From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life Temple Emanuel in Newton

June 1, 2024

We could all use a booster shot of hope. Where do we find it?

Tomorrow we are going to examine two very different models for finding hope in dark circumstances: Rabbi Akiva in the Talmud, Makot 24 A and B, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his epic Morality, published shortly before he passed away in 2020.

Rabbi Akiva’s approach to hope seems to be about a new lens: Look at reality differently.

Rabbi Sacks’s approach to hope seems to be about a new action plan: Act differently.

What is the relationship of these two approaches to each other, and to us now?

What, if anything, lasts forever?  What is impervious to the ravages of time? What can we do today that will still be talked about a hundred years from now?

I have been thinking about these questions since May 13, which is the day that a great writer named Alice Munro died.  Alice Munro won the Noble Prize in Literature in 2013.  She was an absolute master of the short story genre.  I had never read her work before her death, so I started reading a collection with the title Too Much Happiness, published in 2009.  As you might imagine, the title Too Much Happiness is ironic.  The characters in this collection do not have too much happiness.

One story is about a recently widowed woman named Nita.  She had been married to a man twenty years older named Rich.  They expected she would be the first to pass, because she was fighting cancer, and because he had gotten a recent clean bill of health from his doctor. But soon after the doctor’s appointment, he passed suddenly and unexpectedly while on the way to the hardware store.

It dawns on Nita that her life has changed not temporarily, but permanently.  Rich is not coming back. The patterns they used to enjoy will not happen again.  Who she used to be, a wife to Rich, she is no longer.   And she faces this new reality with her own health challenges. She used to be a voracious reader.  When Rich died, at first she thought I’ll just read.  So she would sit with her books in her comfy chair.  They kept her company.  She liked the feel of them.  But she realized she could not read them anymore.  Her medical treatments had diminished her attention span.  What she used to be able to do, she can do no longer.  Is happiness when circumstances change permanently still possible? 

Munro’s story captures a dilemma that many of us find ourselves in.  The world is changing. Our world is changing.  And we wonder is it changing temporarily.  Or is it changing permanently?  It is not always easy, or even possible, to know for sure.  Think back to the worst of Covid.  In the darkest days of the pandemic, we wondered whether we would we ever be able to gather in big, robust, happy gatherings without worry again.  Now we know the answer is yes. But we didn’t necessarily know it at the time. There is a recency bias. The moment we are in is so powerful.  Remember how we all felt in the early days of the pandemic. 

Now we have a different set of questions.  What will be with Israel?  What will be with the American Jewish community?  Is our golden age over, or will the spike of anti-Semitism pass like Covid 19 passed?  Will our relationship with our alma mater ever be loving and uncomplicated again?

Kohelet famously teaches us that there is a time for everything under the sun. Does that extend to both moderation and extremism? Is there a time for moderation? Is there a time for extremism? What do our sources have to say about how we might think about the different appeals of moderation and extremism? We will consider two sources.

The first is a famous love story between Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel. It feels like an extreme story. They fall in love, get married, and then spend two periods of 12 years apart from each other so that he can learn Torah and be a great scholar. She wants this, encourages it.

The second is a teaching from Maimonides about how we should eschew extremism. Shoot for the mean.

The greatest rabbi in the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, seems to live a life that is at variance with the wisdom of our greatest medieval sage, Maimonides.

How do we understand this creative tension, and what does it mean to us today?

Dr. Michael Oren served in the IDF as a Lone Soldier in the paratroopers and then as an IDF Spokesman. He was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, where he was instrumental in fortifying the US-Israel alliance and in obtaining U.S. defense aid, especially for the Iron Dome system. After his time in Washington, Oren served as a Member of Knesset and Deputy Minister of Diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office. He spearheaded efforts to strengthen Israel-Diaspora relations, to develop the Golan Heights, and to fight BDS. He has authored several New York Times bestsellers including Six Days of War, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israel Divide and Power, Faith, and Fantasy and is the founder of Israel Advocacy Group. Ambassador Oren’s latest writing can be found on his Substack, Clarity.

Madness. 

We all feel the madness of our time. How can it be that at the Newton Public library, groups of Newton citizens shout at each other, locked in mutual hate? How can it be that students at Columbia have to hear encampments where they can hear from their bedrooms "We love Hamas" and "Burn Tel Aviv to the ground" night after night—and the administration lets this happen, hate unfiltered? How can it be that graduation ceremonies are interrupted by hate? How can it be that Jews feel so abandoned by so many? How can it be that Israel at 75 was (while it had been a tough year with the protests over judicial reform) basically robust and promising, while Israel at 76 feels so very different? 

Madness was a big theme of Elie Wiesel. Tomorrow we are going to study a number of Hasidic parables that Elie Wiesel taught at Boston University that were reported in Ariel Burger's book called Witness. Elie Wiesel brought these parables to shed light on the madness of the 1930s
and 1940s. 

What light do these parables shed on the madness of our own time—the universities, libraries, schools, and neighbors we used to love that we no longer recognize?

Shabbat Shalom.