For “Days of Awesome” High Holiday Services at the Silverlake JCC
When Shay asked me to deliver the Midrash, I was deeply honored, and said, “Thank you so much for asking me,” and then I asked, “What’s a Midrash?” Now, this is concerning, not only because I’m delivering it all to you now, but also because I teach Jewish education right here in this space. I often feel like I’m learning about Judaism alongside the children. It’s not as much of the cliche, “They teach me as much as I teach them,” as “They teach me much more than I teach them.” Your kids are very smart. And, to be honest, I kind of love rediscovering Judaism. It’s like when you reread an Agatha Christie novel years later, and you’ve forgotten who the killer is, so you get to engage in the mystery all over again. “Abraham did what?” “Oh thank God, he didn’t kill his son!” I feel like I’m falling in love with Judaism over and over again, because the more I learn about it, the more I like it.
I was raised Jewish and with Jewish education, but my participation in cultural rituals certainly dropped off after my Bar Mitzvah, an experience that’s I’m sure is completely unique to me. Growing up in LA and then moving to New York, I took my Judaism for granted, and thought breathing the air and complaining about it was Jewish education enough. This really changed when I played a pig in Alabama. Let me explain. In the fall of 2016, I was cast as Wilbur in a production of Charlotte’s Web at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and spent a year living and working there on numerous shows. During the 2016 election, I was performing A Christmas Carol, which, as we all know as Jews, is really a socialist parable about a greedy old man who changes his ways and learns to give his money away and support workers’ rights. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the audience members missed the point. And that’s not a dig at Alabama - if there’s anything I learned in my time there, it’s how much I, as a coastal elitist liberal, have learned to point fingers at the South and ignore my own complicity. I assure you, people all over the country miss the point of A Christmas Carol. After A Christmas Carol, I toured to schools around the South with Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays, which deeply with issues of misogyny, and was skeptical about bringing such heavy topics into schools. However, the talkbacks with students were enlightening. It was in this process that I fell in love with teaching, and it’s really how I ended up here, being taught by kids about Judaism.
While working in Alabama, one of the only Jews on the theater’s staff, Ellen, flagged me down and demanded I come to Rosh Hashanah services with her. It was a true act of care, and the first time I’d gone to temple in years. I went to Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Beth Or, “House of Light," and was deeply affected by the experience. Temple Beth Or began as a “Jewish Sick and Burial Society” in 1846, shortly after Alabama became a (stolen) state, because the few Jews in the
state knew they needed a religious community to care for the sick and dying. They needed ritual.
It was then established as a conservative synagogue, in 1856, but in 1874, “with great vision and foresight, and even greater debate,” the “congregation adopted a reform ritual and modeled it after Emanu El of New York.” That’s from the temple's website - when I Googled, “Montgomery Alabama, Jewish Temple,” it was the first one that showed up. Googling “Rosh Hashanah Silver Lake” it’s hard to figure out which ceremony I was supposed to speak at. I loved learning that the congregation of Beth Or was willing to grow and change, to learn from the models others had set, and to look forward towards progress. The Rabbi who spoke at the service I attended, Rabbi Elliot Stevens, was brilliant. I don’t remember his exact sermon, but I remember crying, I remember feeling proud and grateful to be Jewish, and I remember feeling how special it was to be in a space where Jewish community had been cultivated with such care and necessity.
Less than a year after he led the service which so moved me, Rabbi Stevens died of pancreatic cancer. It was very sudden, and came as a great shock to the community. In preparing for this midrash, I’ve been reading about Rabbi Stevens’ life and legacy. I’ve been reading through his sermons, and though I don’t agree with everything he said, I’ve loved grappling with his ideas and insights, which are so frequently tied to the need for progress, social activism, and hope. I mean, what better reflection on the cycles of life and the nature of tradition than to have a conversation with this man, whose path I crossed, briefly, arbitrarily, through a series of happy accidents, and whose words had moved me so deeply.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, because I’m now kinda an expert on Midrashes, a Midrash is a speech typically delivered by a member of the congregation that provides commentary on the torah portion, which so far in this speech I have not mentioned [checks notes] at all. Well technically once, in the Agatha Christie joke. So I’m nailing it.
So in his sermon on the Akedah, Rabbi Stevens is critical of Abraham for following God’s words without questioning them, and views this Torah portion as a warning against mindlessly following the powers that be. I like this interpretation, that we must never passively follow orders, but always hold accountable, question and challenge the structures surrounding us - whether they be our family, our government, the Supreme Court - especially The Supreme Court - and lower level courts, which I learned from a Jewish abortion-rights activist named Sheila Katz are perhaps the most essential aspect of the system to target - I digress - and, Rabbi Stevens tells us, we must even question God. “We are not helpless pawns in the hands of the gods. We can change ourselves, and we can change society.” The ability to question and work towards a better world is one of Judaism’s greatest gifts. Without questioning, there is no change, and without change, there is no life.
I also love Rabbi Kipnes and Michelle November’s interpretation of the Akeidah, that it not God who told Abraham to put down his knife, but rather Sarah, who called his name in an “angelic voice.” God works through us, and we must act to stop these acts of injustice from occurring.We must even be willing to defy God - or change our notion of God - in favor of justice. How often do we view God as imperfect, as capable of change? As needing to change? We must remember that belief is not a fixed, unchanging structure - it is a living thing. We must challenge it in ourselves and others. As the Kipnes and November reading shows us, this burden all too frequently falls on women - on all marginalized people, really - and how infrequently they receive the credit. Was it God who ordered it and stopped it, or was it God who ordered it, and Sarah who stopped it from happening?
Some interpretations say an angel stopped Abraham, and I don’t think that conflicts with Sarah being the one to stop him. The work of angels is often carried out by humans, and humans so often carry out the work of angels. To quote my favorite Mary Oliver poem: “You might see an angel anytime and anywhere. Of course you have to open your eyes to a kind of second level, but it’s not really hard. The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don’t care to be too definite about anything.” I also don’t like to be too definite about anything - especially not gender.
Perhaps my favorite interpretation of the text is from Rabbi Aviva Richman, whose Midrash is called, “From Sacrifice to Care: Tending the Fire of the Akeidah.” She says that atonement comes not from Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his child, like many traditional interpretations, but rather from Sarah’s grief following the act - her suffering, her cries of protest, and her subsequent death of a broken heart. This offers atonement for us all. However, as Kipnes and November also point out, what an awful way honor Sarah’s name - by her death. And isn’t that often true in society? How often do we honor those who suffer only after they die? How often does it take a horrific event or a death - or hundreds of deaths - for us to finally respond to injustice? To paraphrase Bob Dylan, my favorite Jewish poet when I was in high school, “How many times must the cannonballs fly before we finally post about it on Instagram?”
So there’s this great 18th century Yiddish prayer from Sarah Bas Tovim, a Ukrainian writer who wrote Tkhines, Jewish prayers written by women for women to recite and often taking a matriarchal perspective of the Torah. Isn’t that amazing? So Sarah Bas Tovim’s prayer upholds Sarah as a role model and the hero of the Akeida, for her grief and her protest, and women would recite this prayer at yard sites while measuring the wicks for Yom Kippur candles. Essentially, the prayer calls out to God, “Let our children not be taken away from us in this lifetime.”
The prayer continues: “The ultimate religious ask of a parent is not to sacrifice a child but to offer care,” both through food and shelter but also through learning and guidance. We must shift from an ethics of sacrifice to an ethics of care, and this fire of care lives on in the mothers’ candles. This fire rekindled in each generation is a fire of brilliance, made to ‘illuminate the eyes of our children as they develop a passion for learning.’”
As a teacher, this of course resonates with me. I have seen that passion illuminated in my students’ eyes, as they learn that they have the power to change the world around them. I have also seen that fire extinguished by cynicism and fear, the feeling that these structures are simply too powerful and too ingrained to ever change. I have been reading interpretations of the Akeidah that honor sacrifice, that value martyrdom, and I think that we, as a society, value sacrifice too much. I asked a student recently how it felt to go through frequent lockdown drills and she shrugged and said, “It’s just normal at this point.” This broke my heart. I was listening to a recent interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, a brilliant Jewish psychologist and healer, and his new book is called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” He says what we accept as “normal” - and which the pandemic has further highlighted as unsustainable - is “a toxic normal, one that we should not hope to return to.” “We live in a culture,” he says, that has been “isolating and atomizing individuals for a long time.” Separating parents from children, separating us from our humanity.
Is it normal for the CEO of the NRA to be worth $20 million, while children and parents have to face the daily trauma of lockdown drills and gun violence. Is it normal for the CEO of Exxon Mobil to make over $18 million while children around the world lose access to clean water and lose their lives to worsening climate disasters? Is it Normal that nine people on a Supreme Court have the power to take away a pregnant person's bodily autonomy, as a so-called “sacrifice” to an unborn fetus - which in many religions, including Judaism, is not considered a human being - and, once born, the child and the parent are neither protected nor supported?
Viewing the Akeidah in this light, the story does not feel archaic or distant to me. In our culture, children are dying and it is in the name of sacrifice to the Gods of wealth and power. The word sacrifice is sometimes invoked when discussing charity - “We need to make sacrifices for the sake of those in need,” or, perhaps, “Why should I sacrifice what I earned for people I don’t even know?” But I do not see sacrificing money as a sacrifice at all - it is an act of care. Money is not human. I think that to hold onto wealth when others have so little is an act of sacrifice - you are sacrificing the deepest part of your humanity. Money is not human.
Gabor Maté tells us the only solution to changing this toxic normal is facing it, challenging it, and working in community to heal. “In the Lakota tradition, when
somebody gets ill, the community says, ‘Thank you. Your illness represents some dysfunction in our whole community, because we are not separate. Your body is not separate from your mind, and your mind is not separate from the rest of our minds. We co-create each other... Your healing is our healing. How can we support you?’” This, I believe, is a true ethic of care.
We, together, we need to stop viewing this as normal. A few years ago I went to a civil rights protest and found myself talking to a man in his 60s, who had taken the train from Syracuse to attend the rally. He told me of his conservative upbringing, how for the majority of his life he held tightly to racist, homophobic, sexist beliefs. I asked him what changed his beliefs, and he told me, “When my son came out as gay.” He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly. “If the person I love more than anyone else in the world doesn’t fit into my current value system, then I need to change that value system.” If our image of God would sacrifice a child, we need to change that image of God.
I came out as genderqueer two years ago, but the journey to discovering my queerness began well beyond that. I found an old preschool yearbook that asked the children, “What is your favorite thing to do in school?” And kids wrote, “Lighting the Shabbat candles” and “Making challah” - it was a very Jewish preschool - but my response was, “Dressing up in women’s clothing.” Much like an Agatha Christie novel, there were clues along the way. In fact, I bought my first dress at a thrift shop when I was living in Alabama, but it hid tucked away in my closet for years. I was too scared to wear it out. That wouldn’t be normal. It took a pandemic that confronted me with how toxic our normal is - and a great deal of encouragement from my friends and queer activists and artists - for me to finally come out. It has to happen in community.
The theme of this Rosh Hashanah is life cycles. Charlotte’s Web is not only a parable about why we shouldn’t eat pork, but it is a beautiful reflection on life cycles. Wilbur is going to be sacrificed because he’s the runt of the litter - and therefore unprofitable - but, like Sarah stopping Abraham’s knife, Charlotte writes words in her web, and using the tools of nature, saves Wilbur’s life - and, in the end, she dies herself. I performed for all ages, even with the play’s heavy themes. After a show one day, an older woman came up to me, and she took my hand. Or, my hoof - I was still in my pig suit - and, with tears in her eyes, she said to me, “Thank you for saying the word ‘death.’" After a different performance, a four- year-old boy came up to me, with tears in his eyes, took my hoof, brought me very close, and said, “I didn’t want Charlotte to die.” And I looked at him and I said, “Neither did I.” We didn’t solve the grief that exists in nature, but we connected over it. In the Aristotelian tradition of theater, we go to the depths of despair, we cry and we weep, we experience catharsis, and then the lights come on, we look
around, and we realize we’re alive, and we’re together, and we can connect over these feelings. “Your healing is my healing. How can I support you?”
After Charlotte’s death, Wilbur tells her children about her acts of generosity. Her words live on, like the words of Rabbi Stevens, though he’ll never know the impact they had on me. This is where I find God - in nature, in theater, in ritual, in the words and stories that we pass on to our children. In structures that allow us to face the realities of the world around us, together, safely and in community. And when those structures no longer keep us safe - we change them. The greatest writer of the 20th century, James Baldwin, said, “Not everything that’s faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I’m grateful to be here with you all, facing our world and our lives, reflecting on the year behind us and the year to come. In this new year, I want to embody Rabbi Richman’s ethic of care, Gabor Mate’s paradigm of healing, and Sarah’s grief, generosity, and protest, facing this patriarchal culture of greed and power head on and working to dismantle it, for my students, for our children, for future generations, to light the fire of learning and love and keep the candles burning. Shana Tovah.