meaning not only in individual prayers, but in worship as a whole.  We are getting better at explaining why Jews come together to pray, and what we hope to get out of those moments.  We spend virtually no time at all on individual prayer - on the communication with the Divine that happens outside of prescribed worship; personal prayer which does not require the participation of others.

One of the common questions that I hear from students is, “Why do I have to learn Hebrew?”  Beyond the question of difficulty and effort, there is an earnest inquiry - “Doesn’t God understand every language?”  The answer that we give is about community - Jews throughout history and all over the world today, pray (at least in part) in Hebrew.  Our Confirmation students, when we worship together with our sister congregation in Budapest, feel at home because, while the Hungarian parts are different, as are some of the tunes, the words of the Sh’ma, the v’ahavta, the aleinu, and so much else is familiar.  At that moment a bond is formed: we have something in common.

Yet the question remains valid. Further, how can we create spontaneous, heartfelt, personal prayer, in a language which we do not speak or even fully understand?  The prayer known as the avodah comes to answer this question.  When the rabbinic sages of two thousand years ago were moving Jewish worship from sacrifices offered in the (then newly destroyed) Temple in Jerusalem to this new concept of offering up words of prayer, they were nervous about whether it would work - whether the act of verbal prayer would carry the power and transformation of sacrifice.  In the service, at the end of the amidah, they placed this prayer, which was both a hope and an apology for the whole effort.  We ask God, in words, that our prayers will be acceptable, in place of those sacrifices.  The original version contained a promise to return to sacrifice once the Temple was rebuilt; that this was only a temporary solution, for use in exile.  Reform Judaism, which threw out the idea of a Messianic return to a rebuilt Temple, removed that reference, but kept the idea of praying that our prayer would be sufficient, would be formed correctly, would be pleasing, would be acceptable.

However, this prayer has more meaning than just an apologia for prayer in place of sacrifice.  The words imagine a greater truth - whatever we offer in worship to God, we trust it will be acceptable, as we believe that God is near to those who call.  The very act of reaching out to God is what draws God near.  For those who believe in a Theistic God - a God who hears prayers and responds, the idea is easily comprehensible.  For those with different Divine concepts, this metaphor may tend to alienate rather than bring close.  Let us then imagine the motion in the opposite direction.  When we open ourselves up to the Divine, then we let God, who is already near, in.  God, not as an external object or separate being, but, perhaps, the concept that ties us to other creatures, the spark we all have in common.  For those who understand God as the voice within themselves that calls them to do better, prayer is the moment of silencing the other voices, and focussing on the Divine, on our better nature.  For those who are called to transcendence by the world around them, prayer is the moment to step away from the centrality of ourselves, and be overwhelmed by the world of nature.
May the worship of Your people Israel, be acceptable to You, God who is near to all who call.  No matter what the nature of that worship, if it is a moment of opening ourselves up, of allowing the concept of something beyond ourselves - our ties to humanity, to each other, to the world, to a higher power - then let us learn to accept that moment as true worship and prayer.  Only then can we find the usefulness of prayer, once we open ourselves up to the possibility that we actually have the power to do it correctly.




Let us end this year’s study of liturgy with the words that bring us out of our silent prayer, our prayer of the heart, in our worship service - May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts, be right and proper prayers before You, our sure and secure Anchor, the Idea through which we save the world.

Truth and Hope - April/May 2019 - Liturgy #7

All this is true and trustworthy, and sustaining for us... Evening G’ulah
True and enduring, beloved, and precious, awesome, good, and beautiful is this teaching - for us, forever. - Morning G’ulah

The section known as the sh’ma and its blessings is added to each evening and morning service.  In addition to the bar’chu and sh’ma/v’ahavta, the hashkiveinu - which is added in the evening, and the v’shamru - which is added on shabbat evening, there are three prayers that highlight the three most important formative events in our Jewish history - creation, revelation, and redemption.  Creation (ma’ariv aravim in the evening or yotzeir or in the morning) and revelation (ahavat olam in the evening or ahava rabbah in the morning) occur between the bar’chu and the sh’ma/v’ahavta.  The first obviously commemorates the creation of the world and humanity - a universalistic event. The second commemorates standing at Mount Sinai and entering into covenant with the Divine, through the receipt of the commandments.  The third, the g’ulah, includes not just words from the song we sang after the parting of the sea - the mi chamocha, but a section before which, in both the evening and the morning, begins with the word emet - truth.

Amateur historians may note that the prayers do not proceed in the order of the historical events.  The world was created, then we were redeemed from slavery, then we received the revelation at Mount Sinai.  Yet, the liturgical norm is to read the creation prayer, then the revelation prayer, and then the redemption prayer, only after the sh’ma/v’ahavta.  The original authors of the prayerbook explained that while creation and revelation had already happened, there was still need for a future redemption.  The exodus from Egypt was one example of God freeing us. They believed there would be more to come in the future, ending with the redemption of the messianic age, when all would be free forever. Therefore, while we remember being freed from slavery in the past, we also look to the future.

Looking to the future is the reason for the emphasis on truth in the g’ulah. We believe in the truth of past and future redemption.  Just like a scientific hypothesis that is proven by repeated results, we look to our past to prove the future. Our ancestors who were exiled in Babylon after the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE, brought back the Torah with its story of Egyptian redemption, which kept them faithfully awaiting their own journey to freedom.  I had lunch with a Black pastor this week who told me that so many African-Americans became Christian, because the Exodus story of redemption gave them hope of escaping slavery.  They rejected the Christianity that justified slavery and focussed on the Old Testament teaching of liberation.

For Jews and for African-Americans (and doubly so for those who are both), the truth of eventual redemption is a desperate hope that we cling to against all odds.  Today, as we see anti-Semitism on the rise, tropes that we thought were gone forever re-appear, we might despair at ever truly finding freedom from fear.  African-Americans, who may have escaped the bonds of chattel slavery, once again found themselves deprived of rights and freedom by Jim Crow laws in the South and institutionalized discrimination in the North.  After the Civil Rights victories of the 1960’s, overt racism moved underground, while structural discrimination in housing, education, and imprisonment rose in proportion.  Today, even overt racism has reappeared, with groups championing the superiority of the white, European race.  Where is the freedom promised in previous redemptions?  At what point do we give up hope?

True and enduring, beloved and precious; it is true and trustworthy - and sustains us.  The g’ulah comes to remind us that there is a path forward, that redemption will come.  In our modern world, we have learned the lessons of previous journeys and know that we must, like the Biblical Nachshon, take the first steps ourselves.  When we despair, we not only turn to the repeated redemptions of our past, but also look to find partners who have travelled similar paths.  The alliance between African-Americans and Jews in the 1960’s came out of this shared language of Exodus and common understanding of redemption.  The connection has frayed in the past decades.  Facing resurging racism and anti-Semitism, we have to work together on both sides to find those truths and restore hope together.  Those are the truths that are true and enduring, beloved and precious - loving the stranger as ourselves, and standing together to pursue justice and peace.

Body and Soul - March 2019 - Liturgy #6

Blessed are You, Adonai, Healer of all flesh, Miracle-Maker. - Asher yatzar, morning liturgy
Blessed are You, Adonai, in whose hands are the souls of every living being, and the breath of every corporeal human. - Elohai nishamah [These prayers are paired in the morning liturgy.]

There is an argument for faith in the existence of God that goes this way: When asked, how can a rational person believe in an invisible God, with no proof of God’s action in the world, the answer is that love, too, is invisible, but we believe in it all the same.  We ascribe to love many tangible effects - emotional and even physical.  We spend a great deal of effort in pursuing love; even in discussing the subject.

Our lives are not just the product of the visible and the tangible, that which is measurable by science.  The rabbis who created the prayerbook saw a duality that they needed to respect in their order of worship. The section of the service now known as the morning blessings, are a collection of the realizations that a reflective (feel free to read “mindful”) person might have as they come into a new day.  One of those on-going revelations was the push and pull between physicality and incorporeality. 

We are reminded each morning of the physical needs of our bodies, as we creak out of bed into the bathroom.  The asher yatzar, which is sometimes known as the bathroom prayer, is a rueful acknowledgement that our bodies are complex; that sometimes parts that are supposed to open, close,  and parts that are supposed to stay closed, open.  Sometimes this is a minor inconvenience; sometimes it can be mortal.  The text of the prayer challenges God by saying that if the right parts are not doing the right things, we are unable to praise God, let alone do anything else.

Immediately following this prayer, which is firmly rooted in the concrete and touch-able, the Sages contemplated the invisible parts of our existence, those things which we cannot see, hear, touch or taste, but nonetheless, propel us forward in our daily journeys.  There is breath - inhaling and exhaling- a mixture of tangible and intangible.  There is thought - abstract and that which causes us to move. There are emotions - which may cause physical reactions but are invisible in and of themselves.  We thank God for having returned those things, which may be invisible to us while we sleep, into our bodies each morning.  Together, this intangibles make up the soul - a word in English with at least three different words in Hebrew - some connected to breath, to wind, to spirit.  The Sages imagined there was an invisible animation of all life, but also a different animation of thought and emotion.

God is the source of both - a body so complex and intricate that we still struggle to understand how it works, and so often fail to find ways to fix it when it does not; and a soul invisible and unmeasurable, but also so obvious when no longer present.  We acknowledge the frailty of each part, on its own, as well as delicate balance between as we come to these prayers each morning.  When so much is beyond our power, we ask for the visible and invisible to be maintained, to remain in relationship and in balance, so that we may pursue the tasks of our life.

Judaism is a pretext to stand back and see the context of our lives - not only to learn how we should act and what our role is in the world, but also a chance for us to appreciate what we have; to acknowledge the fear and the knife’s edge on which we walk, yet to let that fear go in the common knowledge that the price we pay for existence is often anxiety for its continuance.

We pray and we have faith, because there are things that we can see and touch, and things that we cannot; things that we can influence, and things that are beyond our grasp.  Prayer may be an attempt to control, a method to understand, or even a moment to give thanks.  Prayer is invisible, except as it affects what we do.

#createdintheDivineimage - February 2019 - Liturgy #5

Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, who has made me in the Divine image

Nisim b’chol yom (Miracles of Every Day), Morning Blessings

In his book, The Three Blessings, Rabbi Yoel Kahn traces the history of three of the blessings of the prayer that we call the nisim b’chol yom - the Miracles of Every Day, found in the morning blessings section of the daily and holiday morning service.  He traces them to an aphorism common in Hellenistic influenced civilizations, and ascribed to the philosopher, Aristotle: “There were three blessings for which he was grateful to fortune: First, that I was born a human being and not one of the brutes; next that I was born a man and not a woman; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian.”  Perhaps one could imagine that Aristotle was grateful to be a part of society which allowed him to engage in study and philosophic contemplation, which he imagined might be impossible were he any other than those three things, although in our modern eyes, he comes across as a xenophobic misogynist.

Later Jewish liturgical development took these three blessings and adapted them for inclusion into the blessing recited each morning, that became the nisim b’chol yom.  The Jewish formulation was more of a glass half-empty version: “Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, who did not make me a slave; ... who did not make me a goy (non-Jew); ... who did not make me a woman.”  Again, a charitable interpretation would imagine that we were supposed to thankful for being able to take up ol mitzvot - the yoke of the commandments, which neither slaves nor non-Jews are obligated to do, and which is not fully required of women (at least not the positive, time-bound mitzvot).  However, one might also imagine how this appeared to Jewish women, who watched their sons, fathers, and husbands rejoice each morning that they were not of the same gender as their sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers.  In modern terms, we call this a micro-aggression (although this might be more of a macro) - a statement that, perhaps unknowingly, makes others feel separate, apart, denigrated. 

Kahn notes that he found a medieval prayerbook that had been created for a woman that said the opposite, which might indicate that the blessing was about celebrating one’s own nature, but it is also possible that this change was a protest at the normative formulation.  When the Reform movement brought the nisim b’chol yom back into its liturgy, a few changes were made to make the prayer more affirmative.  We thank God for having been created free, for making us of Israel, and for making us b’tzelem elohim - the phrase from the first creation in Genesis, which we translate as in the image of God.  The reference is even more pointed because the rest of the line states, “God created humanity in God’s own image, in the image of God - male and female, God created them.” [Gen. 1:27]  This was actually the second revision.  The first was thanking God for creating me male/female, where the reader could choose their preference.

The earliest Reform Jews in Germany began the process of equalizing Judaism for men and women.  A conference was scheduled on the role of women in Judaism, which was never held, but the early Reformers did proclaim that, contrary to traditional halakhah, men and women were equally bound and equally able to fulfill the mitzvot of Judaism.  Despite that, only one woman was ordained in Germany (and privately, not by a seminary) just prior to World War II - Rabbi Regina Jonas.  The first woman ordained in a Reform seminary was Rabbi Sally Priesand, in 1972.  It has been one of the great privileges of my life to have had the opportunity to learn from Rabbi Priesand and her successors the g’dolei hador (great ones of the generation) and the challenges they faced finding their place in Jewish life.  Their stories are horrific.  What is even more horrific is that many of the prejudices they faced almost fifty years ago are still prevalent today.

The Lutheran Church in North Carolina put together a video this past year that detailed only the tamest of things that had been said to female pastors, called, “Seriously?” I commend you to watch it.  Students at the Conservative Jewish seminary, JTS, created a Purim Spiel called “If Men Rabbis Were Spoken To The Way Women Rabbis Are Spoken To”  But for confidentiality, I could share with you the horrifying statements made to female rabbis and, worse, the situations of harassment and sexual predation that colleagues have endured which shocked me when a thread was created on our Reform Rabbis’ Facebook page. 

The problem is not one-way.  There are rabbis who make inappropriate comments and put congregants and staff members in uncomfortable situations.  There are congregants and volunteer leaders that put each other in such situations. Our tendency is to sweep such incidents under the rug, imagining that we must have heard wrong, or that the person offending is just a product of their upbringing or culture.  In doing this, we further victimize the recipient of the offense, rather than making our congregation a safe place for them, and for everyone.  When we make people uncomfortable in our synagogue home, and compound the offense by not sympathizing, or worse, not believing them, we drive them out not only of our community, but often from Judaism.

We must commit, as a congregation, to do all that we can to make our community a place where no one feels threatened or lessened because of their gender (or background, or race, or sexual identity or preference, or even politics).  To do that, we need to set clear guidelines for staff and members that allow us to call people out when they are making our space unsafe.  But guidelines are only words on paper.  We need - staff and volunteer leaders alike - to commit to training: training on how to recognize such behavior - in ourselves and others; how to react in the moment; and how to follow up after.

Finally, a word about sexual, physical, and psychological abuse and harassment.  I was told recently by a female colleague, whose father was a rabbi, that her father only had two incidents in his career where people came to him to share personal experiences of abuse or harassment.  As a female rabbi, she had over twenty people come to her in her first year.  We have created a society where people do not feel safe seeking help and comfort, especially by those who are perceived to perpetuate the culture that sweeps such behavior under the rug.  On my part, I pledge to listen, not to judge, and to believe; to be a non-anxious presence and to offer whatever help is requested, not to impose my own solutions.  We need to create a congregation that truly supports and shelters its members.  We can only do that if we recognize the defense mechanisms already in place around us, and consciously tear them down.  Only then will we be able to truly give thanks for the blessing that each and every one of us was created in the Divine image.

I Pledge Allegiance - January 2019 - Liturgy #4

Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God; Adonai is One. - the Sh’ma

Each morning in public school, just before the announcements, we would stand up as a school body and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. What always moved me about the Pledge was the words “and to the Republic for which it stands”.  For me, that meant that we were not pledging ourselves to the piece of fabric hanging off the chalkboard in the front of the room, but to what it symbolized - the idea of the United States of America, as embodied in the Constitution.  We were not idol-worshipping the flag, but rather recommitting ourselves to the ideals of liberty and justice for all.

Reform Judaism in America viewed the sh’ma in the same way.  In the Orthodox tradition, the custom is to rise for the bar’chu, then be seated for the rest of the section of the sh’ma and its blessings.  The Reform Movement, which called the sh’ma the “watchword of our faith”, innovated standing through the first line (sh’ma) and its response (baruch shem kevod), and then being seated for what we separated out as the v’ahavta.  In truth, the line we know as sh’ma (Deut. 6:4) is immediately followed by the beginning of the v’ahavta, without the later added response (baruch shem kevod, which is said under the breath, in Orthodox tradition).  For that reason, non-Reform custom is to say the v’ahavta in whatever pose, standing or sitting, one was saying the first line, sh’ma.  Reform custom, which envisioned itself as the Judaism of the United States and its democratic ideals, is that one would stand particularly for the sh’ma, and that this declaration was tantamount to a public profession of faith, a pledge of allegiance.

In context, the line in Deuteronomy is a command from Moses.  Having recapitulated the Ten Commandments, Moses explains how the covenant is that the people will follow God’s commandments; that this covenant is binding on future generations; and that following these commandments is what will allow us to inherit the land promised to our ancestors.  He then reminds the people of their relationship to a particular divine being.  “Listen [up], O [people who will call themselves] Israel.  [The god designated by the name] yod-hey-vav-hey is our God [and that aforementioned God] yod-hey-vav-hey is [unique and solely] one.”  This statement is immediately followed by a command to love that God.  That love is not an ineffable emotion, but rather a practical endeavor which includes following commandments, teaching them to those that will come later, and using various tools to remember to follow those commandments in all places and times - public and private, night and day.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that our American Reform ancestors saw the sh’ma as not just as a moment of worship, but as a reaffirmation of our commitment to carry out the mitzvot that mattered, the ethics of prophetic Judaism.  Standing up to say the sh’ma was not about clarifying which particular god we worshipped, but rather a communal stance to fulfill our part of the bargain of tikkun olam.  “Listen,” we say to each other, “we worship the same God and agree that God demands of us a path of ethical behavior that is the same for all of us.”  Reform Jews therefore, contrary to others’ custom, kept their eyes open during the sh’ma in order to hold each other to the pledge of behavior.  The sh’ma was not to be an interior moment, but a mutually supportive bonding opportunity.

Perhaps this action is something we miss in our modern world; perhaps this moment is the true reason to attend worship together.  Currently, the time at which the largest number of our congregation stands together is at the moment of kol nidrei - a time not when we pledge to do better, but rather a moment when we ask God to forgive us, in advance, for not living up to our promises in the year to come.  Maybe we need to come together more for sh’ma.  Maybe we need to spend more time looking into each other’s eyes and pushing each other to make the world a better place for all, as well as promising to work together, as a community, in that endeavor.  The secular New Year is a time for resolution - let us resolve together to hear this ancient call, and make the pledge together.