A Prayer for Our Country Before Election Day 2024

Our God and God of our ancestors, with hope and humility we approach Election Day, the day on which We the People will choose the individuals who will govern our nation, our states, and our communities.

You have abundantly blessed the United States of America with freedom, security, prosperity, and the right to democratic self-government.  You made it possible for the founders of our country to fulfill the command of Your Torah, to “proclaim liberty throughout the land, and unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Daily we pray to You to restore our leaders as in former times.  On this Election Day, help us to remember that in America we are responsible for choosing our own leaders, and that the survival of our democracy, and the well-being of generations of Americans to come, depend upon the care we take in those choices.

Daily we pray to You for knowledge, discernment and wisdom.  On this Election Day grant us those blessings in full, so that we may consider our choices with knowledge and vote with discernment and wisdom, with the best interests of our country and our communities in mind.

Daily we pray to You to subdue the arrogant in our time.  On Election Day, and every day, help us to subdue the arrogance within ourselves.  Open our hearts and minds to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens, as we call upon them to consider ours.

Strengthen our will to fulfill our duties to our country and to one another.  To exercise our precious right to vote.  And to do all we can to ensure that every legal vote is counted, regardless of the candidate or party for whom it is cast.

May it be Your will that our decisions this Election Day preserve this country as a wellspring of liberty and a beacon of tolerance and democracy for the entire world.

And let us say Amen.

Happy Halloween

As we approach this time of year, a recurring debate arises about allowing our children to partake in Halloween. Some Individuals express concerns that Halloween promotes devil worship.  However, Halloween has its roots in a Celtic festival that celebrated the harvest with bonfires to ward off ghosts and evil spirits and mourn the dead. This tradition is not unique to Halloween and is found in various cultures. Black Cats and Witches emerged much later, in the Middle Ages.

It’s a time for children to don their favorite costumes, explore their neighborhoods, gather sweet treats, and revel in the joy of being outdoors. The sheer excitement and happiness on their faces is a sight to behold.

Something is enchanting about bringing the imagination to bear on costumes and needing to go through the ritual of sorting out the candy as loot candies will be eaten, what candies will be discarded, and how much can be consumed less our children get a bellyache. Of course, that says nothing of the sugar high they will get as they gorge themselves on candy bars. It also says nothing for all of the food they consume between the time they end their trick-or-treating and return home to share the spoils.

Amidst all the real horrors and evils in the world, a night of innocent fun for our children seems like a harmless and enjoyable way to spend some time. Instead of dwelling on Halloween’s potential dark origins or superstitions, let’s embrace it as a moment to unleash our imaginations, step out, and have a good time.

Happy Halloween!

 

Starting All Over Again -Bereishit

There is an old joke that goes something like this:

The rabbi sees Mrs. Schwartz in the grocery store just before the High Holidays. He greets her as most rabbis would, “Mrs. Schwartz, it’s so good to see you. I look forward to seeing you in the synagogue for the High Holidays.”

She replies, “It’s good to see you, too, rabbi. But I don’t think I’ll be coming.”

“Oh,” said the rabbi, “I hope everything is alright. Why won’t you be there?”

“Well, rabbi,” she responds, “Every year, it’s the same old thing. We even read the same Torah portion.”

Although the joke isn’t particularly funny, it notes an essential part of our wisdom tradition; every time we read “Bereishit Bara Elohim” or any part of the Torah, it is different because we are different. Every time we engage in a text, our understanding differs from the last time. Our experiences shape and influence us and, therefore, also affect how we grasp the text. Our lives have evolved, and likely, the questions on our minds do, too. All of us have experienced the same thing differently. Let me explain.

Think about returning to a place you’d been before. Despite our expectations, we experience it differently this time around. The river is not the same water; our favorite book or movie reveals different secrets. Even my beloved childhood Twinkies do not taste the same.

A teacher of mine shared that the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Our texts are treasure troves, just waiting for us to uncover the precious jewels they contain. The questions I ask in middle age are very different from the ones I asked as a young person. The issues I confront today in our current climate have me seeking answers to deeply troubling questions about meaning, seeking wisdom from this insightful tradition.
We begin again with the first words of the Torah. But what does it mean? How does the message resonate with you now?

This has been a challenging year for Jews. The Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, the war starting in Gaza and expanding into Lebanon, threats from Iran, deep political unrest, antisemitism cloaked as anti-Zionism/anti-Israel and unvarnished Jew-hatred appearing across this country and the world have most of us reeling. We are shaken to our core and struggling to figure out how we move forward. Our texts are compelling and filled with timeless wisdom, and we grapple with them this year in ways that we didn’t expect.

During the High Holidays, we are reminded that God understood the need to create a world that balanced Din and Rachamim, law and compassion. Midrashim share stories that this world was not God’s first attempt. Previous creations failed due to the heavy reliance on one or the other trait. Our stories also tell us that the Torah existed even before creation.

This leads me to an interesting thought. Perhaps even the divine approaches the Torah differently, learning from each encounter. Even the almighty learns from the Torah.

Moses once asked the eternal one what would happen to the wisdom once Moses was gone. God sweeps him into a class taught by the sage Rabbi Akiva. Moses is perplexed as nothing Akiva says seems familiar to him as he listens. And then, as if on cue, Akiva closes with, “And all of this comes from the Torah of Moses, our teacher. One of the fantastic parts of our tradition is the messages of core values that remain timeless even if the way they are practiced or understood evolves with the generations.

Our mystical stories talk of black fire and white fire, describing our sacred scrolls.
The words, the letters of the words and even the white spaces on the sacred text are opportunities for us to learn, using the holy text as a timeless source of knowledge, bounded only by our ability to comprehend it.

So, Mrs. Schwartz didn’t get it quite right. As we read the story of God’s creating, let us use this as a chance to see not an old story but as one of a new beginning, reading with fresh eyes, engaging it and asking the essential personal questions as the story of the world and the Jewish people continues to unfold.

Rabbi David Levin is the founder of the Jewish Relationships Initiative, which aims to help seekers of meaning through Jewish Wisdom in human relationships and end-of-life challenges. He is also vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia. The Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia is proud to provide diverse perspectives on Torah commentary for the Jewish Exponent. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Board of Rabbis.

 

Klal Yisrael

 

The Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Francesco Hayez

We spend a lot of time talking about Clal Yisrael or Am Israel, the unity of the Jewish people, the fantastic idea that we are all one. However, it’s never seemed to be the case that everyone who claims Jewish identity considers themselves part of this group. We seem to be very easily swayed into looking at denominations and other forms of Jewish practice as false or authentic and often just plain old wrong.

We don’t have a creed; we have something called Halacha. We practice and interpret the law very differently. This is, historically, a source of strength, allowing our tradition to evolve and be organic, but it’s also been the source of a lot of fighting. It creates a very fractious “people.” Indeed, I wonder if Clal Yisrael is a misnomer. However, from the outside, it is a different story.

When others on the outside look, they see Jews. They do not make distinctions between religious Jews, secular Jews, Zionist Jews, orthodox Jews, and the like; to them, it’s just Jews. We’ve seen that mainly through the world’s antisemitism, the Jew-hatred that unites us from the outside.

This brings me to the idea of Sinat Chinam, the concept of “baseless hatred” that we often use as the reason for the internal friction leading to the downfalls of the first and the second temple. It sounds lofty, radical, and extreme.  It’s easy for most of us to talk about it as a foreign object and disclaim any connection to it.  We believe we are not so strident while at the same time criticizing those who do not practice Judaism as we do. But that is precisely what our sages were talking about when discussing the concept. It’s not some deeply ingrained hatred of another denomination but our inability to accept that your Judaism is as authentic and valid as my Judaism. Your practice is a true expression of your understanding of our faith tradition. As is mine.

So it’s about the annoyance. It’s about the intolerance. It’s about the inflexibility. It’s about the idea that because I am right, you must be wrong. This concept was developed by a teacher and friend, Rabbi Brad Hirshfield, in his book “You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right.” It’s the idea that we can look at each other with understanding and appreciation, even if it’s not how we practice Judaism.

We must find a way to move past our judgment of each other and our intolerance of what we see when it doesn’t comport with what we believe is our tradition’s “proper” practice. The Jewish tent is broad enough to encompass us all.