To be a Jew is to wonder where God is when bad things happen to good people, and, where God was when bad things happened to our people – like the Holocaust, and the Inquisition and the pogroms, and the recent death of Lisa, a 51 year old congregant, mother of 4 … and the Holocaust – Why did that Holocaust happen, God? 6 million of our people, murdered, 1.5 million of them children, and another 5 million others. Really? God, where were You? – and to wonder where God was when bad things happened to other people too, like the 1.5 million murdered in the Armenian genocide, and the almost 3 million in the Cambodian genocide, and the 1.2 million in the Rwandan genocide, and the many Sudanese Darfurans during the first genocide of this century, and that mom… who just died… too young… God, where are you?
To be a Jew is to cry Never Again!, because our moral compass points at the dangers for our people and also shines a light on the dangers for all people, because when we take our eye off the ball – the ball being equality and equity for all people – regardless of their gender, skin color, sexual orientation, country of origin, immigration status, age or religion – we are forgetting that the same ball thrown at others ultimately will come flying back at a Yiddishe kop, a Jewish head.
Yes, to be a Jew is sometimes to bob and weave, to exist in a world of increasing extremes – religious, political, ideological – to live in that increasingly uncomfortably narrow space between those extremes.
So to be a Jew is to be a champion for democracy in its most pervasive forms – embracing freedom of speech, because Abraham argued with God; freedom of assembly, because Jews had to gather in secret during the Inquisition; freedom of religion, fought for so bravely by Chanukah’s Judah Maccabee and those Russian refuseniks; and freedom of the press, because what is the Talmud if not a journal of
intellectual challenges to the status quo?! – and because we know that throughout history when the majority begins to infringe on the rights of the minority, eventually the Jew becomes a target.
To be a Jew is to be like that plant, the wandering Jew, ever prepared to wander and set down new roots, because no matter how cozy we are with the people in power, our place is never eternally protected, even when we are in the inner circle as the doctors of kings or the financiers of fiefdoms or the daughters and sons-in-laws of presidents.
Because to be a Jew means remembering our Jewish ancestors who were wandering Jews, who were forced to immigrate, break laws, forge papers, lie and illegally cross borders, to save their lives and thankfully to save a lot of our lives in this room too.