blogs/brentspodek

U.S.Army photo by Andria Allmond

 

For many of us, even here in the Hudson Valley, the Jersey Shore is where summer happens.

The ocean, the amusement parks, the cotton candy – it’s just the place to be.

The Jersey Shore as we know it began in 1842 when the Ocean House Hotel was built with capacity for 300 people. That hotel lead to further development until we arrived at the Jersey Shore of summer romances and Bruce Springsteen lyrics.

The problem, however, is that the actual shore line – the beaches and barrier islands -- aren't permanent. They move as wind and water reshape them. But we started building on the shore years ago and now there are billions of dollars of development there that can’t just be picked up and moved.

So now the Army Corps of Engineers spends billions of dollars dredging sand from off-shore deposits and pumping it to the places where beaches were, but aren’t any more. It takes about three million cubic tons of sand to cover one beach -- and there are 127 miles of coastline in New Jersey. Over the next few years, the army is going to be dredging a lot of sand to make sure those buildings still make sense.

This is one way of responding to change. It is to say that we are committed to what we built and we will double down on our efforts to maintain it.

In the late 18th century the sands of Judaism were shifting rapidly. The Reform movement made tremendous changes in Jewish liturgy and dietary laws, permitted train travel on Shabbat and more. In the face of the shifting sands, the Hungarian Rabbi known as the Chasam Sofer sought to preserve what Judaism had built. He said that החדש אסור מין התורה - anything new was forbidden by the Torah. The way we dress, the way we eat, the way we talk - we’re putting a lockdown on how things are done. So if you’ve wondered why ultra-Orthodox Jews dress like 18th Century Europeans whether its summer or winter, whether they are in New York, London or Tel Aviv, it’s because that’s how we did it in the 18th Century and החדש אסור מין התורה.

We all have this impulse - transitions are difficult for most people, and when the sands start shifting under our feet, we grab onto whatever we can. When we feel like a ship in a storm, all ports look good.

But an orthodox lockdown is not the only response to shifting sands. Its not, to be honest, a particularly Jewish one.

At first, thousands of years ago, we were a wilderness religion, wandering the Sinai desert with a portable mishkan, a portable tabernacle, in which we reached for God. Then circumstances changed. We entered the land of Israel and over time, built a permanent Temple, right in the center of Jerusalem. For a long time, that was the place where we reached for God. 

But then the sands shifted in the most dramatic way. The Roman Empire rose and conquered the land of Israel. Jerusalem was under siege and our prospects were bleak. In a move of incredible agility, R. Yochanan ben Zakai snuck out of the city in a coffin and negotiated with the Roman commander Vespesain. R. Yochanan was given one wish - he could have even asked that the Temple which had been the center of Judaism be spared. But he didn’t. In an audacious move, he said, תן לי יבנה וחכמיה – give me the town of Yavneh and its sages, and from there, he reconstructed Judaism based on new realities.

It was, if you will, as if R. Yochanan looked at the Holy Temple in Jerusalem as if it was made of Lego blocks and saw that those blocks could be rearranged. He looked at a religion that was based in a physical temple in physical space, recognized that the Romans controlled that space so he reconstructed Judaism as a religion based in time. He didn’t invent Shabbat – Shabbat had always been important in Judaism – but after R. Yochanan, Shabbat – and not the temple - was the center of Judaism. It was one of the most important adaptations in our history – in fact, it’s why we have a history at all. The Temple was destroyed – you can go see its Western Wall, which remains in Jerusalem – but Judaism lived. The Pharisees, the Sadduccees, the Essenes, the Samaritans all fell by the wayside, but we didn’t because 2000 years ago, Rabbi Yochanan understood what was core about Judaism and what was periphery.

In Jewish thought, you have the ikar - the essential thing and the tophel or secondary thing.

For instance, if you are having herring on a cracker, you give a blessing of gratitude on the herring, because that’s the ikar, the important thing. The cracker is the tophel, the delivery system.

Wisdom is the ability to distinguish between the two. It wasn’t obvious, but Rabbi Yochanan saw that the Torah was core – and the Temple was secondary. He knew where to focus his very limited resources because he knew what was essential and what was secondary.

Thousands of years later, management gurus call this way of doing things “agile development.” It’s an approach that recognizes that the sands are always shifting under our feet and that what got you here won’t get you there. If you want to succeed, you have to respond to what is, now, not what was, yesterday.

We know this in our personal lives as well. There are commitments we make that are ikar and there are commitments we make that are tofel. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference and sometimes we don’t even know we made a commitment.

When my kids were younger, bedtime in my house was a brutal affair. I would push and prod and cajole trying to get my eldest to get ready for bed. It was about as effective as pushing a blob of jelly across a sandy beach.

The way we were doing things clearly wasn’t working but at some level, without even realizing it, I was committed to the idea of being the powerful daddy directing my polite, cooperative children.

I finally had the good sense to ask my daughter how she thought bedtime was going, and it turned out she hated it even more than I did. I remembered how at Randolph School, they had posted in the coat room pictures that showed kids how to put on their boots and coats and in what order, and thought that perhaps that could help us at home. 

So, using my excellent clipart skills, I made a pictorial list all the bedtime things – brushing teeth, putting on pajamas and so on, and hung it in the bathroom. It didn’t solve everything, I found myself clenching my teeth and counting to ten somewhat less frequently than before.

The point here isn’t about herring and it isn’t about toothbrushes - it’s about having the discernment to know what is core and what is periphery and more, having the ability to pursue what is core by many different means and discard the means that aren’t working.

Tom Peters, the business management guru puts it simply - agile organizations win because they are not bound by fixed rules that have outlived their purpose. They have the freedom to create new rules so they can pursue what is really important.

That’s the key - understanding what really matters. When it came to bedtime, I needed to understand that what was essential was my daughter getting to bed feeling loved and with the minimally acceptable level of dental hygiene. What was secondary at best was the scenario in which I got to stand around and tell them what to do.

So for us, in this community, what is the ikar, what is the essence?

Judaism, at its core, is a response to souls calling out for a connection with the Source of Life. Judaism offers a system, a covenantal language, a heritage and tradition that grows out of that yearning. We call our pathway to meaning, substance and connection Torah.

When I say Torah, I don’t just mean the Torah scroll that sits in the ark, or even just the words of the five books of Moses. I don’t mean believing that the Torah was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.

When I say Torah, I mean the sum total of Jewish sources and texts — even if every single jot and tittle was written by humans.

When I say Torah, I mean the wisdom stored up in our textual heritage and the community that gathers around that heritage.

When we take bread to the hungry, because we are not to harden our hearts or shut our hands against our poor brothers, that is Torah.

When we welcome the stranger because we were once strangers ourselves, that is Torah.

When we learn to still our minds so we can listen to our own hearts because we place the Holy One before us always, that is Torah.

Lest you think I’m stretching what this word Torah means, let me tell you a story of how Rav Kahana, one of the great teachers of early Judaism hides under the bed of his teacher, Rav Shemaya, as his teacher “makes use of the bed”… with his wife. When the teacher discovers his student under the bed, he’s furious and demands that Rav Kahana leave. Rav Kahana refuses and says תורה היא, וללמוד אני צריך. This too is Torah and I need to learn it.

Torah is not a book you read – it’s a book you live.

Torah has the power to draw us into the conversation, and to push us to think more deeply about ourselves and our struggles. Torah gives us a language for clarifying our own life’s mission, and an entryway to express our deepest values.

Torah is why we exist as a community and the Torah is for all of us.

As my friend Rabbi Elie Kaunfer teaches, the Midrash on Psalm 68 describes the moment of revelation at Mount Sinai as follows:

הקב"ה יתברך שמו וגבורתו

כשהיה אומר בדיבור הקול, נחלק לשבעה קולות,

ומשבעה לשבעים לשונות של שבעים אומות, שיהו הכל שומעין

When the Holy One of Blessing spoke the words of Torah in a voice, the voice split into seven voices; those seven voices split into the 70 languages of the nations of the world so that everyone could understand it.

This incredible midrash comes to teach us that Torah has something to say to everyone. Not just kids. Not just synagogue goers. Not just rabbis. Not even just Jews.

The Torah emerges from and responds to the basic human need for meaning and substance, and that yearning doesn’t exclude anyone. If you have a soul, the Torah has something to say to you.

The Torah is what is core about Judaism. That is the essence and everything else is secondary.

How we get to that core though – that’s not so simple. Things that work in one time and place might not work in another. Things that illuminate Torah for some people might obscure it for others.

So we at Beacon Hebrew Alliance experiment and innovate. We daven in this building, we daven in forests.  We offer a class on this, a workshop on that. We work by ourselves, we work with other communities. We chant, we learn, we meditate. We as Jews recognize that the sand under our feet is always shifting and we remain agile, adjusting, ever keeping our focus on the ikar.

Over the time I’ve been blessed to be the rabbi of this community, we’ve tried lots of things. Many of them have worked, even if not for everyone, and some haven’t. That’s as it should be – if I knew in advance which ones would work, I’d be a prophet, not a rabbi. We will keep innovating and keep finding new pathways into Torah.

We keep our eyes on the prize and the prize is Torah.

We don’t treat Judaism like a fragile heirloom, so precious that it’s imprisoned on a high shelf where it can be safely ignored. We come to Judaism as Mayyim Hayim, living waters, in which we can dive-in and splash around and swim.

We learn the lesson of the Jersey shore and remember that our commitment is to the beach and it’s permanently shifting sands, not the buildings which offer the illusion of permanence.

Whether we learn it the hard way or the easy way, whether we learn it in our personal our professional or our communal lives, we know that we must be agile – we must be able to adapt to changing circumstances. If we forget this, we will be reminded when we try to relate to our children, who grow every day, when we try to search for a job in an economy that changes every day, when we simply try to relate to other human beings, who change every day.

There is no Army Corp of Engineers for Judaism, no magic spell that will make time stop so that the structures we built yesterday continue to make sense today.

And thank God for that.

It gives Judaism the opportunity to continuously reconstruct ourselves with agility. It gives us the mandate not to live in the past, but to honor the past so it can help us grow into the future. It gives us the opportunity to keep our focus on the ikar – the essence of Judaism.

One of the many blessings of this community is that we are small and agile. Even as we are growing, we are able to maintain a spirit of experimentation, of innovation so that we can all access the Torah, the soul-nourishing core that we all need. The Atid Listening Campaign is all about us reflecting on the many different experiments with Judaism that we try here at the BHA laboratory – seeing what helps us best swim in the mayim chayim, the living waters of Judaism and so that we can all access the Torah now, today, in 2019 and beyond. We all need the Torah and the Torah needs all of us.

This teaching was originally shared with the Beacon Hebrew Alliance community on Kol Nidrei, 5780.