Caught Between Heaven and Hell

Labor Day has passed and I feel very strange. After over 40 years in the pulpit rabbinate, I’ve retired to a New England shoreline community that can only be described as paradise. Below are some of the scenes I saw this week during my daily walks.

That’s an osprey nest up on the roof up top, a catbird on the branch (center) – posing that close to me, and sounding like this.  And there’s a grey heron out there on the right, sitting and sunning and occasionally honking in the salt marsh, and a webworm moth on the Shoreline Greenway (left) that, according to one observer, looks like a ‘60s couch that got up and walked away.

These are my congregants right now, my morning minyan – and it is spectacular. They may squawk a little, but never really complain about the AC.

The walks feel strange, but what is strangest is that here it is, post Labor Day, just a few weeks from Rosh Hashanah, and I’m not immersed in writing sermons. For those who know me, you know that I’ve always taken High Holiday sermons very seriously, developing themes and weaving threads many months in advance, to craft a unified message that is entertaining, motivating and thoroughly original. My whole year used to revolve around those sermons.  Maybe it will again some day, but this year I’m smelling the roses.

And now, with Labor Day behind us,  I’m really starting to feel it. No sermons this year. I don’t know how it will all turn out.

But with every loss there is a gain. And what I’ve gained this year is the time to do other kinds of writing.  And there is another gain too. No longer do I have to couch political advocacy with a “wink-wink.”  No longer do I have to play the game of both sidesism, which so often leads to strange bedfellows of moral equivalence. No longer do I have to say, “Trump lied 30,000 times during his presidency…but Kamala misrepresented her position once in 2019, so there’s that.”

This year, beyond any other, it’s important for every rabbi to speak from a place that is pure and deliver a message completely clean of equivocation. For me this year, that pulpit happens to be a salt marsh in Connecticut with a bunch of birds and bugs.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. I am living in Gan Eden – the Jewish term for paradise (literally, the Garden of Eden). But there is a very fine line between Gan Eden and Gehennom, which means hell. The two words are pronounced almost identically, with interchangeable “m”s and “n”s and with the Yiddishized accent on the second syllable.

Gannayden – Gehennom. Gehennom – Gannayden. Let’s call the whole thing off!

I may be in heaven, but right now all of us are living on the outskirts of hell. Israel has been experiencing that hell for nearly a year, with the past few days being especially excruciating.  And a Trump victory would propel America and the world to a hellscape that we can barely imagine. (Now I’m beginning to sound like him.  Scary.)  So I can’t allow myself to be seduced by the fruits of this Gan Eden of mine. There is so much work to be done. The beauty is real but the peaceful feeling is so deceptive, like a music festival near the gates of Gaza. Paradise can become a dystopia in less than a second.

I’ve always had to keep my distance from direct involvement in political campaigns because of my position on the pulpit. No more. So last month I became involved in the Harris campaign and Jewish Democrats.  I know that won’t please all of you, but my job, right now, is not to please all of you.  For the first time in my life, my job is not to please everyone.

Part of my Jewish Dems work has been to recruit other rabbis to sign on and endorse Kamala Harris.  Most of my colleagues on pulpits are reluctant to do so, and I can understand why.  But I plead to them, if not now, when?  If you feel strongly about why Trump needs to be defeated, now is the time for rabbis to get that message across.

Recently, after one of Trump’s near daily rantings about how Jews who vote Democratic “should have their head examined,” I compiled a list of 52 reasons, based on Jewish sources, why Jews shouldn’t vote for Trump.

Here, bubela, take it.  I’m slipping it into your coat pocket. Now, simply slip the link into your next email to the congregation, the one about Mrs. Goldberg sponsoring the kiddush in honor of her recovery from gall bladder surgery. You can feign ignorance.  Just say, “I have no idea how that got in there. And L’chayim to Mrs Goldberg!”

I’ve been there.  There are ways to get the message across without losing your job or putting your shul’s tax exempt status in jeopardy.  I’ll be happy to share dozens of sermons and articles I’ve written that have accomplished just that.

Back in 2018, during the midterms of the Trump administration, I wrote a piece for the New York Jewish Week  called Rabbis’ Moment Of ‘Truth Is Truth’ which was a play on Rudy Giuliani’s “Truth isn’t truth” comment that was making the rounds at the time. Back then, while I was on a pulpit, I made the claim then, while in a pulpit, that rabbis didn’t have the luxury of standing above the fray, that we have a moral imperative to take a stand, especially on the High Holidays when so many are listening to us, and that it can be done delicately enough to avoid overt partisanship.

I wrote (keeping mind that Trump was then in power), that rabbis are already engaging in subversive acts every day, simply by doing our jobs.

Just by standing up for decency and honesty — for being a mensch — I’ve become an accidental insurgent. Homilies that I have been delivering for decades, emphasizing basic values like humility and generosity, all now sound like a call to arms. Even the most pedestrian moral messages can be interpreted as zingers at the White House: “Love the stranger.” “Tell the truth.” “Be faithful to your partner.” “Words matter.” These have always been my bread and butter. Now they’ve become fodder for the resistance.

What was true then is more true than ever this year.  Jews will be looking to their rabbis for inspiration. We can’t flee like Jonah. There is no place to hide. Maybe that is the hidden blessing of this current moment — but only if we are ready to say “truth is truth” to power. This Rosh Hashanah is a moment, that, for rabbis, will define not just our careers, but — just maybe — our lives.

This year, rabbinic colleagues, you’ll have to do it for me.  I’m living in paradise and my congregants are too busy chirping and molting to care much about what I say. But I do sense that they sense that what humans do matters to their survival.  Because it does.

A plea to all my colleagues who are still parading on pulpits: What you say this year has never been more important – and will have a direct impact on America, Israel, and the tranquil, lovely landscape where I’ve set down roots and where my new congregants keep interrupting the sermon to lay their eggs.