The Blessings of Memory: A Message For Memorial Day 2016

The Blessings of Memory

A Message for Memorial Day 2016

by Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

The United States has been involved in wars since its founding.  It’s a grim history.  Perhaps this fact simply reveals humanity’s belligerent nature, or maybe it reflects the role the US sees itself as playing on the world’s stage, at least since the middle of the 20^th century.  Thrust into power after World War One, and as this position was solidified after the Second World War, America saw itself—and has been seen by many—as the unquestionable leader of the free world.

The United States has fought wars both in order to maintain this position, but also to carry out the moral responsibilities it felt came with being a world leader. Tyranny, mass enslavement and genocide had to be stopped.  That was one lesson that came out of the Holocaust, a lesson the United States understood.

There are responsibilities that come with power.  Leadership is never simple; there are those both from within the system and from outside it who question the leader’s abilities and qualifications.  Some of the wars America became involved in seemed to reflect less than pure motivations.

Wars are fought. Causes are redefined.  Goals and red lines are drawn and re-drawn.  Politicians argue.  Historians offer different views and perspectives.  Little by little, the wars recede in our memories, and find a place somewhere in the back pages of our minds.

But there is another, more tragic aspect to war, one that never disappears.  People lose their lives.  People are hurt physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Families are shattered.  The hurt and pain continue well beyond the actual fighting, reaching into the second, third and even fourth generation.

Perhaps that is a good thing.  Perhaps the accumulated pain will one day result in people saying, “Enough! Enough bloodshed!  Enough pain and suffering!”

That is one reason for remembering those who served.

But there are other reasons.

Memorial Day Weekend has become a holiday instead of a commemoration.  Newspapers and other media are filled with flyers and ads for sales, special store events and yet more opportunities to satisfy our never-ending greed for things, for objects, for yet more and more stuff.

Memorial Day should remind us of what really matters in life.  And that isn’t the “stuff” that we accumulate.

How wonderful that this day also serves as the unofficial beginning of summer!  We can go out on picnics, walks or reunions with our families, loved ones and friends.  Because that is what really matters.  The love we share, give and receive in return—that’s what matters.

There are those who go to national cemeteries to remember lost loved ones, the sacrifices they made so that we could be here today, alive and content.  To remember—and to give thanks. That’s what Memorial Day is about.

There are those who go to veteran’s hospitals and homes.  This is a day that brings back all the sadness they thought they had left behind—but which they never actually could or did.  Lost limbs remind them.  Lost friends, comrades and buddies are an empty void that constantly calls out to them.

Memorial Day should remind us of the losses America and Americans have suffered in defense of our ideals.

Memorial Day should be cause for quiet reflection on what we all lost and what we all gained in the many wars America has fought.

Sometime this weekend, when we are all alone or perhaps when we are all together, let’s pause for a moment.  Let’s offer a prayer:  That all the pain, suffering and loss not be in vain; that love vanquish hate; that light banish darkness; that war will finally cease.

And as we do that, let’s remember all those who have sacrificed life or limb so that we can be here today.  May our lives reflect only the best we have to offer.

Memory and hope go hand in hand.  May we, in company with all those who are no longer with us, go forward toward a better, more peaceful tomorrow.

Shabbat shalom and a meaningful, peaceful Memorial Day to all.

© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman

A Sacred Path To Eternity: Emor

A Sacred Path To Eternity:  Emor

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

For those who would search for the fundamentalist strain in Judaism, there’s no need to look much farther than this week’s Torah portion, Emor (Lev. 21:1—24:23). Agreed, there are some other portions, especially in Deuteronomy, that are even harsher.  Yet some of the laws spelled out in Emor are as brutal as any that are still practiced anywhere in the world today.

“Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth” reads Lev. 24:20, a verse that—if practiced—would set Western civilization backward some three thousand years.

In some temples, rabbis prefer to gloss over this section of the Torah.  And yes, it would be so much nicer to just study the laws of Shabbat and the holidays, another topic covered at length in this portion, or focus on that beautiful and compassionate verse about not slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day (Lev. 22:28).

But that leaves us open to attack from various quarters.  After all, isn’t Emor the portion where a blasphemer—a person who curses God’s name—is stoned to death by the entire Israelite community at Moses’s and God’s command (Lev. 24:23)?  And isn’t this the portion where some of the most restrictive rules severely curtail priests’ behavior in love and death?

And what’s this about physical deformities disqualifying priests from offering sacrifices?  Doesn’t Judaism teach us to look inside the book, rather than its cover?

It would be hypocritical of us to focus only on the lovely sides of this portion while simply overlooking those parts that we, refined denizens of the 21^st century, find distasteful.

Yet there is a logic to the portion in its entirety.  For while the Torah does reflect the world as it was at the time of its revelation, built into it is an evolutionary process that allows culture, customs and even laws to evolve and adapt.  We begin at the basic level and move forward from there.

The purpose of religion is not only to unite societies and nations, nor does it set out merely to curtail our more selfish and violent behavior.  Religion imbues us with a sense of wonder, with curiosity about the world around us.  It is these very qualities that, far from restricting us, actually empower us to change, to imagine, and then to create that which we see inside our minds and hearts.

Some of the laws set out in the Torah are indeed harsh, but they are not meant to be the end-all of justice.  Rather, they serve as a foundation, as a starting point for further development. Mosaic Law is based on even more ancient legal systems, but it does not stop with them.  Internal evolution of the concepts of justice and righteousness is evident throughout the Torah, and can be witnessed in the succeeding stories of Noah and Abraham.  Moses furthers this progression, compelling even God to temper justice with compassion, anger with understanding, and frustration with recognition of the frail nature of the human being.

The law that Parashat Emor reiterates in Lev. 22:28, “Do not slaughter a cow or a sheep and its young on the same day,” is there in order to evoke and reinforce within us the same qualities that we expect to find in our God. Arbitrary behavior, brutality and lust for revenge, typical of ancient cultures and the mythological gods of Egypt, Greece and the Near East, cannot be the core of the Jewish system of justice.  We can, and must do, better.

But it isn’t only the legal and moral systems that undergo this evolutionary process. Along with justice and the human condition, Parashat Emor teaches us that time, too, can be uplifted.

Emor teaches us to look at time—time, with its cruel vicissitudes, with its tendency to speed up and slow down; time that trickles from our fingers, that runs out yet never stops—and make it better.  And so we transform time.  We punctuate time with holiness, with those moments when we allow God’s eternity to enter into our lives.  A full third of Parashat Emor gives us instructions for the observance of Shabbat and the holidays, teaching us that they are there not only to give us rest from our daily toil, but also to provide us with precious opportunities to delve into the mystery of existence, when we can try to imagine the unimaginable, when we can fill our minds with wonder, and marvel at the many miracles that surround us.

Lifting basic concepts to higher planes, we become participants in an unending process of growth and development. Emor teaches us that to be God’s people does not mean simply to accept things the way they are—or appear to be.  It means always to look up, always to improve, always to imagine and create better ways.

Perhaps the key to it all can be found in Rashi’s explanation of the verse where Aaron, the High Priest, is instructed about the kindling of the lights on the Temple Menorah: “[Aaron] shall tend the lamps upon the pure gold lampstand before Adonai continually” (Lev. 24:4).  Explaining the words “Upon the pure gold Menorah,” Rashi, the great medieval Torah scholar and commentator, writes, “[Before kindling it] he would first clean and purify it of ashes [from the previous night’s burning].” 

Following the example set by the High Priest, we too look at the world around us.  We examine its laws and customs, its failures and triumphs.  We accept what we cannot—for the time being—change, but improve whatever we can.  Like Aaron, we clean up the ashes and messes left behind by those who came before us, and then, looking up, we find paths that lead us to a new world, a better world, paths that take us ever closer to our ideal of God.

The process itself is sacred, and participating in it gives us a sense of what it means to be holy.

May the light of the Torah continue showing us the many paths we can take to greater justice and compassion.  May it teach us to be more understanding of one another, more accepting of our own frailties, and more forgiving of our failures as the failures we see in others.  May we all come to realize that our time on this earth—as finite, short and full of sadness as it sometimes is—is our share in an eternal and ongoing sacred process of creation.  And may the blessings of this Shabbat help us find the beauty and holiness in every moment and every day throughout our life.

Ken h’hi ratzon—may this be God’s will, Amen.

© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman

The Shades We Speak To: Israel's Memorial Day 2016

The Shades We Speak To

In Memory of Israel’s Fallen Defenders

Yom Ha-Zikaron 2016

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

23,447.

That’s how many Israelis have lost their lives since the State of Israel was born 68 years ago, in defense of Israel or as victims of terror attacks against her.

23,447.  This unbelievable number stands before my eyes today—Yom Ha-Zikaron in Israel.  Memorial Day.

Not one family in Israel is spared.  Everyone knows someone whose name is on that list. 

On this day, all Israel is one family, grieving for its sons and daughters, for fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, lovers, friends.  Their shadows accompany us today wherever we are, wherever we go.  They smile at us; they reach out a hand to us, as if to say, “How could you think we left you?”

We sit by their graveside and share the latest.  Sports, gossip, news.  We see them at our side, we talk to them.  We talk about who was born, who passed on. We laugh at old, familiar jokes; we feel that intense joy and relief we felt every time they walked in from school, from basic training, from their watch in the night, from the battlefield.  We hold them close, and they look around, to see who might be seeing the tears of happiness that well in our eyes, that choke our throats, as we feel their warmth, their heartbeat next to us yet once again.

23,447 of the finest and best.  For 24 hours, they walk with us.  They are with us again, at our side.

When this day is over, we know, they will be gone.  So we hold on to today, to every minute, to every second.  Soon enough, we know, the emptiness and silence will return, and we will watch the shades line up again, to continue their march forward, to eternity, to join the many hundreds, thousands, millions others…

But today they are with us.  They accompany us wherever we go.  We see them alongside us.  We hear their footsteps next to us.  It’s everyone else who doesn’t.  We do.  And the others—they don’t understand why we stop and argue with no one at all, why we stop to talk to the air, try to catch an echo of something whispered in our ear, in our ear alone.

On this day, we see shadows.  We hear footsteps that fall as lightly as a fallen leaf.  We stop to hear a name called, to face a memory that suddenly appears, as though by magic, to see a face materialize out of nowhere.

Somehow, they never stopped being 20-something, while we have aged half a century or more.  How is that possible?

Don’t leave yet, we beg.

And they say, we never have.  We never will.  Not as long as you remember us.  When you rejoice, think of us, and we will dance beside you.  When you fight, we will fight alongside you.  When you sleep, we will watch over you.

Tomorrow—Independence Day.  Live free, you who were my friend, my brother, my father or my mother, my husband, my child, my beloved, my lover, my friend.  Sing free, laugh free, be free, only BE! That’s what we insist on. Don’t give up.  Don’t give in to darkness or overwhelming sadness.  Make our great experiment in history work.  Make Israel strong by living, by creating, by loving.  Bring meaning to our untimely death by teaching your children about us.  Tell them who we were, how we lived and how we died.  Let them know that where we sleep lie buried the seeds of their existence. 

And you—you who are grieving for us!  Know that we are always with you.  Grieve tonight, grieve for the lives we never lived, for the families we never raised.  Grieve for what was, for what could have been.  But then, when this day is over, turn to tomorrow and live your life.  Live it to the fullest.  Live twice as strong, love twice as deep, sing twice as loud, laugh twice as hard!

I will hear you, of that you can be certain.  Listen well, and you will hear me too. Know that I am there, at your side.  Again.  Forever.

23,447 strong.

© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman

The Ritual of Release: Acharei Mot

The Ritual of Release: Acharei Mot

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

May 6, 2016

When I first read the Torah’s description of the rituals of the ancient Israelites, I was thankful for being alive today, not then.  I saw the sacrificial rites as primitive and meaningless.  Why did our ancient ancestors offer God food?  After all, God doesn’t need food.  Surely it was a useless relic of older, pagan cults and rituals.

Later, when I was of a more cynical age, I laughed at the detailed intricacies of these rituals: Which offering was burnt to a cinder, and which was roasted; which was boiled and which, fried in oil.  It was a take-out menu!  Pages from an ancient cookbook featuring desert and Mediterranean cuisines!

Now that I am older still, with a bit more experience in my bag, I return regularly to Leviticus to study—and learn from—its long list of sacrifices.   Now I find myself amazed by the psychological wisdom of this system.  It speaks deeply about the fears and hopes of the people who followed it.  It provided then—as it still does today—answers to humanity’s most difficult questions and deepest needs.

More specifically, I am intrigued by one particular sacrifice:  The Ritual of Release.   What makes it unique is that it involves not the usual slaughter of an animal, but rather the release of one.

For three circumstances, the Torah specifies that a pair of identical animals be brought forward. The priest draws lots, picking one to be slaughtered, while the other is released into the wild.  The first of these is the day when a metzora—a person once diagnosed as a leper, now pronounced cured—returns to the fold of the community.  On that day, he or she must bring forth a pair of birds.  One is slaughtered, the other is set free.  The second occasion is the sacrifice that the High Priest must offer once a year, on the most sacred day of the year, Yom Kippur.  And the third is any other time when the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies.  On such occasions, he must bring forth a pair of goats.  Again, one is sacrificed, while the other is sent out “to Azazel,” into the wilderness.

I have always wondered:  If the slaughtered offering represents God’s food, what is the meaning of the freed bird or goat? Why are they set free?

There are several explanations.  The simplest is that this is a vestige of an ancient pagan ritual.  It may once have held some significance, but over the eons, all that remained was the act itself, devoid of any purpose or meaning.  But I am stubborn.  I want to know why it remained. Surely there is some added Jewish perspective, a new layer of Jewish meaning, a moral or lesson, to this Ritual of Release.

Maimonides, from nearly a thousand years ago, offers a perceptive explanation for it:  Even after a sin is expunged, a stain remains—if not on our reputation, then in our souls.  Sounding a bit like Freud, Maimonides explains that releasing the animal is a dramatic enactment of letting go of the remnants of guilt we hold within ourselves even after we are forgiven.

In our own day, reflecting post-Freudian psychology, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has a different explanation.  He teaches that this ritual signifies the twin sides of human nature—the wild or animal part, and the more tame or moral part.  We are born with both, Rabbi Sacks says.  Casting out the wilder side refocuses us, redirecting our attention to the moral responsibilities that still lie before us.

Maybe it’s my impish side, but I can’t resist turning my gaze away.  I can’t help following—at least for a moment—the released bird or goat. I see it hesitating at first; trying first one direction then another; looking back for a moment, but finally taking off, never to return. 

And I wonder:  What exactly did we let go of?

To be sure, we do let go of guilt; the freed animal represents the release of the burden on our soul, the stain left behind by our misdeed.

But, additionally, as we focus and redirect our thoughts to the future, we also let go of the past.

I look back at the different stages of my life, and I discover than just traces of my past.  I find files tucked away in cabinets, memorabilia stored in worn briefcases.  I still have a few ancient textbooks from college days.  Periodically, I winnow these out and cast out items that have become too much trouble to keep, or that have eviscerated into dust.

We let go of the past when it becomes too heavy to carry with us any longer.

We also let go of anger and frustration.

Life doesn’t owe us anything.  We have life.  For the most part, we also have the means by which we take care of ourselves and help out others.  But of course that is never enough.  Our ambitions keep us wanting more. We want more from life, we want it to be more intense, more pleasurable, more gratifying.  And we get angry when don’t get what we want.  We feel cheated when we find nothing at all at the end of the rainbow.  We lash out, we yell, we scream and cry.  We blame ourselves or, just as often, someone else.  But nothing helps.  We remain what we are and who we are, no more and no less.

These, too, are parts of our experience that become too burdensome, that, as we move forward, we find no longer necessary to a meaningful life.  Our anger, we realize, holds us back; our frustration chokes us.

We let go of them.

And what do we keep? What do we hold on to as we move on?

We cherish and hold dear what we know will sustain us in the future: We keep our hopes and our dreams. We hold on to our faith and traditions.  We treasure our family and community.  Therein lies the source of our strength, holy to God, holy to us.  We offer and rededicate ourselves to our mission, to the path that yet lies ahead of us.

There is significance in the seeming coincidence that this unique ritual is described in this week’s Torah portion.  This is the week we observed Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. And the portion, Acharei Mot (“After the Death,” Leviticus 16:1—18:30), picks up the narrative where last week’s reading ended—with the tragic death of Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu.

Acharei Mot gives Aaron the tools he needs to recover from his deep tragedy.  Performing the Ritual of Release empowers Aaron again, enabling him to carry on with his sacred duties. 

In the millennia that followed, Jews have followed Aaron’s example countless times, down to our own day and age.

For Aaron, as for survivors of the Shoah, these cataclysmic events have reshaped our understanding of the purpose of our existence.  Their enormity has necessitated a change in our faith paradigm, a shift in how we view God.

Now, just as in olden days, there are things we must let go of and things we must hold on to in order to go on living.

Gone is the innocent view we once had of God. Gone is our simplistic belief in a God who saves us from rivers and ovens.

For some, it is faith itself that is gone. 

It is so hard to turn a new page, to let go and begin again.  It’s draining to look at the world around us and realize that the beast of anti-Semitism is still here.  It’s disheartening to see evil and hatred still raging all over the world.  In the face of so much pain, it’s hard to hold on to faith, to our dream of peace, to the vision the prophet Isaiah held out for us nearly three thousand years ago, when he spoke of a time to come when “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).

In the aftermath of the Shoah, we have to let go of our former naïve optimism and realize that if such an ideal world is ever to come about, it will be only if we double and redouble our efforts to make it so.  A passage in Pirkei Avot, the “Chapters of the Fathers” from the Mishnah, teaches that “It isn’t our responsibility to finish the task, but neither are we permitted to desist from it.”  Like Aaron, we are obligated to carry on with our sacred duty.  We have to be strong to persevere. 

So finally, in finding strength to continue, what we must let go of is our feeling of hopelessness, our weariness and sense of discouragement.

The Ritual of Release ultimately frees us.  It empowers us once again, enabling us to endure, to stay the course even Acharei Mot, even after the most terrible tragedies, cataclysms and devastation.

That is the meaning that I find today in an ancient and intriguing ritual.   This is the faith that strengthens me, that redirects my attention from the loss and devastation of the past, to the hope and work of renewal.  It permits me to let go of what I cannot do, but also calls on me to refocus on what I can do—what I must do—for a better tomorrow: for me, for my children, for my people, and for the entire world. 

The work of eradicating poverty, fear, hunger and sickness has been our mission since our earliest days.  Like Aaron three thousand years ago and as his spiritual descendants today, it becomes our sacred duty to let go of the forces that hold us back, and pledge ourselves anew to the task ahead. We are not free to desist from it.

May God bless us with strength, may God bless us with peace.  Amen.

© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman