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April 29, 1971

Israel Independence Day (1971)

Metzora Yom Ha'atzmaut & Yom Yerushalayim Israel & the Middle East
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Israel Independence Day (1955)

I. Sidra opens with Jews concerning childbirth. אשה כי תזריע וילדה זכר וטמאה שבעת ימים... וביום השמיני ימולו בשר ערלתו. Seven days of uncleanliness, of separation, + then circumcision. II. Our Rabbis most profound comment in reason for טומאה and relation of mother's 7-day uncleanliness to child's 8-day ברית → (נדה ל"א ב') – R. Simon bar Yochai – during those 7 days mother is still in state of anxiety that remains with her from before + during _______ birth-giving. It takes 7 days to recover not only from physical experience, but from the mental
Yom Ha'atzmaut & Yom Yerushalayim

Synagogue Sermon

God, Man and State (1966)

The conjunction of the two Sidrot we read today, Tazria and Metzora, is remarkable. The first speaks of birth, the second of a kind of death: metzora harei hu ke’met, a leper is considered as partially dead. Tazria describes the joyous acceptance into the fold of a new Jew by means of berit milah, circumcision, while Metzora tells of the expulsion of the leper from the community. Yet, these two portions are read on the same Shabbat with no interruption between them. The tension between these two opposites, this dialectic between birth and death, between pleasure and plague, between rejoicing and rejecting, speaks to us about the human condition as such and the existence of the Jew specifically. Even more, this tension contains fundamental teachings of Judaism that are relevant to the problems of the State of Israel, whose 18th birthday we shall be celebrating this Monday. After delineating the laws of childbirth, the Torah in the first Sidra gives us the law of circumcision. The Midrash Tanhuma relates a fascinating conversation concerning this Jewish law. We are told that Turnus Rufus, a particularly vicious  Roman commander during the Hadrianic persecutions in Palestine, spoke to R. Akiva, the revered leader of our people. He asked R. Akiva: ezeh mehem na’im, which is more beautiful: the work of God or the work of man? R. Akiva answered: the work of man. Turnus Rufus was visibly disturbed by the answer. He continued: Why do you circumcise your children? R. Akiva said: my first reply serves as an answer to this question as well. Whereupon R. Akiva brought before the Roman commander shibolim and gluskaot, stalks of wheat and loaves of good white bread. He said to the Roman: behold, these are the works of God, and these are the works of man. Are not the works of man more beautiful and useful? Said the Roman to R. Akiva: but if God wants people to be circumcised why are they not born circumcised? R. Akiva replied: God gave the mitzvot to Israel le’tzaref ba-hen, to t…
Metzora Yom Ha'atzmaut & Yom Yerushalayim

Synagogue Sermon

Wishing the World a Speedy Recovery (1974)

I had a dream last night: I was leafing through the New York Times in the late 1900s, when my eyes chanced upon the following item in the obituary column: WORLD, THIS. Passed away yesterday morning, after long illness. Death came quietly instead of by nuclear explosion. No survivors, no mourners. Services will be conducted in Heaven by a relieved Creator. It requires no dream, no nightmare, but a hard-headed and analytic realism to look at the world and conclude that it is sick and moribund, a candidate for the obituary columns of the cosmos. Here are some quick examples of dreadful symptoms: the USSR, a superpower of hundreds of millions of people, is afraid to let a hundred thousand Jews out, and decides to risk its economic and technological future by cracking down on a handful of ideological dissenters. African nations self-righteously condemn white countries as imperialists and colonialists, and proceed to destroy neighboring (black) tribes with genocidal relish. The United States is mortally wounded by Watergate. Its normal, healthy sexual inhibitions have withered up and vanished. Its clergymen having already excused every sexual deviancy as acceptable in the name of “love,” its psychiatrists now declare that homosexuality is no longer an illness – as if proclamation can change the nature of the perversity. The whole country is being “liberated” to death.Israel is undergoing an erosion of its government and experiencing major political malaise. The first Jewish Commonwealth in over two thousand years, brought into being by the teachings, traditions, and aspirations of a people nourished for millennia by Judaism, feigns ignorance of “who is a Jew.” Religious Jews are torn apart by internal dissension. The Neturei Karta delivers itself of an anti-Zionist diatribe not in a Jewish journal, but on the pages of the New York Times – on the weekend of Yom Ha’atzmaut.So the world is indeed sick, and we must wish it a speedy recovery. It is desperately in need of a re…
Metzora Yom Ha'atzmaut & Yom Yerushalayim