Eric Rosin
Temple Beth-El, Richmond, Virginia
June 27, 2003

Ah, summer has arrived. I had expected that as soon as the religious school year was over that I would be able kick back and relax. I was picturing long lunches, time to clean off my desk, a little lishma learning, continuing to clean off my desk, maybe a trip to the Virginia Museum in the afternoon, or perhaps cleaning the papers off my desk. Well, I was wrong. I had forgotten about the Bar Mitzvah and the wedding I still had to do. I had forgotten about my trip to Los Angeles for the Ziegler School ordination. I had forgotten about the sermons that still had to be written and the meetings about the year to come that had to be held. But now, I don't have another wedding until August or another Bar or Bat Mitzvah until next fall. Religious school is over for the summer and pretty soon you will all start delivering the sermons as the summer sermon series begins.

So, summer has finally begun, and all I have to think about is getting ready for the holidays next fall. In addition to everything we did last year, we're planning to add a more creative, family-friendly alternative service for the second day of Rosh HaShannah. . . and I need to start thinking about the parenting program that we're starting at the school. . . and now is also the time to figure out what we're going to do for USY and Kadima . . . and, before I forget, we're going to do our best to put together an alternative and participatory Friday night service once each month. And there are still daily minyanim and a few conversions.

But other than those things, the summer has begun and the time is completely my own. And you know what that means: it means time to catch up on my reading. There are two books in particular that I'm looking forward to reading as soon as I finish the new Harry Potter book. One is an older book called "A Generation of Seekers" by Wade Clark Roof and the other is a brand new book that I've been asked to review called "Nothing Sacred" by Douglas Rushkoff. I can't tell you how they are yet, but I can tell you what they're about.

From what I understand, both are related to the idea that these days, people are looking to religion for personal meaning. The books are written from different perspectives, but both are about the tension between a personal search for meaning and observing traditional religious practices. Talking about religion as the search for personal meaning may sound intuitive in the year 2003, but it wasn't always like this.

I regret that I didn't know my grandfather better, but from what I remember, he was a dedicated Conservative Jew of another era. On his way home from the family business, he would stop by the shul to daven ma'ariv every evening. He kept a kosher home. Some of my earliest memories are of his reading through the Hebrew of the Passover Haggadah at break neck speed and in his Eastern European Askenazic pronunciations. Thinking back, I simply can't imagine him pondering issues like "spirituality" or "inherent meaning" or meditating upon the presence of the shechina, the feminine emanation of the Divine Presence according to the kabalah.

My grandfather went to shul because his mother, the matriarch of the family, expected him to go to shul. He kept kosher because that's what Jews do. He wasn't a learned Jew, but he was an absolutely committed Jew who lived his life as Jews are supposed to live their lives.

There are still many Jews like my grandfather, but for much of the Baby boomer generation and for Generation X and Generation Y and what ever comes after that, we're not looking for my grandfather's Judaism. On Wednesday morning, Rabbi Creditor and I attended a seminar up in Washington, given by Rabbi Jack Riemer. Rabbi Riemer is one of the pre-eminent preachers in the Conservative movement. Ostensibly the seminar was about High Holiday sermons, but really it was a four hour parade of sermon ideas, texts and treatments that Rabbi Reimer has written himself or admired from others. Among the seeds of wisdom that were sown, Rabbi Riemer observed that the argument sh'ne'amar doesn't work any more.

Sh'ne'amar literally means, "as it is said," but functionally in rabbinic literature it is used to offer a biblical text as proof. It is our obligation to respect all of humankind sh'ne'amar va'yivra Elohim et adam b'tzelmo b'tzelem Elohim bara oto zecher v' n'kehvah barah otam. It is our obligation to respect all of humankind because the biblical text in Genesis says, "God created man in God's image, in the image of God, God created them, man and woman." We observe Shabbat she'ne'amer Veshamru b'nai Yisrael et ha Shabbat, because, as we sang tonight, the text of the Torah says that people of Israel are to observe Shabbat. Rabbi Reimer's point was that in rabbinic literature and up until these modern times, a biblical verse was all the proof you needed to prove the value of Jewish practice.

Well, that was then, this is now. I've often heard it said that the pulpit rabbinate is the retail end of the Judaism business. That's because now we have to sell Jewish practice. We have to convince Jewish people of its merits. We have to make it user friendly and responsive to the needs of our consumer base. (Hopefully, rabbis will be effective salesmen because we believe in the product.) Recently, though, I was passing the magazine rack at Barnes and Noble and I purchased an issue of Commentary Magazine because of an article by Jack Wertheimer the preeminent historian of the Conservative Movement.

This article (which you know must have been compelling to convince me to buy an issue of Commentary) was called, "The Rabbi Crisis," and in it Professor Wertheimer writes, "The new Judaism revolves around the lives of individuals and families rather than around the concerns of a people, its holy days, its liturgy, its sacred texts, [or] its collective memories. In this new Judaism, the role of the rabbi is to be a "care-giver," a hand-holder, a counselor. The relevant question becomes not how much the rabbi knows about Judaism and how effectively he instills it but how the rabbi treated me and my family at our "life-cycle" event, whether at our last encounter, the rabbi uttered the words I needed to hear."

I read this paragraph and my first thought was, "Hey, I resemble those remarks." I don't agree with the statement that it doesn't matter how much the rabbi knows or how effectively he instills it, but I don't find the rest of the passage disturbing. As you can tell from my laid back, slacker demeanor, and my shaggy, unkempt appearance, I'm a proud member of generation-X and I want my rabbi to be a caregiver to represent the fact that God and the Jewish tradition care about me. As a rabbi, I want to reach my congregants with my sermons and I want families to experience joyful life cycle events. And while I'm at it, I also want to my congregants to experience joyful and meaningful Shabbatot, and I want them to feel like their consumption of food is a holy act because they say brachot before and after eating and because they keep kosher. So sue me.

But Prof. Wertheimer has a point. That's a lot of pressure for a rabbi. What happens when I can't reach a congregant? What happens when eating is not a sacred act. What happens when, chas v'shalom, the rabbi needs to say something that is difficult to hear? Does that reduce the validity of Judaism? When we look to Judaism for meaning and we don't find it, either due to the human limits of our understanding the human limits of our rabbis, how does that effect our relationship to Judaism?

The truth is that if we make our observance of Judaism contingent upon our personal edification, then Judaism is just one more product in the spiritual marketplace, and if it is not an efficacious product, we'll put it back on the shelf and pick up a six pack of Buddhism or materialism or whatever other "ism" is in vogue at the moment.

The problem with seeing Judaism in this consumer model is that, in the religious realm, the consumer cannot always be right. We cannot know ultimate truths. We cannot know which mitzvot are truly important and which are not. That's part of being human. If Judaism is honest and true, we know that only God is always right and we can't always understand why or how. That's where faith comes in and that's what we learn from this week's Torah portion.

This week we read about the story of the meraglim, the spies, from Parshat Shlach Lecha. The parsha begins in a pregnant moment; the people of Israel have trekked through the dessert and have finally reached the threshold of the Promised Land. The text begins with God's saying to Moshe, "Shlach Lecha v'yaturu et ha'Aretz Cana'an asher Ani notain l'vnai Yisrael, Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the people of Israel." When the rabbis read this verse, they look to the second account of this event, which is recorded in the book of Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy, Moshe reports that it is the Jewish people, and not God who urge caution and investigation before entering the Land of Israel. Therefore, the rabbis don't read this verse to say that God is sending the spies God's self, but rather they understand that God is telling Moshe that he may accommodate the insecurity of the Jewish people.

Moshe sends twelve spies, one from each tribe, with the following instructions:

Go up there into the Negev, and on into the hill country, and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor?"

After forty days, the spies return bearing their reports. Their reports are that the land is, indeed, rich, flowing with milk and honey, but ten of the spies continue to say that the people are a different matter. The people are giants who live in fortified cities and who will never be defeated by the nomadic Jewish tribes. And they conclude, "V'ainainu k'chaga'vim v'chein hai'inu b'ainaihem, We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked like grasshoppers to them."

The masses of the Jewish people are swayed and they cry out to Moses, saying, "If only we had died in the land of Egypt. . .or if only we might die in the wilderness!" They ask, "Why has the Lord taken us to that land to fall by the sword?. . . . It would be better for us to go back to Egypt. " Just to set the scene, this is after the miraculous Exodus from Egypt. This is after the giving of the Ten Commandments. This is after the God has appeared personally to every living Jew at Mount Sinai! Neither Moses, nor Aaron, nor God are happy to hear these complaints.

Only two of the spies, Yehoshua and Calev report the beauty and bounty of the land of Israel and urge the people forward.

God becomes incensed with the Jewish people and decrees that none from that generation except for Yehoshua and Calev will enter the land, and that the wandering of the Jewish people will last for forty years, one year for every day that the spies reconnoitered the Land of Israel.

So here's the forty year question: What did the spies do that was so wrong? If we read the story with our consumer-based model, there's really no answer to the question. The spies were sent out with the mandate to report on the land and the people who lived in it. They were ordered to gather information so that the Jewish people could act accordingly. That's what they did. If you look at the text, you'll see that the report of the ten cowardly spies does not vary in its facts from the report of the two good spies. The only difference is their conclusion afterwards. Well, according to a consumer model, an educated consumer is the best customer, and after getting a little schooling, ten of the twelve spies decided they weren't buying.

There's also another, more introspective version of the consumer model. Maybe this story is not about the pragmatic value of any course of action, but rather it's about valuing the spiritual content of our actions. Perhaps this story is a parable about eschewing fear of the material world and tending to our inner lives. What if we read the consequences of the spies' failure to lead the Jews into Israel as a metaphor for our failure to take the difficult steps necessary to realize our promises and our potential? In that case, the sin of the spies was the fact that they saw themselves as insignificant, as like grasshoppers, and then allowed themselves to project their own poor self image onto to the inhabitants of the land. Therefore, this story is a cautionary tale to warn us against defeating ourselves with pessimism.

The problem with the consumer model is that it focuses only on our needs as consumers in order to illustrate and explain our actions. It leaves an important character out of the story. What about God and God's motivation? Do we really want to think that God wants to punish us for our insecurities? I'm not a behavioral psychologist, but that seems counter productive to me.

This story is not about whether God helps the people to realize their potential. This story is about God assigning the Jewish people a holy responsibility and place in a holy relationship and the Jewish people walking away from both. It's about the Jewish people offending God by abandoning God when their divine obligations grow uncomfortable. God says to the Jewish people, "You shall bear your punishment for forty years, corresponding to the number of days, forty days, that you scouted the land: A year for each day. Thus they shall know what it means to thwart me." (Numbers 14:34) When the Jewish people balked before entering the Promised Land, they were doing nothing less than preventing God from continuing our joint creation of the world.

I believe with all of my heart that God cares about our inner lives. That's the gift when we talk about the gift of Torah. I know that my life is better because of the existence of Shabbat and Kashrut and Torah study. But too often we forget that these gifts were not the result of a unilateral transaction, that this was and is a two-sided covenant with God on one side and the Jewish people on the other, and we owe God the gift of our faith and our observance in return for everything that we have received.

I thought of this yesterday afternoon, when one of our minyan regulars needed to say Kaddish. This particular individual, in addition to being a minyan regular, dedicates more time and attention to this shul that anyone else I know, but he does it quietly. He doesn't seek recognition for everything that he does, and it is our shame that he doesn't receive that recognition as a result of his self effacing grace. Well, early in the day he mentioned to me that he had poled the other minyan regulars and he was concerned that he might not be able to say Kaddish because a number of the minyanaires were headed out of town for the weekend.

After he left I called a few congregants to make sure that we would gather a minyan. The first couple that I was able to reach are a generation or two younger than my grandfather, but before I had even finished explaining our need, they assured me that they would be there. After the service was over, I privately thanked this couple for enabling our friend to say kaddish, they responded that I should not have to thank them, that they should have been coming anyway.

I don't know if this couple understand the Hebrew of the liturgy. I don't know if they come to shul primarily to nurture their inner lives. I do know, however, that that was not the response of individuals looking for personal reward. Instead, it reflected an awareness of our obligations as Jews. This was my grandfather's awareness. This is what kept him going to shul almost every day of his life. We have not yet seen whether the model of Judaism as a quest for personal meaning will lead to the same kind of commitment and have the same lasting value. I pray that it will.