Rabbi's Week in Review Blog

I spent the past Erev Shabbat in St. Louis to be with family after the death of my wonderful Aunt Rose (her funeral was on Erev Yom Kippur, an impossible time for me to leave town). We attended Kabbalat Shabbat services at Shaare Emeth, a large and long-standing St. Louis congregation. The generosity of spirit shown by Rabbis Bennett and Goldstein, and Cantor Warner made not only for a beautiful service, but made me feel gratitude for the way they supported my St. Louis family.  

We raced back to Kansas City to participate in the No Kings Rally at Mill Creek Park. As I surveyed the very large and very diverse crowd (the estimate for participation in all of the rallies from all over the country was 8.2 million), it both reminded me, and made me proud of the America in which I was born and raised, and have always called home. I was thinking in that moment at the rally of this week’s Torah portion - Parashat Noach (I know, the rabbi, in a seemingly random moment, was thinking about the Torah portion.)

Actually, I really was, and, in particular, thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel coming at the end of the Parashah. My understanding of the Babel story is that in striving to build a structure to reach G-d’s realm, this arrogant goal led G-d to punish the people by confusing languages and thereby creating chaos. A less obvious message might be that the story serves as a polemic against more centralized, urban living.

Or… as I experienced the incredible diversity of the No Kings Rally - diversity of race, religion, ethnicity, culture and age - maybe we unknowingly received a gift from G-d. It is in that diversity of which our nation was built that we have the opportunity to experience so much more than we otherwise would if trapped in our own socio-cultural bubbles. 

Something as simple as the way we expose ourselves to other cultures via the food we eat. When Fay and I hosted a group of Palestinians and Jews in our Sukkah, we made food from: Palestinian chef and cookbook author Sammi Tamimi, Israeli Jewish chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottelanghi, and a recipe from a cookbook the two had co-written. It set a positive tone for an evening of important, and at times difficult, discussion.

Finally, while I tend to lean toward the positive in this blog space, addressing who and what we are for rather than who and what we are against, sometimes I feel compelled to point out behavior that should never be normalized. In response to the rallies taking place in cities and towns large and small all over the country, Trump, on his Truth Social site, depicts himself wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet in which he is dumping feces on demonstrators. Never mind that, along with the persistent lies that those of us who demonstrated hate America and are terrorists (I am neither an American hater nor a terrorist), it is an understatement to say that it is disgustingly beneath the office Trump holds, and represents an ongoing refusal to engage in healthy and much needed debate over what is most important in the ongoing and now struggling story of American democracy.  

I can’t, and we should never, let such shameful (beneath the level of adolescent) behavior go by unchallenged lest we normalize it by our silence. At the same time, I never lose sight of the opportunity to gather with other good people to fight for the freedom of all people.