WHAT SERMONS WOULD I WANT TO HEAR? Part 1

Danny Gordis has promised a couple of columns on what kinds of questions he’d like to hear in the sermons at High Holidays. He wrote the first one last week.  He was very clear that he just didn’t want to hear something he already knew.  I really appreciated that. A sermon that condemns Hamas, asserts Israel’s right to defend itself, bemoans the level of destruction in Gaza and calls for the ouster of Netanyahu—that’s not a sermon that is breaking any new ground, and you and I have both heard that umpteen times already.

He offers two ideas for where sermons should focus in his first column.

What is the Jewish relation to history now?  For Gordis, the core Zionist idea is that the state guarantees that we won’t be defenseless and our women won’t be raped by marauding Cossacks while we cower—but that’s exactly what happened on October 7.  For American Jews, he argues, we’ve been living in this delusion that we can be Jews and be perfectly safe.  For him, after the campus protests, that’s just no longer true. I somewhat disagree with this reading of diaspora Judaism, particularly his emphasis on the threat from the left while not paying attention to right wing antisemitism, but there’s no question that left wing antisemitism is a huge problem and it is more dangerous to be a Jew in American than it was 20 years ago.  So here’s what he wants addressed for both Diaspora Jews and Israelis.  Why be Jewish?  Why not just assimilate or emigrate? 

This is a very good question.  And his demand that we not just say Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) because you can do Tikkun Olam without being Jewish—that seems on point as well. Gordis writes “What do we need to learn, what do we need to study, what do we need to read and to understand to have a sense of what Jews and our tradition still bring to the world?”

The second theme is driven by the horrible letters that Israeli soldiers are told to write to their families in case they are killed. One of the common themes in many of the letters is the sense that they died for something worthwhile—defending the Jewish people. Whatever we might think of the wars and how they are conducted, those soldiers are dying for the sake of the Jewish people. Gordis suggest we imagine asking our young people “What do they believe in more than they believe in their desire to stay alive?”  I don’t see any reason to limit this to young people.  What do we believe in more than our desire to enjoy our pleasurable lives? 

Next week I will offer some answers to these two questions.  In the meantime, chew on them for yourself.