Friday, November 16, 2018

A Hot Meal At The End Of The Day: Vayeitzei.18

A Hot Meal At The End Of The Day
D’var Torah for Parashat Vayeitzei
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
November 16, 2018

When my children were young, we loved reading books together.  One of our favorites was Where The Wild Things Are, by the wonderful author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. When we got to the page where Max commands, “Let the rumpus start!” we would let loose with a five-minute cacophony of jungle calls and cries. Only then, exhilarated and completely out of breath, would we go on and read the rest of the story. Somehow that brief jungle interlude made the ending even more satisfying, as Max returns into “His very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.”

Sendak’s book is wonderful fantasy, one that enables children to experience escape, adventure and safe return, all in context of a story line that begins with rebellion and ends happily with reconciliation.

As such, Where The Wild Things Are shares much in common with this week’s Torah portion, Vayeitzei (“And Jacob left,” Genesis 28:10—32:3). This portion begins with Jacob packing up hurriedly and leaving the safety of home after tricking his twin brother, Esau, out of the blessing of the firstborn. Fearing Esau’s violent rage, yet braced by the blessing of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, whom the Torah describes as “a dweller in tents,” faces his first night away from home. 

That night, sleeping alone on a barren mountain, with the cold earth as his bed and a rock replacing his soft feather pillow, Jacob has his famous dream of the ladder with its top in the heavens. He sees angels going up and down the ladder and has a vision of God, who promises always to be there for Jacob, to protect him and see to his safe return home. Jacob awakens with awe in his heart, but he is only partially reassured by God’s promise. Jacob does not yet know the power of dreams, nor is his faith fully formed yet.

Yet, as Jacob is about to face the uncertainties and dangers of reality, all that is about to change.

Life, as they say, is the best school of all, and Jacob is a fast learner. He almost immediately falls in love, and soon finds himself at the head of a bustling household. Jacob becomes a successful entrepreneur, but along with success he also encounters treachery, jealousy and hatred. His father-in-law and brothers-in-law accuse Jacob of unfair business practices and of taking more than his share of the family wealth. Jacob’s reaction, two decades after his first flight from danger, is to flee once again. Taking all his possessions and his family—now consisting of two wives, two concubines and twelve children—Jacob sets out on his return journey, back to his family home in Canaan.

In light of the future history of his descendants, it isn’t hard to recognize the seeds of anti-Semitism in the accusations that Laban and his sons direct at Jacob. 

Anti-Semitism has always been intricately interwoven with societal change. Invariably, throughout Jewish history, economic and political upheaval resulted in massacres and expulsions. However, along with pain and misery, each disaster also brought about reflection and evaluation. Each new conquest, each revolution and pogrom caused Jews to examine and redefine our relationship with God. The Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple resulted in the writing of the Torah; the second destruction, by the Romans, brought about the Bible and the Talmud. The Zohar, the most important work of Jewish mysticism, came about following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.  

Though we now have statistics by which to measure these seismic convulsions, we really cannot call the latest anti-Semitic episodes—including the murders in Pittsburgh—new or unexpected. That, however, does not diminish their effect, the horror and shock that they evoke within us. The Jewish world is small and closely connected, and many of us feel personally affected by each and every attack, whether it be in Tel Aviv, at a kosher supermarket in France, on the streets of New York, or on a college campus just about anywhere in the United States.

The mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue elicited warm support from the larger non-Jewish community. The countless messages of love and sympathy that many of us received provided comfort—but little consolation. The Jewish People are too familiar with the long and painful history of the hatred directed at us. To our dismay, what we have now come to understand is that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.

What did surprise me, however, was the number of people who, following the Pittsburgh tragedy, have approached me for spiritual guidance. It was mostly, though not exclusively, young people, college students or recent graduates, for whom this was the first, and most disturbing, example of a phenomenon they had never witnessed before. Swastikas scratched on bathroom walls is one thing. Jewish blood, shed during Sabbath prayer in a synagogue, is another matter altogether.

Maybe, in the relative calm that followed the Holocaust, we have grown too comfortable; maybe the protection promised us by the ADL and other watchdog organizations made us feel too safe. Sadly, we grew accustomed to hearing about violence in Israel; but instead of seeing it as another form of the global war waged against the Jews, we came to accept the terror and the wars as no more than a regional conflict. Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were also distant from us. Europe, after all, was “the old world.” America was different. 

Or so we thought.

What I have perceived in the many questions that were addressed to me is the shock of awakening to a new-old reality. Young or old, many of us have come to realize the hard truth that Jews in America are not isolated from the rest of our people anywhere else in the world. We are one people. We are not privileged witnesses of the dawning of some new, miraculous age of love and tolerance. The Messiah is in fact still a long way off.

The truth is that we have been deceiving ourselves all along. And it was all so easy to do.

Young men and women have approached me in tears, anger and disbelief. Not unexpectedly, they are wondering about their future and deliberating their choices. They are questioning their faith and pondering their relationship to God and the Jewish People. Like Jacob in Haran, they are wondering if the time has come to go back home to Israel—the national, historic home of the Jewish People. 

Reexamining our Judaism and pondering our path forward is nothing new for our people. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Vayeitzei—the story of Jacob’s many travails and close escapes—is the story of the entire People of Israel. Each new chapter, each murder, pogrom or street beating brings about questions about what it means to be Jewish. Some of us inevitably will try to hide or reject their identity. Others, on the other hand, will turn to tradition and explore ways to combine new and old, looking for new meaning in the ancient customs and rituals of our people. 

Jacob’s journey toward God and faith is an evolving and unending process. At every step, after each tragedy in his life, he questions God’s purpose—and finds new answers, new meaning to life and faith. So too, do we, Jacob’s descendants. Jacob’s journey is our journey; his story is our story. It is our history. 

Hopefully, like Max in Where The Wild Things Are, we too will find our way back to our room, where we will find our supper waiting for us, and, like Max’s it too will still be hot.



© 2018 by Boaz D. Heilman











Friday, November 2, 2018

The Legacy And Promise Of America: Chayei Sarah.18

The Legacy And Promise Of America
D’var Torah for Shabbat Chayei Sarah
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
Nov. 2, 2018



Honorable guests and community members, fellow clergy and educators, neighbors and friends: Shabbat shalom!

We are humbled by your presence and grateful for the message of hope, strength and solidarity that your presence here tonight brings us. 

By some strange coincidence, this Sabbath is actually an anniversary for me.  On a Sabbath exactly 56 years ago, I stood on a bimah—a synagogue podium—for the first time, on the occasion of my bar mitzvah.

A bar mitzvah is a ceremony that marks the beginning, the very first steps, of adulthood.  To tell the truth, however, I was far from being an adult that day. Having only recently come to the United States from Israel, my chief concerns then were making friends and learning just enough English to get passing grades and not have to go to summer school.  And my chief prayer at the moment was, Oh God, please don’t let me mess up, in front of everybody here!

Skip ahead 56 years, almost to the day, and by the quirks of the calendar, the Torah portion—the weekly reading from our Scriptures—that I chanted that very day, on my bar mitzvah, is also this week’s portion, read on this Shabbat at every synagogue, temple and shul around the world: Chayei Sarah, “The Life of Sarah.” 

At thirteen, however, while I understood the basic storyline, I had no inkling of the lessons that this portion would hold out for me for the rest of my life.  Over the years, I kept coming back to it, and at each new stage of life I found new lessons. The past week has been no different. The horrific event at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh added yet one more layer to my understanding of my Torah portion. 

Despite its title, Chayei Sarah, “The life of Sarah” (Genesis 23:1—25:18), this portion isn’t at all about Sarah’s life. Rather, it’s about Sarah’s death, and about Abraham facing the last two great missions of his life. (You may remember that Abraham and Sarah are the first Hebrews, the first generation and earliest ancestors of the Jewish People.) We are told that Abraham mourns for Sarah, and that when the mourning period is over, he negotiates with one of his neighbors, a wealthy landowner named Ephron, for a cemetery plot—no more than a cave actually—in which to bury Sarah. After this, there remains only one last task he must complete: to find a wife for his son, Isaac. One more negotiation takes place—this time not for land, but rather for the girl’s hand: Rebecca. Happily, Rebecca agrees to marry Isaac, and the future of the Jewish People is secure.  Only now, confident that his legacy is safe-guarded and that the future of his family is on solid ground, only now can Abraham  finally rest. 


Like Abraham, this week we too mourned our dead. We mourned for the tragic loss of life at a Kroger’s Supermarket in Jeffersontown, KY, where a white supremacist took the life of two African Americans, after trying—and failing—to enter a predominantly black church nearby. And we also mourned for the victims of the mass shooting in Pittsburgh, where a neo-Nazi, carrying an assault rifle and three handguns, entered a synagogue during Shabbat services and murdered eleven men and women sitting in prayer, while wounding six more, including four police officers.

The Jewish People is well acquainted with evil.  We recognized this murder for what it was.  

But in addition to the anguish we felt, this hate crime also raised memories and fears that we thought we had left far behind. 

For 500 years, Jews have been coming to America seeking refuge and shelter. Fleeing the Inquisition in Spain; expelled from France, England, and from dozens of other towns and countries; escaping murderous pogroms in eastern Europe, we made our way to new shores of hope, a new promised land, a New World. And then, only one generation ago, six million of our people were murdered in the Holocaust, and even more refugees arrived, each of them a survivor, all still trembling with searing memories of the nightmare they had seen and lived through.

In America we found a safe haven from the ancient, evil hatred we know as anti-Semitism. 

Until recently.

Along with steep escalation in anti-Semitic violence across Europe and elsewhere in the world, we have also seen a 57% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, the largest recorded rise in 40 years. These include bomb threats, graffiti, hate speech and physical violence. Safe space has increasingly been denied to Jewish students in many colleges and universities across the country. Synagogues and cemeteries have been desecrated. At a parade at the University of Virginia, white supremacists, many of them wearing shirts emblazoned with Nazi swastikas, marched with burning torches and shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” Hate stickers have been found on cars, park benches and even at children’s playgrounds.  Needless to say, the social media have proven rich ground for even more hate speech and abuse. 

The terror attack in Pittsburgh, however, has taken all this to a totally new place, a place we never dreamed we’d find ourselves in.  Along with waves of grief and anger, for the first time in decades we also felt afraid and isolated, filled with doubt and uncertainty.


I am sure you’ve all seen that bumper sticker that, through the use of various images, spells out  the word “coexist.” It’s a beautiful sentiment; but reality isn’t so simple. Coexistence doesn’t just happen. It takes effort; it takes give and take. For coexistence to be and to endure, it has to be negotiated, and its rules must be respected. 

Maybe that’s why, in this week’s Torah portion, Abraham insists that his land purchase be done in the open. With all the townspeople as witnesses, the full price, as asked, was paid; and the field with the burial cave was turned over to Abraham and his descendants.  Yet what was sealed at that moment was more than just a real-estate deal. It was no less than a sacred covenant, a sacred bond between Abraham and his neighbors. This spot would forever remain sacred, a sanctuary never to be disturbed, never desecrated. Those were the terms; that was the agreement.

And that’s what made the atrocity in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh so horrific. Yes, it was brutal mass murder and a hate crime. But in addition, it was a violation of a sacred trust.  It was breaking faith, intended not only to cause terror and pain, but also meant to tear us apart.  

But in that respect evil did not win out.

Over the past few days, we at TBI have received countless emails, calls, hugs, and messages of support. I have heard from colleagues and friends from all around the country telling me about vigils and services that had overflow attendance, bringing together entire communities. Now that’s the right kind of response! That’s how faith and trust are restored and rebuilt.

We live in unsettled times. War, terrorism and injustice threaten the fragile peace that exists between nations. Climate change, drought and monstrous storms have caused millions of people to lose their homes and possessions, and seek shelter elsewhere. If our nation, our people, are to meet and overcome these challenges, we must never allow hate to come between us. Love your neighbor, our Scriptures teach us; do not hate him or her in your heart. That is the key to our strength and survival. 

Shabbat—the Sabbath—is sacred time. It is right that we are all gathered here tonight, to show our unity and purpose in the face of evil and hate. A synagogue, a temple, church, or mosque—these are the sacred places in our midst. Like the burial cave that Abraham purchased, they are intended to be places where a person can seek God’s presence, and expect to find shelter, peace, tranquility. 

Our united presence here tonight reinforces the holiness not only of this time and place, but also of the bond between us as neighbors and friends. Only with this faith restored can we look forward to a better future, a more secure future, for our children and grandchildren. Like Father Abraham, we can only rest, reassured and confident, when we know that our children can grow up free from fear, at home in a land where all people are considered equal, regardless of their faith, color or gender.

My friends, I recently had occasion to re-read the letter that President George Washington sent to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, RI. It is well worth quoting from today. Asked to reaffirm America’s covenant with the Jews, President Washington wrote: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” 

That IS America’s legacy; that is the sacred ground upon which its future rests.

God bless America; may God bless us all with peace and tranquility. 



© 2018 by Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman