{"id":22095,"date":"2018-10-19T21:33:47","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T21:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jww.org\/?p=22095"},"modified":"2018-10-19T21:33:47","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T21:33:47","slug":"excerpted-from-to-be-a-jew-today-a-sermon-by-rabbi-paul-kipnes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/excerpted-from-to-be-a-jew-today-a-sermon-by-rabbi-paul-kipnes\/","title":{"rendered":"Excerpted from \u201cTo Be A Jew Today\u201d: A sermon by Rabbi Paul Kipnes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"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 \u2013 like the Holocaust, and the Inquisition and the pogroms, and the recent death of Lisa, a 51 year old congregant, mother of 4 \u2026 and the Holocaust \u2013 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? \u2013 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 <\/span>the many Sudanese Darfurans during the first genocide of this century, and that mom\u2026 who just died\u2026 too young\u2026 God, where are you?<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 the ball being equality and equity for all people \u2013 regardless of their gender, skin color, sexual orientation, country of origin, immigration status, age or religion \u2013 we are forgetting that the same ball thrown at others ultimately will come flying back at a Yiddishe kop<\/i>, a Jewish head.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, to be a Jew is sometimes to bob and weave, to exist in a world of increasing extremes \u2013 religious, political, ideological \u2013 to live in that increasingly uncomfortably narrow space between those extremes.<\/span><\/p>\n

So to be a Jew is to be a champion for democracy in its most pervasive forms \u2013 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\u2019s Judah Maccabee and those Russian refuseniks; and freedom of the press, because what is the Talmud if not a journal of<\/span><\/p>\n

intellectual challenges to the status quo?! \u2013 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 like the Holocaust, and the Inquisition and the pogroms, and the recent death of Lisa, a 51 year old congregant, mother of 4 \u2026 and the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[349,188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nationalrefugeeshabbat","category-news-features","category-349","category-188","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}