by Rabbi Tracee Rosen
Hayom Harat Olam. This is the day the world was born. Rosh Hashanah is a universal holiday which celebrates the birth of the entire world - not specifically any event in Jewish history.
The rabbis of old seemed rather uncomfortable without an anchor for the day in a specifically Jewish event, so there were arguments as to which protion of the Torah was to be read on this day. Only as late as 500 CE did they decreed that the Torah reading for the day be the story of the birth of Isaac, symbolically transforming the day from celebrating the birth of the world, to celebrating the birth of the first person to be born Jewish.
But even in this choice of texts, there still remains a great universal message. Abraham, as the first monotheist, is father, not only to the Jewish people, but through his son Ishmael, father to the Arabs, and subsequently Islam, and through his grandson Esau, also known as Edom, in rabbinic mythology to Rome and the latter Christian Empire.
In this morning's reading we find the very difficult story of Sarah banishing her maidservant Hagar and her son Ishmael after he and Isaac seem to run into difficulty with each other (the text doesn't say what happened, but the Midrash says Ishmael would take little Isaac out to the fields and play catch with him, using a bow and arrow).
Nonetheless, as Hagar and Ishmael are struggling in the wilderness, Hagar prays to God, and God answers her, and saves them, and promises her that Ishmael, too, will become a mighty nation.
Do you understand how remarkable that is? Nowhere in any other ancient text of the time is a god portrayed as speaking to, making promises, or otherwise looking favorably on a people besides its chosen one, not to mention a nation destined to be your historical enemy. God speaks to Hagar! God doesn't only speak to Jews. Our God created the entire world, all the people in it, in God's image, not just us. Even 2000 years of persecution and isolation from the rest of human civilization, while it has produced a decidedly us vs. them mentality in the minds of many Jews, we still can't shake that universalist outlook which comes to us from our founding stories.
There's one more story about Abraham and Sarah I want to focus on today. Not directly from the Torah itself, it comes from the oral tradition, called Midrash, which preserved the tradition of stories which read between the lines of the bible to fill in the missing details.
According to the midrash, one of the unique features of Sarah's tent was that it was open in all four directions. This was so they could see travelers passing by in all 4 directions. Furthermore, when Abraham and Sarah first come to the land of Canaan, the Torah says, "they came with all the people that they had made." What does that mean? The midrash explains, the people they had converted to monotheism. Abraham converted the men and Sarah the women.
How did they do this? Whenever Abraham saw passers-by, he would run out to greet them: "Come, sit a while, relax, have some food," and Sarah would prepare them elaborate meals. After the guests had enjoyed themselves, they would rise to bless Abraham and Sarah, and he would stop them: "Did I create this food? No, it's not really mine. Bless with me the true source of all that is, the true creator of the universe." In this way, even before God called Abraham and Sarah to Canaan, they were spreading faith in the one true God.
It also points to the power of food to influence people, something as a people, we know all too well.
In today’s world, we need to recapture the essence and meaning of Sarah’s tent. If you take a close look at the building in which we sit, you can see that it was designed, not like a standard cathedral, but like that tent - doors and windows on all 4 sides - welcoming people from all directions. The name of our congregation, Kol Ami means "All my people," reflecting the vision of our founding families that this be a place of outreach and welcome for everyone. Through our long history in this community, we have become the Jewish heart of Utah, but we have not always lived up to our potential of being truly welcoming to everyone. It's time for that to change. It is imperative, not only for the survival of this congregation, but for the survival of the Jewish people in America in the 21st century.
· Statistics are against us - the number of Jews in this country are declining. The 2000 National Jewish Population Survey reports 5.2 million Jews in US down from 5.5 million in 1990, a 10% drop. At the same time, 6.7 million people are living in households with at least one Jew.
· Of new families being formed, 47% of marriages involving a Jewish person in the past 10 years have been intermarriages, and while nationally, 31% of all married couples are now intermarried, here in the West, it is 42%. This is despite the fact that the organized Jewish community has declared for the past 25 years that addressing this crisis is the number one priority of the American Jewish community, during which time, the intermarriage rate has continued to climb from 38% in 1980 to 47% today.
· But the problem didn’t begin with the marriage rates. What we failed to recognize is that it wasn't the cause, it was a symptom: a symptom of living in the most open and accepting society the Jewish people have ever known, where one of the prices of that acceptance is the fact that the world is no longer trying to isolate us and push us into the ghettos of Europe or the segregated suburbs of the 1940's and 50s. A society so open and integrated that we meet and fall in love with people from all religious backgrounds. In fact, given that we Jews make up only about 1.5 percent of the US population, that over half of our young people still marry other Jews in this day an age might be considered a miracle.
· One of the greatest root causes of this problem is that while we were growing up in the 60s and 70s and even during the generation before, the Jewish education most of us received was infantile and perfunctory. Neither our parents homes nor our religious schools gave us a compelling reason for remaining Jewish. We were stunted in our Jewish education by calling it quits after seventh grade. Imagine if our reading of general literature come to an end at 13 years old, how much we would have missed in our own intellectual development. Well, that’s what happened to most of us Jewishly. So it’s not surprising, really, when it came to getting married that so many of us failed to seek out Jewish spouses. As Rabbi Harold Schulweis puts it, when an indifferent Jew marries an uncommitted Christian, it’s an “interfaithless” marriage.
· This is not a situation we are going to reverse any time soon. Intermarried families are entering their second, third, and even fourth generations, and there statistics seem even more grim. A child with only one Jewish parent is 3 times more likely to marry a non-Jew than one with both parents Jewish.
· Ironically, while our numbers are shrinking the sphere of influence is increasing. It’s now actually cool to be Jewish, Anyone following the Democratic presidential primary this past year knows that in order to be a serious contender, you didn’t have to be Jewish, but you had to have a Jewish family connection: Howard Dean has a Jewish wife, John Kerry, Jewish grandparents and a Jewish brother, Gen. Wesley Clark is descended from a line of rabbis, Joe Lieberman himself is an actively practicing Jew. No wonder poor Dick Gephardt didn’t stand a chance.
· Unfortunately, we have no evidence that this ethnic pride will transmit itself to future generations. One of the most dismal statistics of the population study is that while 96% of families with 2 Jewish parents raise their children Jewish, only 33% of intermarried families do. Over ½ million children in this generation are being lost to us. Only 15% of intermarried families belong to a synagogue, and who can blame them, for years rabbis and demographers have shouted at them that they are destroying the future of our people.
We need to take a new approach. We need to recognize that non-Jews who choose and commit to raising a Jewish family even if they themselves don’t make the up-front choice to convert aren’t the enemy. They are heroes, and they are the best chance we have to save our community. Over the past year, I have met many such heroes, and they have my sincere and undying respect.
· The mother who brought her son to every bar mitzvah meeting with me, who during the ceremony was mouthing the words of the blessings along with the son, having memorized them from so many repetitions on the car stereo as he studied on the drive between school and soccer practice.
· The father who stood on this bimah charging his bar mitzvah son that someday he, the son, would stand on the bimah with his own son, transmitting the heritage of his people to the next generation.
· The mother who brought her 11-month old twins to the mikvah, who has promised to bring them back for our training wheels and yeladim programs, so that she can start learning about Judaism along with them.
In addition, I wish I could take each one of you with me into the bet din ceremony for the wonderful students and new friends who spent the past year studying and preparing to join our people.
· The young couple, raised in different religious faiths who after intense research and study decided that Judaism for them was the only religion they found to be truly monotheistic;
· The young woman who told me that it was a sense of family and belonging to a larger community that attracted her;
· The older gentleman who after being a member of the LDS church, after studying in a Russian Orthodox seminary, after practicing Islam and Buddhism, finally found his true home amongst the Jewish people;
· The young man who sitting before the bet din told of his own experience of asking forgiveness of his work colleagues as part of his process of preparing for Rosh Hashanah, that inspired every one of the people listening to him;
· The woman, not Jewish, but one of our strongest supporters, who responded on hearing one of our students define himself as being Jewish because he loves to question everything, responded, “What a wonderful religion. I spent my entire childhood in another faith being told that asking too many questions was wrong.”
The Torah preserves the story of a non-Jewish prophet named Balaam. Hired by the king of Moab to curse the Israelites, instead he composes a beautiful blessing on the people, the hymn with which we enter our sanctuaries of prayer: Mah Tovu Ohalekha Yaakov, mishkenotekha Yisrael – How beautiful are your TENTS O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel. Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider to help us to see the beauty inside our own tent. We need to learn from this.
How will we open wide this tent? The truth is, there are no easy answers. Every faith tradition has the obligation and right to define for itself who is a member and who is not, and blurring the lines indiscriminately will only serve to dilute the message, and result in a mish mash that holds no authenticity for anyone. But to be too rigid and closed-minded to change risks shutting the door, not only to outsiders, but to our own, who want no part of a such an exclusivist enterprise.
This is a struggle we need to grapple with as a community. Therefore, I am asking you to participate in a number of events. In the coming year, we will be inviting a number of people to help us understand some of the underlying issues:
· Orthodox Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who will be our scholar in residence during the weekend of October 24 will talk after Shabbat services on some rather unorthodox perspectives on welcoming interfaith families using the biblical model of the Ger Toshav, the resident foreigner.
· Our own, Dr. Vincent Cheng, husband of Maeera Shreiber, and more importantly, father of Gabi, whose new book Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity, deals in part with the nature of Jewish identity in the modern diaspora. He will be one of the speakers at our new monthly Thursday night lecture series. On November 11 he will address us on “Imagining Jewishness: Talking about Identity.”
· On March 10, Karen Kushner, from the Union of Reform Judaism will come to town to address us on "Project Welcome: Steps Towards Making Interfaith Families a Real Part of Your Community"
In addition, I am in the process of organizing a task force on welcoming interfaith families to look at our current operations and policies and to recommend areas for change and improvement. You’ll be reading more about this our next bulletin, and I invite your participation on this task force and in focus groups which will solicit input, whether you are yourself part of an interfaith family, have kids or grandkids who are, are a Jew by choice, or are part of that vanishing breed a family in which all members are Jewish by birth. This topic involves us all.
· At this stage of human history, the world needs to hear the Jewish voice, the Jewish perspective. We are engaged in a war against radical fundamentalists who believe that God wants them to murder innocent civilians and children to further their cause, whether it be in Iraq, in Chechnya, or in Israel. And they are being fought by a Christian fundamentalist president who believes that God is in his corner in the fight against terrorism, as well as the fight to implement his vision of God's will for the citizens of his country.
· More than ever, the world needs to hear a message from religious leaders that no one system of belief has a patent on God, that all human beings, not just the ones who believe like my group, are created in God’s image, and that the reason there are a multitude of religions is not because there are multiple gods, but because we, as human beings are infinitely complex, and no single system of spirituality will be appropriate for every person.
· It’s time to open wide the doors of Sarah’s tent. We need to reach out because the world needs to hear our message. We need to reach out because there are many, many people, born Jewish, and those who feel a spiritual pull to become part of us, who need to know that what we’re about is a passionate, committed community, who are willing to engage together in life’s biggest issues, to stand together as family and help each other in times of need, to celebrate the simchas the joyous times, to mourn and console, to argue, to agree, and to sit down in fellowship and eat, and study, and pray.
· But to open the tent, we need everyone; each of us must be an Abraham or Sarah. We must be the one to greet the stranger, to welcome the visitor, to extend a hand to the newcomer. Let us all join together in this exciting venture.
May this be a year when we open wide the doors of our tent. Because the people standing outside the door aren’t only outsiders and newcomers, they are our children and our grandchildren, and we MUST bring them back into the fold. Shanah tovah.