Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

When I was ordained as a rabbi this past April, there were a lot of requirements. I don’t mean classes or comprehensive exams or a master’s thesis – I knew about all of those going in, and I had knocked them off one by one. No, instead I and my fellow ordinees contended with a series of polite emails from AJR administration asking for details: how did we want our names spelled and pronounced at the ordination ceremony? Who was on our list of invitees, and were they attending in person or virtually? Who had we asked to serve on our beit din? What measurements could we provide for our gowns? Could we send a headshot? And, of course, had we written our 400-word ordination bio and supplied a pasuk in Hebrew and English to go with it?

I didn't read all the emails as carefully as I should have, so I didn't realize we had to have a pasuk until early January, the day before the bios were due. I looked back at last year’s ordination journal: sure enough, each bio sketch was preceded by a verse, usually from Torah or Tanakh, although there were a few entries from Pirkei Avot. Now, the kids at Givah can tell you that I am not very good at deciding on my favorite color or my favorite food, so deciding on my favorite pasuk was not easy. Many of the verses I loved only made sense in context, or if I could explain the accompanying midrash, and I definitely didn’t want to pick the same verse as anyone else, so “hear O Israel” was right out. At the same time, I wanted to pick a verse that would be a meaningful way to describe my future rabbinate. It was difficult, but eventually I settled on a verse that appears in this week’s Torah portion, Deuteronomy 5:3:

לֹ֣א אֶת־אֲבֹתֵ֔ינוּ כָּרַ֥ת ה’ אֶת־הַבְּרִ֣ית הַזֹּ֑את כִּ֣י אִתָּ֔נוּ אֲנַ֨חְנוּ אֵ֥לֶּה פֹ֛ה הַיּ֖וֹם כֻּלָּ֥נוּ חַיִּֽים׃

And here’s how I translated it: “It was not with our ancestors that the Eternal made this covenant, but with all of us here today, every living one of us.”

It’s not even this verse that I love, but this idea. You’ve probably heard it before at the Passover Seder, when we read about all of us being redeemed from Egypt, or at Shavuot, when we talk about all of us standing together at Sinai. And it appears several other times in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy, of course, this sentiment has a very practical purpose: Moses is speaking to a generation of Israelite men born later than the group who originally escaped Egypt and stood at Sinai. They never saw the plagues descend on the Egyptians, the Red Sea part, or the mountain of God shake and smoke; if they remember anything, it is probably the various forms of divine punishment God metes out to sinful Israelites in the wilderness. Moses needs to convince this new generation that the covenant their parents made was hereditary, that they are just as special to God as the generation that God personally did miracles for and spoke with face to face. The sixteenth-century Italian Rabbi Ovadyah Sforno suggests that perhaps it was important to Moses and to God to establish the facts of the covenant with a generation that did not experience the original covenant, in order to emphasize that all future generations should consider it equally binding.[1]

Outside its original context, though, I consider this to be one of the most beautiful ideas in all of Judaism. All of us are equally inheritors of the divine covenant – yes, this was a Jewish idea that Paul of Tarsus borrowed for Christianity[2] – and all of us are really and meaningfully part of the founding generation of Judaism. We are grateful for what our ancestors accomplished, and for all their wisdom, but at the same time, we do not have to assume we are further from the Divine. We are undoubtedly luckier than our ancestors in some ways – I’m a big fan of indoor plumbing, not dying in childbirth, and near-instantaneous communication technologies – and we are undoubtedly unluckier in other ways, faced with a warming planet and near-instantaneous transmission of hatred and bigotry. Thinking in more Jewish terms, most of us lack the erudition and the piety of past Torah giants, but I think they would have loved our vibrant Diaspora existing alongside the modern State of Israel, our libraries that extend onto the Internet, our schools and camps that build up Jewish identities for children in a world where being Jewish is always a choice, and our beautiful synagogues where – well, let’s just say they’d have a few surprises about who’s on the bimah. Or, actually, about the bimah itself, this frontmost elevated section being very much a nineteenth-century design. But each generation is part of the covenant, so each generation can re-invent Judaism – and synagogues – for itself.

But weren’t things better in the Good Old Days? Later prophetic and rabbinic texts definitely buy into that idea; it’s no accident that the one line from Eicha we enthusiastically adopted into our liturgy is the one where we implore God to return to us and “renew our days as of old.” Today you can find Jewish nostalgia for almost every era of the past, from the heyday of the Hasmoneans to the heyday of the appetizing store. I am more than capable of romanticizing the Jewish past, and my first career involved connecting the past with the present; I am the last person in the world to tell you to forget about where you came from. And I generally think of myself as a traditionalist. On the other hand, studying Jewish history has made me very practical about one thing: time only goes forward. We live in the era that we live in. And the era that I live in is really the first one in which I could have become a rabbi – so I’m pretty happy about that. The question on my mind is not how we can recreate the Jewish past, but how we can draw on both the past and the present to improve our present – and our future.

On Tisha b’Av, we remember the Jewish past as a succession of tragedies. On Shabbat Nachamu, I think we are entitled to find comfort in both the reality that the Jewish past wasn’t entirely tragic – large parts of it were amazing – and the equally compelling reality that we are in an amazing Jewish present, where we can work towards a hopeful future. Now that we’re moving upwards – le’ila ule’ila – toward the Yamim Noraim, it’s time to think about how we want to change, both as individuals and as a community. We are all here today, every living one of us. God spoke to us at Horeb, in words that we still remember, in words that we read from our Torah just now. And we belong to a covenant – a covenant that is for our benefit. We’re going to pass something incredibly valuable down to the generation that comes after us. I hope you’ll all help me plan for it.