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Scrolls and Stones A Rosh HaShanah Morning Sermon Delivered by Rabbi Marc Disick 1 Tishre 5770/September 19, 2009 At Temple Sinai of Stamford, CT A new archeological discovery reveals something completely unexpected about Moses 40 days atop Mt. Sinai as the Israelites waited for him. We’ve discovered a clay urn containing ancient parchments which are said to be actual transcripts of text messages between Moses and his brother Aaron: Day 38 Aaron to Moses: RUOK Moses to Aaron:: NTW (not to worry) Aaron to Moses: GTG (got to go)collecting gold for false god Moses to Aaron: EM (excuse me) 2
Day 39 Aaron to Moses: JTLYK (just to let you know ) debauchery awaits your return Moses to Aaron: NTA (not this again) Day 40 Moses to Aaron: Just got 10 commandments, BRT, be right there. Aaron to Moses: OMG Moses to Aaron: yeah, he sends his best. In my work, and as you might expect, I spend lots of time at cemeteries. And sometimes when I arrive early for a funeral or an unveiling, or after grieving families have left in their cars, I usually wait behind until the grave is filled. I know it sounds a little odd, but for the 10 or 15 minutes it takes I often find myself walking among nearby and not so nearby graves, reading the stones, calculating relationships and ages, guessing countries of birth, I read English names, Hebrew names, and, of course, laudatory inscriptions designed to encapsulate a person’s life chiseled into the granite, loving father, devoted husband, cherished mother, adored wife. There in stone, the full and complicated lives of those who came before us, are winnowed down to but a few carefully hewn words. But why stone? 3
Why do we mark our graves with stone? Because writing in stone gives us a sense of permanence, an odd illusion of perpetuity, writing in stone gives us the cool comfort that even after we are gone, there will, at the very least, remain a stone which on our behalf will make the most basic assertion of all: I was here. I once lived. My life counted for something. And nothing could be more Jewish. For if Judaism has a central symbol, if there is in Judaism a holy object, our choice is obvious, we would actually choose two pieces of stone, two tablets of engraved stone. But these are no gravestones, the writing on the stones we would choose was born at the end of God’s finger, and the words of the 10 commandments themselves offer us nothing less than for the first time in human history, not only the idea of one God, but the idea of a God who is pleased when people treat one another with fairness and compassion. With the permanence of words written into stone, what was 4,000 years ago a new faith answers an old question in a revolutionary way: What does God want of me? To do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Judaism is a faith born not of idols and symbols, not of a pantheon of capricious demigods, Judaism is a faith born of words, words on two stone tablets. Our mystics teach that the tablets were made from stone formed at the beginning of time and the letters were ready and waiting to be properly ordered since the formation of the universe itself. 4
We know that the Israelites placed the tablets in a carefully crafted ark which they hauled circuitously through the wilderness from Mount Sinai to the land promised to Abraham on a journey which took 40 years, eventually this ark finds a home in Jerusalem. While in the desert, worshipping God meant setting up and breaking down an elaborate system of tents and gates, creating a portable shrine around the ark called a tabernacle. Bar and Bat Mitzvah students will tell you about Torah portion after Torah portion which, like a camping manual, describes how to build the tents around the ark, like a cook book, describes how to offer the sacrifices and burnt offerings, which like a medical journal, describes when to quarantine people with certain skin afflictions from approaching the ark for prayer. They wrote all of it down, and much as we gather today before our ark, our predecessors gathered before theirs, and because they wrote it down, and because we still study what they wrote, we’re still here. And by the time the ark with the tablets finds its home in Solomon’s Jerusalem temple, our faith evolved into far more than could be written on stone. A little more than a thousand years after the Exodus from Egypt, and the book of Exodus knows far too much about ancient Egyptian religion for us to dismiss the Exodus story as mere fancy, but a thousand years the Exodus from Egypt, in the 5th century BCE, we know that the words of the very Torah scroll we have in our ark, the words of the very 5
Torah scrolls that are in synagogues throughout the world, we know that just like you here, this day will hear these words, just like every child and adult who has become or will become a Bar or Bat Mitzvah will read these words aloud, our people, in a direct chain of tradition and practice, our people were reading aloud the very same words at least two thousand five hundred years ago. Each scroll written on meticulously prepared parchment in deep black ink, each with a carefully cut and pointed quill, each Torah, written completely by hand, each of 300,000 letters, each of its five books written on rectangular panels is sewn together into one scroll. In the ruins of ancient Rome, on view to tourists, remains to this day a victory arch constructed to commemorate the victory of the Romans over Jerusalem in the year 70. It is called the Arc of Titus, built to the Roman emperor who burned Jerusalem. Depicted in the frieze on the arch can be seen the Roman pillage and desecration of Jerusalem’s great second temple. And chiseled into the wall of the arch one can clearly see it, on Roman shoulders one sees the Menorah and the Ark of the Covenant being hauled off to Rome. The tablets given to Moses, became war booty. This is the last we know of the tablets and the ark. And once the ark leaves Jerusalem for the last time, we cease being people of the ark, we become a people of the scroll. 6
The Caesar Titus then does something curious in an effort not to alienate all of the Jews in his charge. It was during the Sac of Jerusalem that Titus allows an approach by a rabbi, Johanan Ben Zakkai, who was smuggled out of town in a coffin during the siege…Ben Zakkai is permitted to make a request but does not ask for cessation of Jerusalem’ seige, instead, he makes a very different plea, he asks for a small city on what is now Israel’s coastal plain, and he asks that his students and their teachers be permitted to congregate there. Titus agrees and Ben Zakkai sets up a center of learning and Jewish life which even though unknown to many, was, in many respects, Jerusalem’s equal. The city’s name is Yavneh: it was at Yavneh that the Jewish calendar, which determines to this day whether the holidays are early or late, was intercalated. The great teachers who laid the groundwork and set the style for the sacred literature of rabbis taught there, learned Jews of other lands sent their questions there; the canon of the rest of the bible, prophets and writings was finalized there. It was at Yavneh that our sacred scroll of five books became first of the three sections we call the Jewish Bible, prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, Jonah and Joel, and writings like Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Esther, all sewn together at Yavneh. And it was there, in Yavneh, that the very structure of our Jewish worship service found its form. With the Temple in ruins, with the death and exile of so many in Jerusalem and the burning of its Temple, built to worship God, with the ark of the 7
covenant hauled off to Rome, everything we once were was gone, and in that vacuum the Israelite cult became early Judaism, what was a religion of rites practiced by priests around an ark containing two tablets in the temple’s holy of holies transformed itself into a faith based on learning and study, on sacred disagreements between Hillel and Shammai. Our beliefs evolve and people come to believe that God revealed far more than the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, our sacred mythology asserts that every letter of the Torah is what God gave to Moses at Mt. Sinai, every word is, they taught, a direct gift from God. And so we grow, from two tablets to scroll with five books, then from a scroll with 5 books to a Bible with 39 books. By the year 200 our Bible with 39 books gave birth to Judaism’s next sacred text called the Mishnah, or the teaching, with 525 chapters, In what direction to you light the Chanukah candles? Do you light in ascending order or descending order? When do you say the Sh’ma? What’s the order of the Passover Seder? The Mishna is the place which takes on these questions and thousands of others just like it. And then by the year 500, 300 years after our Mishnah with its 525 chapters is complete, emerges Judaism’s free‐form, multi layered non‐alphabetized multi‐sourced, poly‐
lingual encyclopedia with 2792 pages, it’s called the Talmud …each Torah, each Bible, each Mishnah and each Talmud is, more or less the same, these core texts were held as sacred, each sprouting from seeds 8
planted when Moses sent that text message to his brother at Mt. Sinai, each taught and studied, practiced and cherished. Why is study and learning so important to Jews. With Ben Zakkai’s move move to Yavneh Jewish study and learning truly began, with that move, learning became as important if not synonymous with prayer, and wherever we found ourselves, we built schools, yeshivas, not only for study but for deliberation, not only to provide answers but to argue questions. And because they wrote it down, and because we still study what they wrote, we’re still here. After the burning of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 Jews now dispersed found new homes in far away lands. One of those places was Spain, where Jews lived at times with unmatched oppression by those who would convert them, and during other periods the Jews of Spain flourished alongside Muslims in what is described as one of Judaism’s golden ages. But in the Spain of 1492, the country whose Jewish community created unmatched literature and poetry, philosophy and music, kicked its Jews out. Just four months before Columbus set sail for the new world, the very country that gave us Maimonides with perhaps the greatest Jewish mind of the millennium, threw out all its Jews. And one Spanish Jewish family, we’ll never know their name, left home with a single book, it was a complete Passover Haggadah, imagine leaving everything behind, one thing to take and it’s your Haggadah. That was in 9
1492. By 1609 the book, its pages stained with Seder wine, makes its way to Venice. And while the Jews of Venice had some protections, to avoid the book burnings which were common by the church, Jewish books, particularly their Hebrew books, had to pass the test of the pope’s official censor, and there on the last page of this Haggadah is the signature of a Catholic Priest who in 1609 certified that the Haggadah, a Haggadah which exists to this day, posed no threat to the church…by 1894 this Haggadah makes its way to Bosnia where a poor Jewish family puts it up for sale…and then in 1941, when the Nazis enter Sarajevo, a Muslim man, Chief Librarian of the Bosnian National Museum, which became the newest home of the Haggadah, this Muslim librarian who believes that the priceless Haggadah is part of his nation’s Jewish heritage, literally hides it in his pants while lying to the Nazis about its whereabouts…the Nazis where planning to build a museum to the Jews, to show the world who we were once we were no more, and the Nazis wanted what is now called the Sarajevo Haggadah knew about the Haggadah and wanted it for the museum…BTW, there on the pages of the Haggadah is an illustration of a Spanish seder, and there at the table is a woman with black skin and African features…but now to our day, during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, yet another Muslim librarian with a deep appreciation for Jewish culture rescued the Sarajevo Haggadah from its hiding place under floorboards. And because they saved the book, and because these two Muslims saved the book, we still read and celebrate the text of the very book they saved, 10
we’re still here. We must never forget that, for better and for worse, that Christianity and Islam, had a hand in the arc of Jewish history and literature. From two tablets of stone, to a handwritten scroll, to sacred books somehow protected from the fires of hatred for hundreds and hundreds of years, to this moment in our history when there are more books about Judaism being printed with over 50 U.S. based English language full‐time publishers dedicated to Jewish books, and that doesn’t include Israel, and with 129 colleges and universities in the United States alone which offer college degrees in Judaic Studies. So now, Judaism meets our modern electronic age. Now many of us spend lots and lots of time sitting at our computers, and many of you know that America’s first internet addiction center just opened…how do you know if you have a problem? You have an Internet problem when: …you step out of your bedroom and realize that your parents have moved. …your dog has his own face book. …your husband tells you heʹs had the beard for 2 months. …you wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop and check your face book on the way back …when you wake up there’s a laptop in your bed. 11
…your wife says better communication is important in the marriage...so you buy a new computer. I do know that the internet’s perils and promise is everyone’s challenge. I do know that the very quality of the way we connect with one another using electronic gizmos has increased the value of a simple face to face meeting. I do know that parents have a supreme responsibility to moderate and edit not only their children’s computer use but their own as well, and I include myself among people who need to be reminded of that rebuke. I do know that the internet has given us amazing communal tools and has allowed those isolated to connect meaningfully with caring others. We know that darkness lurks around every internet corner and we surf at our own peril, but there is no going back now. The internet is far more than a mere tool, its use changes the way the brain works, the quality of human exchange is altered by this extension and reflection of the self. And beyond its immediacy, there is a fusion between the self and the virtual self which clouds the line between reality and reflection. The Jewish world is aware of the perils of neo‐nazi hate sites, and on the other hand, we’re also aware how important it is when we send out caring and sensitive e‐mail messages notifying them one another of deaths in the congregation. The internet has created a way for people to hide like never before. But it has also created an opportunity for people to show up in a radically new way. Judaism is used to adapting from one medium to the 12
next. Now on‐line you can find Heeb magazine, j‐date, and my favorite, a website whose name gives it away, e‐moyil.com…it’s all there on line. This week marks the sad passing of Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk who for 30 years as its president, led with excellence Reform Judaism’s seminary, HUC‐JIR. As I recently learned, “In 1938, when he was 8, he witnessed the destruction of Jewish homes and businesses in the Kristallnacht pogrom carried out by Hitlerʹs agents. Decades later, Gottschalk often would recall watching his frail grandfather wade into a creek to rescue pieces of the Torah scrolls that the Nazis had seized from the synagogue and hacked to pieces. Handing the pieces to his grandson, the old man said, ʺOne day you will put it together again.ʺ “ (JTA Obituary) Rabbi Gottschalk ordained and handed Torah to the first woman rabbi, Sally Priesand, Rabbi Priesand handed Torah to Cantor Morgovsky our cantor became a Bat Mitzvah. And it was Rabbi Priesand who installed Cantor Morgovsky here at Temple Sinai a few months ago on this very pulpit. And Rabbi Gottschalk ordained me as a rabbi and passed Torah to me in 1986. We reenact, over and over, the very moment that God handed a sacred text written on two pieces of stone to Moses. Which is why, in a few moments our friends, Marty Roth and Melissa Speisman will take the Torah scrolls from the Ark and pass them to Jen Yamron and Mona Kubli, 13
and when Jen and Mona walk around this our sacred space at this our most sacred season, we each will take Torah as our own, and now that it is ours, it becomes our turn to answer a question answered by every generation before us: What will we do with what we have been given?