(After the many thanks yous to the community and Rabbi Mendel Lew, its rabbi, CJF and United Synagogue)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. As far as I have traveled, from New York to London, England, somehow I can be halfway across the world and find the religious experience of prayer so familiar in another Orthodox synagogue. The music, the melodious cantorial experience, the liturgy, the reading, the many features of an Orthodox synagogue, these are those that make me feel as if I am actually home. That isn’t to say that an Englishman is like a New Yorker, I expect you would be offended at such a comparison. But what I mean is that I have found this synagogue a uniting experience, I feel as if we are family, and I thank you for your friendliness and hospitality that has made Michal and my stay here all the more pleasant.
There is one issue that stands out as something you will never find in a synagogue in Ameica, one that could perhaps shock a New Yorker. In large print on the wall behind me, to my left, as you well know, is the prayer for the Queen of England, who deserves a grand happy birthday for her 90th today. However, we simply don't have such a prayer in New York - we haven't had monarchy in a few centuries.
But it is most fascinating for me, coming from Yeshiva University and the United States. The prayer for the queen, written in English as well as in Hebrew, must be contrasted with what we have on my right, the prayer for the state of Israel. And if you think about it, you may find it most strange. How, indeed, could we have said both today? Does this not represent a fierce dichotomous experience? How could we both pray for our brothers and sister in Israel, pray for the safety of our own nation, our own private concerns, and yet pray for the country in which we live? How can we abide in two worlds, a world which values the outside world, the welfare of where we stay, turning us outward, and also live in the world of what makes us special as a people, which should turn us insular and inward? Is it possible to care for the Euro games (England vs Russia tonight!), yet value as well the lesson of the Sabbath and the importance of Torah? It certainly seems conflicting!
We read today an interesting Haftorah that seems wholly irrelevant to our Parsha. Bamidbar mostly discusses the numbers of the Jews, but only the first verse in the Haftorah relates to that topic - the promise of God that we shall one day be numerous like the sand in the sea and stars in the sky. The rest of the Haftorah, however, is not about that at all - it goes on to describe our falling away from God, and how one day we will unite in the time of the Messiah.
However, I believe it is indeed relevant - our relationship to God as Jews is summed up by the last few verses, which tells us how we can indeed become full of potential and truly innumerable.
The most pivotal verse states:
And I will make a covenant for them on that day with the beasts of the field and with the fowl of the sky and the creeping things of the earth; and the bow, the sword, and war I will break off the earth, and I will let them lie down safely.
God says, I will make a covenant with you, that somehow involves all the living creatures of the world, and all major conflict will dissipate. The bow and the sword will cease to exist, not only for us but for everyone. If we pay attention to the words of the prophet, we are struck by the seeming impossibility of that which he suggests. A covenant! That means a special two-way promise between God and the Jewish people. The end of war! That means a fundamental change in all of humanity!
Again we see the dichotomy we noticed earlier. And actually, we do find that there seem to be two ways to be religious Jews. We find that some have turned to their own, made their own communities, their own studies, their own schools, and have little to no connection and interaction with those beyond them. In truth, we have the concept that we are chosen, special, that this necessitates a focus particularly on our people, our practices, our Torah. And yet we know of the concept of tikkun olam, on being a light unto the nations, on reaching out to the human species and the recognition that we are all in this world together! And so many Jews go to Africa and many third world countries to heal the sick and change the world for the better. But often this leaves behind those special aspects of Jewish religion. Which one are we meant to practice? Are we Jews first and only, or Jews of the world? Must we rectify the universe, or shall we concentrate on setting our own house in order?
Let me present this in the view of Shavuot. There are two themes present in Shavuot that contradict and collide with each other; two ideas that coexist while giving us inconsonant messages We find that all the pilgrimage holidays in the Torah, Passover, Sukkot, and yes, Shavuot, have agricultural significance. Sukkot is the Holiday of Gathering, Chag Haasif, where one pulls together and piles up the grain from his field. Passover is the Chag Haaviv, the springtime holiday, where we plant our grains, especially wheat. Finally, Shavuot is the reaping holiday, Chag Hakatzir, when the wheat has grown enough to be cut in the field. In other parts of the Torah, it is called “Yom Habikkurim” since farmers bring their first fruits of the field to the Temple during this time. This is a theme to which anyone, Jew or Gentile, can relate: the need for grain, the worry about sustenance, the concern about feeding one’s family.
Amazingly, the rabbis of the Talmud identified an altogether different meaning of the holiday, hidden in the Torah’s chronology itself. That is something we will be saying in our prayers tonight and for the next couple of days, “zeman matan torateinu”. The time that we were given OUR Torah. It was around this time, about 50 days after leaving Egypt, that we found ourselves at the foot of a mountain, one nation, one soul. We declared, Naaseh Venishma, and from then on we became God’s “Am Segula”, His treasured and special people. A pivotal aspect of Jewish history.
Do you see the vast change here? The universal concern of the farmer and his crop is transformed into a nationalistic Torah ideal! The rabbinic consideration of Shavuot is extremely particularistic. It is the time for what makes us different, special, separate. Yet we must contrast this with the agricultural emphasis of the Torah, which is completely universal. Everyone is a farmer - or rather, everyone can appreciate the food we eat, the renewal of the cycle of the seasons, of the change that happens year in and year out as we move from spring to summer, from fall to winter, and its effect on our food supply. There is nothing that makes Chag HaKatzir, the reaping holiday, uniquely Jewish. All can understand it. But this is not so within “zeman matan Torateinu,” the holiday of the giving of the Torah. We seem stuck between two worlds, between ourselves on one hand, our particular nationalistic mission, the Shavuot which is the time of our Torah, and the Shavuot of all the world, the other, the people beyond us, those not Jewish, whom we interact with every day, those who enjoy eating as much as we do and who rely on the welfare of the food economy as much as we do. What is the nature of this holiday? What’s its message, a universalistic one or a particularistic one?
Another ritual related to Shavuot also contains this mysterious dichotomy. Jews around the world have been counting the Omer, the days from Passover leading up to Shavuot. Last night was the last time we performed this mitzvah - 49 straight nights of counting. Why do we do this?
Maimonides provides an answer in his Guide for the Perplexed 3:43 - “Shavuot is the time of the Giving of the Torah. In order to honor and elevate this day we count the days from the previous festival until it [arrives], like someone who is waiting for a loved one to arrive, who counts the days by the hours. This is the reason for counting the Omer from the day that we left Egypt until the day of the Giving of the Torah, as this was the ultimate purpose of leaving Egypt: “And I will bring them to Me” (Exodus 19:4).”
Thus, the counting of the Omer is to create that excitement and anticipation of the Torah. Our Torah. Our national endeavor. Our our our.
However, we have other sources that relate the counting to our anticipation of the upcoming harvest. Rabbi David Abudraham, the 14th century Spanish commentator on the Siddur, makes it a powerfully dramatic and indeed, traumatic religious experience: “Because the world is distressed from Passover to Shavuot regarding the grain and the fruit trees… Therefore, God commanded us to count these days so that we will remember the distress of the world, to return to God wholeheartedly, to plead before Him to have mercy on us, and on all people, and the land itself, so that it should produce grain as it is supposed to, for it is our life.”
So again, which is it - Torah or agriculture? The giving of the Torah or the celebration of the harvest? The particular or the universal? Looking inward or glancing outward?
The former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, visited Yeshiva University several years ago. He taught the semicha class a powerful lesson of leadership and resolution of conflict which provided me with a crucial insight into this conundrum – an insight that had a powerful effect on my own understanding of this conflict.
Orthodox Jews around the world have the practice to mourn for part of the time that we count sefirah - for the Talmud reports that thousands of students of the Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva died during this time period. How did they die? A plague wiped them out. The Sages were certain that this was supernatural. Thousands of students of the same teacher all died in a plague in such a short time span? What could possibly have caused this tragedy? Were they murderers? Rapists? They worshipped other gods? What is the worst crimes that could have warranted such terrible destruction and disaster in Jewish life? Must be something pretty bad. The Talmud states, “Lo nahagu kavod zeh lazeh.” - “They didn’t respect each other.”
Commentators (and rabbis on the Talmud) have struggled for centuries to understand the meaning of this. For lack of respect, failing to honor a fellow colleague, God sent them a death penalty?
Some focus on an even greater incongruity, for if we look at the teachings of Rabbi Akiva, it is even harder to understand what could have caused his students to act this way. After all, it was Rabbi Akiva who declared “You shall love your fellow as yourself” the greatest rule of the Torah. It was Rabbi Akiva who, when asked what an extra definitive article in the Hebrew command of “You shall fear the Lord”, he said that includes scholars as well. How could the students of Rabbi Akiva turn their backs on their teacher and ignore his teachings? How could Rabbi Akiva’s followers completely disregard his most important lesson?
Rabbi Sacks noted that some say that the plague was not while Rabbi Akiva was still alive, but rather after his death. If so, said Rabbi Sacks, this indicated that the problem with his students took place in a post-Akiva world. What happens when a great leader dies? How do the followers of that leader react? Perhaps, as we have seen in our lifetimes, the problem was not simply about not giving respect to each other, but that they broke into sects of Jews who fought over their rabbi's teachings and legacy.
On the one hand, as we have noted, Rabbi Akiva was a man of ethics. Respect for each other and the respect of the sages of Israel was paramount. Peace and tolerance were matters that Rabbi Akiva valued highly. In many ways, he saw the value of the entire mosaic of humanity. He saw value in all people, going so far as saying in the Mishnaic work Ethics of the Fathers that all humankind is blessed for having been made in the image of God.
However, paradoxically, Rabbi Akiva supported the Bar Kochba revolt. He supported war for Jewish independence. He even imputed a divine mission to Bar Kochba as granting him the possible title of Messiah. For Rabbi Akiva. this was a religiously driven war. Rabbi Akiva the universalist was also Rabbi Akiva the particularist.
Somehow, Rabbi Akiva taught war as often as he taught love. Somehow, he taught particularism as much as he preached universalism. Rabbi Akiva was obviously a complicated man. And when every wonderfully complex leader dies, the complexity dies with them. The followers are too often unable to synthesize the multifaceted nature of their leader, and lines of extremism, of schism, are drawn. Some fight for the warring legacy of Rabbi Akiva. Others fight for his universalism and pacifism. And they are completely unable to see eye-to-eye - for each believes that he is fighting for the holy legacy of their leader, their teacher! They cannot ever agree, and each is willing to fight to the death for what he knows is the truth. As one can imagine, it wasn't too long before their extremist political-religious "legacies" died out. And the world was in shambles for it. It would seem that insulating ourselves from the world is just as dangerous as giving ourselves completely over to it. We learn from Rabbi Akiva’s students that there is a failure to Judaism to be an extremist, a fundamentalist, in either direction. His students believed that Rabbi Akiva’s true legacy was either particularism or universalism – and the result was that not one survived. For Rabbi Akiva’s legacy is reflected in the complexity of having a Judaism that insists on both the universal and the particular. Only the combination of the two accurately conveys the Jewish People’s divine mission.
If Rabbi Akiva was both universal and particular, both loving the fellow and fighting for our independence, so must we be. My friends, Rabbi Akiva teaches us that Judaism requires us both to be people of the world and people of the book. To love Jewish particularity along with love for the world around us. To keep our values in a world indifferent to values, and to teach where people wish to learn. If it looks contradictory on the outside, we must show how it is actually part and parcel of what it means to be a Jew.
Judaism starts with the question, and never fully answers it. In each generation, we look to our traditions as we look forward to the future that awaits us. We learn from our ancestors as we teach the next generation. We are indeed part of this world, and we hope for a day that our covenant with God, as we saw in the Haftorah, will influence the whole world toward world peace and prosperity, with the days of the Messiah soon to come.
Tonight we will begin Tikkun Leil Shavuot with learning Torah, here in the synagogue. If you would celebrate this holiday with us, please, I urge you, come tonight and learn together with us. Emphasize the importance of our unique addition to the world, even while we keep the universalistic ideal alive. See how the Torah can teach us so much about our positive contribution to the world. Come to see how to successfully synthesize the universalist Shavuot message of Chag Hakatzir, the time for praying and celebrating with the world, and the particularist message of Zman Matan Torateinu, the time to celebrate our Torah, our values, and our love for one another.
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