Jewish #Disruption©


Jewish #Disruption©

Parashat Terumah 5779 - February 9, 2019




Facebook has a motto that they were famous for, and now are infamous:
'Move fast and break things' – it speaks to their company, the tech industry in general who values the concept of disruption. Disruption might seem like a negative term, but recently, it has become the ideal for any company. Move fast and break things. Disruption is the new model. Disruption leads to innovation, to startups and new technologies. But it also leads to people and companies being left behind – people losing their purpose. The new overtakes the old, and the old slink away. I wanted to read you something that challenges the concept of disruption:

“At a certain point — somewhere on the way from sounding smart and buzzy to becoming an over-worn cliché — a word loses its power. Disrupt is a good word we have mistreated terribly to the point it has become powerless. We’ve forgotten what it means, even as several smart people have written columns dedicated to reminding us about what it means, really, to disrupt an industry today. I will make this simple (not smart) and short (not long): a disruption is a breaking apart, or renting asunder, or falling to pieces. A disruption is a bad, unsettling, untidy thing.” - (Ryan Bradley, Time to retire theword 'disrupt')

What we see here is a challenge to breaking things. But I want to state something you may not realize – we are here, in this place, praying out of this book, because of disruption. So, today, I want to talk about three disruptions that we find, one in the Torah, one in the Mishnah, and one today.

I love to ask the following question – tell me a place where you have felt God's presence strongly. I like to call these Sinai moments – the lightning and thunder, the wonders and miracles. Seeing sounds and hearing colors (Exodus 20:18). But those moments just don't last, if they did, they wouldn't be special. Bnai Israel has just experienced God – from plagues, to the splitting of a sea, and the giving of the Torah. Now, just a day later, we are here in Terumah, and God gives the following command:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם׃
And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. (Exodus 25:8)

Why not just live in Sinai? Because you can't, and God knows this. Sinai is a stop on the road to the Promised Land, a very important stop, but it's just a place. Ramban, a famous French Medieval commentator wrote an introduction to this parashah, probably because he saw it as a pivotal moment. He writes the following: “The mystery behind the Tabernacle is that God's presence, which dwelled publicly on Mount Sinai would discreetly do the same in the Tabernacle. He notes similarities in language between the two incidents. He writes, “The Presence that Israel saw at Sinai would always be with them in the Tabernacle. The same utterance that communicated with Moses on Mount Sinai would come to him when he entered the Tabernacle.” The Tabernacle is the same as Sinai; the Tabernacle is the portable mountain. But it's even bigger than a reconceptualizing of the Sinai experience, it is also a new beginning. The JPS commentary points out that the completed Tabernacle is erected in New Year's day as we read in Exodus 40:17. Nachum Sarna writes, “This underscores the idea that a new era in the life of the people has begun...”

The Mishkan becomes the place where God dwells and it is the precursor for the Holy Temple. How could the people even imagine worshiping God without the Mishkan? We can leave Sinai because Sinai is just a place where God once dwelled – but God dwells with us, wherever we go, God is portable.

But all good things come to an end, and so what happens when the Temple is destroyed and never rebuilt? About ten years ago, one of our congregants asked me a question during my interview process: “which Rabbi, dead or alive, do you admire the most?” It's a tough question, think about it. I blurted out, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai. Of course, the next question, why? Here's the story of Yohanan Ben Zakkai...

The year, 70 CE, the place: Jerusalem. Now we knew what happened that year, Jerusalem is under siege, the Romans are at the gates, the extremists inside Jerusalem have fully taken over. In fact, his nephew was the leader of the Sicari, the extremist zealots. He pleads with his nephew to give up the fight, it's over, and everyone will die of hunger. But his nephew cannot surrender because he will be killed by his followers – the end is inevitable, it's just a matter of time. So they devise a plan – Rabban Yohanan, who is considered the rabbi of rabbis, will pretend to play dead. They are going to sneak him out of Jerusalem, and he is going to meet with none other than General Vespasian, the General is who is laying siege to Jerusalem. He approaches the General and he calls him King. Vespasian says, I should kill you for calling me king, I'm not Caesar. It is at that moment that a servent comes in with a note from Rome: Ceasar is dead, and you are going to be the new King.

Vespasian is impressed – a prophet rabbi. Then, Vespasian knows he is going to ask him to save Jerusalem. He says Rabbi, and I'm paraphrasing, don't even think about it, Jerusalem is as good as destroyed. Yohanan says, ok, but please, leave me Yavneh, one small little town that no one cares about, and the sages who live there. Vespasian will be Ceasar, who cares about some pesky rabbis. You can have Yavneh, but we are still taking Jerusalem. And so why was he a rabbi whom I admire?

Because without Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai, none of us would be here. We would have gone down in flames with the second Temple. It's the rabbis whose center is no longer the Holy Temple, but the Mikdash Me'at – the Batei Knesset, the synagogue. Synagogues were around during the Second Temple period, but slowly they become the center over time. (BT Gitten 56a-b)

Yohanan was able to secure the future, by innovating in the present, while also bringing the past with him.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “[The Israeli historian] Menachem Stern wrote “in establishing the synagogue, Judaism created one of the greatest revolutions in the history of religion and society, for the synagogue was an entirely new environment for divine service, of a type unknown anywhere before.” It became, according to [the historian] Salo Baron, the institution through which the exilic community “completely shifted the emphasis from the place of worship, the Sanctuary, to the gathering of worshippers, the congregation, assembled at any time and any place in God’s wide world.” The synagogue became Jerusalem in exile, the home of the Jewish heart. It is the ultimate expression of monotheism—that wherever we gather to turn our hearts toward heaven, there, the Divine Presence can be found, for God is everywhere.

How can we live without the Temple?!? How can we live without Jerusalem?!? Where will we find God?

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם׃
And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. (Exodus 25:8)
Dwell among them, not it. What is them? The answer was always there – to dwell in them, in us, in our hearts, that is where God will dwell. In our synagogues, in our homes, whenever we study Torah, or eat or drink, or do acts of loving kindness. When we do Godly things, God will be with us.

After each disruption, brought on by outside forces, we have constantly evolved and innovated, but all our innovations have been based on the past. In the first real teaching of the Ethics of our Fathers (1:2), we read the following:

שִׁמְעוֹן הַצַּדִּיק הָיָה מִשְּׁיָרֵי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה. הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, עַל שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים הָעוֹלָם עוֹמֵד, עַל הַתּוֹרָה וְעַל הָעֲבוֹדָה וְעַל גְּמִילוּת חֲסָדִים:
Shimon the Righteous was from the remnants of the Great Assembly. He would say, "On three things the world stands: on the Torah, on the service and on acts of loving kindness."

Shimon the Righteous was the last remaining member of the Great Assembly, the authority of Judaism in Jerusalem. He is among the earliest of the rabbis of the Talmud. He says that the world stood on three things, Torah, Temple service, and acts of loving kindness. What do we do in a world where we cannot do Avodah? Avodah isn't only Temple service, it is service of the heart, prayer.

The future is built upon the past. This is what the tech giants don't understand. When we discard the wisdom of the past, when we are eager to replace and say that our way is new and improved, we are worse off. In Judaism, we think differently; as the famous Jewish innovator Rav Kook said we, “make the old new, and the new holy.”

Move fast and break things – it grew Facebook, but it's gotten them into much trouble. Our tradition teaches us that Sinai, the Mishkan and the Synagogue are all connected, and yet, they are different. The only constant in the world is change, it is why I am a Conservative Jew, because I believe in tradition, but also in innovation.

William Pollard, a 20th century physicist and Episcopal priest known as the Atomic Deacon for his quest to marry science and faith famously said, “Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” And so we see that business as usual, especially in the synagogue business, isn't cutting it. In South Palm Beach County, there are 69,000 households, and only 10% are affiliated with a synagogue. We need to ask ourselves tough questions, and come up with innovative answers. And yet, over the last 10 years, our congregation has grown by roughly 60%, so we are doing something right.

Part of our vision statement reads the following: We ENGAGE (לְהִתְעַסֵק - l'hit’aseik) by incubating (לְטַפֵּחַ - l’tapeach) new ways of building Jewish communal experience. We must embrace innovation built upon the richness of our past. We stand on the shoulders of giants – we can see clearer, but only because we stand on them. We secure the future, by honoring the past, and innovating in the present.


As we think about our future here, I want us to remember the lesson of good disruption; of the journey from Sinai, to the Mishkan, to the synagogue. There are some new things coming soon, and I want all of you to be a part of it. All I have to say is, stay tuned.


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