Senior Sermon-Lech Lecha

Tobias Divack Moss Parashat Lech Lecha October, 26, 2017 Strangers-By-Choice There’s this story about a boy who never left his parents’ home, never left what was familiar. A true homebody, he knew everybody in his neighborhood, but not a soul beyond. He joined the family business, and for seventy-five years he lived the exact same life. He did get married along the way, but to his half-sister. Talk about an insular upbringing!

Well, you may know who I am talking about at this point, none other than our beloved Abraham. You see, the story of Abraham, and the story of our people, only truly begins when, at the budding not-so-adolescent age of seventy-five, Abraham finally leaves his birthplace, his kin, his parents’ home. When he leaves the familiar and becomes a stranger. When he answers God’s call of lech lecha, go your own way.

Our rabbis emphasize that this was a call—a suggestion and not a command. When God said lech lecha, Rashi explains, God added l’hana’atcha u’l’tovatcha. It’s for your benefit, it’s good for you. Try it, you’ll like it. The point is, Abraham could have said no. Instead, he courageously answered the call.

Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch goes so far as to say that this choice encapsulates the essential mission of Abraham and we who have followed in his faith. Hirsch asks, “how could we have survived to this day, had we not, at the very outset, received from Abraham the courage to be a minority.”1

1

Samson Rafael Hirsch, The Pentateuch: Trumath Tzvi, trans. A. J. Rosenberg (Judaica Press, 1986), 60.

We sometimes call Abraham the first Jew-by-Choice, but that’s not quite accurate. He was a Stranger-by-Choice. Walking in this tradition of Abraham, grants us license to be different. It bestows nobility on the experience of the stranger. It calls us to find our own unique path, as a people and as individuals.

I ask my fellow students, and perhaps teachers and visitors as well, when you first came to HUC, didn’t you feel like a Stranger-by-Choice. Perhaps you were among the first here of a certain identity. Or perhaps, in an era when liberal religion is hardly in vogue, we have felt like strangers because we took a path that none of our high school buddies did, none of our college classmates either. Some of our parents’ friends, or perhaps our parents themselves, thought this was a strange decision. But we made that decision. Though it might seem like hubris to say so, the truth is that we came here because we actually thought we could become a blessing to our people, and help our people be a blessing to others. So, with lech lecha reverberating in our ears, we set out to make ourselves a stranger.

Make yourself a stranger? It sounds a bit absurd. Since birth we have been told to be afraid of strangers, don’t talk to strangers. Strangers are, well, strange. We wouldn’t want to be strange, would we? Furthermore, as we see from Abraham himself, it’s often terrifying to be a stranger. You would think that with God’s call guiding him, the rest of life would just fall into place. But that’s not the way the Torah tells it. Abraham sets off and in quick succession encounters famine, strife, and serious moral dilemmas in his relationships with both his wives, and both his sons.

There’s an automatic and, frankly, understandable, response to the fear of looking like a stranger: to conform completely to the group that’s gathered around us. We think to ourselves, if I can just look, talk, and walk like everyone else, I’ll be safe! When we all think like this, how

easy it is to ghettoize ourselves—but at a cost. We become unable to interact beyond the ghetto walls. We need the courage to step into the unknown.

We often stay that we hope to walk in the footsteps of the greats. That’s not literally true.

Our matriarchs and patriarchs had their lech lecha—we have ours. We can’t simply settle for a pre-established track, unlike that simple pet we all had back in elementary school, the hamster.

I remember being dumbfounded at how that animal was content to run its wheel for hours every day, though actually getting nowhere. I think it’s safe to say that none of us came here to be hamsters. Day after day, to lecture the same lessons, sing the same songs. Pray in just one way, stay in just one place. God said lech lecha! Get yourself off any such wheel. Get going!

Let Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel be our model for how to get going, how to be a stranger. He refused to be bound by any ghetto—a ghetto of place or a ghetto of the mind.

Attempting to define the humanity of an individual, Heschel said, “the repetitiousness of doing, the stereotypes of speaking, they deprive us of the dignity of living….The root of creativity is discontent with mere being, with just being around in the world.” 2 We humans have this God-given capacity to reject the status quo, and seek out the new.

Jews especially should understand Heschel’s insistence on departing the familiar and becoming strangers. What began with Abraham became characteristic of all Jewish tradition. Abraham was the eevri, the one from over there. The central moral of Moses’ lifetime is that you shall act justly. Why? Because you were once strangers in Egypt. The Prophets were the quintessential outsiders and the Rabbis, they honored and preserved minority opinions.

In the 19th century, it was Reform Jews that took up this mantle of strangerhood. The Reformers proudly declared, “we refuse to stay within the sheltered comforts of the ghetto and

2

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 95.

we refuse the invitation to become full insiders of the Western and Christian mainstream.”

What’s perhaps even more significant is how individualistic Reformers were among themselves.

In the 19th century alone, Reform rabbis wrote some 100 prayer-books reflecting their distinctive theologies and aesthetics. Read the editorials from their day and you see genuine, open, and sometimes scathing critique, not just of orthodoxy, but also of their fellow Reformers. Our forebears were willing to stand alone.

There are no two better examples of this legacy, than the founders of this very institution, Isaac Mayer Wise and Stephen S. Wise—no relation. They boldly crossed boundaries of geography, politics, religious ideology, and Zionist identity. They explored frontiers of possibility. They were willing to take risks, and even willing to fail. Both Rabbi Wise and Rabbi Wise aspired to establish institutions for all of American Jewry—they failed! But they also succeeded. They laid the foundation for novel scholarship, for an egalitarian Judaism, for an institution that would save European scholars from the Holocaust including Heschel and Dr. Eric Werner. Werner then founded our School of Sacred Music that would encourage original composition.

All of this groundbreaking work by our founders has made possible the invaluable training of everyone here, 140 years later. And yet, our founders would be the first to say, “your training is incomplete if you do not go your own way. Find your lech lecha moments.” Are we, each one of us, living up to their model, pursuing our own path, going off the derech of expectations? If we do so, inevitably, there will be bumps in the road. There will be times when we return from our synagogue internships with the battle-scar of a critical comment from our supervising rabbis or the temple president. Let us remember, that Isaac Mayer Wise once came back with an actual scar when his first shul president, literally, punched him in the face. Of

course, I hope none of you ever receive that kind of reaction, but some level of failure is an inherent part of creativity, of innovation. Bravery is demanded of us as we explore beyond our borders.

Our movement has been calling for audacious hospitality, but it is time that we simply become audacious.

So lech lecha, experience being a stranger in other religious communities. We would have much to learn from a week spent uptown at JTS. Perhaps there would be even more to gain by venturing further afield, by engaging with the perspectives, people, and possibilities at BINA’s secular yeshiva, or at an Orthodox institution, or even at a Christian or Muslim seminary. Could our administration help make this a possibility? Could our curriculum have a rubric entitled Lech Lecha, Go forth to a land that God will show you? Until it does, could we simply make this happen ourselves.

Lech lecha, be an intellectual stranger. Those who allot their precious elective credits on midrash, might try halacha. And those stern halachists might rediscover the joy of midrashim.

Moreover, we should stretch beyond the official curriculum. Like Heschel, what could we learn from immersion in poetry? Like Mordecai Kaplan, what from sociology? What are the intellectual passions that you once had, but have neglected while here? Pursue them, and bring the lessons of those fields back into our community.

Lech lecha, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Just as the State of Israel was dubbed the start-up nation economically, we should become known as the start-up nation religiously. Let us expand our efforts to bring experimentation into our education and technology into our toolkit. Let’s build upon the recent innovations of our Tefilah workshop, the Be Wise

entrepreneurial fellowship, and the media and marketing course that Dr. Weiss will pioneer next semester.

Lech lecha, to the professors who honor us with your presence and teaching. How do you keep yourself reinvigorated and renewed in a building you know so well? Might you teach an elective outside your discipline, forge a new collaboration with a colleague, or explore a novel approach as you share with us your scholarship.

Lech lecha, ultimately, lech lecha is a call to every one of us who wishes to lead. It is a call to individuals who do not know the endpoint of their journey, but still dare to step forward and begin.

We commit ourselves to this quest not just to sing beautiful Jewish music, not just to give a profound Shabbat sermon, not just to teach a great class on the parasha. Rather, our mission is to find a way forward. Our calling is to continue the journey that began with Abraham and Sarah.

Our purpose is to lead our people along paths that await discovery by each one of us who is willing to be a stranger.