There are a couple of major news stories this week that touch on our identities as Jews, or as those exploring Judaism or supporting Jewish loved ones: one local, one national.
On the local level, many of you may be aware of the planned “boycott ride” on Sunday, November 8, organized by a small local group of self-described left-wing bicycle riders,targeting Jewish- and Israeli-American-owned restaurants Mac Mart, K’far Cafe, Huda, Goldie, and Schleschinger’s, declaring “No Business for Zionists!” and “These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!”
I have written in the past about how the word “Zionist” (sometimes shortened to “Zio,” a word brought into prominence by the self-described white supremacist David Duke) is often used as a euphemism for Jew. (Explore theselinks for examples.)
Of course, Zionist has an actual meaning: an adherent of the recognition of the Jews as a people with rights to establish and sustain a state in their homeland, Eretz Yisra’el.
And, while it is exceptional in the world to have an existing state whose right to existence is still being debated some 78 years after its founding, good-faith debates about the actions of that state are not antisemitic.
(Note, one of my least favorite exchanges to witness is something like the following, asked of a politician running for office: Q: “Does Israel have the right to exist?” A: “Israel does exist. Why am I being asked this?” — The reason the question still needs to be asked is because so many people are actively working to ensure Israel is dismantled and no longer exists. That is the literal platform of anti-Zionism. Whether or not states have the existential “right to exist” is beside the point if the existence of only one existing state in the world is questioned.)
It’s not unreasonable to have debates about Israel and U.S. support for Israel, to have harsh criticism with respect to the actions of these governments. But, we’ve moved from debates about governmental policy, to boycotts of Israeli-American owned restaurants here in the United States, to boycotts of Jewish-owned restaurants here in the United States. It is likely that the organizers and supporters of these boycotts would argue that the owners of these establishments have said or done politically supportive things about Israel. Even if that were true (and I have no evidence that it is), is that a standard we witness with respect to other nationalities? A felt connection to a national homeland that someone finds politically objectionable results in a boycott here in the United States?
The history of antisemitism is informative here, a history about which contemporary participants in these debates tend to be remarkably incurious. Jews have, in society after society, been scapegoated for evolving reasons, under evolving guises. In the New Testament, which positioned Jews as the wrongheaded, mendacious opponents to Jesus, the seeds were sown in that influential text, often taken out of context, to position Jews as antithetical to any society’s values system, whether politically, theologically, economically, or culturally. It has often been seen as righteous, part of the fight for social justice, to oppose Jewishness, in whatever form that takes. Today, the form it takes is in conversations around Zionism and Israel.
Again, it is possible to have good-faith criticisms on these topics. Lord knows I had my hopes for the most recent election and deplore whenever I see settler attacks on Palestinian villages and other moves that block a path forward to peace for two peoples living side by side. Some people do the work and are able to consciously identify how millennia of antisemitic influence informs all of our thinking and are better able to parse out their criticism of Israel. Others remain blind to it, and that antisemitism manifests as demonization of “Zionists.” It’s deplorable to see that take place here.
Fortunately, the energy in response to the boycott has been stronger than the energy behind it. The Jewish community has been united in pushing back against this. I’ve learned that Goldie had a record sales day yesterday, and I encourage you to patronize all of these businesses not just on Sunday (in fact, I’ve learned that some of the businesses are hoping to keep a low profile on Sunday) but far beyond.
I’m grateful that some political leaders like Governor Josh Shapiro, U.S. Senators Dave McCormick and John Fetterman, Attorney General Dave Sunday, U.S. Representative Brendan Boyle, Mayor of Philadelphia Cherelle Parker, and Pennsylvania State Representative Amen Brown have all made statements decrying this boycott. When those outside the Jewish community speak up, it makes a big difference.
Speaking of electoral politics, we experienced a watershed moment on a national level this week. The results of Tuesday’s U.S. election marked one of the largest single-day shifts in the political tides in modern history, with a significant repudiation of the direction this country has been taking over the last two years, and in some respects a repudiation of the person who has been at the top of the political discourse over the last ten.
An electoral victory this broad, in this many different districts in the country, rural and urban, with this many different styles and approaches of politicians (though all caucusing with Democrats) probably doesn’t tell any single story about the future of the country. Voters seemed to be sick of any or all of the following: a high cost of living on everything from housing to healthcare to gas prices; an unpopular war with Iran that may have contributed to those rising prices; self-dealing and personal enrichment among the political elite in power; a visible level of harshness and zealousness in immigration enforcement, and more. No single approach, for example, to issues around Israel connected all of these Democratic wins.
Political tides shift rapidly in the United States, and we don’t know how long this shift will endure. But many new senators, governors, and representatives are beginning six-, four-, and two-year terms, with an opportunity to make a significant impact. We pray for peace and justice in our country and in our world, with our own engagement in the political process being part of what actualizes those prayers.
Finally, I want to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night, when we hosted the Jerry and Lois Rosenberg Scholar-in-Residence Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who offered a remarkable teaching on our yearning for the experience of home in this broken world.
(If you can believe it, our next Jay R. Baer Scholar-in-Residence Shabbat with thenationally renowned Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is just around the corner on Friday and Saturday, March 5 and 6. You can register here.)
I am profoundly intrigued, called to, by the topic of tonight’s teaching — finding a sense of home in an uncertain world.
I say this because, on a personal level, I find traces of my own life in the Jewish experience that Rabbi Feigelson will speak about this evening. That experience being, as Professor Elliot Ginsburg has called it, knowing “the joys of homecoming, and the enduring dislocations of exile.”
By the time I was two, my family had already called five different cities home, if you could even use the word “home” for such short stays: three cities on the West Coast, a stay in another city that will feature in our story of homecoming, and Jerusalem, before finally finding a home right here in Philadelphia. We managed to stay in Philly for about ten years, before those peripatetic journeys resumed: back and forth across the coasts we went; I lived in six more cities over the course of my twenties, four on the West Coast, two on the East Coast, before once again returning to a seventh, here in Philly for rabbinical school at age 30, where I have lived ever since.
So when I say that this archetypal Jewish experience of homecoming and dislocation speaks to me, I mean it on a very literal level. But I also mean it on a spiritual level. This type of dislocation can have profound effects; it can, one might say, disrupt the soul, can give us a sense of wondering. Where is my place? Do I have one?
And yet, while my family’s travels might be one extreme, though certainly there are many others with similar experiences, it’s my belief that all of us, for various reasons, at different points in our lives, feel this sense of spiritual dislocation, of asking, where is my place? Do I have one?
I often cite the Midrash of Hillel haZeken, Hillel the Elder, whose students would walk with him on their way home from the Beit Midrash, the study hall. After a while, they noticed that he always seemed to be walking home with a real sense of urgency, a real sense of purpose. And on one walk they asked him, “Rabeinu, our teacher, where are you going walking like this?” He said to them, “To perform an act of kindness for the guest inside my house.” They said to him: “Wow, you seem to have a guest every day.” To which he responded: וְהָדֵין נַפְשָׁא עֲלוּבְתָּא לָאו “Is not my poor soul a guest in my body, here today, gone tomorrow?”
The guest he is urgently working to make feel at home was not an external visitor, but himself. Visitors in this world as we all, in some sense, are, it can be easy for us to feel a sense of estrangement and alienation.
The Jewish experience of exile is in many ways the collective story that holds this heartbreak for all of us. Our ancestors throughout the generations, dispersed as they have been from their homeland, have yearned for a sense of place, praying each day, three times a day in the traditional liturgy, for a return home.
As we said, one understanding of that home is Yerushalayim, Jerusalem. As Professor Nathaniel Deutsch observes, Jerusalem contains the Hebrew word shalem which means something like wholeness, peace, perfection. And so at the end of Pesah or Yom Kippur when we sing l’shanah haba’ah beyerushalayim, in addition to any geographical yearnings that are held by that song, it is also holding this yearning to experience wholeness, peace.
At the same time, as Deutsch points out, there is a different popular teaching in Jewish life that also contains this word for wholeness, shalem: ayn davar yoter shalem mi lev shavur. There is nothing more shalem, more whole, this popular teaching says, than a lev shavur, a broken heart.
And so, Deutsch’s reflection that Jerusalem is whole and a broken heart is whole leaves us with some paradoxical questions. What is the wholeness we seek when we sing, “Next year in Jerusalem”: is it a return from exile or the embrace of a broken heart? Is exile a punishment that distances us from God, he asks, or an opportunity to get closer to God (God goes with us in exile, tradition teaches)? “Is it more Jewish to be broken than whole? Or is the point of Judaism the attempt to find wholeness in brokenness?”
Now, lest we run the risk of glorifying exile, of glorifying brokenness, I want to be clear that this is not a teaching calling upon us to seek it out. In this shevirat hakelim, fractured world, in which we live, we don’t have to go too far to find the brokenness. It will find us.
But fortunately, so, too, do moments of wholeness, moments of homecoming. Home can find us too, or we can find it, ephemeral as it might sometimes feel.
I feel it every time, for example, even if it’s just a couple of times a year at this stage, when, in the middle of the night, Caroline and I hear the pitter-patter of not one, but two sets of feet, as both of our daughters climb into bed with us, all four of us in one room under one roof, a sense of home I’ve rarely known in this life. I feel it every time the four of us are around the dinner table together, sharing the highs and lows, the peaches and pits, as we call it, of our days.
In a sense, I feel it every time I’m doing this: for the millennia that the Jewish people have been in exile, have been experiencing a sense of brokenness, once per week, without fail, we experience an invitation to a sense of shalom, of wholeness, one might say, of peace, and that’s Shabbat. Each week we are invited to experience Shabbat, which tradition teaches is a taste of olam haba, the world to come, where we all come home, where we all find our place. Shabbat, where after six days of toil and struggle we mirror the Holy One who said, “Now it’s time for me to be.”
For me, I have found a sense of place in Judaism writ large. There have been chapters of life where I haven’t been as engaged with my Jewishness as I was when I was a child or as I am today, and while by no means would I suggest that Jewishness is the only means of finding a sense of homeness, for me, returning to it has been vital. Stepping into the rhythms that have been walked by ancestors for generations, whose echoes still seem familiar to us, inheriting their experience of knowing both home and exile, of having discerned teachings and rituals that transmit this memory, and the responses that flow from it, while also inviting each of us to contribute something to the tapestry that has been collectively woven, is profound. Jewishness has helped me find my place.
Jewishness also holds for me another invitation to experience a sense of home, of place, which is place as manifest in our relationship to the Divine, to God, a name for whom in Hebrew is indeed simply HaMakom, The Place. As it says in the Midrash, this is because הוּא מְקוֹמוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם
The Holy One is the place of the world. One way of articulating this is that the world is situated within God. No matter where we are in the world, God is in that place, even if we did not know.
When we offer words of consolation to mourners, to those who may be most experiencing their worlds having been turned upside down, who may be most experiencing a sense of displacement, what do we say? We say HaMakom yenahem et-hem, may HaMakom, the Holy One who is known by the name HaMakom, the place, the home, comfort, console you b’tokh she’ar avelei Tziyon viYerushalayim, alongside all of those feeling an enduring sense of having lost their place, from having lost a sense of grounding. We’re not all actively in mourning, but according to Jewish tradition, while we all have moments of feeling at home, we also all have experiences of feeling out of place, and the ultimate place, HaMakom, the Divine, to whom we can always turn, pours out nehama, comfort, compassion.
May we all feel the solidarity of home in knowing that each of us has moments of exile and displacement, and may we all feel the comfort and compassion of knowing there is a place to which we can always turn.
targeting Jewish- and Israeli-American-owned restaurants Mac Mart, K’far Cafe, Huda, Goldie, and Schleschinger’s, declaring “No Business for Zionists!” and “These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!”
Speaking of electoral politics, we experienced a watershed moment on a national level this week. The results of Tuesday’s U.S. election marked one of the largest single-day shifts in the political tides in modern history, with a significant repudiation of the direction this country has been taking over the last two years, and in some respects a repudiation of the person who has been at the top of the political discourse over the last ten.
Finally, I want to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night, when we hosted the Jerry and Lois Rosenberg Scholar-in-Residence Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who offered a remarkable teaching on our yearning for the experience of home in this broken world. 
In a sense, I feel it every time I’m doing this: for the millennia that the Jewish people have been in exile, have been experiencing a sense of brokenness, once per week, without fail, we experience an invitation to a sense of shalom, of wholeness, one might say, of peace, and that’s Shabbat. Each week we are invited to experience Shabbat, which tradition teaches is a taste of olam haba, the world to come, where we all come home, where we all find our place. Shabbat, where after six days of toil and struggle we mirror the Holy One who said, “Now it’s time for me to be.”