Rabbi Joshua Waxman: November 2007 Archives

I took part in a phone conference earlier this week with Gil Hoffman, the chief political correspondent for the Jerusalem Post to hear his reflections on the Annapolis conference--a conference for which expectations were so low that everyone is coming away pleasantly surprised by the outside chance something may actually come of it. Gil began his remarks by observing that every 30 years, in November, something extremely significant for Israel’s future takes place. In November 1917, it was the Balfour Declaration, stating the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In November 1947, it was the United Nation’s vote to partition the territory of the Palestinian Mandate, effectively creating the State of Israel. In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Jerusalem, laying the groundwork for the Camp David Accords and the possibility for Israel to make peace with her neighbors.

Who knows, Gil said--perhaps the Annapolis Conference of November 2007 will go down as the turning point that led to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians?

I appreciate Rabbi Grossman’s overview of Jewish texts pertaining to the mandate to heal. I would add Chapter 25 of Leviticus which, while not directly relating to health, speaks to the question of obligations to those in need that are borne on the individual level versus obligations that are born collectively--at the societal level. Chapter 25 of Leviticus speaks of the yovel or Jubilee year, which is the 50th year when all land that had switched hands for whatever reason in the previous 49 years reverted back to its original owner. Debts were forgiven and slaves were freed--in essence, whatever inequities had developed over the prior 49 years were wiped clean. By acknowledging God’s power rather than worshiping our own, yovel functioned as a check on society--a built-in mechanism to ensure we would not end up with haves and have-nots, and a recognition that sometimes wealth would need to be redistributed in order to make this happen.

Today many schools and government offices are closed in observance of Veterans Day, a time to honor and thank those who have so bravely served their country. Veterans Day is always a solemn occasion–and never more so than when members of our armed forces are fighting and dying abroad.

At latest count, 3,858 Americans have been killed since the beginning of our invasion, to say nothing of nearly 30,000 more confirmed wounded (to say nothing at all of the estimated 80,000 Iraqi civilians killed since we went in – including the latest instance yesterday of a private security firm opening fire with impunity on an unarmed Iraqi).

It’s interesting even to be raising the subject of Jewish poverty: So much of the world reflexively associates Jews with wealth, and in some cases great wealth, the sort that leads to ugly displays of conspicuous consumption and one-upmanship at lavish Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties. To some, Jewish poverty may seem like an oxymoron, or even a joke. And yet, as any community leader can tell you, it is a real a very serious phenomenon. Just a couple of weeks ago, my six-year-old son and I spent the morning loading boxes of food through a wonderful local program called the Jewish Relief Agency and then delivering them to Jewish seniors in the area who depend on these deliveries to help them have enough to eat over the coming month. That morning, volunteers delivered nearly 2,200 boxes to needy Jewish families, and that’s just in one small corner of Philadelphia.

Many of the families to whom we delivered are immigrants from the former Soviet Union, where hundreds of thousands of needy Jews still live. But poor Jews can be found everywhere, in this country and abroad. The problem is that these Jews are often out of sight--those assumptions about Jewish wealth create a stigma that keeps poor Jews off the radar and even allows us to fail to see them before our eyes.

I found Rabbi Grossman’s stories of the successes in her synagogue’s religious school inspiring, even as I found the criteria she used to evaluate success perplexing. Our synagogue’s religious school–a thriving and engaging school run by a dynamic education director–has just finished an envisioning process that invited first the education committee and then congregants (both with children in our religious school and without) to explore what they most want their children to learn in our school. Certainly our committee members and congregants listed many of the same goals evident in Rabbi Grossman’s post: comfort with Hebrew and prayers, knowledge of the holidays and Jewish history, connection with Israel, and other worthy curricular goals. But what was most striking to the professionals and lay-leaders who carried out this envisioning process were the more elusive qualities that topped the list: a feeling of connection with and belonging to the synagogue community, a strong and proud Jewish identity, a sense of ethics and tikkun olam (social justice), a love of Judaism and a commitment to engaging the world with their Jewish values.