The Choosing People: Kol Nidre Sermon 5779

Editor’s Note: Rabbi Greenstein originally gave this sermon on Kol Nidre 5779 (Sept 2018).

A new rabbi arrives in town and the congregation eagerly awaits his first sermon. They are all ears as he eloquently speaks about the importance of observing Shabbat.

After services the President of the shul approaches the new rabbi and confides to him, “Rabbi, you can’t speak about observing the Sabbath to this community. No one observes the Shabbat here. You’ve got to know your audience! Believe me; I’m trying to help you out.”

The rabbi is suitably grateful. The next Shabbat he gets up and gives an impassioned sermon, citing chapter and verse, on the virtues of keeping kosher.

After services the President goes up to him. “Rabbi, you can’t talk about keeping kosher to us. Keeping kosher is not who we are!”

The rabbi apologizes and promises to do better next time.

The following week he takes a deep breath before opening his mouth, and then launches into a beautiful celebration of the meaning of daily prayer.

After services the President goes up to him and says, “Rabbi, you can’t talk about daily prayer in this community! That’s not our way!”

The rabbi is unsettled and at a loss. “I can’t talk about keeping Shabbat; I can’t talk about keeping kosher; I can’t talk about regular prayer. What should I talk about?”

The President looks at him as one looks at a simpleton: “Why, how about talking about Judaism!?”

On Rosh Ha-Shanah I talked about the law. I asked what the law meant to us – where is the law in our lives – as Americans? Tonight I wish to follow up on that discussion and think aloud about what the law means to us as Jews.

I mean by that question – What does Jewish law mean to us as Jews? Where is Jewish law in our lives?

After all, we are here tonight because Jewish law decrees that tonight is Yom Kippur. We can listen to Kol Nidrei on Youtube any time we want. We can even sing it ourselves, any time we want. But only tonight is really the night of Kol Nidrei – because Jewish law says so.

So, are we here tonight because the law tells us to be here? If we look around us, we can see that, no matter how many people are here tonight, we know that there are many Jews who are not here. All of the seats in all of the synagogues in the Montclair area cannot accommodate all the Jews who live in the Montclair area. We don’t have to, because there is no need to accommodate all the Jews of Montclair at our services. We know that many will not be here. That is their choice. And that is the point. If we are here, it is not because the law requires it of us, but because we have freely chosen to be here.

The law may say that tonight is Kol Nidrei. But the truth is that tonight is Kol Nidrei only for those who choose to make it so. Here is the classic puzzle – If the night of Kol Nidrei falls in the middle of a forest and no one observes it, is it still a law?

What makes a law a law? In physics we say that something is a “law of physics” when it is more or less always the case. The conduct of the physical world must follow in accordance with that law. Not to follow the law of gravity, for instance – is impossible. But in physics we do not make laws, we discover laws. Laws of physics are accurate descriptions of the way the world works. They are not rules and regulations that force the world to work a certain way.

In human affairs we make laws. Some person or group of persons – who have power – make decisions for others about what actions are allowed, required or forbidden. Such decisions are stated as “laws.” But, ultimately, the power to make a law is the power to enforce the law, to make it – like the law of gravity – impossible not to follow. An unenforceable law is not a law. And laws that the powers that be decide not to enforce are not really laws. It is only the possibility that the authorities may choose to enforce the law that gives the law its name and reality.

On Rosh Ha-Shanah I told a story of an encounter with a law enforcement officer. The law depends on the possibility of enforcement .

Can anyone name one Jewish law that is a law in that sense? Shabbat? Kashrut? Daily prayer?

Historians have pointed out that this is the revolutionary change of modern Jewish history. Until the process of Emancipation began a little over two hundred years ago, all Jews were subject to the authority of the leaders of their local Jewish community, who worked in concert with the leaders of all other Jewish communities all over the world. Those communities had the power to enforce Jewish law.

The power to enforce the law was the ironic result of the subjugation of the Jewish people to powers greater than theirs. Our rulers and oppressors treated us as a group, rather than as individuals, and wanted to make it easy for themselves by delegating Jewish issues to our own self-governing bodies. When we were given our individual rights as equal citizens of the countries we lived in, the power of those collective Jewish community authorities was dispelled.

Our freedom is a great blessing! But the price we paid for our freedom was that we are free of Jewish law, as well.

Over a thousand years ago, the great Jewish philosopher, Saadia Gaon, could confidently say: “Our nation of the people of Israel is a nation only by virtue of its laws.” (Beliefs and Opinions, 3:7, p. 158) He meant that we are defined by the distinctive way of life we follow, and the distinctive Authority – God, we are subject to. He also conveyed the essentially collective quality of law. The term “law” has only metaphorical value when it refers to the isolated individual. Laws entail groups. And he also meant to say that a nation is no nation if it cannot make its own laws.

The Jewish world is divided between a small minority who believe and who make believe that the law is still binding, and the rest of us, who question, rather than believe, and who reject the binding nature of Jewish law.

This has been our response to new form of an ancient question: We accept that freedom is a blessing. But is the law also a blessing? Or is it a necessity, or even a burden?

Practically speaking, in the West, the argument was decided long ago. A small group of Jewish messianic enthusiasts overthrew the regime of law in the name of love. They conquered half the world. Unfortunately, in the name of love they also oppressed and exterminated millions of people. The enemies of the forces of love, the Pharisaic legalists, stubbornly clung to the law. But they were reduced to a despised remnant. With the onset of modernity a truce was reached. The Jews could breathe free again. Common ground was reached – with the universal agreement that the law was, truly, a burden to be rejected.

So, without any laws that are binding upon us, and without any laws that  bind us, are we still a nation? The Zionist project was simultaneously an expression of the unmooring of the Jewish people from its ancient legal traditions, an active rebellion against those traditions, and a heroic attempt to save Jewish nationhood in the absence of the old legal order. A tiny minority of the Jewish people felt this problem so acutely and worked so hard to create an alternative vision, that they wrought a miracle in the face of overwhelming opposition from within the Jewish people, just as surely as they faced implacable foes from without.

But that program is not what we have wanted. We are here, not there. We cannot substitute Israeli-ness for our Jewishness. We cannot swap Israeli law for Jewish law. We are left with Jewish law as the most salient means for keeping our identity. This is, in some sense, a great paradox.

The leading rabbi and mystic, Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (Nahmanides), who fled Spain in 1267 and lived his last years in Israel, where he composed one of the greatest commentaries on the Torah, advances a shocking teaching. He claims that Jewish law, as the law of the Jewish people, is meant to be binding only in the Jewish homeland, in Israel itself. He claims that, although the Jewish people are, indeed, obligated to observe the Torah outside the land of Israel – in Montclair, for example – this is only so that they do not forget the laws and will be able to pick up observing them for real when they return to the land.

For most of the Jewish people today the situation is the reverse – most Jews in Israel feel little or not need for Jewish law, where their Jewishness is supposedly guaranteed, but many discover the need for Jewish law – as the indispensable tool for assuring Jewish identity – when they are outside of Israel.

For Saadia, Jewish law formed Jewish identity. For Nahmanides, Jewish law expressed Jewish identity.  But for the modern Jew, Jewish identity is self-defined and expressed. But the problem, for so many, is that modern Jewish identity has turned out to be too amorphous, fleeting  and fragile without Jewish law. So, while Jewish law has been rejected as an active element of Jewish being, instead, it has been turned into its preservative. Like BHT. BHT is supposed to be tasteless. But what happens when what is being preserved is also without distinctive taste?

Our discomfort with the law is palpable. But, if we are stuck with the law, what do we do with it? What do we want from it?

One thing some of us do with the law is change its name. We speak of “practices,” “customs,” or “traditions.” I do this frequently, myself, in the honest recognition that observance is now a choice, not an obligation imposed from above. But I also change the word in the hope of doing an end run around our kneejerk rejection of law. Even if we don’t respect the law, we may still respect “tradition.” Fiddler on the Roof was not as superficial as many people claimed.

We have gained acceptance and freedom. But we have lost our acceptance of the law. Along with that loss we have lost any understanding of the law as a blessing. What if the law must be obeyed, not because it will be enforced, but because it is good?

We have accepted the distinction between Love and the Law even as we – if we choose to attend services – recite the blessing that extols the Law, not as the opposite of Love, but as the greatest expression of God’s great and eternal love for us – ahavah rabbah, ahavat `olam. Our mystical teachers insisted that the law is not contrary to love. Rather, it is precisely what gives love its shape. We have let go of our grasp of that vision.

And I wonder whether we have not also lost another precious gift: the grounding of our impulse toward true compassion.

When I think about that story I told on Rosh Ha-Shanah, about the compassionate law-enforcement officer, it occurs to me that – compassion is possible because enforcement is possible – the police officer can give a ticket, but doesn’t. That is what makes his act significant and moving.

I have been speaking about compassion from this pulpit for some years, now. I have watched this country programmatically become less compassionate. The law has become an excuse for ruthless cruelty and an instrument to enforce that cruelty. We have lurched in this direction in the past. The debacle created by mandatory sentencing, for example, happened because lawmakers feared that judges would use their discretion – another word for compassion. But, if before we struggled and debated the wisdom of such an approach, now we have gone loudly and fiercely down that path. The price we pay as a society in human suffering, and in economic waste, is devastating.

Within the Jewish community I see the minority of our people who declare their adherence to the law become more and more selfish and uncaring. There is no place for compassion in their enforcement of the law. What has created such a deformity of the soul?

Among those who have rejected the law, there is a small minority who try to find Jewish meaning in mishpat  and tzedaqah – social justice and righteousness. For many of them, this is the only content of their Jewish lives. But the vast majority no longer sees these values as having any connection to their Jewish identities. Why this sense of alienation and emptiness?

I believe that one important reason is that we are all – all – suffering from the failure of modern Jewry to develop a rounded approach to the law. We have all – those who reject the law and those who bow to the yoke of the law – we have all accepted the denigration of the law as a burden or even a curse. We run away from it or we grit our teeth and subject ourselves to its weight. The law is no longer enforceable. It is our choice. But we no longer know how to exercise that choice well. Neither the law-abiding Jews nor the law-rejecting Jews have been able to arrive at a vision of the law as a source of blessing, as the very ground that makes sustainable compassion a reality.

On this Day of Atonement, may God forgive us for this failure. And may some of us succeed in finding the path of teshuvah  – of return – to engage in the work of creating such a vision of “the law as blessing” for all of us. So that we may choose blessing; so that we may choose life.

Rabbi Greenstein


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