The Secret to Our Greatness©

Parashat Tzav - Shabbat HaGadol 5778/2018
The Secret to Our Greatness©
Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

A couple of months ago, I officiated at a wedding for a young Shaarei Kodesh couple.  The wedding was planned to a tee, every scenario was taken into consideration.  It was an outdoor wedding in winter in Boca Raton - it never rains in the winter.  As I got to the hotel, the rain started coming.  Even my weather app was confused - it said no 0% chance of precipitation.  So we waited, and waited, and the guests sat outside through the drizzle.  Finally, they started coming in, and I’ll never forget what happened next.  A senior woman in a walker came up to me in a huff, “Are you the rabbi?”  I said, “Yes, I am.”  She answered, “It’s raining out there, do something!!!”  I said, “Ma’am, as a rabbi, I might have some powers, but controlling the weather isn’t one of them!”

I bring this up because just this week because a D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. posted the video to his official Facebook page at 7:21 a.m. as snow flurries were hitting the nation’s capital. He said the following:  “Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation, and D.C. keeps talking about, ‘We’re a resilient city.’ And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”

The Rothschilds are a famous European business dynasty descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, an 18th-century Jewish banker who lived in what is today Frankfurt, Germany. The family has repeatedly been subject over the years to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories alleging that they and other Jews clandestinely manipulate world events for their advantage.

I bring this up because even though we are arguably living in the golden age of Judaism, we are still subject to anti-Semitism, from the right, the left, and all around. According to the ADL, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States increased nearly 60% from 2016 to 2017— the largest one-year increase since the organization began tracking the information nearly four decades ago.[1]  There were 1,986 incidents of anti-Semitism in the United States in 2017, the ADL found, which included vandalism and physical assaults and the incidents occurred in all 50 states.

Our Jewish-American community has been rocked by high profile anti-Semitic incidences, the most egregious incident in Charlottesville when hundreds of white supremacists marched chanting, Jews will not replace us.

Living in freedom in the United States, we seem surprised by this - it is unusual for us, but for our ancestors, this feeling of persecution was a part of what it was to be Jewish.  Who can forget the famous joke, what is every Jewish holiday about?  They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.  Passover might be the ultimate example of this feeling - we were slaves, Pharaoh tried to subjugate and kill us, God saved us, and how do we show our gratitude?  In ancient times, we had to eat an entire lamb in one evening. 

Just think about that - the Jewish response to salvation from a near-death experience and continued persecution is…stuffing our faces with an entire lamb. 

But I actually think this might be the secret our, the Jewish people’s, greatness and our resiliency.  Today, I’d like to share what we can learn from this week’s parashah and our Haftarah about how we have overcome incredible odds, and how we can continue to overcome almost anything that stands in our way. 

Our Torah portion offers a taxonomy of sacrifices - there’s a sacrifice for every feeling - but today, I want to focus on just two: the guilt offering and the Thanksgiving offering.

What I found most interesting was that the guilt offering comes right before the Thanksgiving offering.  The guilt offering was offered by individuals who had performed certain sins.  The difference between a guilt offering and a sin offering, a separate offering altogether, is that a guilt offering is offered for unintentional sins (Leviticus 5: 14-16).  As I thought about this idea of unintentional guilt, I could not help but think about my grandparents.  All four of my grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust.  Through the stories of their experiences, I always picked up on something - they lived with a sort of guilt.  Why did they survive, while their family members and friends, many of whom they thought were better people than they, were killed? 

Many of us know about the famous Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel - the famous philosopher, writer, teacher, and social activist that marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  But few of us know a different side to Rabbi Heschel - the guilt that he lived with.  Rabbi Heschel was born in pre-World War II Poland to a great Hassidic dynasty.  He received his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1934, the beginning of the rise of the Nazi party, and the eventual downfall of European Jewry. In October 1938, while living in a rented room in the home of a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Heschel was arrested and deported along with other Jews living in Germany but holding Polish passports.

After 10 months teaching at Warsaw’s Institute for Jewish Study, Heschel fled to London six weeks before the German invasion of Poland thanks to a visa obtained for him by Julian Morgenstern, President of Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, Ohio, who worked tirelessly to secure visas from the U.S. State Department to bring Jewish scholars out of Europe. Ultimately, he was only granted visas for eight of these refugees, collectively known as “The Jewish College in Exile.” For six months, Heschel stayed in London, where his brother Jacob, was serving as Rabbi to an Orthodox congregation. In January 1940, Heschel finally received his American Visa, and arrived in the United States.

Rabbi Neil Gillman, Z’L, was one of his treasured students.  He told us that he rarely spoke about his family who was killed, rather, he spoke about the Holocaust in broader terms.  But Heschel did write the following poem:

When I wash myself with water I shudder, thinking:
This is the sweat of millions of laborers.”
Street-walkers are my bastard sisters,
and sinister criminals–souls perhaps transmigrated from me.
Concerning those murdered,
I think that I encouraged the assassin.
Perhaps I insulted
the disgraced people in my town.
Something in me confesses
“I’m guilty a thousand times for your distress.”
I want to throw my head at your doorsteps–
Prisons, hospitals–and beg forgiveness.”

The Asham, or guilt offering, allowed our ancestors a public way to acknowledge their unintentional sins - the sins which they didn’t know that they performed, but felt guilty about.  It was after the guilt offering that the Todah, or Thanksgiving offering was offered. 

The Todah offering might be the ultimate secret to our resilience, our survival, and our greatness as a people. Our very name, "Yehudi/Jew" is based on the word “Toda.”  The Todah offering was unique - it was given by the individual in thanksgiving for surviving a brush with death.  Today, this manifests itself with the Birhkat HaGomel - when we thank God but state how unworthy we are of God’s goodness. 

Abarbanel (15th century Spanish/Portuguese commentator) notes, since the meat had to be finished that day, the offerer was encouraged to invite relatives, friends and neighbors to eat and celebrate with him. They would be curious to know the reason for the celebration, and he would have the opportunity to share the great wonders of God that precipitated the offering. Such an experience would engender positive and fruitful discussion and involvement.

The Todah offering was the ultimate response to survivor’s guilt - going from the private to the public, sharing food with strangers who will become friends. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “There are three ways to mourn, the first is to cry, the second is to grow silent, and the third is to transform sorrow into song.”

I believe that this might be the secret to our survival and our flourishing - the ability to turn our grief and guilt into something positive.  Rabbi Heschel turned his grief and guilt into a lifelong quest for justice for all.

In his poem, Abraham Joshua Heschel wants to confess his guilt: “I’m guilty a thousand times for your distress.” He wrote these words in Yiddish as a student in pre-Holocaust Europe. Years later, teaching in America, Heschel moved from expressing feelings of personal guilt to a call for an active response.  He writes, “It is important to feel anxiety, it is sinful to wallow in despair. What we need is a total mobilization of the heart, intelligence, and wealth for the purpose of love and justice.”[2]

Love and justice, two things that might seem to be opposing values, yet come together as a whole, Shalem.  On this Shabbat HaGadol, a Shabbat where the prophet Malachi says that our ultimate salvation will come when the hearts of parents and children will return to each other, we stand here in prayer, and many of our teens, especially those who survived the most horrific school shooting in U.S. history, are praying with their legs in marches across the country.  I’m sure many of them are dealing with the trauma of their experience, but also the guilt they hold with them - why did I survive when my friend was killed?  The Jewish tradition seems to be a big part of the #NeverAgain March for Our Lives movement.   And I am sure that Rabbi Heschel’s soul is marching with them - and he is smiling, knowing that a new generation is committed to both love and justice. 

Contrary to popular belief, we, the Jewish people, do not control the weather, or much else, but we can control our reaction to the dangerous storms that harm us.  And we do have an influence on the world – we are a light unto the nations.

As we prepare for the ultimate Todah meal, the Passover seder, let us all reflect upon the lives we have, even if we seem unworthy of them, and let those feelings of individual guilt turn into a song of love and justice to share with all who surround us.  Let us acknowledge the secret to our greatness - our resiliency in the face of injustice, our ability to turn to transform sorrow into song.





[1] http://time.com/5177193/anti-defamation-league-anti-semitism-report-2017/

[2] http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/heschel-religion-and-race-speech-text/

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