One God, Two Names, One Tent: Sermon on Parshat Va’era

Sometimes adulthood, and leadership, is about making decisions that you wish you didn’t have to make, but which you are rather convinced are right. We are often faced with a situation we wish were different.  But we do not script the canvas upon which we paint the landscape of our lives, or influence. We inherit reality, confront it, and try to make decisions informed as much as possible by our values, even if our values most point to a desired reality far different than the one we face.

COVID has been all about that: Decision-makers around this institution, and city and nation and globe, faced with a situation they rued, having to make the best possible decisions given the circumstances. Such decisions emerge from a less than perfect situation, and as such the decisions themselves are vulnerable to second-guessing, ridicule and even contempt. Certainly, they are vulnerable to not being understood.

I, and members of the Temple Beth Am (TBA) leadership, made such a decision recently. It was to permit a group of TBA members to self-organize, under the informal imprimatur of the TBA communal banner, but not as a formal TBA group with direct oversight from staff, but as a cohort of conservative political thinkers.  A subset of them came to us with this request. In recent months and years, they, many of them decades-long devoted members of the community, testified to feeling on the outs, judged a priori for anything they might say or do in the community as a result of their identifying as conservatives. They felt they were losing their sense of feeling at home within what had been their spiritual home.

In an era in which many conservatives decry “safe spaces” as arenas full of liberal snowflakes, this group of conservatives ached for a safe space within TBA, which would be free from recrimination. And in an era in which many liberals tout safe spaces and properly insist on our listening to and believing those who say they feel uncomfortable, targeted, othered and treated unfairly, some on the more liberal side in our community contested whether this group of conservatives’ experiences were real, legit, worthy, and whether creating a safe space for them to gather, share ideas and be a community within a community was proper.

Welcome to synagogue life in 2022.

The decision weighed on us. Mostly not because we were that split on what the decision ought to be.  That decision seemed rather obvious to us.  But it was weighty because we rued having to make it in the first place. Bucking a growing, and to me troubling, trend within Jewish communal life, TBA proudly exists as multichrome, eschewing the notion that what one believes about God charts in only one direction regarding what one must believe about country, about America, about poverty, about racial injustice, or about how to vote in an election.

Decades ago we pioneered a multiple minyan model, suggesting that there is more than one way to pray to God.  And within the community, and within each minyan in this community, we have AIPAC donors, J-Street devotees, nearly avowed anti-Zionists and those who might support the ZOA, but might do it surreptitiously lest they be reprimanded. We are wonderfully kaleidoscopic. I am proud of that, even and especially during these times of riven national identities.  A civil war may be raging, burgeoning out there. But we have found a way to be one community, one tent, at 1039 S. La Cienega. For as long as I am the rabbi here, that will be a stated, clear aspiration.

And so, the decision we made sat well with us. But the circumstances that pushed us to have to make it did not. All of us wished that there were no need for individual subgroups within our community to have to self-organize as such, especially if that self-organization was not just to offer niche programming, which we do all the time, but because the self-organization stemmed from their feeling unwelcome, lacking an embracing space to be who they really are.

As a political being who, myself, rejects over-labeling, and straddles a wide center, and answers the question about whether I am right-wing or left-wing by saying: tell me what issue we are talking about, and I will tell you where I stand, for now, and why, and I am open to reconsidering…I witnessed first-hand some of the pain this group of TBA conservatives spoke of.  

It cannot be forbidden, or unsafe, to be conservative at a Conservative synagogue.

One memorable example for me was at one of our Hanukkah Monologues within the last few years. These powerful, curated evenings of self-revelation are stirring gatherings. People share from the depths of their soul, and it is nearly impossible not to feel pulled in to their narrative. One year one of the presentations veered from personal and vulnerable sharing into political grandstanding. And it did so in a way that at least seemed to suggest that the presenter just assumed that such a stance would resonate with every person present. And if not, too bad. That was the tone.

As someone not personally so at odds with what this person presented, I did not feel wounded and othered. But I knew that any person present who tended more towards the conservative side of American political thinking would not have experienced it as if they had been invited to consider a different approach, but rather that they had been bludgeoned by the presenter’s certainty and certain expectation that every person present agreed. One long-time member of our community, a beloved, gentle, generous and utterly humane person who self-identifies as conservative, gently wept that night, and then emailed me the next week, wondering if TBA could still be a home.

Such moments dig at me. Profoundly. They dig at me in the same way they would if the person feeling that way, that outed, that unmoored were feeling it because they were part of the LGBTQ community, or the black/brown/Asian community, or indigent community, or, yes, liberal/leftist community and felt patently unsafe or unwelcome in our midst.

Small tents help define what we believe, and what we don’t; what is right and what is wrong. If someone wanted to start a Messianic Judaism minyan in our building, we’d say “no.” But our tent must be big enough to include those on all parts of the political, sexual, gender, racial and financial spectrum.  It cannot be forbidden, or unsafe, to be conservative at a Conservative synagogue. Particularly because we are knowingly varied when it comes to what we believe about God and Torah and religion, how can we be less varied when it comes to what we believe God and Torah and religion say about being an Angeleno, a Californian?  We can share space with one who disagrees with us about what God says about Judaism, but not about what God says about America?

We can share space with one who disagrees with us about what God says about Judaism, but not about what God says about America?

So to come full circle, we agreed to have this group meet, and since they started their soft-advertising, more people than they expected or knew about identified themselves as being interested.  A few said that they wondered whether they could still call TBA their home, or whether others had left their previous shul, as a result of their political leanings.

How did we get here? And in what way is this topic, this sermon, a d’var torah rather than a “state of the union”?  One of my most treasured teachers, the great Micha Goodman who teaches at Hartman and elsewhere, has a wonderful notion about the inverse relationship between one’s sense of one’s God and one’s certainty about one’s own decisions and stances.  Common thought in the Jewish world is that the more frum you are, the more you believe in God.  Look at how long my skirt is! Look how punctiliously I make my tea on Shabbat! Look at the long list of hekhshers I don’t accept. It must be that I am incredibly God-fearing.  My God is great, because my halakha, my personal practice, my convictions are precise and unyielding. That’s how I show my devotion.

Micha says it is the opposite. How small must your God be such that that God cares about such micro-moments in the cosmos?  How pusillanimous, and borderline narcissistic, your theology is if you are convinced that God must love and hate the same people you do, the same religious acts and, yes, the same American political positions and politicians? Micha, himself a devoted observant Jew, argues that the greater import and certainty you impute to any act, mitzvah, ritual or thought position, the smaller your God must be. And the greater your God is, the lesser the significance and rectitude is of anything you say, or do.  In 2022, however, we are living in perpetual Purim. Nahafokhu, topsy-turvy, where the pious get to hang their piety on their pettiness. Gone is the notion of a God who is truly grand.

This way of thinking dovetails with a fascinating sermon I heard recently. It was delivered by someone I first came to know of as a dear friend of Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who is the rector of the Seminario Rabbinico, the Masorti Rabbinical School in Buenos Aires. This colleague of Rabbi Skorka’s gave a sermon about littleness.  Here is one fetching line from the sermon: “God does not rise up in grandeur, but lowers Godself into littleness. Littleness is the path that God chose to draw near to us, to touch our hearts, to save us and to bring us back to what really matters.”

While one could erroneously understand this message to mean, or only mean, that God is found in the miniature particulars of what we do, and what we think, I am pretty sure this message means that God is found in the miniaturized way in which we present who we are. Humble. Curious. Uncertain as a religious value. Now, this may be the first time that a drash given at TBA quoted a Christmas homily. For the friend of Rabbi Skorka’s who gave this homily was the Pope. And I am inspired by his message. Both Pope Francis and Micha Goodman are in good company.

On a flight recently I got happily lost in a not-great but not-awful Hollywood take on the Civil War called Cold Mountain. Nicole Kidman. Jude Law.  Renee Zellweger. Lots of death.  But in the middle of it was a line that pierced this rabbinic soul. The general context was futility of war, even a righteous war such as the Civil War which propelled our great country out of the scourge and the scar of slavery. On the ugly, brutal battlefield, away from the generals and leaders whose lives were not in danger, brothers against brothers were in a merciless battle to the death, that seemed far removed from true rights and wrongs. One weary soldier says, “I imagine god is weary being called down on both sides of an argument.”

How pithy. Can we not believe in and worship a God who can be genuinely and earnestly called upon by those with whom we strongly disagree?  Can we not sit together and assume that the person in front and in back has a different conception of what God might have to say about being alive, being a Jew, being a citizen, being an American? And can we not celebrate that admixture, choose it, aspire to it…rather than balkanize ad infinitum?  What’s the next subgroup who will ask for TBA’s imprimatur? Democrats of TBA? Republicans?  Carnivores of Beth Am? Vegans?

While niche programming has its merit, I hope that is not the general direction we go in. I am, after all, the one-kiddush guy.  Even if we daven in different spaces, and in slightly different ways, we can’t eat a bowl of cholent together every week? But if we cannot figure out, individually and communally, how to act in a way in which our political or religious or conceptual adversaries feel safe and welcome, being their full selves, in our presence…if we cannot hold back from projecting that our sense of God excludes their sense of self, their amalgamation of thoughts and principles, then we are destined to subdivide such that we are only a myriad of tents, who just happen to be pitched at the same address on La Cienega.

Oh right…it’s Parshat Va’era. What insight might it have? From the opening lines, a lot.  Its first verse lays bare the indivisible God’s utter divisibility.  Many of you know the general rabbinic notion that reads the two main names of God as representing different attributes of that God.  Elohimis justice, harsh decree and unyielding punishment. Adonaiis tender intimacy, forgiveness and mercy.  Both of those names, and divine aspec launch us into Va’era, and thus out of slavery. Elohim spoke to Moshe. And said to him, I am Adonai.  Perhaps we have the bulk of the meaning and import of Torah right in those schizophrenic 8 words.

The God who invites Moshe into a relationship, and will battle Pharaoh, and who will redeem Israel and thus create our nation, is multichrome, kaleidoscopic, at times manifest as seemingly merciless fury, at times the most gentle force in reality. A midrash in Shemot Rabbah on this verse says that this divided aspect of God is not just present in reality at large, but can evolve and change one second to another. Such a metamorphosis happens in the verse itself. God begins as elohim, chastising Moshe for seemingly losing faith a few verses earlier.  But then, mid-thought, God becomes adonai, recognizing that a different tone, a different view of the same set of facts, was what this moment required.  Surely such a God, who tolerates God’s own shimmering, shifting, transposing realities, can bless, and be present, and be worshiped by all at Temple Beth Am. Without fear of being harnessed as the defender of just one approach to thought and life, and America.

I always keep a book in my tallis bag, to read a few pages at a time here and there during services.  Much easier to do when I am on vacation!  Right now, that book is Yossi Klein Halevi’s “Letters to a Palestinian Neighbor.” It is a series of short essays, written as letters to a conjured Palestinian living just over the valley from Yossi’s home in French Hill.  The book attempts to describe, with clarity and without contempt, the truest and most compelling rationale for the Jewish claim to the land of Israel, and thus the State of Israel.  While part of me thinks I should remove the book and put it on my night stand so I can finish it in the next day or two, a larger part of me is reveling in reading it slowly, as one does Torah commentary, so that my experience within the book lingers and marinates.

It’s a masterpiece. Both in its erudition and knowledge of history, culture and geography, but also in its humility, which does not eviscerate its passion. And also in its curiosity about the counter-narrative, which takes nothing away from Yossi’s convictions about his own. I have never come across such a generous read and attempt at articulation of the narrative of an enemy sworn to one’s annihilation.  But Yossi does it without self-abnegation. And not to curry favor. He does it to model, maybe, to any Palestinians or Arabs who may read it, but mostly to us, his more devoted readers, what it means to believe in one’s story, one’s God, with no apology, but also to make capacious room for the story, the God, of the other. Even if the other wishes you did not exist, and militates so that you do not.  Yossi is a Jew and Zionist who would davven in any shul.  And would share services and kiddush and frank conversation with any member, any American, any Israeli, neither sacrificing his principles, nor making whatever other who may share that space with him feel anything but embraced, welcome, whole, accepted, a child of God.

We should be thrilled to share space with those who offer us the gift of pushing our certainties, and thus expanding our humanity.

How Yossi writes his book about existential realities facing the nation and state of Israel is how I desire us, here, to live our Jewish, Beth Am lives as we face one another in the midst of a tumultuous era.  We, too, face existential issues as Americans and Jews and Californians and Angelenos. And we dare not assume that our God is so picayune such that the divine spirit can be aligned with our, and nearly only our, views on all of the above.

We should be thrilled to share space with those who offer us the gift of pushing our certainties, and thus expanding our humanity.  We should, to paraphrase a witticism I have used before, which I originally heard from Professor Alex Kaye of Brandeis University, assume that those with whom we disagree are neither moron nor monster, but rather have much to teach us, which is different than saying that they are poised to convince us. And we should plant pegs in a tent narrow enough such that its boundaries mean something, so that there is a coherence to being a traditional, progressive, egalitarian, modern Conservative Jew in this city, but also wide enough such that we are not the ones who are partially responsible for the next splinter, the next individual or group who wonders, “at TBA, do I have a home?”

This is our one God, with two names, representing endless divinities, invoked with reverence and variety, under a singular protective tent.

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Adam Kligfeld is the senior rabbi at Temple Beth Am.