“In the Name of God”

Rosh Hashanah 5767/2006
Rabbi Judith Schindler

Ten years ago, I had an odd experience. I was asked, as a rabbi, to visit the Bedford Hills Maximum Security Prison. As I passed through the many security checkpoints, I do not remember feeling any sense of trepidation. I had run many women’s groups, and imagined that my session with these Jewish women prisoners would be much the same. I was wrong.

As we began discussing the Akeidah, the renowned Torah portion that Cantor Bernard just chanted, I gained entrée into a world I never knew. The inmates took turns reading the lines of this text in which God called Abraham to take his son Isaac and to offer him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains. They read aloud the narrative: “Abraham had bound Isaac upon the wood, stretched his hand and took the knife to slay his son.”

And then came the discussion. These women saw something in this text that I had never seen. “Abraham’s near crime,” they suggested, “was one of passion.” Just as Abraham was driven to almost kill his son for the love of God, these women were driven to kill for the love of another human being. They were serving life sentences, they explained, for similar crimes of passion, though their crimes were for personal and political motives, rather than theological.

The novelty of Judaism, in its transition from paganism, is that God stopped Abraham’s act of passionate obedience. In serving God, we are not required to sacrifice the life of any child nor of any human being. In Temple times, we brought animals, and today we bring prayers, as a suitable substitute.

Sadly, killing in the name of God did not cease with the creation of Judaism. From last Rosh Hashanah to this day, we have seen countless and senseless killings in the name of God. The senselessness of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac and the senselessness of the murders of the women who I visited in jail, mirror the senselessness of the terrorists who, in recent times, have strapped explosives to their bodies and devastated innocent lives.

This past summer we were sickened as Hezbollah, “the party of God” they call themselves, showered thousands of rockets across Israel’s Lebanese border bringing death and terror to our brothers and sisters in Israel. In Iraq this past year, we witnessed Sunnis killing Shiites and Shiites killing Sunnis – all in the Divine name. In recent years, we have seen, in continents far and wide religion used, in some cases as partial and other cases as complete justification for violence -- in Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and beyond. Since the year 2000, forty four wars have been waged in the name of God¹.

Holocaust survivor and author, Elie Wiesel, was once on a panel with a group of interfaith scholars when they were asked to name the unhappiest character in the Bible. Some said Job, because of the trials he endured. Some said Moses, because he was denied entry into the Promised Land. One Christian scholar, suggested Mary, from the New Testament, who was forced to watch her son Jesus suffer. The best answer, Wiesel, suggested was God, “because of the sorrow caused by people fighting, killing, and abusing each other in God’s name.”

As we sit here today before God, as Parent and Judge, we plead our case. “This past summer,” we explain, “Our brothers and sisters in Israel who engaged in battle did not kill in the name of God, but rather they were forced to kill in the name of self-defense.”

Even so, we acknowledge the deep pain of our victims’ loved ones and our hearts weigh heavy. The contrition we feel this day is reflected in the comment once made by Golda Meir, “We will one day be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we will never forgive them for forcing us to kill theirs.”

In the past year, religious extremists have not only devastated cities across the globe and pushed our homeland of Israel into violence, they have desecrated even the name of their own faith. In an effort to defend Islam, Madeline Albright appropriately notes, “Just as there is nothing Christian about the violent bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan, there is nothing Islamic about terrorism. One billion three hundred million people can hardly be characterized the by violence of a tiny fraction. The Quran is explicit that the taking of a single innocent life is prohibited, even equating it with the killing of all humanity.”

Those who claim to wage holy wars have even damaged the image of Judaism. While fortunately, Jews killing in the name of God is a rarity, Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein, have cast a somber shadow on our history. “You know rabbi,” a Jewish parent recently said to me, “We have chosen no formal faith at all for our children, for we believe that religion does more harm than good.”

To these parents and others like them, we can respond with Rabbi Harold Kushner’s words, “Judaism is not the problem, it is the answer.”

A great religious leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, whose words continue to illuminate the world, taught that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Judaism is that light and that love by which we can banish the darkness and the hatred of our world.

Yes, too many evenings during this past year, we have gone to sleep to the spiritual darkness of the world – of religion being abused and used as a tool to create hatred and conflict. But we can wake up to light by actively living our faith and loudly proclaiming its ethics and values to the world. We can brighten this world by bringing the wisdom of Judaism into our daily actions and personal lives, and we can give religion the name and stage it deserves by doing collective acts that pursue justice as a congregation.

The first Lubavitcher rebbe, Shneur Zalman taught, “When you doubt the existence of God. When you find the universe dark and cold and empty of meaning, go and heal the sick, go and feed the hungry, go and lift the fallen, and you will feel in your own hands the presence of God, the reality of God and the meaning of existence.”

One of our Temple Beth El congregants is serving in Iraq. He has no Jewish community with whom to share his faith and life is often hard for him. I was stunned when in response to a recent congregational email appealing for backpacks for needy kids, he had a check sent from his bank so that he could participate. If this congregant can engage in community acts of goodness from across the globe, and from the darkest corner of our world help to create light, then so can we.

Let us counter each painful piece of news we hear with a mitzvah, with a positive religious act – by bringing food to Jewish Family services, sending tzedakah to our Angel Fund or Temple’s Discretionary Fund to aid a family in desperate financial need, honoring the elderly with a visit or a call, inviting guests into our homes, or coming to our sanctuary to share our prayers.

We can bring light to our own lives with individual religious acts, and we can restore faith in religion with our collective acts as a community.

A rabbinic school classmate, Shifra Penzias, told the following story of her great aunt Sussie on a snowy evening in Munich, Germany. The older woman was riding a city bus home from work, when SS storm troopers suddenly stopped the coach and began examining the identification papers of the passengers. Most were annoyed, but a few were terrified. Jews were being told to leave the bus and get into a truck around the corner.

My colleague’s great aunt watched from her seat in the rear as the soldiers systematically worked their way down the aisle. She began to tremble, tears streaming down her face. When the man next to her politely asked why, she explained: “I don’t have the papers you have. I am a Jew. They are going to take me.”

The man exploded with disgust. He began to curse and scream at her, “You worthless imbecile,” he roared. “I can’t stand being near you!”

The SS men asked what all the yelling was about.

“Damn her,” the man shouted angrily. “My wife has forgotten her papers again! I am so fed up. She always does this!”

The solders laughed and moved on. Great Aunt Sussie never saw the man again. She never even knew his name.

This anonymous soul, was one of what Christian scholars estimate were between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand Christian rescuers, who practiced their faith, and who risked their lives to defend life. “How ironic it is,” Rabbi Harold Schulweis notes, “That our children and we ourselves know the names of Klaus Barbie, Goebbels, Goering, Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler but not the names of those who risked their lives to hide and protect the eight members of the Frank family for over two years.” Stories of righteous religious acts do not make the headlines, do not sell the evening news, and apparently, do not even store well in our memories. But they exist and they abound.

Like that anonymous man on that Munich bus, we need to stand up and speak out as a community. As the largest synagogue in the Carolinas, we need to be a powerful and positive voice for Judaism, for religion and for change in this city and state.

The outpouring last year in response to the tragedy of Hurricaine Katrina and our adoption of twelve families was a solid beginning. One of the displaced families wrote the following in gratitude: “Out of such tragedy and human suffering was born a blessing for us… that blessing was coming here to Charlotte and meeting the members of Beth El. Never have I seen such kindness, generosity and love for mankind. Only family could have cared for us the way you did.”

Our Temple’s ongoing dialogue creating bridges of understanding with those of others faiths, our joining together with other faith communities in Charlotte to provide housing to the homeless through Room in the Inn, and our aid to the impoverished through Crisis Assistance Ministry are all wonderful efforts, but we need to do even more than to temporarily lift those who have fallen, we need to speak out bravely and boldly to create a just society. We need to be attentive citizens and critical thinkers – unafraid to question our leaders when they have strayed from our ideals.
 
Our Social Justice and Action Committee invites you to join with them on Yom Kippur afternoon: to study what it means to act with justice and to create a plan for having a greater voice for Beth El’s advocacy in the coming year and years.

I recently heard the story of a congregant who was attending Shabbat services with his five year old son. The little boy was waiting for services, and looking around apparently agitated remarked, “Where is God? Will He come later?”

The father, uncertain of how to answer the question, did what my own husband, Chip, might do, he told the boy to go ask his mother.

This past year, as adults, we may have found ourselves asking those same questions, “Where is God? When will God come?”

And this mother would say, “Do not wait for God to come. If you help the needy, if you care for the stranger, if speak out against discrimination, hatred and injustice wherever you see it, in whatever its garb, if you pray with sincerity, not only for yourself, but for our world, if you reach out and care, you will look up and find that God is already here.”

We can create a world in which people reach out across the lines of faith not with guns but with olive branches reflecting peace.

In the Midrash, the legends surrounding the binding of Isaac, an angel misinforms Sarah that she has lost her son. “Sarah, have you not heard what happened in the world?” the angel Sammael asked. “Your old husband took the youth, Isaac, and offered him as a burnt offering. The youth cried but he could not be saved.”

Immediately Sarah began to weep. She let out three cries corresponding to the three the tekiot, the sustained notes of the shofar, and three howls corresponding to the three teruot, the broken notes or alarms of the shofar. And her soul fled and she died.

In just a moment one hundred such blasts of the shofar will shatter the serenity of this day. The Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Bible, surprisingly calls this day of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Yevava, the day of crying. This year, we can hear in the shofar’s blasts the crying of parents who have lost their children to war… the sorrow filled weeping of Israeli parents, the mournful moans of Palestinians parents, the despairing cries of Iraqi and Lebanese parents, and the grief stricken wails of parents of American soldiers.

And I imagine God, our ultimate parent, cries alongside us, saying “What has happened to the world I created? What has happened to humanity?”

When creating the world, God’s first words were, “Let there be light.” Yet during this past year, terrorists have eclipsed that light. The shofar now calls to us to wake up from our sleep, to examine our deeds, to remember our creator. In this New Year of 5767, may we wake up each morning to righteous acts, as individuals and as a congregation, and thereby elevate God’s name and bring God’s light into our world.

Amen.
 

¹ Research: Wars Fought in the Name of God by Lesley Cohen Ringley.pdf