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Dear Chaverim,

Let me wish you a Happy Chanukah and share with you a brief primer on how to light candles.   As Chanukah has a few complexities of its own, below is a  brief summary of its laws and customs.

Candle Lighting 

1. When: Ideally one should light candles just after the stars come out, for Vancouver that is about 4:50 pm and the candles should last a minimum of 30 minutes thereafter, but preferably closer to an hour.
   1. If one is delayed, one can light with a blessing anytime that people in the street or members of the household are still up and about.  
   2. If one is so delayed and finds all other household members asleep and the streets empty, then one should still light the menorah with a blessing.
   3. If the candles go out.  One is not required to relight, as the Mitzvah has already been accomplished.  However, keeping the candles burning is always a good idea. 
2. Where: One should ideally light the menorah outside, or at least in a place where it projects its lights into the street or public space. Therefore, a window to the street, or a porch, doorway (if your menorah is in a wind proof case)is ideal.
3. How Many Menorah(s):  If you are Sephardic, one menorah for the entire household.  If you are Ashkenazic, one Menorah for each person in the household
4. How Many Candles: One the first night one, second night light two, third night three, etc. …. of course with an extra candle, known as the Shamash, serving as the utility candle. 
5. Candle Placement: The candles are on the right, relative to the person lighting (and of course left justified relative to the viewer on the street), thus all the candles will be shifted to the right of your menorah, with empty slots on the left of the person lighting.   On all subsequent nights the candles are lit starting with the newest addition from the left proceeding to the right. 
6. Blessings:  On the first night, three blessings are recited; and all other nights the first two blessing are recited 
   1. Lehadlik, To Light the Chanukah lights . . .
   2. She Asa Nissim,  Who Performed Miracles . . 
   3. Shehechiyanu,  Who Has Preserved us . . .
   2. For audio and text please visit http://www.torahtots.com/holidays/chanuka/brachot.htm

7. Erev Shabbat (Dec. 8): Chanukah Candles should be lit prior to Shabbat candles at approximately 3:45 pm and they should be long enough to last until about 5:40 pm (for this year). That is 30 minutes after the stars are out. 
8. Motzaei Shabbat (December 9):  Chanukah candles are lit after Havdalah (after 5:09 pm) candles.
9. Greetings:  Believe it or not Chanukah is not a Chag in the technical sense.  Thus the custom is to say Chanukah Sameach, Happy Chanukah or a Freilechin Chanukah (Yiddish) . 
10. Food:  I have often wondered what is the most calorically challenging holiday, Chanukah or Pesach.   Perhaps Eliyahu Hanavi (Elijah, the Prophet) knows the answer; sadly, I am challenged by both.  As I am sure you know Chanukah foods largely follow the tradition of remembering the miracle of oil.  Thus fried donuts and Latkes dominate the menu.  However, there is a very old tradition to remember the triumph of Yehudit over the general who she lulled to sleep with milk.  As a result dairy foods are also traditional.
    1. In the Birkat Hamazon / Grace after Meals one should insert the Al Ha Nissim paragraph.  If forgotten the Birkat Hamazon is not repeated
11. Prayers:  On Chanukah two additional prayers are said
    1. The Hallel is recited in celebration of the miracles that took place. Hallel is recited even when one is praying at home.  
    2. The Al Ha Nisim blessing is inserted into the Modim or Thanksgiving blessing, which is the penultimate blessing of the silent devotion. 
12. Dreidel: Those brave Jews who defied the Greek and the Roman decrees against us and dared to illegally study Torah used the Dreidel as the cover story to their subversive preservation of Torah culture. When the wicked authorities would come catch them learning, they would pretend they were gambling, a vice which the Greeks and Romans embraced.  We celebrate their bravery by playing dreidel.  The letters on the dreidel, נ ג ה ש correspond to the word גשנה in Parshat Vayigash which describes Yaakov Avinu sending his son Yehudah ahead “to Goshen” to set up a beit midrash so that the Jews would continue to have Torah even in the darkest exile.  They are also the acronym for נס גדול היה שם “a great miracle happened there”, referring to the miracles of Chanukah.  
13. We will end with the first law presented in the Shulchan Aruch or Jewish code of law in its presentation of Chanukah. Especially this year, we should try to make these days full of fun and joy. The light of Chanukah should brighten our darker days during this difficult time of year and especially in such times of rampant antisemitism. 

Happy Chanukah!!

This past summer, artificial intelligence succeeded in producing a song called Heart on My Sleeve which was an artificial musical collaboration between Drake and the Weekend, while I am not a devoted fan of either, people in the know were convinced of its authenticity. I saw one reporter was able to fool her bank by reproducing her voice through AI. A local rabbi told me that they used a chatbot to give a D’var Torah at a board meeting, with strong reviews. So, in a moment of writer’s block before Rosh Hashanah, I turned to Chat GPT and prompted the computer to “write me a sermon in the style of Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt.”  On the one hand I was relieved, because I was disappointed with the product — my job is safe… for now. On the other hand, this is what the chatbot produced.

         L’shanah tovah, my beloved congregation!

As we gather here today, on this sacred day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I am filled with a profound sense of gratitude and awe. It is a privilege to stand before you once again, to usher in this new year with hope, reflection, and renewed commitment to our faith. And so, I want to speak to you today in the style of our dear Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt, may his memory be a blessing, who inspired us with his wisdom and compassion.

I must say it was a bit of a shock to hear of myself in the blessed memory category – בלי עין הרע. My first reaction was to analyze why this is so. Is it because my name is Andrew – as opposed to something more Hebrew/Biblical sounding – that it used the style of a Reform rabbi?  Was its inability to copy my style a function of how little published material of mine it found on the web? 

I had to remind myself, it is a soulless entity that is trying to approximate humanity by thinking what is the next most probable statement to come out of my mouth. I am glad that I still have enough connection to my own soul to be able to be more skilled than the computer. More and more of our communication is touch-less, and without human involvement. I can assure you that you are receiving birthday cards, emails, apology letters that have been written by a computer.  

Even Hashem is getting automated prayers. Canadian Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Nathan Englander wrote a book called Kaddish.com. The protagonist, Larry, has just lost his devout father. His sister, together with her rabbi and the head of the chevra kadisha, try to browbeat him into saying Kaddish. They settle on a compromise; he will find a representative. After a quick search Larry finds the website kaddish.com, which connects him to a yeshiva that will help one find a candidate or two to recite the Kaddish on their behalf for a loved one. Larry calls it “JDate for the dead.” 

While in 1999 this was in the imagination of Nathan Englander, in 2023 such a website actually exists, with exactly that name. It made my heart sink. It costs $75 for one Yahrzeit, $150 for Yahrzeit in perpetuity, $175 for daily kaddish for 11 months, and for $250 kaddish will be said 3 times daily for 11 months and for Yahrzeits in perpetuity. It is about as soulless as one could possibly imagine.

Larry the protagonist says one line that I found very striking. “Does anyone really think G-d sits up there with a scorecard checking off every one of Larry’s blessings?”  This is interesting, because I often think we do think exactly that. We see blessing as a transaction. My father paid for me to get into medical school; I will pay for me getting into heaven. How do we pay for heaven? Is it with prayers?

It is hard to deny transactional Judaism. There are many rituals and metaphors that lead us in that direction. We think of our sins and mitzvot sitting on a scale, being judged for the new year. It is as if putting on Tefillin often enough makes up for slanderously gossiping, or as if giving a big donation makes up for infidelity.

I remember in university I had a friend in a very competitive engineering program. He would attend morning services whenever he had a midterm or a final. It was a very transactional approach. Here I am Gd, maybe you could award me with an extra 10 points or so for the Aliya of my GPA.

This transactional mentality is very old, it is even at the heart of the Haftorah that we read just minutes ago. The people cry out to Gd and they say,

לָמָּה צַּמְנוּ וְלֹא רָאִיתָ עִנִּינוּ נַפְשֵׁנוּ וְלֹא תֵדָע הֵן בְּיוֹם צֹמְכֶם תִּמְצְאוּ חֵפֶץ וְכָל עַצְּבֵיכֶם תִּנְגֹּשׂוּ.

Hashem answers them plainly, On the fast day you came with your shopping list of personal needs. Isaiah says to them, “you fast with grievance and strife…”  Really, they fast with an edge, with anger at Gd, maybe. Gd says, “do you call this a fast and a day of favour to Hashem?” Isaiah then repaints the picture like this.

No, this is the fast I desire:

To unlock fetters of wickedness,

And dissolve the groups that pervert justice,

To let the oppressed go free;

To annul all the unfair contracts

It is to share your bread with the hungry,

And to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe them,

And not to ignore your own kin.

Essentially, Gd is saying that this is not pinball; you don’t score points every time you say Shema.

Rabbis for the past thousand years have been wrestling with this problem. Rambam laments the fact that we reward children with candy to encourage the study Torah. He says they soon outgrow candy and they want bigger rewards, like clothing. I had no idea, Cairo where Rambam lived was such a fashion hub in the 12th century!  When they mature further the children want money. At some point money is no longer a good enough reward, so you have to reward them with honour and ego boosters to inspire Torah study. Rambam laments that when you start with the reward game, it is hard to rediscover the intrinsic rewards. Alas, even Rambam is resigned to the transactional; “and all of this is despicable, nonetheless, it is necessary because of the smallness of the human intellect that he make the objective of wisdom something else besides wisdom.”

Rabbi Yitzhak Hunter takes on the Talmudic metaphor of the scales. If you are righteous, your mitzvot outweigh your sins, and Hashem immediately judges you for good. If you are wicked, Gd judges you immediately for bad. Most of us are in the middle at 50/50. It would seem that we must perform more mitzvot to tip the scales.  Rabbi Hunter is shocked at this. How do you reconcile your accounts if you have no idea what each mitzvah is worth, and what the debit is for each sin? He concludes that being in the middle realm means that you have to reshape your character. It is not about scoring more points; it’s about being a better all-around player.

There is a secret that you should know about Kaddish: its origin. The early sources on Kaddish are all about leading the prayers. The earliest source does not actually have the mourner saying Kaddish, but rather leading the full prayer service. However, the skills to learn to lead the prayers are many. Shacharit, the morning service, is 70 pages. Kaddish is 1 page. There are so many Kaddishin in a service because each of the mourners can then have a turn in leading. In short, now that father or mother has passed away, the matriarch, the patriarch is gone, this puts the child in their wake in a place to be the leader.

Maybe one of the best expressions of this idea came from the most famous Jew from my hometown, Henrietta Szold. Her friend Hayim Peretz offered to say Kaddish for her mother. Szold’s letter to him is timeless.

It is impossible for me to find words in which to tell you how deeply I was touched by your offer to act as “Kaddish” for my dear mother. I cannot even thank you — it is something that goes beyond thanks. It is beautiful, what you have offered to do — I shall never forget it.

You will wonder, then, that I cannot accept your offer. Perhaps it would be best for me not to try to explain to you in writing, but to wait until I see you to tell you why it is so. I know well, and appreciate what you say about the Jewish custom; and Jewish custom is very dear and sacred to me. And yet I cannot ask you to say Kaddish after my mother. The Kaddish means to me that the survivor publicly and markedly manifests his wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community which his parent had, and that so the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation, each adding its own link. You can do that for the generations of your family, I must do that for the generations of my family.

Kaddish is not a transaction. It is not about points on a scorecard as Larry quipped about kaddish.com. It is not a token; it is not Mitzvah pinball. Kaddish and Yizkor are publicly and markedly manifesting one’s wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community which the parent had.

Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah Women, wrote that letter in 1916. However, her exact turn of phrase hits harder in 2023 than it did in 1916.

Assume that one’s relationship to the community is the exact opposite of what Henrietta Szold wrote. This would be synonymous with the more recently-coined term capable loner.  The concept of the capable loner was developed by columnist and political analyst Yuval Levin. Levin argues that the technological advances of the pandemic are making us all more capable loners. The massive technological adoptions of the pandemic,

… means that we are using this time to hone our capacity for isolation and solitude. “Social distancing,” “remote work,” and “distance learning” are the watchwords of this national response … so that the habits we are building will enable us to more effectively stand apart when this is over… Rather than a sense of mutual dependence, then, we might walk away from this crisis as even more capable loners… A great deal of what we have thought of as the information revolution in the last two decades has amounted to novel ways of avoiding real social interaction.

One can pick up Starbucks coffee with remote ordering without saying a word to anyone. How often have you texted someone because you lacked the emotional energy to actually talk to them? Sadly, there is also kaddish.com, where one can have kaddish said without any relationship to any community.

The cost of a transaction used to be higher: a conversation with the Barista, maybe even getting them to pronounce your name correctly, looking someone in the eye when you talk. Now we have reduced the transaction to the funds transferred.

There is a story in the bible of miracles-for-cash. It is about a Syrian general named Na’aman. He is stricken with leprosy – Tza’arat – and the young Israelite girl that he took captive suggested that he go to the prophet Elisha to cure him. He heeds her advice and travels to the prophet – who instructs him to bathe seven times in the Jordan River and emerge with the skin of a six-year-old. Na’aman, the powerful general, attempts to give Elisha a gift, — Elisha refuses. Na’aman entreats further. Elisha refuses.   Na’aman then takes an oath saying that he will never engage in the worship of any other Gd but Hashem. The general of the Syrian court pledged himself to Hashem and Torah. Elisha knew that he could not let Na’aman pay for his miracle. He could not let him off with a price so cheap. By refusing the transaction Na’aman had to deal with the enormity of Gd.

But defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory. As Na’aman returns to Syria, one of the students in the prophetic academy Gechazi runs toward him and says,  “my master, my teacher let you get away before accepting your gift.” Then Naaman gives him a little silver and several pairs of clothing. The Syrians returned to being the enemies of Israel.  Na’aman had traded epiphany for a little silver and some clothing.

Who are we in that story? Are we Elisha or Gechazi? Imagine the Kaddish said by each of these men. Elisha is like Henrietta Szold, wondering how he can fill the place of his parent, how he can add to the community, how he can make a spiritual commitment, how he can attach himself to the community, to the mission. There is an insurmountable mountain of gratitude. The only thing that can answer for the gifts of upbringing by parent and community is commitment of the entirety of one’s character. That is what you owe, “to assume the relation to the Jewish community which his parent had, and that so the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation, each adding its own link.”

I always end Yizkor by speaking to those who are about to observe Yizkor. I want to speak to all of the rest of you first. I have spent the last 25 minutes rejecting the concept that Kaddish is a transaction with Gd. I have tried to demonstrate that it is a call to leadership, a call to embody the values that your family has carried for the past 100, 300, 1000 years — the values dictated by the Torah. The worst time to learn what that means is when the actual mourning begins and you are called to it. Your leadership has to start now. Learn that leadership when your parents can take that pride in seeing you there.

To those observing Yizkor, you know that what you owe to those who built this shul, is not the small token that is pledged in the text of the Siddur. It has to be bigger than that. Our culture is in a crisis of disintegrating into capable loners. We need your leadership. We need your presence.  We need to rebuild the week in and week out vitality of this community — that is what we owe to those who built this community. We owe them the effort that maintains the vitality they worked so hard to build. 

Rabbi Rosenblatt

How many pairs of shoes do you own?

In 1940 women had an average of four pairs. During World War Two Americans were rationed two pairs per person, the British could buy up to three pairs. In 2010 women owned an average of 20 pairs. The Daily Mail estimates that today’s average is 30-35 pairs of shoes. That’s average, across the entire population. It is a telling measure of our economic well being. We live quite well. 

We live so well that over the past year one of the most trending concepts has been quiet quitting ­– which has been variously described as doing the minimum at work necessary to not get fired, or a workers’ rights movement to not go the extra mile or even work the extra hour for one’s employer. Regardless of how you define it, being able to quietly quit is a luxury. Tevya the milkman could not quietly quit if he intended to feed his family. We live quite well.

Last week there was literally a river of wine flowing through the streets in Portugal, because there is now too much wine in Europe. The Indian immigrant comic Zarna Garg hit a nerve when she said the following.

I mean, in India you get water in a bucket. There are buckets in America too but they are filled with fried chicken! A shower doesn’t stop here until you stop it. People fill gallons of drinkable water in a bathtub and just sit in it. Because they’re sad.

We live well.

There is no question that a free and open society and free markets and open trade borders have contributed to our high standard of living. Much of that high standard of living is supported by mountains of debt, personal and national. Canada’s national debt has nearly doubled since 2019. Credit card debt in Canada hit a record in the first quarter of 2023 at 91.5 billion dollars. The trends are no different in the United States and the European Union. 

In the long run the amount of debt may be the single greatest threat to the Western way of life. This observation is not the rabbi using the pulpit for politics. It is more about where things stand today in the historical record of empires – the countries that dominated the world economically. The most prominent ones include the Dutch trading empire, the British Empire, the Chinese and American. 

The economist and investor Ray Dalio published a New-York-Times-Bestselling book last year, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Dalio’s analysis reflected the fact that historically, all empires collapsed when their GDP – the total value of the goods and services of the economy – could no longer produce enough value to service the debt.

The foundation of Ray Dalio’s claim is not just wonky economic analysis, it’s social and psychological reasoning as well. Societies that can amass debt on the scale of the modern West are yoked together by certain behaviors.  

As people become wealthier, they tend not to work as hard. They enjoy more leisure, pursue the finer things in life, and at the extreme become decadent. 

According to Dalio, the early generations, the builders of the empire are hungry, ambitious and hardened by tough life. The Dutch reclaimed the land from the sea. The British adapted to strange (at least to them) climates, the Americans tamed vast expanses of wilderness. On the other hand, “the new generation is less battle-hardened, steeped in luxuries and [is] accustomed to the easy life, which makes them more vulnerable to challenges.” 

The assumption that we are all entitled to the good life is built into everyone’s wallet. I don’t know any adults who operate in today’s economy without a credit card. Some use credit responsibly; many use it to ensure the good times keep coming. I remember seeing an episode of Leave It to Beaver; for you kids out there, that was like the Friends or Riverdale of the early 60’s. Ward Cleaver [the dad] thought Eddie Haskell [Ward’s son’s sketchy friend] was reckless and crazy for buying gasoline with a credit card.

People used to save and then pay in cash; now we buy on credit and pay later when we have the cash. The grandchildren of those who pinched every penny after the Second World War treat their twice-yearly vacations as a given. Homework and deadlines are negotiable. Showing up for work at 9:00 is a suggestion and leaving early is entirely forgivable. Using your parents’ credit card until late adulthood is entirely normal. If you grow up in the good times, you are unlikely to want to work very hard for them. There is a new economic baseline, and you didn’t have to sweat to earn it.  

Dalio is convinced this was true of all the societies of wealth. The Romans, the British, the Dutch all suffered from the same problem. When times got good, the workforce was not hungry enough to work hard. The societies declined and so did the empires. Dalio writes for investors; he suggests that it might be time to bet against the prosperity of the United States, Canada, and the EU.  

Even before the Roman Empire, Moshe in the closing chapters of the Torah warns of exactly this phenomenon. Moshe is terrified of the success that will come to the Children of Israel in the land of Israel. He says bluntly, “וישמן ישורון ויבעט and the Jewish people grew fatted and kicked.” We tasted luxury and left Gd.

In the rabbinic text the Sifre, the rabbis wonder how Moshe knew success would be so corrosive. In an uncanny fashion they use an analysis much like Dalio’s. Moshe examines the first societies that rebel against Gd. All fell from power specifically because of their prosperity. The generation of the flood had it too good. Babel was a hyper-efficient society that built giant towers and felt secure enough to rebel against Gd. The people of Sdom, who were extremely wealthy, rejected Gd and the idea of charity. The generation of the golden calf was the first generation that had Skip the Dishes with Manna falling from heaven at everyone’s doorstep every morning; they also rebelled due to their position of luxury. 

Up to this point, this sermon is as relevant in our synagogue as it would be in the halls of Parliament or in St John’s church, or at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The West is facing a cultural crisis twinned with an economic one. Some of you may be more convinced by Ray Dalio, some more convinced by Moses, but it is the same lesson: וישמן ישורון ויבעט the straight have grown fat and rebelled. Our culture is becoming poisoned by its own success.

Dalio offers no remedies, only ways to make money off the crisis. However, Moshe envisions a unique formula for the Jewish people to survive the challenges of success. The formula is a counterintuitive framing of our Jewish identity. Moshe asks the Jew to forever consider ourselves as strangers. Ultimately the Jewish people and its character are born in Egypt – even reborn in Egypt – every year at the Seder. Yet, there is one place that the Torah tells us that we can never return to – that is Egypt itself. We are Hebrews, from the word עברי, literally the other side of the river.  In other words, Hebrews are always from somewhere else.

The Israeli writer and philosopher Micah Goodman points out that the ceremonies that celebrate the blessing and gift of the land of Israel declare us to be strangers to it. This is most striking in the Mitzvah of Bikurim, the first fruits that the farmers bring to Jerusalem to celebrate the gift of the land. He notes that we declare, “ אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי, וַיֵּרֶד מִצְרַיְמָה וַיָּגָר שָׁם בִּמְתֵי  מְעָט, וַיְהִי שָׁם לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל עָצוּם וָרָב “my father was a wandering Aramean.” Goodman emphasizes that “when the Jew celebrates the land of Israel he declares he is not of the land of Israel, his roots are elsewhere, in wandering.” 

Moshe’s greatest fear about the future of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is what will come of their success. He is not afraid of the future struggles but of the times of plenty.

“פֶּן תֹּאכַל וְשָׂבָעְתָּ וּבָתִּים טוֹבִים תִּבְנֶה וְיָשָׁבְתָּ ..…רָ֖ם לְבָבֶ֑ךָ וְשָֽׁכַחְתָּ֙ אֶת־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ 

Beware lest when you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, …..your heart grow haughty and you forget your God יהוה who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of slavery.“

He is afraid of what economic success will mean for a nation whose character and ethos were forged and founded in the suffering of Egypt.

Goodman points out that the Torah establishes a holiday celebrating the liberation from Egypt, and a holiday remembering traveling and living in huts in the desert for 40 years. However, there is no biblical holiday for national independence. We never celebrate conquering Israel or founding Jerusalem. All of the holidays recall foreign or unsettled geography, Egypt, the wilderness. Interestingly, there is no holiday in the Torah for our success, only for our suffering and perseverance.  

I always thought Jews never felt like citizens because we were expelled from every country in Europe: 1276 from Bavaria, 1290 from England, 1492 from Spain etc, etc. We were expelled from most of Europe and every country in Arab Africa and Asia in 1948. 

This [being outsiders] is not a bug, it’s a feature or our identity. Being the stranger is part of the design. We are meant to always feel like outsiders, this is the secret to not letting prosperity and success spoil us. We Jews are always meant to feel like vagrants, even in Israel. This is not because we are not entitled to stay on the land, and not in the way that the anti-Zionists delegitimize Israel. It is because we are not meant to feel entitled.

Viscerally, we need to feel like strangers and identify as strangers so that we will always remember to extend comfort and support and caring to others. The Torah tells us because we were strangers in the land of Egypt and we still feel so today, 

“וְגֵ֖ר לֹ֣א תִלְחָ֑ץ וְאַתֶּ֗ם יְדַעְתֶּם֙ אֶת־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַגֵּ֔ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃

 you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.“

I think this is the first practical lesson for us in the cultural war against the perils of success. We need to occupy a very special mindset, a place in the story where we tell ourselves that we are permanently immigrants.

We are not the Establishment. We are the children of the malnourished and at the same time we need to feed the hungry.

We have been oppressed because we are meant to help the oppressed.

Our story is that of Abraham the wanderer and of Moses – who was prevented from entering the land. We are Esther – who was both queen and a marginalized Jew at the same time. We are Isaac Abarbanel – who was expelled from three countries even as he was the finance minister of two kings and a queen. We are Dreyfus who was both a war hero and branded a traitor. We are Irwin Cotler who Mclean’s Magazine called “Counsel for the Oppressed.”

How do we create consciousness of the sacred stranger? We immerse ourselves in the story. We study the narratives of those individuals in the Torah who met the challenges of being outsiders. We become familiar with them as they emerge in weekly Torah readings and in the cycle of the holidays. We make them our heroes. 

I cannot tell you at which one of my family’s Sedarim or at which moment in synagogue or in the activities of the shul I came to know this concept. However, I know that these two messages were clear: we were Jews and we did things differently. We ate different food. Sandy Koufax could not pitch on Yom Kippur. We were supposed to speak up for the oppressed and feed the needy. We are the sacred strangers. If we want to inoculate ourselves from the poison of property and the ills of ‘affluenza’, we need to occupy this identity of the sacred stranger that emerges so naturally from 929 chapters of the Tanach. 

There is a second discipline that Moshe gave us to avoid the corrosive nature of success. You might call it givitude.

Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg, from mid-19th century Königsberg, noted that in Judaism our first obligation is to give back. Before you enjoy any of the harvest, before the first grain can be made into food for the table, you have to give back. You have to bring the Omer offering. Why? 

ואמרו המחברים לפי שאין דבר מרים לב בני אדם ומחטיאם כשפע רב טוב, כמאמר וישמן ישורון ויבעט לאמר כחי ועוצם ידי עשה לי את החיל הזה, ולמען דעת כי לה’ הארץ ומלואה פירות ופירי פירות, וכח האדם בם אין כי הכל הבל

The great codifiers of the law said that there is nothing that embitters the heart of man and tempts a person to sin as much as abundance and good times as Moshe said, the Jews grew fat and kicked. They said to themselves it is because of my genius and the work of my hands that I have achieved this strength. We give back to remind ourselves that what we have is a gift from Gd. 

If you recognize this, as Rabbi Mecklenburg does, [i.e.,] that there is nothing that poisons the heart of a person more than abundance, then it follows naturally that one should not reward oneself first. It follows that self-care is not the first priority. One might even reach the conclusion that one’s own children must be second in the pecking order behind the mission of giving. 

The key to avoiding the trap of success is to feed other people first. If you handle all the money as treif until the fruits of success are shared, then you understand that wealth is a blessing. If Gd gave it to you it has a sacred purpose. 

What is the most radical form of charity in the Torah? It’s the Shmitta. Let’s imagine that you were a vintner in the Torah. You spent years finding the right patch of land, developing the right variety of grape. You set up the right row orientation, made sure that the drainage channels were properly excavated. You had pride in all you invested in this land. On the seventh year the Torah demands that the fruit of the vineyard belongs to whomever can pick it. The vintner has no more right than the vagrant to that fruit.

Rabbi Ari Bergmann is a Talmud professor at Yeshiva University and CIO of a hedge fund specializing in derivatives structuring and negative correlated alpha portfolios. (I have no idea what that means, other than to say he spends half his day talking economics and the other half talking Talmud.) He said the following about Shemitta. 

I think the giving and charity, although is very noble, but in some ways it’s a form of violence. It is a form of control. You realize that by giving you are the giver and somebody else is the taker. We all see that this idea of giving charity, you feel good about yourself that you give, it’s yours. At some point in time, you realize that we own nothing. In essence, sharing is much greater than giving. You realize that giving is a form of control, is a form of power, because by nature, when you give is a form of control and form of ownership. Shmitta is relinquishing. The word shmitta in Hebrew means le’hashmit, means to relinquish. It’s amazing to relinquish.

Yes, we are meant to become strangers to our wealth too. It’s radical, maybe even very radical. There may be no other way to avoid the trap of being poisoned by our own success. 

Let me be blunt here in the last minute. There is nothing that threatens our happiness, our wellbeing, and our character as much as the success that we have been blessed with. I know many of you, maybe most of you, share my concern that there is nothing that threatens the West and this community in particular as much as our material success. Short of taking vows of poverty, there is only one formula for avoiding the corrosive features of success; become a Sacred Stranger, a Hebrew, an Ivri.  The Torah does not preach poverty, it preaches perspective and performance.  

How do we occupy the mindset of the Sacred Stranger? We do it through Torah perspective and performance of mitzvot. The only way you get perspective is by immersing in the story of the Jewish people, immersing in the Torah narrative, and taking its instruction. 

Start with a minimum of one hour a week of actual Torah class participation in the shul. If you don’t embrace the story, you can’t occupy the mindset. You can’t embrace the time-tested formula Moshe gave us for surviving success. 

Second comes performance – the small mitzvot. Do you thank Gd before you eat your grass-fed Wagyu kosher steak? Do you make sure that you take off 10% for tzedakah before you deposit your paycheck? Do you come to shul and engage in the book that asks you to be thankful for everything from higher cognition to unremarkable trips to the washroom? Yes, there is a blessing after peeing, and it is profound. I know that praying is hard, but can we really afford to not be appreciative? Have we become so callous to the blessings that they mean nothing to us?  

Our grandparents prayed for salvation from fascists and famines. We pray to save ourselves from fast times and financial success. We need to pray to save us from ourselves. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rosenblatt