Caught Between Heaven and Hell

The world is on fire and I'm living in paradise. But there's something I can do about it. 

 

Summer’s gone it’s been a long September

Nothing matters long as we’re together

Yeah we’re living in paradise. - Bon Jovi

Labor Day has passed and I feel very strange. After over 40 years in the pulpit rabbinate, I’ve retired to a New England shoreline community that can only be described as paradise. Below are some of the scenes I saw this week during my daily walks.

That’s an osprey nest up on the roof (top left), a catbird on the branch (center square) - posing that close to me, and sounding like this. And there’s a grey heron out there on the right, sitting and sunning and occasionally honking in the salt marsh, and a webworm moth on the Shoreline Greenway (left) that, according to one reviewer, looks like a ‘60s couch that got up and walked away.

These are my congregants right now, my morning minyan - and it is spectacular. They may squawk a little, but never really complain about the AC.

The walks feel strange, but what is strangest is that here it is, post Labor Day, just a few weeks from Rosh Hashanah, and I’m not immersed in writing sermons. For those who know me, you know that I’ve always taken High Holiday sermons very seriously, developing themes and weaving threads many months in advance, to craft a unified message that is entertaining, motivating and - I took great pride in this - thoroughly original. My whole year used to revolve around those sermons. People looked forward to hearing or reading the full four-sermon cycle, to see how things all would turn out.

Until now.

And now, with Labor Day behind us, is the first time I’m really feeling it. No sermons this year. I don’t know how it will all turn out.

But with every loss there is a gain. And what I’ve gained this year is the time to do other kinds of writing, some of which is finding its way into this Substack, some of which going to other locations, like today’s column on children and culture wars for the Religion News Service.

And there is another gain too. No longer do I have to couch political advocacy with a “wink-wink,” No longer do I have to play the game of both sidesism, which so often leads to strange bedfellows of moral equivalence. No longer do I have to say, “Trump lied 30,000 times during his presidency…but Kamala misrepresented her position once in 2019, so there’s that.”

This year beyond any other, it’s important for every rabbi to speak from a place that is pure and deliver a message completely clean of equivocation; even if, for me this year, that pulpit happens to be a salt marsh in Madison with a bunch of birds and bugs.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. I am living in Gan Eden - the Jewish term for paradise (literally, the Garden of Eden). But there is a very fine line between Gan Eden and Gehinnom, which means hell. The two words are pronounced almost identically, with interchangeable “m”s and “n”s and with the Yiddishized accent on the second syllable.

Gannayden - Gehennom. Gehennom - Gannayden. Let’s call the whole thing off!

I may be in heaven, but right now all of us are living on the outskirts of hell. Israel has been experiencing that hell for nearly a year, with the past few days being especially excruciating. David Horovitz writes, in today’s Times of Israel, a screaming column that states, simply, Under Netanyahu, Israel is in existential danger. Read it and you’ll see that the danger has never been greater.

And a Trump victory would propel America and the world to a hellscape that we can barely imagine. So I can’t allow myself to be seduced by the fruits of this Gan Eden of mine. There is so much work to be done. The beauty is real but the peaceful feeling is so deceptive, like a music festival near the gates of Gaza. Paradise can become a hellscape in less than a second.

I’ve always had to keep my distance from direct involvement in political campaigns because of my position on the pulpit. No more. So I’ve become involved in supporting the Harris campaign and Jewish Democrats, because everything depends on what we do right now. I know that won’t please all of you, but my job, right now, is not to please all of you.

Back in 2018, during the midterms of the Trump administration, I wrote a piece for the New York Jewish Week (it won an award for commentary), called Rabbis’ Moment Of ‘Truth Is Truth’ which was a play on Rudy Giuliani’s “Truth isn’t truth” comment that was making the rounds at the time. Back then, while I was on a pulpit, I made the claim that rabbis didn’t have the luxury of standing above the fray, that we have a moral imperative to take a stand, especially on the High Holidays when so many are listening to us, and that it can be done delicately enough to avoid overt partisanship.

I wrote (keeping mind that Trump was then in power):

Rabbis are engaging in subversive acts every day, simply by doing our jobs. Just by standing up for decency and honesty — for being a mensch — I’ve become an accidental insurgent. Homilies that I have been delivering for decades, emphasizing basic values like humility and generosity, all now sound like a call to arms. Even the most pedestrian moral messages can be interpreted as zingers at the White House: “Love the stranger.” “Tell the truth.” “Be faithful to your partner.” “Words matter.” These have always been my bread and butter. Now they’ve become fodder for the resistance.

Jews will be looking to their rabbis for inspiration. We can’t flee like Jonah. There is no place to hide. Maybe that is the hidden blessing of this current moment — but only if we are ready to say “truth is truth” to power. This Rosh Hashanah is a moment, that, for rabbis, will define not just our careers, but — just maybe — our lives. 

I’m living in paradise and my congregants are too busy chirping and molting to care much about what I say. But I sense that they sense that what humans do matters to their survival.

A plea to all my colleagues who are still parading on pulpits: What you say this year will be very important - and will have a direct impact on America, Israel, and the tranquil, lovely landscape where I’ve set down roots and where my new congregants interrupt the sermon to lay their eggs.