EREV YOM KIPPUR 5776
SOUTH CAROLINA, SAME SEX MARRIAGE, AND PROVIDENCE
I am very excited about our Gan Avraham preschool this year. Long time
teachers Jill Rosenthal and Marta Moline are the new co directors, and they bring
a wealth of experience, enthusiasm, and energy to the job. They have also hired
three new preschool teachers. I have more to say about later, as it is not their
lessons we will be focusing on today, but we will return to them in a few minutes.
For now, continuing with the theme of learning from all people, and even
all things, based on the Pirke Avot quotation, “who is wise, the one who learns
from all people,” today we will look back into the past to learn from the Temple
Beth Abraham clergy in the sixties—Rabbi Harold Shulweis and Cantor Simon
Cohen. In order to be able to learn from them we are going to need a time
machine, and we are going to play one of my favorite imaginary games. I often
find myself daydreaming about getting into a time machine and going back to a
certain time and place to tell the people what’s going to happen in the future to
see how they react. In this case, we are going to wind up right back here, on this
bima at Temple Beth Abraham, but the year is 1967, nearly 50 years ago.
I do realize that time travel isn’t actually possible. My knowledge of time
travel is much more in the realm of Science Fiction than Science—the Tardis
phone booth in Dr. Who and the Delorean in the Back to the Future movies. But,
in about a week and a half we will have an award winning physicist, Dr. Marvin
Cohen, who is a member of our congregation, speak to us about religion, science,
and whether time travel is even theoretically possible. Actually, I’m fairly certain
he won’t be speaking about time travel at all, but his work as a physicist is really
quite impressive and I am so honored that he will be sharing his thoughts with us
on a Shabbat that I thought I should somehow throw it in today’s sermon. I really
hope to see many of you on Saturday, October 3.
In a certain way, though, you actually do hold your own time machine in
your hand—the High Holiday Machzor. Machzor is a word that means return in
the sense of the Circle of Life. Each year, we cycle back on the High Holidays and
think about where we have been and where we are going. It is filled with different
rabbinic sages talking to one another across the centuries. You have martyrs like
Rabbi Akiva of the 1st Century in Israel linked to Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol of 11th
Century Spain who wrote Ki Hineh kachomer interfacing with the common folk of
the 9th Century who may or may not have written Kol Nidre (the origin of that one
has a range of nearly 500 years, scholars placing its origin somewhere between
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600 and 1050 CE, but there are those who think it is based on something even
older). In any case, the Machzor is a compilation of different sages and ages,
scholars and common people from different centuries and different places. And
we bring ourselves to this mishmash when we too, are both different and the
same each year. So, in a sense, the entire High Holiday experience is a version of
time travel, with the Machzor as our time machine.
But now we are going to get back into our more conventional imaginary
time machine, and we land back in 1967, on Yom Kippur, right here at Temple
Beth Abraham Oakland, California. In American history, 1967 was the year of the
“long hot summer,” a series of over 150 race riots that swept across the nation.
The tension was palpable all over the country, and certainly right here in Oakland.
Rabbi Schulweis was inspired to redouble his outreach efforts to the African
American community. He had already given a famous sermon on a previous High
Holidays, whereby he castigated members of our own community for being
“slumlords.” If you believe you are a moral person, he admonished, you should
get out of the business. Members of the congregation walked out in the middle of
the sermon. In 1967 he was meeting with not only African American Church
leaders, but leaders of the Black Panthers. He believed we were making very real
progress, and that this sort of racism would disappear in a generation. So he
would be both deeply saddened and shocked to learn that nearly 50 years later, a
group of people at their predominantly Black Church in Charleston, South Carolina
would be shot to death by a man who considers himself a religious Christian,
while studying the Bible. It would also sadden and surprise him to learn that
African Americans represent over 40% of the U.S. prison population, that one in
three black men can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives, and
that many fear for their very lives if they happen to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time. The stories of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Walter Scott, all of
which occurred this year and are just the ones that were publicized, are all too
believable to us. But they would be completely shocking to the forward looking
Rabbi Schulweis of fifty years ago. He would be hard pressed to believe that
African Americans would continue to be just like the proverbial scapegoat we will
read about in the Torah tomorrow morning on Yom Kippur. The fact that Oakland
would become ground zero for protests, all too many turning to violence, might
be the one thing that would not be so surprising to the young Rabbi Schulweis.
“So what do we do about it,” he might ask? What can we do to change the
status quo. The only answer I can give him at that moment is for him to follow his
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own future advice. He would write a sermon many years later at Valley Beth
Shalom in Encino, undated, where he would say:
We cannot always control the streets, but in our homes and in our table talk our
children must know where our hearts are. Even if our hands are bound, even if we don't
know exactly what to do, we can teach them that no racist remark will go unanswered,
and no denigration of another people will go unchallenged. It is important for our
children to know that we Jews don't act that way; that we Jews don't talk that way.
I have to tell you that, amidst all this mess this year, we experienced a great
moment of hope, and I am so proud of this congregation for the small part we
played in it. Not really being able to imagine what this is like for the African
American community, after the South Carolina shootings, I asked us to express
our sympathy to the local AME Church here in Oakland. Over 75 of you wrote
letters of sympathy to Pastor Harold Mayberry of First AME Church on Telegraph
Avenue in Oakland. I was so proud and sad when my son Jonah and I walked into
the Church and gave them to the staff there. Reverend Mayberry was moved
enough to share the letters with his congregation, and partly as a result of that
gesture, we are hoping to set up a pulpit exchange later in the year, much like we
did with the Catholic Diocese last year. He is also convening an interfaith clergy
discussion on racism, which I will be participating in, and through the remains of
the Davis Hunger Fund, we will be sponsoring several of the church’s communal
Wednesday night meals that their church serves to the homeless in their
neighborhood. Out of hatred can come love.
Speaking of love, the second thing I want to tell Rabbi Schulweis and Cantor
Cohen is that in 2015, the Supreme Court will rule that all same sex couples have
a constitutional right to marry. And Rabbi Schulweis, even as progressive as he
always was, will not even be able to conceive of this as a possibility. After all, it’s
Yom Kippur, and in the afternoon of Yom Kippur, we read Leviticus 18, where it
lists homosexual acts between men to be a toevah, an abomination on par with
incest and bestiality. The tolerance was there for Schulweis, but it was all
theoretical. This is what he wrote in 1996.
Many years ago, the issue of homosexuality was for me a matter of theoretical interest.
Intellectually, I knew there were homosexuals, but personally I knew none. These last
years they have lost their anonymity. Blood and flesh persons come into my study,
visible and audible with faces, eyes, lips who have come to see me.
He told the story of one of those seminal moments of change. A woman entered
his office with a large Bible in her hand, sat down in a chair across his desk, and
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pointed to the passage in Leviticus 18, the passage of Torah we will read from
tomorrow afternoon. She read the passage aloud, and then went on to tell the rabbi
about how her son had been taunted and teased all his life, had been through what
they called “reparative” therapy, lived a tortured life, and eventually, took his own life.
She looked Rabbi Schulweis in the eye and said: “You knew my son, Rabbi. Was he an
abomination?” Schulweis writes:
What did she want from me—exoneration, consolation? Neither. She wanted my hineni
response to her cry. She wanted a rejection of the condemnatory mandate in Leviticus.
She left the room sobbing and me in confusion. I was caught between the voice of an
anguished mother and the verse of a sacred book. Both voices had claims on me. To
whose voice should I respond?
Shortly thereafter, he responded to the love and the voice of the anguished
mother—one of the rare times where he, and I, had to simply compartmentalize
the sacred text.
But to tell the 1960’s Schulweis that not only would lbgtq folks be entitled
to marriage under the law, but that Conservative rabbis would be doing same sex
ceremonies for many years preceding the U.S. Supreme Court decision would be
so “out of sight,” to use the slang of the time, that he couldn’t even see it with
binoculars. It was simply inconceivable, even to one of the most progressive
rabbis in the country. Yet here we are, proudly. We still read Leviticus 18 on Yom
Kippur afternoon, but we are able to read this challenging text tempered with
new ways of understanding and a more open heart.
And as for Cantor Simon Cohen, we are going to tell him what will become
true about twenty years after our time machine meeting there in 1967. Cantor
Cohen, by the way, was a real people person. While Schulweis was incredible on
the bima, Cantor Cohen excelled off the bima, in addition to having a beautiful
voice. He made deep connections with people of all ages, and both children and
parents loved the man. In any case, we are going to tell him that even as he gets
older, he is going to conceive a child in his sixties. It will be part of a second
marriage.
Well, we are going to get back in our time machine now and arrive back in
the present day. It was nice to spend a little time with Rabbi Schulweis and Cantor
Cohen. For our Jewish community to still be deeply involved in issues of civil
rights, for both African Americans and those of all sexual orientations, is part of
our prophetic religious imperative. No less important is the Divine idea that there
is no such thing as coincidence, that God somehow has a hand in everything.
Remember that I said that three new preschool teachers started this
month? One of the hires is an African American woman. She is a deeply religious
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Christian who is also inspired by Judaism. Another is a man, and at one time,
people thought that the only men who would become preschool teachers had to
be gay. This teacher happens to be straight, but with the Supreme Court Decision
in Obergefell vs. Hodges, it truly doesn’t matter. As for the last of the hires, well,
there’s a story there too. Cantor Simon Cohen got remarried, but tragically, he
had a heart attack while his second wife was pregnant, and he did not live to see
the child be born or grow up. But the child was born, and they named her Simone,
after her father Cantor Simon Cohen. And Simone Cohen is the third of the new
teachers in the preschool.