Author: Rabbi Joel Abraham

Categories
Convention Israel

Home

When my daughter was younger, she used to say she had three homes – the one we all lived in and kept our stuff, URJ Camp Eisner, and Disney World.

Wednesday morning, the CCAR – representing the Reform rabbinate – was invited to a meeting of the Knesset committee on Israel/Diaspora Relations – a historic moment. The chair of the committee, told us that this house of the Jewish people was ours as well, and welcomed us home.
Returning to Israel always feels like coming home. Part of the reason is that many of us spent our first year of rabbinic school studying at HUC’s cam2pus in Jerusalem; living in Israel. Somehow, even though the streets now head in different directions, favorite restaurants are closed, new buildings obscure old views, and you can’t even walk to the Old City the same way anymore, there is a hamische familiarity in the streets, the smells, and the sounds of the birds chirping at 5 am.

To be welcomed home in the parliament of Israel was a moving moment. The moments continued. One after another, interspersed by the leaders of the North American, Israeli, and world-wide Reform movements, 15 members of Knesset from parties across the political spectrum came to speak. They told us that for Israel to be the only democracy in the world where all Jews could not pray in the manners they wished was not right. They told us that we were partners with them in preserving world Jewry and the Jewish state. They told us that we had won an important victory in the new plan for the Kotel (the Western Wall). They told us that we were home. 1

We were warned that any Knesset member had the right to enter the meeting and speak. The day before one of the members of a religious party had said that all Reform Jews were mentally ill. We were ready to hear insults, and even threats. Instead, we were only welcomed – not as friends, but as family.

The division between those of us Jews who live in the Diaspora and those who live in Israel is more than an ocean and a continent, and less than width of a piece of matzah. Even when we speak the same language, we often mean different things. We fight like siblings. Like family, there is no one who can disappoint or irritate us more. Yet, when facing the rest of the world, we stand together. We welcome Israelis into our synagogues, our camps, and our homes, and when we land at Ben Gurian airport, we, too, are home.

Home is never an easy place to visit. There are comforts and joys, but there is also the responsibility. A guest is polite and doesn’t need to help set the table or clean up. Famiy can’t leave until the work is done.

After we heard each speech, we stood together – Israelis and Diaspora Jews – and we sung our common song – the national anthem of the state of Israel. The words of Hatikvah had special significance as we thought back over what had been said – I’hiyot am chofshi, b’artzeinu – to be a free people, free to worship and to live as Reform Jewish, in our own land, our home, eretz Yisraeil.

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Joel N. Abraham serves Temple Sholom in Scotch Plains, NJ . The latest in a short line of rabbis, he has been attending CCAR conventions for most of his life. This is his third Israel convention.

Categories
Social Justice

A Lamentation and a Journey

עַל אֵלֶּה | אֲנִי בוֹכִיָּה עֵינִי | עֵינִי יֹרְדָה מַּיִם כִּי רָחַק מִמֶּנִּי מְנַחֵם מֵשִׁיב נַפְשִׁי הָיוּ בָנַי שׁוֹמֵמִים כִּי גָבַר אוֹיֵב: פֵּרְשָׂה צִיּוֹן בְּיָדֶיהָ אֵין מְנַחֵם לָהּ

For these things, I cry out.  My eye, my eye pours down water, because the comfort that would restore my soul is far from me. My children are desolate, because the enemy has prevailed. Zion spreads open hands, but she has no comfort.         Lamentations 1:16-17a

Churches are burning again in the United States, and I am swept back two decades.

It was June of 1996 and I had just arrived back on the East Coast and was trying to integrate into my community at Hebrew Union College in New York.  I received a note from Rabbi Nancy Wiener, one of the faculty at HUC, who invited anyone who was interested to travel with her and some other student volunteers to Boligee, Alabama.  There, working out of a Quaker Workcamp, we would volunteer for a week to help re-build some of the churches burned in a wave of hate-filled arson that had swept through black churches in the South.

The experience was transformative.  Travelling with cantorial and rabbinic students, I felt proud that this could be my job – to travel with my congregants to place ourselves and our hands in service of others in need. The hospitality was humbling. The church women refused to let us bring our own food the jobsite – they insisted on cooking for us, every day.  They said it was the least that they could do.

I felt good about the spackling and sanding that I was doing, but I did not quite understand until Tisha b’Av.  Named after the date at which we are told that the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE and the Romans burned the second Temple in 70 CE, it is the only other full day of fasting and mourning in the Jewish tradition, besides Yom Kippur.  As a Reform Jew, the holiday had been of historical interest to me, but I failed to grasp the visceral impact of losing one’s house of worship – until our group decided to hold our Tisha b’Av commemoration at the former site of the church we had come to rebuild.

These churches were small – hardly more than a central room for worship, an office, and a kitchen.  We stood on the blackened ground of the sanctuary and, as the sun set, were surrounded by the grave markers of at least a century of parishioners.  These local churches were small in population as well – only a few families, who had been members for generations, whose families were buried surrounding their worship home.  The law did not allow this community to build in what had become a cemetery, and so their new house of worship – although strong and clean, would stand alone several miles down the road, without the presence of loved ones.

For me, that was when it hit home.  I thought about how I had felt when I lost the synagogue that I grew up in – the loss of a place to come home to at the High Holy Days; the place that I had known I would see the same faces (a little older), in the same seats.  But, that Temple still exists, I was just no longer a member.  How much more the loss by our ancestors, with no place to travel to at each pilgrimage holiday, no direction to turn when praying, no high hill to stand on and look out over the capital, the graves of ancestors, the history of generations, the promise of a people.

Three years later, in my first year at my present congregation, we learned of a fire set at a friend’s congregation.  That Tisha B’Av, I asked each congregant to find a place in our building where they had a special memory.  We travelled from room to room, picking up people and hearing their stories, building a mental map of our Temple.  Finally, we each made a fabric square, illustrating and completing the phrase, “A Temple is a House of….” which were sewn together into a quilt which we sent to Congregation B’nai Israel in Sacramento.

We see Tisha b’Av as a grand historical moment – the transition from animal sacrifice to prayer and rabbinic Judaism.  Our Reform forebears saw it as a moment to be celebrated – the beginning of our mission into the greater world, to be a light among the nations, not apart.  And yet, there is the personal sense of loss that we have forgotten: the pew no longer present; the yahrzeit plaque melted into slag; the prayerbooks scattered and burned.

In reaching out to others, I rediscovered the loss of my people.  In feeling that loss, I was able to see not only what they had lost, but what it meant to them for us to be there, just to show with our physical presence that they were not alone, not abandoned, that not everyone wanted to wipe their home of worship from the earth.

On Tisha b’Av, we read from what is called in English, Lamentations, in Hebrew, Eicha.  Eicha is a barely articulate cry – “How?”  How can this have happened?  How can I deal with this loss?  How can I face a new reality, when my rock has been shattered?  We may have no answers to this plea, but we have actions to share the burden.  We will walk from Selma to Washington, DC with the NAACP’s Journey for Justice and we will say: Tell us of your pain.  We may not be able to fully understand it, but we can listen; we can try to carry some of that weight.  We can say, we will not let someone do this to you again, without putting ourselves in their way.

Eicha – how?  How can we do anything else?

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Rabbi Joel N. Abraham serves Temple Sholom of Scotch Plains/Fanwood, NJ. 

Tisha b’Av (July 25-26) is considered the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It is the day when we mourn  our various destructions and exiles, and in many communities is marked by fasting, reading the Book of Lamentations, and the rituals of mourning. For the last several years, Reform CA has used this holiday as an opportunity to gather to reflect on the brokenness and alienation still present in society and recommit ourselves to the sacred call to repair.  Wherever you find yourself this Tisha B’Av– alone or in congregation, at camp or at home– we hope this resource, about the urgent need for racial justice helps you refocus and rededicate yourself, firmly rooted in our Jewish tradition.  This was created by Rabbi Jessica Oleon Kirschner of Reform CA and Rabbi Joel Simonds of RAC-West.

Categories
omer Rabbis Organizing Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

We All Count: To See Ourselves, We Should Also See Others

This blog is the second in a series from Rabbis Organizing Rabbis connecting the period of the Omer to the issue of race and class structural inequality.  Rabbis Organizing Rabbis is a joint project of the CCAR’s Peace & Justice Committee, the URJ’s Just Congregations, and the Religious Action Center. 

בכול דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים

“In each generation, a person is obligated to see things as if they themselves came out from Egypt.”

Looking through my father’s desk after he died, in the wallet that he had used in high school, in Baltimore in the 1950’s, I found two cards.  The first said something to the effect that “I am glad that your establishment chooses to serve people of all races, and I am proud to patronize it.”  The second basically said the opposite.  “I am sorry that your establishment does not choose to serve people of all races, and I will no longer chose to patronize it.”  I do not know that my father ever actually used these cards.  None of his friends remember this campaign.  I can only imagine the combination of courage, tact, and chutzpah it took to do so.  But before my father could have used such a card, he had to take a look around and notice the patrons of a particular store, or the signs that denied patronage.

In my middle school grade, there was one black child.  I noticed that he was black, but I did not consider what it might have meant for him to be the only black student in a white, suburban school.  My high school, on the other hand, was more diverse – I recall one of my teachers calling it a “ghetto school.” While the race of students in my health class matched the local demographics, there were no black students who were enrolled in all honors classes.  I didn’t recognize this until later.   To be honest, I might have noticed a large amount of African-Americans in a given situation; I didn’t noticed a demographically disproportionate small amount.

I have since learned that a vast amount of racial inequality happens under the radar of those who therefore reap, often unknowingly, the benefits of that injustice.  In learning about “the talk” that parents of African-American children need to give to their sons and daughters, I have discovered an entirely different view of our society.  Over the last several years, with a small group of individuals of different racial backgrounds, I have been engaged in deeply personal and open conversations about our experience of race and prejudice.  Educationally, socio-economically, and geographically, the leaders of this group (Social Justice Matters) are in the same location.  The world that we live in, however, is very different.  There has been much talk about what it means to “drive while black”, how the encounter of an African-American male with the police can be very different from that of a (seemingly) white or Asian male or female, even about being seen as an opportunity for a sale or a problem in a retail store.  What I have begun to see is the entire social construction that a black member of the group wears every day in order to live in a world where he must be ever-ready to explain himself, where any encounter can turn disastrous, and where he cannot even voice his frustration at the failure of another’s understanding or the non-existent pace of social change, lest he be branded an “angry black man”.

What does it mean for Jews to see ourselves as if we ourselves came out of Egypt?  Even if we cannot live inside someone else’s skin, how can we begin to understand another’s story?  How can we not only share that we are willing to try, but that we can begin to open our eyes to see the world differently – through the eyes of oppression?  After my father put those cards in his wallet, and before he handed them out, he had to take account of where he was, and who was around him.  Because, only once we have begun to see and take stock of and to number what is around us – to truly count, as we are called to through the omer – can we even ask the question what we can do to make change.

We all count is not just about who matters.  We must also actually count – who sits at the table with us; who can even enter the same doors; who is present and who is not.  Only then can we seek them out, and ask what it is we can do to help.  I have just begun to open my eyes.  This period of the Omer, I, and Rabbis Organizing Rabbis, invite you to open your eyes and take a count, as well.  Take the old story of the Exodus, and see through different eyes.  Look at the numbers that are people – in your communities and across the nation.  Only if we all count, can others count on us.

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Rabbis Organizing Rabbis is project of the Reform Movement’s social justice initiatives: the CCAR’s Committee on Peace, Justice and Civil Liberties, the Religious Action Center, and Just Congregations.

Rabbi Joel Abraham serves Temple Sholom of Scotch Plains, NJ