A sermon I delivered this morning. Feel free to skip it if ethnoparticular rallying cries aren’t your thing.
DO GOOD FENCES really make good neighbors – or just a bad impression?
Let’s review the piece of Torah that our rabbi just chanted, specifically the part where the Canaan-bound spies report back to our assembled ancestors: “The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.”
Sounds hopeless, doesn’t it? Powerful people living in fortified cities. The spies can perhaps be forgiven for freaking out over the prospect of future conquest.
But Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sees the situation differently. He says the spies drew the wrong conclusion: that if the cities are strong; then the people are strong. But that’s not accurate: if the cities are strong, the people must be weak.
It’s like this: If the people were truly strong, their city walls wouldn’t need to be, because they could trust to their own strength to defend themselves against interlopers.
Rabbi Sacks says that this can be an analogy for Jews in the modern age. We couldn’t possibly build enough walls to keep out occasional threats. And anyway, Judaism teaches us to engage with the world, not retreat from it. Even when faced with our most ancient enemy, Jew-hatred.
From Pirkei Avot, that digest of rabbinical wisdom, comes this advice: “Rabbi Elazar teaches: Be diligent in the study of Torah, and know what to answer a heretic.”
In simpler language: Know who you are. Why you are. Where you come from. And how to take care of yourself in a non-ideal situation.
It may not be easy. But Rabbi Sacks assures us that Judaism is strong enough to withstand any challenge. And strong people don’t need to live behind walls.
We are, all of us, almost 4,000 years’ worth of strong. It’s a hard-won strength, gained from resisting some very severe attempts to marginalize or vanquish us. And as I said, resistance isn’t always easy, either then or now. But we’ve done it, and are still here to prove it.
So my question today is: “How do you strengthen and maintain your sense of Jewish identity?”
[pass mic: some of the dozen-or-so answers included studying our textual tradition, attending services, and cooking (and teaching!) Jewish recipes]
Thank you, everyone. Shabbat shalom.