Categories
News Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

Joining the North Carolina Marriage Equality Lawsuit: Living Up to Our Values

I am proud to be a Reform Rabbi.  This week the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) has joined the marriage equality lawsuit in North Carolina.  This past week the CCAR joined the United Church of Christ (UCC) as a plaintiff in overturning the same-sex marriage ban in North Carolina.  This is significant in several ways.

First, the CCAR has supported marriage equality for many years. As early as 1996 the Conference is on record as supporting Civil Marriage Equality. And then again in the year 2000 in at our convention in Greensboro, North Carolina the CCAR went on record to endorse officiation of rabbis at Jewish and civil marriages.  So it is fitting that we join this lawsuit in North Carolina.

Secondly, the CCAR and our Pacific region (PARR) have been involved in marriage equality cases in California, Washington, New Mexico, Massachusetts and the Windsor case at the Federal level. However, we have not been the plaintiffs in these cases.  Instead we filed friend of the court briefs as a religious group whose religious rights were being denied.

But with the case in North Carolina we are actually suing the state as the co-plaintiff.  This is taking an important step forward in our advocacy and support for marriage equality.  One of the things that makes this case so unique among the marriage equality lawsuits that have been filed around the country is that this one hinges on the rights of clergy to perform gay and lesbian weddings.  The North Carolina law specifically forbids clergy from performing even a commitment ceremony let alone a legal wedding, and imposes penalties on clergy who do so.

Sacred Encounter Cover 3Many Reform rabbis have led their communities to embrace and welcome LGBTQ Jews into their communities and have been proud to perform the first weddings in their states as marriage equality has become legal.  I had the honor in California in June of 2008 when I performed the first wedding of plaintiffs on the steps of the Beverly Hills Court House. And this past week, our colleagues, Jonathan Biatch and Dan Danson had the honor of performing some of the first lesbian and gay weddings in Wisconsin, the newest state to welcome marriage equality!

I rejoice that the Reform Rabbinate is taking a lead in this case, supporting our North Carolina rabbis, and living up to our stated values of full equality, justice and inclusion of the LGBT community!  And you should be too!

If you want to read more about the history of the LGBT equality and Reform Judaism, read further in the new offering from CCAR PRESS,  The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality,  ed. Rabbi Lisa Gruschow, Ph.D.

Rabbi Denise L. Eger is the founding Rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami and serves as President Elect of the CCAR.

Categories
Immigration News Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

We Stand With Ruth as We Get Ready for Shavuot

Tomorrow, on Sinai, we will affirm the purpose of our freedom from Egypt.
Tomorrow we will remember our history and our values, our mitzvot.
Tomorrow we will stand with Ruth.

We invite you to speak – even in the briefest of ways – to the Ruths of today.
We invite you to use whatever part of this liturgy speaks to you and your community.
We invite you to stand with Ruth.

And if you do, please let us know by clicking here. 

On this Shavuot, we stand with Ruth. We stand with rabbis and their communities across the continent in calling still for comprehensive immigration reform. Why? Congress has debated reform for far too many years while millions of aspiring Americans remain in the shadows, their lack of legal status barring them from good jobs and rendering school scholarships almost unattainable. We will not give up. Over the past seven weeks, we have counted the days from Egypt to Sinai, and we will not stop counting until all the Ruths have been welcomed home.

And why was the Scroll of Ruth written?

Rabbi Ze’ira says: “To teach [us] of a magnificent reward to those who practice and dispense chesed/loving kindness” (Ruth Rabbah 2:15).

Hear now the voices of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz:

I am Ruth.

With beloved family I came to a new country. I worked hard, determined to create a better life for myself and my loved ones. Today, I see my experience reflected in the lives of so many aspiring Americans strengthening this country through the work of their hands and the love of their families. On this Shavuot, please stand with me in recognition of the dreams of so many.

We are all Ruth.

I am Naomi.

I fled tragedy in one country to come to another filled with promise…only to be rejected—my dreams dashed against unthinkable challenges. Today, I see my experience reflected in the lives of so many aspiring Americans facing the fear of deportation, a promising future turned bitter.

On this Shavuot, please stand with me as we turn dreams sweet once again.

We are all Naomi.

I am Boaz.

I recognized those toiling in dark shadows in the corners of the field. I used my power to bring light to lives burdened by daunting trials. Today, I would like to see my experience reflected in the lives of many more American working to change current policies that keep bright futures dim. On this Shavuot, please stand with me to welcome those toiling in the corners of this country.

We are all Boaz.

* * *

On this Shavuot, we stand with Boaz, Naomi, and Ruth.

We stand with Boaz who looked into the face of the stranger and accepted responsibility, welcoming Ruth and teaching for the generations the ideal of chesed/loving-kindness, just as his grandfather Nachshon demonstrated action by leading others into the Red Sea.

We stand with Naomi who sought the well-being of others, who defied the example of her husband, Elimelech, a man who fled from his responsibility to others, whose narrow vision, selfishness, and jealousy led to his own demise.

We stand with Ruth who graciously said:

“Your people shall be my people,” who was the immigrant becoming citizen, the outsider becoming insider, whose descendent King David gives us even now a sense of promise.

On this Shavuot, may we be inspired to act with chesed with aspiring Americans, as we stand with Ruth.

Categories
Immigration Rabbis Social Justice

We Stand with Ruth of Moab, And We Stand With the Ruths of Today

This blog is the last in a series from Rabbis Organizing Rabbis connecting the Omer to Immigration Reform. This Shavuot, we recommit ourselves to working with the modern-day strangers among us. This Shavuot, we stand with Ruth. Rabbis Organizing Rabbis is a joint project of the CCAR’s Peace & Justice Committee, the URJ’s Just Congregations, and the Religious Action Center. Learn more and join the mailing list.  

We Stand With Ruth of Moab 

The Book of Ruth begins with the introduction, “It happened in the days when the judges judged” and concludes with the birth of King David, the representative figure for Malchut, the sephira of sovereignty.  The book itself is a kind of cri de couer for a better time—free of this book’s rampant poverty, loneliness and maltreatment (in Ruth 2:9 Boaz warns his workers not to molest Ruth, implying that they regularly molested other women).  We know that that is the Biblical view of the period of the Judges, when periodically “Israel did what was wicked in the eyes of Adonai” (Judges 4:1 et al.) because “in those days there was no king in Israel; each person would do what was right in one’s own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

For while it was a time when the Judges judged, they did not seem able or interested to judge how they might stop the famine which had sent Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi and her family into exile in Moab to seek food.  In our own time, so many people come to the United States to flee famine, drought, poverty or political oppression, often because they have given up hope that the powers in their own countries will be able to assist them, or care about assisting them.  They too are searching for a sovereignty which cares for them.  They have learned to believe that Americans do care.

To leave Eretz Yisrael for another land was a major decision, just as it is today.  To leave the country of one’s birth, however oppressive its living conditions, remains a difficult decision, never made lightly.  Today’s immigrants, like those in the Book of Ruth, have to abandon family, friends, the only language they know, sometimes the only place they have known.  Naomi, widowed by the man who led them into Moab, speaks of herself often as a bitter woman.

Her husband’s name was Elimelech, “My God is Sovereign”.  Yet what is sovereign in this book?  Naomi seems to believe that for each person—at least in her family—homeland is sovereign; in the book’s most famous passage, 1:14-17, three times Naomi urges Ruth and her sister Orpah to return (shovna)to their homes—the source for the custom of turning away potential converts three times.  They were all immigrants, Naomi held, and with their husbands dead, the sisters should return to the place from which they came.  But Ruth perceives a higher obligation—a higher sovereignty, if you will; using the same word as her mother-in-law, Ruth says, “Don’t entreat me to abandon you, to turn back (la-shuv) from you.”  For Ruth, to “return” to her own home would be to turn away from her proper home—the home she felt called upon to go to, because of her loyalty and love for Naomi.  If this book is a tribute to the rewards that come from following the precepts of the Torah (obedience to parents [or in-laws], caring for the stranger, leaving grain for the poor, etc.), Ruth turns to the sovereignty of God rather than the sovereignty of her own native place.  But the sefirah of Malchut also has a human dimension, representing kenesset Yisrael, the community of Israel—since it is through the community of Israel that God’s sovereignty is manifest.  When Ruth embraces the people Israel in choosing to go with Naomi, she embraces this dual dimension of Malchut as well.

The implications of this decision for today’s immigrants is instructive.  While we usually attribute primarily economic motives to contemporary immigrants’ desire to remain in the United States, we do our country a disservice by playing down a motive similar to Ruth’s: a belief, or a desire to believe, that the United States is a more caring country than the one from which they came.  How often do we tarnish that belief with the insensitivity, fear, and hostility we show particularly to undocumented immigrants, but often to all immigrants! How insensitive we often are to the still present American commitment to being a beacon to the oppressed—to the malchut, if you will, of the “American dream”—and of the American people as, at their best, the embodiment of it.

As a result of Ruth’s decision to remain with Naomi, the older woman feels an obligation to care for her.  A word that pervades the book, chesed, usually translated “love” or “lovingkindness”, really means love borne of a covenant.  Ruth shows chesed to Naomi, Naomi shows it to her, and Boaz shows it to both of them.  This covenantal love stems from the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai, which the Holy One will renew with us when the period of the Omer climaxes with Shavuot.  Devotion to the covenant is a sign of acceptance of the sovereignty of the God who made it—ol malchut shamayim, the “yoke” of the rule of heaven, and ol mitzvot, the “yoke” of the mitzvot.  Ol in Hebrew is related to the word al, above, with the sense that the yoke links us to the God above, rather than the more usual image of joining two creatures on the same level.

Are we ready to feel a sense of “covenant” with the undocumented immigrants of our time?  Are we ready to link them with the memories of grandparents or other relatives who endured many hardships to reach these shores—often out of the same motives as today’s undocumented?  And if we say, “Well, our ancestors came legally,” we forget that most of them came here at a time when immigrants were wanted, invited, encouraged by the state.  Now that the state is hostile to immigrants, to which sovereignty are we going to be loyal, that of a welcoming, covenanting God, or a too often frightened state?  Or, in the language of the Book of Ruth, are we going to be  citizens of a too often uncaring rule of Judges, or of the ideal, embracing sovereignty of God’s Malchut?

The season in which we read this book makes our choice quite clear.

We Stand With the Ruths of Today

Rabbi Shoshanah Conover of Temple Sholom of Chicago speaks with Erendira Rendon, Lead Organizer at the Resurrection Project in the Pilson neighborhood of Chicago. As Naomi stood with Ruth of Moab, Reform rabbis are standing with the Ruths of today – undocumented immigrants like Ere. Watch the Youtube video. 

Rabbi Richard N. Levy is the Rabbi of Campus Synagogue and Director of Spiritual Growth at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, CA. He completed a two-year term as the President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and was the architect of the Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism, the “Pittsburgh Principles,” overwhelmingly passed at the May, 1999 CCAR Convention. Prior to joining the HUC-JIR administration, Rabbi Levy was Executive Director of the Los Angeles Hillel Council. He is also the author of A Vision of Holiness: The Future of Reform Judaism.  

 

 

 

Categories
Books Social Justice

First Encounter with The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality

Here’s a hint that the intersection of Judaism and sexuality is a complex, multi-faceted, and endlessly fascinating topic: the new CCAR anthology, The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality is 810 pages, with over fifty contributions from clergy and thought-leaders from the Reform movement and beyond.

Clearly, there is a lot to say – and I’m both encouraged and excited by the depth and breadth of perspectives put forward by the book’s editor, Rabbi Lisa Grushcow, and the many authors included in this book. No one takes the easy way out, as each essayist tackles a wide range of issues head-on, employing new, creative approaches for textual analysis, ritual creation, and contemporary policy debates. From same-sex marriage, to infertility, to creating sacred space in cyberspace, these of-the-moment topics address age-old questions with refreshing honesty and intellectual rigor.

We enrich and sanctify these conversations when we convene them within Jewish communities, and this anthology provides us with an incredible tool to do so.

So – where to start? We have synthesized the incredible material included in this volume into a study guide, providing both topic-based tracks and chapter-by-chapter discussion questions.

The tracks, which include Marriage, Social Justice, Sexual Ethics, and more, are appropriate for a variety of adult and young adult education sessions. Each track includes relevant sub-topics and chapters. You could opt to teach the entire track as a longer, multi-part course, or select a particular sub-topic and its associated chapters in the book for a one-time discussion.

We also created tracks that include topics of particular interest for a WRJ/Sisterhood group, MRJ/Brotherhood group, synagogue teen group, or youth workers to discuss together. Synagogue boards may wish to study together using the tracks that include Reform Movement policy perspectives or improving LGBTQ Inclusion. The tracks also serve as a useful topical index – if you’re looking to recommend one chapter for a couple in pre-marital counseling to read, the Marriage track distills sub-topics from sexual intimacy to ritual and legal innovation.

The second part of the study guide includes discussion questions for every chapter of the book. You might use these questions in an adult education course covering one or more of the track-based topics. You could also employ the questions as a starting point for personal reflection after reading a particular chapter. Many of the questions are geared toward how the ideas in a given chapter could be implemented in your synagogue or local Jewish community.

Finally, The Sacred Encounter is full of beautiful personal reflections related to the broader topics in the anthology. Included in many of the tracks in the study guide, these reflections also provide an accessible entry-point to the book as a whole.

We look forward to hearing how you are teaching and discussing the many perspectives included in The Sacred Encounter. How do you plan to teach on any of these topics? Please let us know which tracks, discussion questions, and chapters spark the most exciting debates for you! This is only the beginning of what we know will be an incredible conversation.

Liz Piper-Goldberg, CCAR Press Rabbinic Intern/HUC-JIR ‘15, wrote the study guide for The Sacred Encounter

The study guide for The Sacred Encounter is available for free as a downloadable PDF

Categories
General CCAR News Rabbis Reform Judaism

What It Means to Truly Live Jewishly

Rabbi Shoshanah Conover

I first heard of Emmanuel Levinas when I was a first year student in rabbinical school.  Rabbi Levi Lauer, then head of Diapora-Israel relations and scholar at Shalom Hartman Institute, addressed first-year students in hopes of recruiting some of us to attend Hartman’s seminar for rabbinical students.  In the midst of his remarks, he summed up the essence of the philosophy of Levinas  in one sentence.  I still remember Lauer’s phrasing: “When you meet another person and look into their eyes, you take responsibility for them.”  This notion of the mutual responsibility of humanity resonated deeply.

I barely studied Levinas in rabbinical school– just one hour in a class with Dr. Eugene Borowitz.  It wasn’t until I came to Chicago, three years out of school, that I began to study him.

When I arrived to Chicago, I almost immediately found a perfect chevrutah, the extraordinary Rabba Rachel Kohl Finegold.  We decided to learn together Nine Talmudic Readings by Emanuel Levinas.  She was the Gemara queen and I had “a bit” of a knack for the commentary by Levinas.  We managed to get through four of his transcribed lectures before life intervened in our intensive studies.

One lecture stood out among the rest– “Temptation of Temptation”.  There, he analyzed the passage from the Talmud (BT Shabbat 88a-b) beginning with the midrash of God holding Mt Sinai over the Hebrews like a titled tub.  In his analysis, Levinas criticizes “Western Man” for his constant dabbling into ideas, never committing to any one thing.  Yet, in our receiving of Torah, the Israelites accepted the ethic of action– of responding to the Other.  At our core, according to the ideal of Levinas, we understand that “the messenger is the message.”

I have studied this lecture intensively three times now.  First with Rachel, then with a beloved colleague and conservative rabbi Adam Kligfeld.  And this year, I studied it with high school senior Caroline Kaplan.  I want to share with you excerpts of how she described the experience in her Dvar Torah at her Kabbalat Torah ceremony:

For months now I’ve had a sticky note up in the corner of my computer. It reads, “We live in a world that gives no room to be what we dreamt of being”.  Poet Adrienne rich wrote this. She was a woman, a Jew and gay, none of which are easy to be.  …

I connected with this quote because she articulated the hopelessness I’d seen around me.

 How can we move forward when there is so much to do, so much to repair, and so many distractions that keep us from truly committing to do good works?

The answer is at once both obvious and complicated; so of course Torah and the great scholars who study it could only give the answer.   I was looking for a place, something to ground me, to give me purpose. I needed to reconnect. That’s what I told Rabbi Conover, and she immediately knew what I needed. “Levinas!” she said, and she couldn’t have been more right.

Together we read Levinas’s Talmudic commentary entitled “Temptation of Temptation”, which made me understand what it means to truly live Jewishly.

The passage in the Talmud begins with a famous Midrash.

“God inclined the mountain over [the Israelites] like a tilted tub and said: If you accept the Torah, all is well, if not here will be your grave.”

Levinas saw this not as being threatened with physical death, but instead the threat was an even greater one. If we didn’t accept Torah we were to spend the rest of our lives just wandering in the desert—tempted by all kinds of ideas and interests. The wandering and never committing to a real ethic would’ve been the greatest death of all.

The passage in the Talmud continues  on with the response of the Israelites when we are offered the Torah.  We responded:  Naseh vinishma, “we will do, and we will hear “ implying we will do before we hear.

So what does it mean to do before hearing?

According to Levinas it means to truly respond to another’s need, without weighing all the available opportunities, or contemplating all the other options. … According to Levinas,“Consciousness is the urgency of a destination leading to the other person and not an eternal return to self.” So much of my learning in secular education and in my life has been about dabbling.  Learning for knowledge’s sake, being well rounded. … Torah teaches us that there is only one true piece ofknowledge that we must learn: “The messenger is the message.” Our duty is to respond to their needs, their voice.  It’s a different kind of learning and being in this world. And that’s what I’m embracing when I receive Torah this evening. That’s the way I want to live in this world, by acting. Not just so I can become what I dreamt of being, but so I can listen and respond to others—help their dreams to be realized too.

In my life I’ll extend my hand whenever needed. I’ll wander through this desert with a purpose. This connecting with others is what I need to do, hearing the needs of the ones aroundme and responding.  This is how the people like …family have begun to change the world. In the years to come I’ll join them in making room for dreams to be realized, those who commit and act, those are the ones who repair the world, and that is the type of woman I’m becoming.

My family at home has certainly helped me strive to become this kind of woman, yet my family here at the Temple has inspired and embraced my development as a Jew and as a person in crucial ways.

Emmanuel Levinas (photo: CC BY-SA 2.0)
Emmanuel Levinas (photo: CC BY-SA 2.0)

Rabbi Shoshanah Conover serves Temple Sholom of Chicago.

Categories
Immigration News Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

We Stand With Ruth: Staying Connected to Our Families

This blog is the sixth in a series from Rabbis Organizing Rabbis connecting the Omer to Immigration Reform. This Shavuot, we recommit ourselves to working with the modern-day strangers among us. This Shavuot, we stand with Ruth. Rabbis Organizing Rabbis is a joint project of the CCAR’s Peace & Justice Committee, the URJ’s Just Congregations, and the Religious Action Center. Learn more and join the mailing list.

In this week’s post, Rabbi Joel Simonds and Reuben Banks, President of University Synagogue youth group and a member of Reform CA, share a powerful video message for the 6th week of the Omer. (Youtube Video)

“As we prepare for Shavuot, as we prepare to receive Torah from Sinai, and all of the beauty that is wrapped in our Torah, this week, the week of the foundation of yesod, We Stand with Ruth. We stand with all our brothers and sisters who seek to keep their families connected, who seek to keep their families together, who seek to keep their families – the foundation of this country we love so much. We stand with Ruth, we stand with all our brothers and sisters.”

Will you stand with Ruth? On this Shavuot, we recommit ourselves to working with the modern-day strangers among us. On this Shavuot, ROR stands with Ruth – and so can you! Pledge to participate in ROR’s Shavuot campaign, “We Stand with Ruth.”

Categories
General CCAR Rabbis Reform Judaism

We Are All the Interim Rabbi

In the opening months of my tenure at my new congregation, I said to a group of lay leaders, “I am the interim rabbi.”  No, I didn’t mean that I would move on at the end of a year, like the outstanding intentional interim colleague who served so well in that capacity before my arrival.  Still, I meant what I said.

There was a time that such a thought would have shocked me.  I served more than twenty years in one congregation, beginning a year after ordination.  I expected to serve there until retirement, then actively as rabbi emeritus until burial in that Temple’s cemetery.  I envisioned my rabbinate as intimately bound to that singular synagogue.

The future I envisioned was not to be.  After a traumatic upheaval, I submitted my resignation; then, however awkwardly, by mutual agreement, I continued to serve in limited ways during a year’s sabbatical.  Over the course of those months, I came to the realization — at first painful, and ultimately comforting — that the congregation and I would be just fine without one another.

I began to divide the ways of that congregation into three categories:  1) Practices that predated my rabbinate there; 2) Aspects that colleagues, congregants and I had built together; and 3) Innovations that sprang into being after me, before I was even fully out the door.

My division of that congregation’s world, though, was false. Even if I was there much too long to have been what we derisively term an “unintentional interim,” I had been the interim rabbi.  We all are.  Congregations have stories that begin before we arrive and continue after we leave.  Even our most lasting and well-remembered impact would likely have happened, in one form or another, had somebody else been in “our” pulpit.  בלעדי, Yoseph said, “Without me, God (and unseen forces of history) will see to (the congregation’s) welfare.”

This realization requires a humility, a ביטול היש, that challenges everyone, perhaps particularly rabbis.  Its acceptance, though, may lead to a healthier, happier rabbinate, not to mention more successful congregational transitions.

Whether we serve five years or fifty, we can help our congregants become the Jews they can best become, facilitate meaning and service in our communities, and summon the Divine Presence.  If we see ourselves as interim rabbi, for four years or forty, we can leave our congregations healthy.  Read that last sentence again; it’s an intentional double entendre:  Both we and our congregations need to be healthy at the end of our tenures.

When an interim rabbi leaves, at the end of one year or a full career, s/he can find a new, fulfilling life, potentially including meaningful rabbinical service, outside that congregation.  When an interim rabbi leaves, after two years or twenty, the congregation can be primed to welcome a new rabbinical leader, to continue its history into its future, from strength to greater strength.

Rabbi Barry Block serves Congregation B’nai Israel in Little Rock, AR.

Categories
Immigration News Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

This Shavuot, Will You Stand With Ruth?

To our colleagues and friends:

We created Rabbis Organizing Rabbis (ROR) for the same reason so many of us became rabbis – because we believe in the power of the Reform rabbinate to change the world! We know you feel that way, too. We have the opportunity this Shavuot to stand together and to stand with Ruth. Will you join us?

Please take the pledge to use any part of ROR’s Shavuot liturgy, written by Rabbis Adam Stock Spilker and Shoshanah Conover, and/or ROR’s Shavuot text study, written by Rabbis Erica Asch and Elana Perry.

You can share the liturgy by reading it during services, including it in your synagogue bulletin, sharing it over email, printing or posting it for your congregation/community, or sharing on Facebook or Twitter (using the hashtag #WeStandWithRuth). You can use the text study during your Shavuot tikkun, or in adult education classes leading up to Shavuot.

However you chose to share these ritual components, let us know that you are joining ROR – that you Stand with Ruth – by pledging at rac.org/ROR.

B’shalom,
Adam Spilker, Ari Margolis, David Adelson, Elana Perry, Erica Asch, Esther Lederman, Gary Glickstein, Greg Litcofsky, Jason Rosenberg, Joel Mosbacher, John Linder, Josh Caruso, Karen Perolman, Kim Herzog Cohen, Larry Bach, Mark Miller, Peter Berg, Sam Gordon, Seth Limmer, Shoshanah Conover, Sissy Coran, and Wendi Geffen

Categories
Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

Hunger Still Haunts America

For one in six Americans, hunger is a daily reality. That’s right—1 in 6, close to 50 million of our citizens! As you are reading this article, nearly 13 million families in America are struggling with food insecurity. And most of these do not match the stereotype that we too often conjure up in our minds: instead they are normally hardworking families who simply cannot make ends meet and are forced, for lack of sufficient funds, to cut back on the amount of food they eat—sometimes it just the adults, too often the entire family.

In the Torah portion Emor (‘speak’) God commands us (Leviticus 23:22), “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am Adonai Your God.” In parashat K’doshim (Leviticus 19:9) we encounter a similar mitzvah with the additional instruction that “you shall not pick your vineyard bare or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard.”

Rabbi Bernard Bamberger z”l, broadened our understanding of theses verses in his commentary on the book of Leviticus for The Torah: A Modern Commentary (URJ Press). He refers to “the rights of the poor at harvest time…It confers the right to glean and to harvest the uncut edge on those who have no resources of their own. It is perhaps the oldest declaration that the disadvantaged members of a society have a right to support from the society. They should not be dependent on voluntary benevolence alone…”

Rabbi Bamberger’s multiple use of the word ‘rights’ when it comes to the poor and hungry in our midst represents a radical new use of language that, if adopted, would change our understanding of our society’s obligations to those millions of Americans who are daily challenged to feed themselves at all, let alone nutritiously. Neither our political nor our judicial system has ever spoken of the ‘rights of the poor and hungry’. The adoption of this creative language would be an important first step towards changing the attitudes and practices that conspire to keep hungry Americans in such desperate straits.

I recently accepted an invitation to join the national Board of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, and I am honored to serve in this position. In recent months I have learned a lot about the issue of food insecurity in America (and in Israel), and I am often horrified that in our day this struggle is still so common. I am proud that many Reform congregations have adopted ‘Hunger’ as the central focus of their social justice efforts. Many synagogues host weekly Soup Kitchens, regularly make sandwiches distributed at multi-service centers and deliver bags of food to the needy multiple times per year. This is wonderful work, God’s work. Nevertheless, these benevolent activities are stopgap measures. The only way to end the devastating problem of hunger is to pursue justice for everyone.

The Union for Reform Judaism, our Religious Action Center, our Reform movement’s Commission on Social Action and the Central Conference of American Rabbis have each adopted resolutions that challenge us to fight the injustice of hunger and food insecurity in our midst. These statements of support go back as far as 1975 and have been reiterated on several occasions through the intervening years. But while they theoretically commit us to engage in this fight, we clearly are not yet doing enough. The statistics are simply overwhelming.

Deuteronomy Chapter 15 challenges us: “If, however, there is a needy person among you, one of your kin in any of your settlements in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kin. Rather, you must open your hand and lend them sufficient for whatever they need….for there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.”

RabbiJonathanSteinAs hunger and poverty continue to flourish in America, and as economic inequality continues to widen, I pray that our Reform movement will ever take to heart the obligations that our Torah enjoins upon us. Let us work for the rights of the hungry in our midst and for a just and compassionate society. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and welcoming the stranger…these are the real tests of our commitment to making God’s good world even better.

Rabbi Jonathan A. Stein serves Temple Shaaray Tefila in NYC. He is the Immediate Past President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Categories
Israel News Rabbis Reform Judaism

Reform Jews Must Look at Themselves

Reform and Conservative Jews feel discriminated against in Israel. The rabbinic establishment shuns them. Though the state pays salaries to some non-Orthodox rabbis, it ignores and discriminates against them in many other ways.

Polls indicate many secular Israelis favour equal rights for all religious streams, yet most non-observant Jews choose Orthodox synagogues and rabbis for life-cycle events. Of those who turn to Conservative and Reform congregations, only a few actually join them, and even fewer are actively involved.

Nevertheless, non-Orthodox Jewish movements remain committed to Israel. They show it, for example, by insisting that their rabbinical students spend at least a year there. If some return less than enthusiastic about the state, it may be due to a sense of not really being wanted.

I perceived some of that when I heard a Shabbat sermon last month at the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew Union College, which trains Reform Jewish professionals. The weekly portion was M’tzora, which deals with an affliction called tzara’at, often erroneously rendered as leprosy but is better identified as “a mysterious and causeless malady that renders you utterly incapable of partaking in society.”

That’s how it was described by the speaker. Sam Kaye is completing a year in Israel before returning to the United States for the rest of his five-year rabbinical training. Referring to the ritual unfitness that may cause the affliction and deem sufferers to be outside the camp yet still inside the Israelite community, he suggested that’s how many Israelis perceive Reform Jews.

I believe he reflects the feelings of most of his fellow students: “All too often, especially in this city, it feels as if Reform Jews are the modern lepers of the traditional Jewish world, described as unfit and unqualified to participate in matters related to spirituality. While we remain in the secular realm, we’re tacitly accepted… but when we desire to enter into the realm of that which is holy, suddenly our infection bubbles to the surface.”

He believes the reason is that “Reform Judaism lifts up a mirror to Jewish society and reminds it of an uncomfortable truth” about the Orthodox establishment. He argued that “those that society has traditionally deemed ‘spiritually unfit’ are actually quite capable of embodying spirituality.”

Kaye seems to have had in mind the “big tent” that Conservative and Reform Judaism advocate. They and other liberal groups seek to make room for as many Jews as possible, irrespective of halachic status and chosen lifestyle.

He urged perseverance in the face of establishment intransigence: “Even if authorities don’t believe in our message or when they invalidate the messenger, it doesn’t change the need to continue holding up the mirror and show our people the flaws, the cracks, and the impurities they would rather pretend did not exist.”

Escape into victimhood is common among those who feel discriminated against. Self-righteousness to the point of claiming higher moral sensitivity than others is part of the defence mechanism.

But Kaye went further. He urged the future Reform rabbis, cantors and educators whom he was addressing to apply the same scrutiny to themselves as they do to others. Our critics, he said, are also holding up a mirror “that is shedding light on our failure to maintain Jewish identity” and they’re sending us a message “eerily similar to our own: ‘turn inward; acknowledge where you have left others behind.’” Instead of self-pity and self-righteousness, he advocated self-scrutiny.

Hence his sober conclusion: “When we demand that others face their reflection, it is fundamental that we do not find ourselves unable to bear that same self-scrutiny when our own turn arrives.” Being victims doesn’t entitle us to be smug. Responding to our critics includes being steadfast in our commitment, yet learning from them, despite their belligerence.

I can think of no more apt way to articulate my own Judaism: stand my ground as a critic, but apply the same rigid standards to myself. I’m grateful for the reminder.

 This post originally appeared on cjnews.org.