Rabbi's Blog

This Sunday we celebrate one of my favorite holidays, Hoshana Raba. Hoshana Raba is the seventh and last day of Sukkot, and the services that morning combine melodies and practices from weekdays, the High Holidays, and the Festivals.  The climax of the Hoshana Raba service comes near the end, when we take up a bunch of willow branches and beat them on the floor of the synagogue so that the leaves separate from them and fall to the ground. 

Why?  Mystical tradition relates that while our fate in the coming year is written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur, it is on Hoshana Raba that God gives the decree to the angels to be delivered into the world.  Before God hands over each decree, God checks to see if the person in question has perhaps, at the last moment, made a change for the good, so that the decree can also be changed if need be.  Hoshana Raba represents our last chance to change our direction in the coming year, to add a note, an addendum, to the fate written for us.  When we beat the willow branches, the leaves that fall off represent the old ways that we are leaving behind to allow us to move in new and better direction.

May we take this opportunity to check in with the changes to which we committed ourselves throughout the High Holidays and to recommit ourselves to change.  Then we will have added a pitka tova - Aramaic for a “good note” - to the fate we have written for ourselves in the coming year.

On Rosh Hashanah I spoke of the mitzvah of protecting and even loving the stranger, and I urged us to reach out to those who are unlike ourselves, to see them not as “them” but as part of “us.”  You can read my talk as well as other talks from the holiday on our website by clicking here.

Many of you have asked me what you can do, so as part of our preparation for Yom Kippur I wanted to give some ideas:

Interfaith Hospitality Network:  For over 10 years GJC has been hosting homeless families in rotation with other faith communities through the Northwest Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network (NPIHN), an agency directed by our own past president Rachel Falkove.  This has proven to be a wonderful way for volunteers to connect with people in a difficult situation on a personal level.  We are always looking for new volunteers to help!  For more information or to volunteer, please contact GJC’s IHN coordinator Milt Cohen at (215) 247-6186 or cohen_milton@hotmail.com.  

Food Stamps:  The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has been encouraging more people to take the Food Stamp Challenge to gain a better understanding of the program and its impact on those benefiting from it.  More recently, this effort has been headed by our own Rabbi Emeritus Leonard Gordon.  For more information about the Food Stamp Challenge, click here.  For more information on the issue of food stamps and hunger, a wonderful source is the Food Research Action Coalition (FRAC) website.

General Assistance:  Ever since the state’s General Assistance program was cut out of the state budget, a coalition called PA Cares for All has been working to restore the program and advocate for those affected.  You can find out more on their website by clicking here.  

Voter ID:  The Pennsylvania Voter ID Coalition, whose members include the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia among other community groups, has been working to educate the public about the Voter ID law and to help those who are most affected - particularly the elderly, the disabled, and the poor who are most likely to be missing the required ID and most likely to have trouble acquiring it.  You can find out more information about the issue on the Committee of Seventy website.  If you would like to volunteer to help, please call the Coalition at (215) 848-1283; the contact person is Carl Butler.  In addition, our Social Action Committee has been working to identify and contact GJC members who may not have the required ID.  If you would like to volunteer to help in that effort, please email Andrea Moselle at amoselle@comcast.net.

Shabbat, the cessation from labor and the pursuit of rest, peace, and enlightenment one day a week, is one of Judaism's great contributions to the world.  Yet we should not underestimate the importance Jewish tradition ascribes to work.  The Torah teaches:  "Six days you shall labor and do all your work..." [Exodus 20:9], indicating that it is as much a commandment to work six days of the week as it is to rest on Shabbat.   

The ancient rabbis saw work - and they had in mind mostly manual labor - as a complement to Torah study, thinking that each activity should inform the other and that neither should exist on its own.  They were worried that the realm of earning a living and the realm of considering what makes for a moral and holy life would be separated, the first confined to the six days of the week and the second confined to Shabbat.  Instead, they taught us to take as much care about the morality and holiness of our work days as we do with our rest day.  This idea that work itself can be holy carried over to the kibbutz movement in Israel, as shown by this picture of workers on Kibbutz Givat Hashloshah in the 1930's.

As we in the U.S. enjoy a long weekend of vacation in the name of labor, we should also take time to think about the morality and holiness of work in our own lives and in the lives the people who surround us.  Are our work lives fair and just?  Are those we work for and with adequately compensated for their efforts?  Are we concerned not just with the "bottom line" of our businesses but also with their capacity for doing good in the world in ways not captured in dollars and cents?

Even the ancient rabbis knew that work would occupy far more hours of our lives than rest and contemplation ever would.  So we are even more obligated to find the capacity for holiness that those long hours of work hold for each of us and for those with whom and for whom we work.

Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav taught: 

Teshuvah has three aspects:  seeing with the eyes, hearing with the ears, and understanding in the heart [based on Isaiah 6:10].  People who seek repentance must use their eyes to look towards the ultimate goal and purpose of this world.  They must concentrate on this goal with all their heart, resolving to travel there and nowhere else.  And they must use their ears to listen carefully to everything that our holy sages said.  Then they will be able to return to God.  [Likutei Moharan I:6] 

In Rebbe Nahman's perhaps radical view, teshuvah is not about bemoaning our sins, feeling shame at our guilt, or filling ourselves with regret.  Instead, it is about using all of the abilities of our bodies, minds, and hearts to re-orient ourselves and recalibrate our lives for the coming New Year.  Just as on Shabbat we re-focus on the ultimate meaning of our lives that may have become hidden to us during the work week, so too as the High Holidays approach we can re-focus ourselves on a larger scale, breaking through the haze of daily activities that may have obscured for us what our lives are really about.  We can resolve to keep our focus in the coming year, and we can use the abilities and resources within ourselves and within the teachings of Jewish tradition to re-set the trajectory of our lives.  May Rebbe Nahman's teaching inspire us to move beyond guilt, shame, and regret toward true change this High Holiday season.  

It is only the month of Elul, and here I am already saying “May you be inscribed for a good year,” the greeting we normally associate with Rosh Hashanah.  Aren’t the High Holidays a month away?  Well, yes, but there is a tradition that from the first day of Elul one signs letters and ends conversations with this phrase.  We all need to be reminded that the work of preparing for the New Year - especially the inner work of introspection and setting the course for change - takes time.  Yom Kippur is not the beginning of the season of repentance but its culmination.  The real work begins now.  And that work starts with the recognition that (as Rabbi Alan Lew z”l taught) we are not prepared.  We thought we would have progressed more in our relationships, we imagined that we would have struggled more successfully with our failings, and we hoped that when we looked back on this year, we would not be as troubled by what we see.  And yet, the time has come, again, for us to take an honest look at ourselves so that we can see where we are and where we need to go.  Turning is hard work.  We are like huge ships thundering through the sea.  Once we get off course, it is a great effort to break the momentum and turn back.  Yet the earlier we start to turn, the easier it is to correct our course and find a new way.  May we all support each other in beginning the turning. 

Over 50 years ago, many Jews - including members of GJC - were heavily involved in the civil rights movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  In fact, both of these acts were physically drafted at the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center in Washington, DC.  That was because the Jewish tradition of justice and equality before the law pushed us to stand with those whose basic rights - including the right to vote - were being denied to them unjustly, just as such rights had been denied to Jews in many lands in the past.  With the passage of laws protecting the right to vote, we thought the battle had been won.  So it is particularly hard to believe that the most basic of rights in a democracy, the right to vote, is now being attacked again. 

The Voter ID law passed by the Pennsylvania legislature and signed by the governor places unreasonable obstacles in the way of those who are trying to exercise this right.  Despite claims that this law is intended to prevent voter fraud, the state admits that it cannot point to even one case of in-person voter fraud that would necessitate such a law.  Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania citizens, registered voters who lack the kind of ID required by the law, will be prevented from voting.  And research has shown that the law has a disproportional impact on minority neighborhoods, the elderly, and the poor, who are the citizens least likely to have the required ID.

A court case challenging the constitutionality of this unjust law is in progress, and plans to urge the legislature to repeal the law may be next.  But in the meantime, we must act to try to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to vote.  Rev. Kevin Johnson, the Pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church, at 12th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue in North Philadelphia, has called on clergy and congregations of all faiths to join him and his congregation at a rally at his church this Sunday, August 12, at 6:00 PM.  Rabbi Lewis and I will be attending this rally and exploring together with other clergy how we can be effective in making sure that justice is served and that our democracy truly represents the voices of all of its citizens.  This is not a partisan issue but an issue of basic equality and fairness.  So no matter what your political preferences, I hope you will join Rabbi Lewis and myself at the rally on Sunday.  Please feel free to be in touch with me to talk about this issue - it is one that should concern us all.