Rabbi Susan Grossman: September 2007 Archives

Wednesday night begins the holiday of Sukkot, a time when Jews around the world move temporarily out of our comfortable homes and eat, and sometimes also sleep, in sukkot, fragile structures with three to four walls and a roof that lets in the wind and rain.

Sukkot was originally a harvest holiday, the original thanksgiving. It reminded our ancestors of their vulnerability to the vagrancies of the weather, and their concurrent dependency upon God.

Today we are generally insulated from the agricultural year and the vagrancies of weather by our home thermostats, global agribusiness, and car air conditioning. Even the effects of global warming do little to impact our daily lives, except perhaps to leave our lawns brown due to local water restrictions. We are unaware of the dangers of climate change, that is unless we live in New Orleans, the Midwest where floods have ravaged communities, or the West where forest fires have raged for the last few summers.

Why do we end our Yom Kippur services with the prayer: “Next year in Jerusalem?” Why not: “This year in Jerusalem?”

Last year when we ended our holiday services, many in my congregation meant just that: this coming year in Jerusalem. We were looking forward to a congregational mission to Israel that would bring us to the city of our prayers.

However, I think there is a lot more here than a travel advertisement for the Holy Land.

I think our Sages who crafted the Yom Kippur liturgy in the future tense--speaking of next year rather than this year--knew that Jerusalem is not only a very real city but also a prayer and a dream.

The name Jerusalem literally means City of Peace or ir shalem in Hebrew.

Throughout the centuries, Jerusalem has rarely lived up to that name. Destroyed by the Babylonians and Romans, fought over by the Crusaders and Muslims, and the fault line between Israelis and Palestinians. Jerusalem may not currently be seething with violence, but it is roiling with tension. Jerusalem is far from being a city of peace, at least right now.

And perhaps that is the point of the prayer--that if not this year, perhaps next year, or the year after, Jerusalem can live up to its name and be a city of peace. Despite our fears over terrorism and concerns over finding a reasonable partner among the Palestinians to broker a secure and lasting peace, we can never give up the hope that someday peace will be possible, not only for us and all of Israel, but for our neighbors as well.

Someone once told me that the number of words a culture has for a particular idea or phenomena reflects its importance to that culture. The Yupik Eskimos are reported to have 24 words for snow, which makes sense since much of their lives hang on understanding and accurately adapting to the snow conditions around them.

If 24 words for snow is one yardstick of serious importance, then Judaism’s lexicon for “sin” is relatively paltry: averah (crossing over the line of the straight and narrow path), het (the missing the mark), ahvon (wrong doing), and peshe (negligence).

This is not a foolproof system, of course. Christianity has built its entire theology around sin and yet only has one word for sin (its modifiers, like "mortal" and "original" notwithstanding).

I agree with Rabbi Waxman that we must be proactive in working towards strengthening the relationships between our various Jewish movements to facilitate closer cooperation and deeper respect within the Jewish community here and in Israel. However, I also agree with Rabbi Stern that we need to more actively cultivate a dialogue with the Muslim community.

In addition to the Children of Abraham, another important project is Roads to You, a foundation of tolerance founded by the young Jordanian pianist, Zade Dirani. Dirani has brought together Muslims, American and European Christians, and Israeli and American Jews to perform together and to work together on tolerance issues through their music. Their concert at my synagogue helped spark other Muslim –Jewish cooperative projects and dialogues.