This sermon was delivered at our service on April 25th.
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Shabbat shalom.
Before I say anything else, I want to offer my gratitude to Rabbi Lizzi and Rabbi Steven for inviting me to share this space with you all this evening. Thank you too and mazzal tov to Nikki Kothari and to Jacob Gold on sharing this Shabbat with us all and for giving us reason to celebrate. And thank you—all the Mishkanites and Builders in this room or on the livestream—thank you all for being here to sustain this sacred community. The kind of love and support that we foster in this kind of uplifting space is so deeply needed in this time.
Before I share with you some words of Torah, I want to introduce myself briefly. I am Rabbi Jonah Rank, and since 2022, I have served as the Rosh Yeshivah of Hebrew Seminary: A Rabbinical School for Deaf & Hearing. As an institution, we have been in Chicagoland since 1992; we were founded as a pluralistic rabbinical school that trains rabbis—hearing and Deaf—to be able to work with hearing and Deaf Jews. Our rabbinical students who are full-time dedicate themselves to 5 years of study, studying Torah, Talmud, Kabbalah, Jewish history, Jewish ethics, and all the subjects you would find in any other 5-year North American not-exclusively-Orthodox rabbinical school; plus, we require our students to be able to lead and to communicate in a certain amount of American Sign Language and Signed English. For students who may be interested in learning more ritual knowledge and just a bit less of the intellectual tradition, we also offer a shorter 2-year Pararabbinic Program, which can also serve as a stopgap for students who decide they want to put in 3 more years and become a rabbi. I have the privilege of teaching Torah to a diverse population of students (diverse in age, ethnicity, Jewish denominational identity, sexual orientation, gender identity, economics, hearing status, dis/ability, and far more factors). For me, the purpose of teaching Torah is to create wiser, holier, and kinder leaders; they in turn also give others the tools for building a wiser, holier, and kinder society. With our home base being right here in Chicago, we have students who are local as well as students Zooming in from both coasts of this country—and, in one case, from Uganda. When we graduate someone from any of our programs, we expect our students to step into spaces as spiritual and ethical leaders—so profoundly needed in a world in need of healing. I want to talk to you about leaders.
A comedian whose name I have unfortunately forgotten once began his set with the following words: “First things first; here is what I don’t like about Hitler.” The audience laughed lightly. It was a dark but decent opener; it is hard to imagine anything more morally depraved than the genocidal ambitions and actions of the Nazi party. When we think about the definition of evil, the Sho’ah—which we usually call in English the Holocaust—feels like the lowest hanging fruit in our cultural vocabulary of evil. This word sho’ah (שואה) is hard to define; we often say sho’ah means “destruction.” But Sho’ah means more “than destruction.” The prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 38, heard God warning him of a time of deep divisions, when Ezekiel himself would turn to war and become like a stormy sho’ah overwhelming the whole earth (v. 9). The ancient poet who composed Psalm 35 imagined an enemy taken by surprise, caught in a net, and falling into a Sho’ah (v. 8). In the opening chapter of the Book of Proverbs, Chokhmah—Wisdom personified—mocks humanity for rejecting the contemplative life and getting lost in a whirlwind of a Sho’ah that the wise ones could have seen looming (vv. 22–33, esp. 27). Our spiritual forebears spoke of this amorphous thing they called Sho’ah: an uncontrollable chaos, but an all-too predictable tragedy if we would only use our senses.
Yesterday, the Mishkan community and Jews across the world marked Yom HaSho’ah—this “Day of Sho’ah,” a sanctified moment for remembering the horrors instigated by the Nazis and all who complied with their orders. Remembering this low point in human history compels us to vow “Never again,” yet I have often felt censored in discussing the enduring lessons of the Sho’ah.
You may be familiar with Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law is not an actual law; it is something of a prehistoric meme, appearing on the internet in 1990. Michael Godwin, an attorney and advocate for free speech on the internet, offered this formula: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” In other words, the longer that people spend arguing about anything online, the chances increase that somebody will irrationally and desperately liken somebody else to a Nazi. In some circles, this means that whoever first brings up the Sho’ah loses their debate. This kind of cynicism tempts us to believe that “Never again” doesn’t mean “don’t let the Sho’ah happen again.” Rather, Godwin’s Law tries to persuade us that “Never again” might only mean “the Sho’ah is over and will happen never again; relax.”
But I can’t relax—because the Sho’ah happened once, and, as Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”). When I hear of current attempts to ban from public libraries and from public schools books that support quote-DEI, and when I hear of attempts to withhold funding for educational institutions—I believe our present story echoes more than 30 university towns where Nazis burned more than 25,000 books associated with quote-“Jewish intellectualism” in May of 1933. When I recall that President Trump signed an Executive Order in January to ban trans people from serving in the military—I remember that, in May of 1935, the Wehrmacht, the German defense forces under Nazi rule, banned Jews from serving as officers. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week a National Disease Registry for Autism, this sounded more ambitious to me than when Nazis in November of 1941 ordered Dutch people of Jewish descent to self-report their heritage in municipal registries.
I believe that this terror in America is not exactly the Sho’ah, but the clouds in this political climate tell me we all have to be on the lookout for a Sho’ah. Incidentally, Michael Godwin—of Godwin’s Law fame—after 33 years finally identified an American politician that made him say, “Yes, it is okay to compare.” That politician now lives in the White House.
I wish I could tell you that these moments in history occur because of some illegal power grab—but Hitler rose to power by being legally appointed after a fair and democratic election; so too Donald Trump earned enough votes to garner a second term as President. I wish I could tell you that injustices arise because of constitutional crises—but Nazis came to power through constitutional means, and they adapted new and hateful laws; meanwhile, Americans today are discovering the strengths and severe weaknesses built into the grey areas that surround our systems of checks and balances. In other words, the problem we face is not the weakness of democracy alone; we are up against an ailing national moral conscience.
I am a Jew who almost never talks about the Sho’ah. You here tonight have now heard me say almost everything I have ever said about the Sho’ah. My day job is teaching and spreading Torah: specifically torat chesed—a Torah of lovingkindness. But a Torah of chesed—of lovingkindness—must be able to withstand the test of the Sho’ah; a Torah of lovingkindness must be able to survive every Sho’ah that has happened, and a Torah of lovingkindness must be able to outlast every Sho’ah that will happen.
Some 1500 years ago, the Babylonian Talmud, in tractate Bava Metzi’a (30b), asked: Why did the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. have to take place? The Talmud cedes the floor to one Rabbi Yochanan; this may have been Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who himself witnessed and escaped the destruction of Jerusalem before establishing a new yeshivah—a new Jewish and rabbinic cultural center—at Yavneh, west of Jerusalem. After considering the question—why was Jerusalem destroyed?—Rabbi Yochanan responds: the Jewish sages of Jerusalem ruled according to the laws of the Torah, but they never improved on the literal letter of the law of the Torah. The Jewish sages followed the law, but they did not exceed the law. The Hebrew phrase Rabbi Yochanan employed—lifnim mishurat haddin (לפנים משורת הדין), meaning “beyond the line of the law”—subtly whispers to us the secret behind every civilization: no law-code is sufficient unto itself; even the Torah is insufficient. When we have laws or rules, we cannot commit to behaviors that rely on the low bar of whatever minimalist mores we agree to in writing. We have to do better than the law.
Lifnim mishurat haddin—that principle of living beyond the line of the law—justifies the invention of rabbinic Judaism. There was Judaism before there were rabbis, but it barely looked like what Judaism looks like now. You may have heard that the Torah is holy, and I agree, but no Torah scroll is as holy as what we call the Oral Torah. Dr. James Kugel, in the end of his book How to Read the Bible, explains that, no matter how important the Torah may have ever been, what truly sanctified the Torah to the students of the Torah was the Oral Torah, the discourse that surrounded the written Torah. What we say to one another when we fill in the gaps of what is missing in the Torah sanctifies the Torah. What we say to one another when we smooth over inconsistencies in the Torah sanctifies the Torah. What we say to one another when we offer answers to hard questions the Torah poses sanctifies the Torah. A Judaism that is about the Torah alone is not Judaism; a Judaism that is all about just the Torah is a fundamentalist book club. Should a society hold in its highest esteem the original intentions of the authors of its constitution? Or should a society review its constitution from time to time and edit it so that the law can adapt to changing norms? Rabbi Yochanan voted against the Bible being some stand-alone book. The Written Torah needed the Oral Torah to develop so that, as society advanced, the “Torah” could evolve too. The definition of holiness needed to expand; the definition of morality needed to expand; the definition of wisdom needed to expand. The Torah needed to step forward—lifnim mishurat haddin. The Torah needs us to step forward—lifnim mishurat haddin—and I believe this country needs us to step forward, beyond the imagination of the Constitution.
You might be familiar with a practice called “doomscrolling:” consuming news articles or social media about troubling developments in the world. It’s easy to keep hoping for a glimmer of light at the end of that dark tunnel of the world wide web—and it’s addictive to sit in front of the soft blue light of our devices. This turns into what the political scientist Dr. Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyism.” In his 2020 book Politics is for Power, Dr. Hersh wrote:
A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics. Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family. (P. 3.)
Dr. Hersh continues:
Political hobbyists tend to be older than the general public… disproportionately… educated, male, and white… more likely to be Democrats than Republicans or independents… of the people who spend two hours a day on politics but no time on volunteering, 56 percent are men. But of those who spend that much time on politics, with at least some [emphasis mine] of it spent volunteering, 66 percent are women… An American who is white, college educated, and interested in politics… spend[s]… less time than racial minorities volunteering for political organizations. (Pp. 3–4 and 6.)
These statistics from Dr. Hersh present a disproportional reluctance to step up among those who oppose President Trump’s flavor of discriminatory laws. This is not a moral shortcoming per se, but that outweighed inactivism yields a society that can succumb to dangerous laws.
Is it possible that the time that I spend doomscrolling—or that anybody else spends engaged in political hobbyism—could be better spent? Certainly. Our mental health requires us to step back, to take breaks, and not to be in a constant Go Mode. Our need for self-care though should not exempt us from knowing that we and our neighbors may require more of us as a whole than we have ever imagined. Anyone who voted against your rights or my rights or your life or my life I sincerely believe simply does not know who you and I are and why we matter. As a Jewish community in the United States, we owe ourselves and the rest of this country relationships that build trust among misunderstood strangers; we owe ourselves and the rest of this country reasons to invest in protecting people and protecting rights that many have hesitated to consider vital. We owe this country an important lesson: that we should be living lifnim mishurat haddin. There must be a greater standard than the one we bear today.
To start up conversations with strangers about how we can do better demands skills that many of us never learned. Several organizations do train volunteers to engage in deep canvassing: holding true and heartfelt conversations with strangers about values that relate to issues that appear on our ballots. Deep canvassing yields conversations that rarely revolve around particular politicians or parties; these heart-to-hearts lift up the moral values that we want our society to express through our laws and leaders. And, according to all the research, even though deep canvassing is slow, it’s far more inspiring and impactful than text-banking, phone-banking, or knocking on a door to ask a voter which team they’re rooting for in the next election.
Stepping up to be a leader—whether as a volunteer or as a more formal leader—is more important now than ever. No level of leadership is too small for you to influence others or even to attract a large following. In 2021, millions of dollars from large PACs supported candidates running for their local school boards across the country. Why was there such excitement over these undervalued and overlooked municipal elected positions? Because somebody discovered that these undervalued and overlooked offices could quash students’ exposure to ideas that are now called D.E.I. Many well-populated parts of this country have shortages of people willing to run for lesser-known offices (Recorders of Deeds, Prothonotaries, Constables, Railroad Commissioners, and Mine Inspectors); and there is an even greater shortages of honest people willing to run. More than anything else, a society that has forgotten how to be compassionate needs leaders who can model honesty and empathy.
I do not train politicians, but Hebrew Seminary trains leaders. The skills that rabbis must learn—to sit and to grow with texts, to sit and to grow with people, and to sit and to grow with our deepest values—are at the core of what every leader in every society needs. The clouds may portend some storms ahead, but when I look out here this evening at a sea of people who could have chosen to be anywhere at all in the world, I see people who have chosen Mishkan, to gather in a community that chooses holiness, that chooses lovingkindness, and that chooses wisdom. This is a room full of potential leaders. Some 2,000 years ago, the Jewish sage Hillel taught, “במקום שאין בן אנשים השתדל להיות איש” (“in a place where there are no people of virtue, be a person of virtue.”)
If you are not yet a leader of any kind, consider it now. Now is a time to step up—lifnim mishurat haddin; we will all step forward.