“FIVE QUESTIONS IN SEARCH OF AN ANSWER”
PART TWO –
“Why Be Jewish?”
A Sermon for Rosh HaShanah Day 5765
September 16, 2004







Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana

    “Why be Jewish?”— It is a question of course that those people in Theresienstadt had no need of asking.  As it was in so many centuries prior, they were defined and their perilous status assigned them by others; their identity was often reduced to a number tattooed upon their arm.

    Today, in France, in Hungary, Holland, and Poland, Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and institutions are suffering the increasing ravages of anti Semitism reborn.  Violence and terrorism threaten the lives of Jewish children on their way to school, record number of French Jews are accepting Prime Minister Sharon’s invitation to come home to Israel.

    So by no means am I unmindful of the stubborn prevalence of anti-Semitism, either here in America or across the world.  But, thank God my friends, today you and I enjoy an unprecedented degree of volition as to how we choose to answer this question “Why Be Jewish?”

    Pakistan, February 21, 2002, journalist David Pearl, not unlike the Patriarch Abraham, answered the summons to sacrifice for his beliefs.  Tragically, for Pearl there was no ram in the thicket.  

    Do you remember his last words to his despicable captors?  “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”  My point is this.  Whether in extremes or in easy going times of convenient assimilation, every one of us ought to be able to answer this question:  “Why be Jewish?”

    Oh, of course, we are likely to adjust and refine that answer as we grow in experience and in wisdom, but on any given day, we ought to have a ready reply when asked: “Why Be Jewish?”  So let’s take a look at some possible responses.

I.
BIRTH

    Some of us would surely reply— well I’m Jewish because that’s who I am.  I was born a Jew and, it is possible that had I been born into another faith or ethnic group, I would probably be just as happy.  But Jewish I was born and Jewish I will stay.  It has shaped my entire view of existence, my memories and slang, my humor, my values, my tastes, my pride, my shame, my guilt— oh yeah, my guilt, my prejudices, my ambitions and my standards.  Being born into a Jewish family has made a profound difference.

    Being Jewish is how I relate to life.  My Judaism has always given me a sense of connectedness with life.  Or as Michael Medved puts it:

    Jewishness (however we choose to define it) attaches us to our fellow Jews around the world, guaranteeing membership in a large, contentious, frequently quarreling, always emotional, extended family.

    I’m always looking to spot another Jew in a crowd.  Being born a Jew I can be among the most indifferent or happily moved to celebrate and discover the depths of Judaism’s intellectual and emotional resources.  It’s more than a faith for kids.  Far, far more.

    “Why be Jewish?”  Well, because I was born a Jew, that’s why.

II.
IT’S HOW I TAKE MY STAND

    Alright, here’s another take you might prefer and I hope you do.  Being Jewish is far more than an accident of birth; it is the way I stand firm in life’s raging storm.  Russian anthropologist, Michael Chlenov (Shlay-nov) insists:  “Judaism is a tool of resistance.”  Resistance to what?  To the politically correct, to the status quo, to the emperor who has no clothes!  To the easy way?  To the evil way? It is how we Jews seek to distinguish wisdom and truth from folly and falsehood.

    I mean think about it for a moment.  To be a Jew is to belong to a people isn’t it.  A people that was expelled to Babylon from its homeland 2700 years ago.  And then the Persians tried to annihilate us 2500 years ago.  The Greeks tempted us with togas, orgies and ham sandwiches 2200 years ago.  But the Maccabees kept the menus kosher.  

    No other people’s story parallels the survival of our Jewish faith and family.  Fifty-six years ago an ancient dream was realized when the Jewish state of Israel was reestablished.  And, a couple of months ago we visited the birthplace of Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism.  How right he was!  The events this year in Europe only prove the necessity of a Jewish homeland where, when no one else wants us or protects us, our own kin welcome us with open arms and a secure embrace.

    Henry Kissinger used to quip:  “I know that I am paranoid, but that don’t mean I ain’t got enemies!”  “Why be Jewish?”  To ensure that there will be a Jewish state to support it. To defend it.  To visit it— a test we failed this year!

    I remember Alan Dershowitz’s fabulous lecture in New Orleans last spring when Dershowitz insisted:

We Jews have played a crucial and perhaps even unique role in the unfolding of human affairs.  Sometimes willingly and sometimes despite our wish, we have been the ones to challenge the conventional wisdom, provoking no little antagonism (and worse) as a result.

Why be Jewish?  Because it’s our way of standing firm in the storm. Its how we take our stand.

III.
BEING JEWISH IS HOW WE DREAM

    Now here’s a third possibility.  I wonder if you’ve thought of this one. To be a Jew is to identify yourself with great dreamers and intellects, and with visions and ideas which have often proven earth shattering in importance.  Being Jewish how we dream.

    Larry King once asked the ailing Harry Golden, author and publisher of the “Carolina Israelite”, if he ever regretted being Jewish.  He replied, “not at all” because, as he figured it, after death he was destined to meet four possible leaders in the afterlife:  Moses, Jesus, Marx or Freud.  And since they were all of them Jewish Golden figured he was on the right team from the start.

    An actress, comic and writer, when asked “Why be Jewish?”,  Sarah Silverman responded:

Remember the guy who smashed all the idols in the idol store?  (of course she was referring to Abraham in that great midrash). His mother had a heart attack when she saw the mess, but I’m sure she bragged about it later.  That’s us.  That’s me.  I am Jewish.

    So we are the idol breakers are we?  Well yes, that often has been our role and I hope that it continues to be throughout history. I’d rather break them than make them! That impulse has led us, among other callings, to the practice of law.  Ruth Bader Ginzburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1993, when she was asked, “Why are you Jewish?”   In essence replied:

Because the demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition.  I hope, in all the years I have the good fortune to serve on the bench. . .I will have the strength and courage to remain steadfast in the service of that demand.  

“Why be Jewish?”  Because Judaism is an invitation to make a difference by exercising our prophetic potential.  

Says actor Richard Dreyfus, who describes himself as “a passionate Jewish agnostic”:

Say that it’s God, say that it’s the complexities of history.  Say that it’s a mystery.  Say that it’s a metaphor, whatever, but I believe that the Jews are chosen to illuminate the human condition, good and bad . . . .

    Since 9-11, for understandable reasons, many believe the mood of America has been entirely too self-preoccupied, too mousy, too fearful and suspicious of discord.  There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man or woman all wrapped up in themselves.  

An unhealthy reaction has threatened to freeze civil debate and there is an unwholesome tendency to accept unquestioned— the politically correct and status quo.

    As Jews, you and I are the inheritors of a powerful legacy of prophetic protest.  Amos and Jeremiah, Isaiah and Micah attest to the irrefutable fact that “Hell is truth seen too late.”  And as Bill Coffin writes:

Truth is above harmony.  And those who fear disorder more than injustice invariably produce more of both. . . . good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world.

    In a recent interview with the brilliant American Jewish Playwright, Lake Charles native, Tony Kushner, author of the magnificent “Angels in America” and the current Broadway hit, “Caroline or Change”, describes his take on our Rosh HaShanah question: “Why be Jewish?”  Says Kushner:

Our willingness to speak and articulate things that even seem heretical and to refuse to accept common wisdom is what has given us our astonishing resistance to the dominant cultures in which we Jews found ourselves.

    As so, dear friends, this insightful and fearless Jewish American has not hesitated to loudly denounce the actions and policies of homophobic legislators, the Pope in the Vatican, President Bush in the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and, for that matter, anyone else whom he believes to be working mischief and at odds with the highest values of the human family.

    Well, that’s a reason to be Jewish isn’t it?  To lift a voice, to speak truth to power, and to exercise our own moral muscle in a weak-kneed society of mindless and gut-less lemmings.  

    There was a Scottish theologian and teacher of ministers who, on the last day before ordination, used to look out upon his class (in those days all of them male), and this is what he would advise them:

‘Gentlemen’, he would say, ‘magnify your certainties’.

Well, so my dear ones, ought we!  As a once forsaken Torah has been brought back to life and taken its place in our sacred ark, ours too is to “magnify our certainties.”

    And it is, in that certain faith, that we most happily embrace the gift of this new year.

Amen