This week there appeared in our local press a letter to the editor of the Springfield Union signed by one of the respected citizens of this city and a former president of this congregation. This letter raises an issue which I believe has significance over and above the matter discussed and is certainly worthy of mention in a sermon. The writer objects to the policy of the paper of carrying advertisements by certain real estate agents offering houses in “highly restricted sections,” which, as any child knows, means “Jews not wanted.” The writer further points out that the better newspapers in this country have dropped such ads because they do not want to be accessories to such bigotry and plead with the editor to pursue a similar policy. The editor’s reply is childish as it is evasive and as naïve as it is downright silly. We cannot dignify such sophomoric arguments with a rebuttal from the pulpit. The writer, however, does deserve congratulations for performing a public service, and the topic requires elaboration and analysis from a democratic and religious point of view.The McCarran mentality, which motivates this kind of “restricted” clause, is nothing new to us Jews. Spain put up such a sign in 1492, Russia is an expert in it with centuries of practice, and England tried it in Palestine until they gave up. Our own great country has succumbed to such disgrace today when, through political connivance and malicious cynicism, it has passed a McCarran Act. I need not bother to convince you of the fact that this is a violation of every great principle of Americanism. Our lawmakers, with this “gezerah,” have clipped the wings of the American Eagle, darkened the bright stars on Old Glory, and effectively extinguished the torch of the Statue of Liberty.So that when we find an ad in the press of our own town carrying this McCarranish clause, we regard it as more than the undemocratic snobbishness of an isolated bigot. It brings to our memory the full blast of the horrors …

The major portion of this morning’s first Sidra deals with mundane, prosaic financial law – the disposition of real estate, the law of Shemitah (the sabbatical law which controlled agricultural development), with loans and debtors and creditors, and with the care and treatment of the poor and the indigent. And then – at the very conclusion – we find an abrupt shift from a Torah for businessman to the great and timeless religious principle which is so often repeated in the Torah and is one of its sacred fundamentals: Lo sa’asu lachem elilim, upesel umateivah lo sakimu lachem. And here the student of Torah wonders: what does real estate and commerce have to do with idolatry? What is the relation of illegitimate business dealings to icons?Our Rabbis were in all probability as vexed by this passage as we are. And that is why they clearly identified the idol here intended by the Torah. They maintained that in this verse the Torah did not have reference to all idols in general, but especially to the one called Markulis, a pagan idol also known as “Mercury” or “Hermes.”And with this interpretation of the Sages, the Biblical passage assumes new dimensions and becomes extremely meaningful to Jews of all times, and for us as well. For Mercury or Markulis was the pagan god of the merchants, the idol of commerce. And what the Torah thus tells us is that if Torah is to be just ceremony, just synagogue procedure, just dignified ritual, and not a way of life which governs our conduct in business and trade as well as in shul – then we are no better than the worshippers of Markulis or Mercury. For if G-d and Torah have no place in the professional life and business life of the Jew, then he is in effect worshipping business and trade as an end in itself, he is a devout communicant in the cult of Mercury, god of commerce.This is the challenge of today’s Sidra: either G-d or Mercury. There is no middle position. Either you are a Jew all day and all week, or you are a pagan even when c…

One of the key verses in this morning’s Sidra reads:  כי ימוך אחיך עמך, ומכר מאחוזתו, ובא גואלו הקרוב אליך וגאל את ממכר אחיו. “If your brother becomes poor, and sells some of his possessions, then shall his nearest relative come and redeem that which his brother has sold.” This verse may be read on three levels. First, there is the obvious, literal meaning of the verse which is halakhic, or legal. If a man is reduced to such poverty that he feels he must sell his ancestral land, then his nearest relative must repurchase it for him, so that the land will remain within the tribe and family, and not be left to strangers.A second level is the moral one. It speaks in general of responsibility to one’s family. It reminds us that no matter how ambivalent the feelings of relatives are to each other, nevertheless, in the long run, one’s closest relatives are one’s best friends. Parents and children, brothers and sisters, may harbor their private resentments, but in the final analysis and in times of crisis it is one’s relatives to whom one turns, and rightly so.Finally, the same verse can be read on a more fundamental, spiritual level. It has wider Jewish implications and it is these upon which I propose to elaborate this morning.This spiritual interpretation was given by one of the giants of the early Hasidic movement, R. Elimelech of Lizensk, the author of "נועם אלימלך". He derives this novel insight by playing on two words in our verse. The Hebrew word מכר he interprets not literally as “and he shall sell,” but in the sense of התמכר, “and he shall become enstranged.” And the word אחוזה refers, he says, not to one’s ancestral or real estate, but rather to one’s ancestral spiritual heritage. Thus, the verse reads as follows: if your brother becomes reduced to such extreme spiritual poverty, that he is enstranged from the heritage of his fathers, he feels distant and cut off from the sacred traditions of Israel, then we, his fellow Jews, who are his closest relatives, must …

Two weeks ago, the last time I spoke from this pulpit, my theme was ecology – a not unimportant issue in contemporary life. However, that was the Shabbat after the Cambodian invasion and the Kent killings. Some days after that Saturday, some of our younger men met with me and expressed criticism – not of my sermon, but of my choice of topic. They voiced their sentiments with admirable delicacy and consummate derekh eretz. The gist of their remarks was, “Rabbi, how could you? We were just waiting for a ringing talk on the great issues of the week.”In a sense, I admit that this particular form of criticism was welcome, since it offset the sometimes disgruntled reactions that come from my occasional foray into public issues. Now, in good faith, I must say that before and during and after that particular sermon, I worried about my choice of a subject. And today I still do not know if I was right in what I did and what I did not do. Indeed, I beg your indulgence for turning personal this morning, for taking you into my confidence and sharing my dilemmas with you. I do so in the conviction that my individual problem is just one special case of a larger situation that faces most of us in many areas of life, that moral ambiguity and the difficulty of making a decision without clear guidelines is part of the existential predicament of man, especially in these complex times in which we live. My “confession” will, I hope, be an honest one. We read in today’s Sidra, לא תנוחו איש את אחיו, “you shall not deceive one another.” The great Hasidic teacher, Rabbi Yitzchak of Vorke, asked: We know that a Hasid always goes beyond the law; he observes not only the din, but also lifnim mi-shurat ha-din. How can a Hasid observe this law of “thou shalt not deceive thy brother” in such a manner? And he answered: לא תנוחו איש את עצמו, “do not deceive yourself…” So today I want to come clean with myself too in public, not deceiving myself, even if it means that I may conclude with more proble…

This Shabbat, the eve of יום ירושלים, commemorating the reunification of the Holy City in 1967, has been proclaimed “Aliyah Sabbath” by the Orthodox Union and other national Orthodox organizations. It is therefore appropriate, at this time, to touch on the relationships of two communities which the Babylonian Sages of the Talmud called הכא והתם, “Here and There,” the Diaspora and Israel.The theme of Aliyah is not new to this pulpit. And this congregation is far too sophisticated for the simplistic platitudes which have for too long obscured clear thinking of this subject.We can no more accept the Ben Gurion thesis that one can be a Jew only in Israel, than we can the old super-American canard that preaching or practicing Aliyah constitutes an act of disloyalty to America. And certainly, we want to avoid conforming to the cynical image of the Zionist, who has been defined as one who tries to persuade a second that a third should give money so that a fourth can go on Aliyah to Israel.American Jews are particularly fortunate in this respect. They are not driven to Israel by oppression; adverse and tumultuous social conditions are not the same as persecution. We can afford to encourage an orderly Aliyah, not in panic. The motive of American Aliyah must be idealism – religious or national – mixed with an enlightened self-interest.Every American Jew ought – and, I believe, the great majority probably do – have Aliyah in the back of their mind; especially for those beginning their higher education, for young men and women or couples just starting on their careers, for retirees who want to spend their remaining years in the Holy Land, for those retiring a bit early so that they can still bring to bear the benefit of their experience for the State, and those in their middle years who are financially capable of making this change.Our parents and grandparents came to this country, to the Land of Promise; there is no reason that we and our children should not go to Israel, as …

Our Sidra opens with the words וידבר ה’ אל משה בהר סיני לאמר, “And the Lord spoke to Moses at Mt. Sinai, saying…” What follows this introduction is a portion that deals with the laws of שמיטה, the Sabbatical year, when the land must lie fallow and all debts be remitted. The Rabbis were intrigued by one word in that opening verse: the word בהר, on the mountain. Why this special reference to Mt. Sinai at this time? The question as they phrased it has come over into Yiddish and Hebrew as an idiomatic way of saying, “what does one thing have to do with the other?” Thus (תורת כהנים as quoted by Rashi): מה ענין שמיטה אצל הר סיני, What connection is there between the sabbatical laws and Mt. Sinai? Were not all the laws and commandments enunciated at Mt. Sinai? Why then this special mention of Shemittah in association with Mt. Sinai? Rashi quotes the answer provided by the Rabbis. Permit me, however, to offer an alternative answer: although Judaism is action-geared, oriented to the improvement of man and society; although it has a high moral quotient; although it addresses itself to the very real problems of imperfect man and suffering society; although, in contrast to certain other religions, it is more this-worldly; nevertheless, this concern with the real and the immediate and the empirical has a limit. Not everything in Judaism has to be as practical as an American businessman’s profit-and-loss sheet or as “relevant” as the social activists and the radicals would like it to be. Judaism may not be ancient history, but neither is it journalism. And this we see from the piquant fact that the laws of Shemittah were given specifically at Mt. Sinai. Laws known as מצוות התלויות בארץ, commandments whose fulfillment is dependent upon the Land of Israel, were given to the people of Israel before they ever arrived in ארץ ישראל, the Land of Israel! Agriculture laws were now given, in all their details, to a nomadic tribe without farms, without roots in the soil. Consider what the …

After banning a permanent slave class among Israelites by legislating that every Israelite servant must be emancipated on the Jubilee year, the Torah offers its reason: כי לי בני ישראל עבדים – “for the children of Israel are servants unto Me, they are My servants.” The title עבד or servant is obviously meant in an honorific sense. Thus, the highest encomium that the Bible offers for Moses, that most superior of all prophets and humans, is, משה עבד השם, Moses the servant of the Lord.There is also another description of man’s relationship to God used by the Torah: בנים אתם לה’ אלקיכם, “you are sons (or children) to the Lord your God.” So we have an interesting biblical typology: בן and עבד, son and servant, two symbols or archetypes of the religious personality.Unquestionably, in one sense eved (servant) is superior to ben (son). “Servant” indicates one who has no natural relationship, but has come to his master-father from without. The eved of the Lord is one who therefore comes to the אדון עולם (the Eternal Lord) voluntarily, utterly of his own free will, ready to subjugate himself to the will of the Almighty, to suppress his ego and restrain his desires in manifest and meaningful commitment to God. “Son,” however, is one who, as it were, was born into this relationship with his Father. From this point of view, the proselyte is superior to the native-born Jew! Indeed, in a famous responsum or תשובה by Maimonides to Obadiah the Proselyte, who complained that his Jewish teacher was rebuking him and insulting him by reminding him of his pagan origin, Maimonides says that the teacher should be ashamed of himself, and should stand in awe of the student who is proselyte and who came to the Almighty of his own free will rather than being born into it naturally.And yet the weight of the Jewish tradition offers the reverse judgment, and maintains that the category of ben is superior to the category of eved. Thus R. Akiva teaches in the Ethics of the Fathers, חביבין ישראל שנ…