Riding on a Cloud (1957)

/ Riding on a Cloud (1957)

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February 16, 1957

Riding on a Cloud (1957)

Ki Tissa Israel & the Middle East

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Synagogue Sermon

Lift Your Head - editor's title (1958)

Our Torah Reading this morning begins by telling us of a very ordinary, prosaic affair in the life of the nation of Israel some 3500 years ago. Moses is commanded to take the census, to count the people. And one may wonder: why does such a common, unspectacular event have to be mentioned in our Torah? Our Torah is not a textbook of political science, it is not a tract on the workings of government, and it is not a book on civics. Why, then, mention a census, even if it is Moses who is in charge?Perhaps one answer may be found in the sort of language the Torah uses to describe G-d’s command to Moses to muster his people. He says, and these are the opening words of the Sidra, ki sissa es rosh Bnei Yisrael – when you will count the Children of Israel. That is what it means. However, literally speaking, the words actually mean, when translated from the Hebrew idiom: when you will lift the head of the Children of Israel. That is the way the Bible uses the Hebrew expression for counting – ki sissa es rosh Bnei Yisrael, “when you lift the head of the Children of Israel.” And in the use of this particular idiom, we have a great lesson, one which changes an ordinary procedure of census into a great challenge to today’s Jews, and particularly to today’s Jewish youth.We are growing up in a strange world. It talks a lot about freedom – and yet does not allow us the freedom to choose our own way of life, but tries to force us to accept what most people do. It talks about the individual – and forces him to follow the majority standards, whether right or wrong. It tells us to think creatively, but punishes us if we dare to think of something we are not expected to think about. There is a word for it – conformity. If we conform then, we will all go to certain colleges, wear crew-cuts and dark sport coats, vote liberal, become agnostic the first three years of college, and in the fourth consent to attend an occasional late Friday Service. We will marry, perhaps live in a suburb, an…

Synagogue Sermon

Sleeping Gods (1961)

When, as recorded in today’s dramatic Haftorah, the prophet Elijah ascended Mount Carmel in what today is the city of Haifa, he faced the hundreds of priests of the Baal and the crowds of the people of Israel, and flung a challenge at the dissident and confused masses to make up their minds and decide where their loyalties lay. “How long halt ye between two opinions?” – Why are you as indecisive as a small bird hopping from one branch to another, unable to make up its mind on which branch it wishes to perch? “If the Lord be G-d, follow Him; but if the Baal, follow him.” You can’t have it both ways. You can’t escape the necessity for choosing, painful though it be. Indeed, Elijah speaks to all men of all times when he presses us to make a choice between G-d and the Baals of all ages. Especially interesting in his historic challenge is the piquant description of idolatry when he presents the alternatives from which the choice is to be made. His searing sarcasm contains a nugget of wisdom about idolatry both ancient and modern which is most important for us. “And it came to pass at noon” – at a time when all a man’s actions are open and revealed and he can hide nothing –” that Elijah mocked them and said ‘Cry aloud, for is he not a god? – either he is musing, or he has gone aside, or he is in a journey’ – and most important – ‘or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awakened.’” The nature of idolatry, Elijah declares in the measured accents of mockery, is that of sleep. When you most need him, he is most fast asleep. I would add that the difference between a man asleep and the sleeping god is this: A sleeping man looks lifeless but he is alive; a sleeping god looks alive, but is very much dead. The idol appears real enough: it has eyes, ears, nose, hands, but as King David said, “They have mouths but they speak not, they have eyes but they see not, they have ears but they hear not.” What Elijah called the sleeping god refers not only to the idolatries of the ancient …

Synagogue Sermon

Stubbornness (1959)

It was R. Simchah Zissel, one of the giants of the Lithuanian Mussar movement, who pointed out an unusual aspect of G-d’s reaction to the worship of the Golden Calf by the Israelites. The divine wrath was kindled at the people of Israel not for idolatry, not for faithlessness, but because hinei am keshei oref hu, because it is a stiff-necked people. Evidently stubbornness is, in G-d’s scheme, more deserving of anger than idolatry. The Torah regards an obstinate character as more evil than a pagan soul. The calamities that followed the Golden Calf were due more to bad character than bad technology.Certainly this is a valid point. The man with the stubborn streak has a rigid will. His mind is frozen, and so he cannot learn. His soul suffers from a rigor mortis which prevents him from communing with the Source of all life. Brazenness, ignorance, a closed mind and a dead spirit – these are the prices of obstinacy and the casualties of stubbornness. A stubborn people will persist in its evil ways and never learn the ways of G-d. A stiff-necked people cannot raise its head above the Golden Calf.And yet the matter cannot be dismissed so simply. A blanket condemnation of stubbornness does not fit in with the complicated facts of today’s Sidra. For while, on the one hand, G-d points to stubbornness as the root of the sin of idolatry, and while he blames obstinacy for His withdrawal from Israel – ki lo e’eleh be-kirbecha ki am keshei oref ata, I will not go up amongst you because you are a stiff-necked people – yet, on other hand, it is this very characteristic that Moses presents as a reason why G-d should rejoin the Camp of Israel! In his second prayer of intercession, Moses says, yelech na ha’Shem be’kirbeinu ki am keshei oref hu! Let G-d go with us because we are stiff-necked people! The very reason G-d gave for abandoning Israel is the one Moses presents for His accepting them! If stubbornness is an unconditional evil, an absolute sin, then how can Moses point to Jewish…