October seventh is a new date for us in the Jewish tradition. It’s a strange thing, this date, as it is now ingrained in our psyches – different from the Yom Kippur war, which began on Yom Kippur, because October seventh is not being called the Simchat Torah pogrom, which could actually be a better description. It is just being called October seventh, as the lack of a title expresses our lack of words – ein milim, there are no words – said every Israeli I know and heard.
And this is not a sermon about Israel or about October 7th, even though it would be easy to give one. It is more than that. Those who know me already know, those who don’t will – I have been an overarchiever all my life. So this is a sermon about us, the Jewish people.
The thing is, I cannot look at October seventh without thinking of the entirety of our people, and the entirety of our history.
In the Torah, as we know, as soon as the Jews leave Egypt, with 10 great miracles, a strong hand, an outstretched arm, seeing God’s greatness and presence become explicit and obvious, in ways that us moderns can beg for and never ever get… …. …. – merely three months later, ‘ninety days’, here are the Jews dancing around // a golden calf. That disappointment leads God to almost kill everyone. Moshe, with words we still chant throughout our High Holidays today, Moshe changes God’s mind. And a few months later, here come the 12 spies. If God was disappointed earlier, now God is really upset. Again wants to kill everyone, and Moshe again is able to prevent that – but, here comes the quicker – that generation has to die. Why?
Put this in perspective for a second: why was God so upset this time around? The Jews were definitely not dancing around a golden calf. They were just afraid, not willing to go up to the land. What’s the big deal?
The thing is… God can deal with you not believing in God. And as modernity continues on, God gets really used to that.
But God cannot deal with you or us not believing in the Jewish people. God can’t deal with you not believing in yourself – after all, God Godself believes in you!
Look it up in any siddur – modeh ani, the very first prayer of the day, ends with us saying “great is Your faith”, Your with a capital Y. God has faith in us as individuals and faith in us as the Jewish people.
So when the Jews say “we can’t do this, we can’t go up to the land, we are mere grasshoppers” – God gets Godly mad.
Now humans are capable of incredible things. Take science, for instance. Some of you know that my parents were scientists, and this frames a lot of my views of reality.
Now what really is the greatest thing in my opinion, is when science mixes itself with another of my interests, history, and yet another one, philosophy. Science nerds all know that there is this amazingly interesting field of History of Science.
Now science, you might be surprised to learn, does not grow incrementally – all science historians know that. Science does not grow neatly, with one discovery on top of the other.
It is not that each scientist discovers something a little more refined or better than the previous scientists, and incrementally we get to truth. That is not how it works.
The historian of science Thomas Kune is the one who writes about this, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Science, he says, begins with the scientist having a theory about the universe, and theories about how certain things work, and then the scientist and their team gather data points and see if those fit in the theory, refining the theory, giving it more strength. And then, every so often, certain data appear that do not comfirm that specific theory.
And every so often, certain data points bring a complete change – this is what is called a paradigm shift. Take the Ptolomaic universe – this was a theory of the universe that had the earth in the center and everything circling around our earth. It worked until we got telescopes, courtesy of Galileo Galilei. And then you can see, with your own eyes, a moon circling Jupiter.
Oops. Not supposed to see that.
Because that was really the death blow for the Ptolomaic understanding of things.
And this is what happened – the old theory was eventually thrown out, and a new one began forming, one that we call Copernican universe, one that accounts for these new data points. In Kune’s words, this was a paradigm shift.
Tonight I want to venture that our Jewish people knows quite a bit about new data points and paradigm shifts. Despite our fierce love for tradition, and for continuity, our people has adapted countless times, either because of what has happened to us from the outside or because of what we have done to ourselves from within. We recreated, reinvented, reviewed and adapted values, institutions, practices and thoughts.
Arguably the greatest change in our history was the destruction of the Temple by the Assyrians in 586 BCE and then by the Romans in 70 CE.
Each of those destructions brought about changes, by necessity. The first destruction gave us our Hebrew alphabet. And without the temple and its sacrificial system, which were in their last legs due to corruption anyway, we primarily became a people organized around texts, books and the rabbinic interpretations of those texts. Most of you have heard me say a few times that Judaism is not the religion of the Torah, Judaism is the religion of the Torah interpreted, domesticated and renewed by the rabbis – with Mishnah and Talmud, with Midrashim and Kabbalah.
But that was not the only change we survived. The encounter with philosophy, Greek and Arabic, brought us the great Maimonides. It is the obvious tension between that theory of reality and Judaism that impels him, for his own sake and for the sake of his students, to write the law code Mishneh Torah and then the Moreh Nevuchim, the famous Guide for the Perplexed. Who are the perplexed?
Whoever studies both Torah and philosophy, and is perplexed, astounded by the distance between those views, those who are seeing, feeling, understanding this paradigm shift, that do not believe in the same truth of their grandparents.
That shift brings about the Spanish Golden Age, with Jewish music, grammar, philosophy, poetry as our own recreation of our world view and our love for Torah and tradition. And the Jews are very comfortable in Spain for about 6 centuries.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, back in Ashkenaz, we have the Crusades, and Rashi and his grandsons writing their commentaries to Torah and Talmud, 800 years after the mishnah. Another incredible change: instead of knowing things by heart, needing a teacher who knew midrash and could explain things to you, now we have books that can explain things.
Just get a group of Jews together and get going, reading, debating, deciding and revisiting decisions. This was an amazing feat, and Rashi’s commentaries are now the most basic door to understand Judaism.
And then you have the expulsion from Spain. That is another paradigm shift that brings about the first popularization of Kabbalah which takes over the Jewish world. And then the Polish academies and the poverty of the shtetl bring about the Ba’al Shem Tov and all of Hasidism, all the “really Jewish Jews” in the words of a student of mine.
And here is the mind blowing thing: all those amazing books, all those incredible teachers only show up in times of paradigm shifts, in times of discontinuity. It is actually the challenge of discontinuity and destruction that make what we call the Jewish tradition.
Think about it: when everything is ok, when everything is actually going as it should and there is continuity, you just do what your parents and grandparents did. You don’t need a new book if nothing is being challenged. You have no questions. It is all working as it is supposed to. But when the temple is destroyed – we create the synagogues and Yochanan ben Zakai and Yehudah HaNasi together compile the beginnings of the Rabbinic tradition.
And don’t think for a second that any of this happened without despair: as the temple is destroyed, the question is not simply “now, what? Where do we go from here?” The question was much bitter – “does God hate us? Does this all still matter? Where do we go from here?” And come the rabbis to say – Paradigm shift. The word is the center. The study. Open to all. God will be happy with the sacrifices of our lips, with our words. With our hearts.
And here we are, heirs to that break and all the other breaks and despair, and challenges and adaptations since then.
Think of it, we happen to be very good at this.
After the Baal Shem Tov, comes another “small” paradigm shift – Enlightment. The new idea that we, too, are equal citizens like other equal citizens in countries. Enlightment brings the idea that we can do tradition and change, that we can embrace modernity and still be Jews. And new leaders appear. All with profound answers to the question “now, what? Where do we go from here?” As the beloved Hanukkah song says “in every age, a hero or sage came to our aid”.
And October 7th is another such event. It looms large this year and it will loom large for years to come. It has been compared to 9-11, and it has been compared to the destruction of the temple.
And it does not come alone, of course. All our paradigm shifts and all the adaptations I reminded you before, all of those happened with a few centuries between them. But look at the 20th century. That alone brought us [FINGERS] modernity, Zionism, the first World War, the Holocaust, the state of Israel.
It is obvious that we, as the Jewish people, are still trying to figure out what do with modernity. All of the discussions that all the forms of Judaism that we see today, all the facets of this beautiful, great diamond that is the Jewish people – all of them, are answers to modernity’s great question: what is the relationship between the individual autonomous self, and the collective? Between me and my family? Between me and my community, my people, my country, all of humanity, the world?
For us, Jews, that is a huge question. We are still working that out.
We use different facets to do this answering back: Ultra Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, Zionist, Secular.
And really, you know and I know that if one of those facets should disappear, the Jewish people would be poorer for it –just as a broken diamond would loose its value.
And let me give you yet another thing to think about: as I said, the greatest destruction that happened to our people in our sources was the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. And the Holocaust makes it look like child’s play. …
And the greatest redemption that happened to our people in our sources was the Exodus from Egypt, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 makes it look like child’s play. …
And the greatest creative center that happened to our people in our sources was Babylonia – and America and Canada make it look like child’s play. …
So all of this – all of those paradigm shifts, all happened in the last two generations. We are still trying to figure all those out.
If you are as old as Rav Yitz Greenberg, may he live to 150, you have seen it all with your own eyes. And some of you around here saw a lot of it.
And then October seventh happened. And I will tell you that I think we all were shaken because that day is revealing fault lines we did not know were there.
The promise of Zionism was that we would not be objects of Jewish history anymore, that we would create a new people and become actors in the history of our people. That Jews would be safe from their enemies at least in our own land. And that shattered.
The promise of America and Canada and the rest of the liberal democracies in the world was that Jews would be accepted as part of the melting pot, or fruit salad. And that shattered: we had to deal with “Jews Will Not Replace Us” in Charlotsville and with “It depends on the Context”.
We, collectively, did not expect that antisemitism would show up in Harvard and Columbia and other universities and colleges. White supremacists were a known quantity, your garden variety of antisemitism, so common that they kind of faded in the background noise of America – until about seven years ago. Those are all small shifts, maybe they are signaling a larger one.
There is one idea I want you to go out tonight with: We have a particular talent for cultural creativity. Our people has an incredible knack for revisiting, translating, surviving crisis and paradigm shifts.
God is not finished with us yet – God has an immense faith not only in you, individually, you, Jew in the Pew, but also God has an incredible faith in us, as the collective of the Jewish people, to keep on going and renewing the connections between us and God Godself.
A dying people does not produce the great things we have been studying and creating and renewing for the past five thousand years. And that we continue to create.
The amount of books and Torah and music and videos and software and podcasts and tshirts and coffee mugs created since October Seventh is staggering.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. As sad as this might be, I want to point out how unJewish that reaction was.
As a response, the Jewish and Israeli poet and educator Rachel Korazim wrote: To write poetry after October 7th is necessary.
As the prophet Jeremiah says: there is hope for your future. Renewing, revisiting and reinventing, creating new traditions, we will get through this – together with our people, taking part in our facet of the invaluable diamond of the Jewish people.
Gmar Chatimah Tovah.