by Rabbi Peter S. Knobel
Rosh Hashanah Eve 5761 - September 29, 2000

Rosh Hashanah is a birthday party for the universe. Jewish tradition calls it yom harat haolam, the day of the world’s birth. Rosh Hashanah is simultaneously yom ha din, judgment day. It is both a moment of celebration and a time for reflection. It is the time of beginnings. It is the annual season for rebirth and renewal. This is no clichéd theme. It is an ever-present faith in the power of human beings to change. Today we are addressed as individuals and as a community. Change comes from many sources--from new knowledge, from new people who have entered our lives. Sometimes change is the culmination of a process. Sometimes it is the result of a sudden flash of inspiration.

I believe that we are witnessing the beginning of a new era in the United States. It is a remarkable time to be alive. It is a remarkable time to be a Jew; Joseph Lieberman, an observant Jew is running for vice-president. Jews and Christians have begun to speak a language of respect for one another. Major Jewish philanthropists and communal leaders have come to recognize the synagogue as a crucial place for the perpetuation and enhancement of Judaism. I suspect when we look back a decade from now, we will see this as a turning point in the history of American Judaism.

The chronology of these events are amazing. In August, the Democratic party nominated an observant or if you prefer an Orthodox Jew, as its vice presidential candidate. On September 7th, Charles Shusterman, Edgar Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt pledged $18 million to transform synagogues. On September 10th, a group of Jewish scholars published a statement called Dabru Emet: (Speak Truth) A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity. On September 28^th, Charlotte Newberger and I convened the first meeting of The Strategic Planning Taskforce of the Synagogue Federation Commission, whose goal is to change the nature of the relationship between the Synagogue, the Federation and Jewish Agencies in this community. I believe these events are connected.

This is my assertion. American Jews are more comfortable with Christians than ever before. Christians are more comfortable with Jews than ever before. Religion is no longer a taboo subject. Jews will be able and willing to assert their values in terms of Judaism without the fear of anti-Semitism. Religion will play a more significant role in public policy and the synagogue will be more important to larger numbers of Jews. Jews will be required to be more knowledgeable and committed to their Judaism to participate fully in society. Liberal Jews will need to know how to use religious language to justify their positions; if not the religious right will co-opt the political process. Being an observant Jew will be respectable and important. Therefore the Jewish community and particularly the synagogue will have to better prepare for its new role.

Let’s begin with Dabru Emet. This evening I will only share with you the introduction and the eight bullet points. The document as a whole deserves to be studied. Therefore, on Yom Kippur afternoon between the morning service and the Family service, we will study the whole document together. I invite you to join with me.

The document is significant for two reasons. 1) Because it will focus on the many positive theological and liturgical changes which Christians have made since the Shoah; 2) because the document is written and issued and signed exclusively by Jewish theologians and rabbis, without the participation of the secular Jewish defense agencies such as the ADL, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. Its authors and its signatories are rabbis and Jewish academics. It is a statement to Christian leaders who themselves are mostly clergy and theologians that in the future they must engage their religious counterparts in the Jewish community rather than the secular agencies who have hitherto represented us.

Without trying to exaggerate what is happening, I do believe religious leadership is reasserting its role in the Jewish community and as a result, both Jews and non-Jews will take Judaism more seriously. Let us listen to the introduction to Dabru Emet:

In recent years, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift in Jewish and Christian relations. Throughout the nearly two millennia of Jewish exile, Christians have tended to characterize Judaism as a failed religion or, at best, a religion that prepared the way for, and is completed in, Christianity. In the decades since the Holocaust, however, Christianity has changed dramatically. An increasing number of official Church bodies, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have made public statements of their remorse about Christian mistreatment of Jews and Judaism. These statements have declared, furthermore, that Christian teaching and preaching can and must be reformed so that they acknowledge God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people and celebrate the contribution of Judaism to world civilization and to Christian faith itself.

We believe these changes merit a thoughtful Jewish response. Speaking only for ourselves -- an interdenominational group of Jewish scholars -- we believe it is time for Jews to learn about the efforts of Christians to honor Judaism. We believe it is time for Jews to reflect on what Judaism may now say about Christianity. As a first step, we offer eight brief statements about how Jews and Christians may relate to one another.

1. Jews and Christians worship the same God.
   
2. Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book, the Bible (what Jews call "Tanakh" and Christians call the "Old Testament").
   
3. Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel.
   
4. Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah.
   
5. Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon.
   
6. The humanly irreconcilable difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world as promised in Scripture.
   
7. A new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice.
   
8. Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace.

Dabru Emet concludes with the magnificent vision of the prophet Isaiah:

It shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the top of the mountains and be exalted above the hills, and the nations shall flow unto it . . . and many peoples shall go and say, "Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the house of the God of Jacob and He will teach us of His ways and we will walk in his paths." (Isaiah 2:2-3)

The authors and signers assert that Judaism and Christianity have a cooperative responsibility to combine their vast resources of these two great religions to establish the "Kingdom of God." In this redeemed world the lion and lamb will lie down together, swords and spears will become ploughshares and pruning hooks, justice will reign and abundance will be universal. Every person shall lie under the vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.

I am a long time participant in Jewish–Christian Dialogue and I have witnessed and participated first hand the dramatic theological and liturgical changes that have greatly altered Jewish-Christian relationships. I endorse the thrust of the statement and I would have signed it if I had been invited to do so. However, as the statement makes clear, there are still real and irresolvable theological differences between Jews and Christians which only will be settled in the distant future through Divine intervention. The document is a clarion call for Judaism and Christianity to accept joint responsibility to transform the world.

I do not have a pollyannaish view of the world, everything is not rosy. The document skirts the issue of Christian anti-Semitism and gives short shrift to the Holocaust and avoids completely a discussion of proselytizing. This new world is fraught with difficulty and everyone is not in the same place.

But I believe in this emerging new world that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant factor in American Jewish life. I believe people will vote for/or against Gore-Lieberman for political reasons not because of/or in-spite of prejudice. It is certainly true that there will be some Jews who will vote for Gore-Lieberman out of some kind of Jewish loyalty and some Christians will vote for Bush-Cheney because of anti-Semitism, but the vast majority of Americans who vote will vote for political reasons.

This leads me to my second point. Lieberman’s nomination has opened a debate about the role of religion in politics and public policy. It has sharpened the conversation about private and public morality and questions of character. Religion and politics are intertwined in dangerous but potentially productive ways. Affluence, the telecommunications revolution, the resurgence of spirituality and its questions about the meaning of human existence touch our lives in important and profound ways.

Just last Monday I participated in a panel at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism on the "’God factor’ in the Election’, My fellow participants were, E.J. Dione Jr., formerly the New York Times correspondent in Rome, Professor Richard McBrien of Notre Dame, and William Martin of Rice University, the biographer of Billy Graham and an authority on the Evangelicals. The forum raised important questions. What do we want to know about a candidate’s religious commitments? As E.J. Dione quipped, anything they think is important for us to know. Does it tell us anything about character? How does one’s religious beliefs effect the person’s position on public policy?

Joe Lieberman’s clear commitment to modern Orthodoxy, George Bush’s description of Jesus as his favorite philosopher and Al Gore’s WWJD, "What would Jesus Do"? injects religious belief into the center of the debate about the nature of the United States and the role religion should play in the political life of our nation.

Steven Carter, in his interesting and provocative book The Culture of Disbelief is concerned that in the United States many consider "that religion is like building model airplanes, just another hobby; something quiet, something private, something trivial—not really a fit activity for intelligent, public-spirited adults. This intuition, then, is one that in the end must either destroy religion or the ideal of liberal democracy. That is a prospect that can please only those who hate, one or the other, or both." ^{(Page 22)}  I believe Lieberman’s candidacy challenges this intuition. Serious observance does not interfere with one’s place in society. It does not disqualify a person from the seat of power. It proclaims that an observant Jew can be President of the United States.

Belief is more than private concern. It is in theory, a determiner of character and an influence on public policy. Can one be moral and not be religious? Of course! Yet serious religious belief should be coupled with morality. Does the constitution provide freedom of or freedom from religion? Again I want to cite Stephen Carter. "What the religion clauses of the first amendment were designed to do, was not to remove religious values from the arena of public debate, but to keep them there. The Establishment Clause by its terms, forbids the imposition of religious belief by the state, not statements of religious belief in the course of public dialogue. The distinction is one of more than semantic difference." ^(p.112)  I believe that the Constitution protects us from the unwanted intrusion of religion into our lives. But this should not mean a trivialization of religion nor its absence from public life. Let me repeat! We must safeguard the neutrality of government from intruding into our private lives and from imposing religion upon us. At the same time America is one of the most religious nations in the world. Judaism and Christianity as well as the other religions, which now make up our polyglot nation, have similar visions of what constitutes a just and caring society. I want to assert however that as Jews, as liberal Jews, we must take a strong stand on the values that should pervade society and we should support those candidates, those organizations and the legislation that seeks to implement these values. It is our right and our responsibility.

As a rabbi, I tried to share with you and persuade you that your Judaism offers a magnificent vision of a just society that we are commanded to create. In its most audacious form, God demands that we speak truth to power, that we repair the world, that we lift up the fallen, and free the captive and heal the sick. Through the words of the prophets and the legal narrative portions of the Torah and from rabbinic literature we have tried to energize a community and to inspire a nation.

Remember the words of Isaiah which we read on Yom Kippur:

5Is such the fast I desire,
A day for people to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like a bulrush
And lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call that a fast,
A day when God is favorable?

6No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.

7It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

-- Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures, (Philadelphia, Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society) 1985

In the United States, the Christian pulpit has often been an important catalyst for social change. The Bimah too has been a venue to challenge the status quo. From the child labor laws, to civil rights, to the anti-war movement, rabbis have spoken out and called upon congregants to rally and to vote and to change their behavior.

In recent years, Reform Jews, in contrast to some other sectors of society, tend to see religion and religious observance as private individual choices and understand statements from the pulpit on public policy to be political rather than religious and dismiss them. My question is, "Will the religiosity of our politicians and the renewed religious rhetoric of our age inspire Jews to speak out in the language of Judaism"? I believe that it will. Will we demand more of the synagogue and religious institutions to prepare us for public policy debates and to encourage us to action? I believe that we will.

Father Richard McBrien, a member of the Medill panel discussion and one of the leading Catholic theologians in America, said he expects politicians who are motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs to make the case for their views public policy on the basis of rational argument not faith alone. This is our challenge, religionists must distinguish between private and public morality and must persuade the electorate on what should or shouldn’t be public morality. Issues such as access to health care, affordable housing, quality education, and economic justice are matters of public morality. The way to achieve them is a matter of debate.

In this election there is a great deal at stake. The future direction of the Supreme Court is just one significant concern. It is not the function of the pulpit to tell people how to vote. But participation in the greater society by exercising our responsibility to vote is a religious obligation.

Now, at the end, I wish to turn to the synagogue. This has been an incredible year at Beth Emet. We have celebrated our fiftieth anniversary. We have completed a new Torah scroll and are preparing to present a Torah scroll to a Jewish community in the Former Soviet Union. We have said goodbye to Cantor Klepper and his family after 18 years and to Rabbi Smith after seven years. We are so happy that she and her family remain part of the community. We have welcomed Rabbi London and her family into the Beth Emet family and she is already demonstrating how important she is to all of us. We have been progressing in our capital campaign, strengthening our endowment and preparing to break ground on May 20^th for our building addition and refurbishment. Our cantorial search continues. In the meantime, we are blessed with Steven Hummel on a weekly basis, Flip Frisch on many Shabbatot and Rachel Gottlieb, our cantorial soloist for these High Holidays. Rhonda Mlodinoff, Hyma Levin and Jill Randell are consistently our mainstays, without whom we would be so much poorer. We thank Merle Lehman for coming out of retirement to lead the choir. We are deeply grateful to the choir, whose prayers enhance our prayers. We also thank the many volunteers who make this service possible and sustain the congregation all year long. We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge with profound gratitude Donna Chastain, Lois Snider, Florence Jacobson, Esther Tasley, Rhoda Gordon, Beth Liebman, Mayta Spitz, Shari Sherman and Ramona Rush. Our maintenance crew is fantastic.

The word is out in the broader Jewish community. The synagogue is the most important institution to enhance and perpetuate Judaism. Only religious Judaism will preserve the people, perpetuate the covenant, nurture individual souls and create involved ethical individuals. But the word is also out that the synagogue is a broken institution in need of renewal. Mega-philanthropists have created STAR (Synagogue Transformation and Renewal) and pledged $18million. Synagogue 2000, ECE (the Experiment in Congregation Education), Synagogue Federation Commissions and task forces throughout the country have become the focus of leadership concerns. New alliances between agencies and synagogues, coalitions of synagogues, movement commitments to fund broader communal activities to meet needs that cannot be met by individual synagogues are proliferating. There is an explosion worship of initiatives and alternative services. Torah study is breaking out all over. Beth Emet The Free Synagogue has been in the forefront of these changes. The congregation continues to grow and to be secure financially, thanks to your great generosity. If everything is going so well why then do I have a sense of dis-ease? It is because I believe we can do much better. Because I believe we must do better. I want to share with you a story which Rob Weinberg told to the UAHC Strategic Planning committee meeting last Sunday:

Several months ago a woman and her teenage daughter visited a local automobile dealership. The sales representative, upon seeing the teenager, assumed the woman was purchasing an automobile for her young daughter. He therefore decided to capitalize on the sales opportunity by attempting to sell the daughter a sports car. The woman, a kind and gentle customer, forgave the salesman--advising him that she was "in the market for a nice family car." The salesman then asked, "But what are you really looking for?" She thought for a brief moment and responded "I am looking for a mid-size car that will be dependable and will not be expensive to maintain." She did not mention that she wanted the car to reflect her business success, that she wanted it to be comfortable (for her 3 hour daily commute), and that she wanted to be proud to have it sitting in front of her home. The salesman indicated he had "just the car." During the 20-minute test drive the salesman asked the customer to "use the factory installed cellular telephone to call home." To her amazement, as she began keying in her home telephone number, the AM/FM radio went silent--automatically. At that instant, she knew she would never again own an automobile that does not offer such a key feature.

The above incident reflects several important points about our understanding of the client. The salesman, based on inferences, assumed the customer was purchasing an automobile for her teenage daughter (a good example of one's operating on assumed needs). When asked about what she was looking for, the customer shared several expressed needs (mid-size, dependable, low maintenance cost). However, not mentioned were unexpressed needs (comfortable, reflects success, pride of ownership)--such factors would have eventually impacted whether or not she felt she had purchased the right automobile. Also, what ended up being the one key feature--the automatic AM/FM radio volume control--was initially an unknown need...the customer did not know that such technology exists!

This story offers us a profound challenge to us. We, at Beth Emet now need to find a process that allows us to express our needs to this community, to deal with our unexpressed needs and meet our as yet, unknown needs. It will require thinking out of the box. I believe that we have entered a new era. The renewed community requires that we move forward in important and new ways. Unless we can truly listen to one another it will be very difficult for us to prepare the community to be different than it has been. The synagogue must become a real community which meets our intellectual and spiritual needs and is a driving force in propelling us to be involved with the hands on work of tikkun olam and the new world of a revitalized Judaism that will heal our souls and make Judaism a significant factor in the future of America.

Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world. It is the Day of Judgment. This Rosh Hashanah the first of the new millennium is the beginning of a new era. It is our prayer, our hope, and our commitment that we will work actively to make the words of Isaiah real in our day.

It shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the top of the mountains and be exalted above the hills, and the nations shall flow unto it . . . and many peoples shall go and say, "Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the house of the God of Jacob and He will teach us of His ways and we will walk in his paths." (Isaiah 2:2-3)