Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

Imagine with me, if you will, a small village in Ghana, West Africa. In this village, with no electricity or running water, there’s a primary school, sitting in shambles. Now, despite the decrepit look of the building, the school fills daily with sounds of young children running to and from their lessons. On the side of this school is a mural, painted with stylized images of African workers carrying concrete in pans placed atop their heads towards the building site of a new school. Also in the painting, are young women, stylized versions of many of the volunteers who came to the village to help build the new school, each of them carrying heavy loads of rocks and wood as part of the building project. Then there are the school children in uniform, and mothers with babies tied to their backs; each figure walking toward the school’s foundation on a golden path, each carrying building materials. On this mural, mixed in with the sand, with the rocks, and with the concrete, are books, rulers, globes, letters, and numbers. The metaphor is clear. It’s not just the physical space created by the workers of the community that makes the school. Rather, it takes the entire community, women, men, and children, as well as outside visitors each with their own special contribution that makes a community thrive.

One of the male workers pictured in the mural, is named Quame. Quame, is lean and taught, a hard worker by anyone’s account. When Quame came over to the mural, he smiled so wide that it seemed that his face was all mouth. His smile was like the Cheshire cat in the children’s story Alice in Wonderland, all teeth. His grin was in appreciation of its vibrant colors and stylized figures adorning his community’s school. He also smiled because of what the mural represents: the work that he did, and the work the community did, and the work that the volunteers did, in building up his community. In 2002 I had the privilege and honor to work alongside Quame as one of these volunteers through American Jewish World Service. I traveled to Ghana, West Africa, for two months to do unskilled manual labor. It was a powerful experience for me, laying the groundwork of much of what I know and care about as a rabbi. And the image of the mural, and Quame’s broad smile remain powerful symbols to me, of what we can do together as builders of our world.

But there is another side Ghana as well. Imagine with me, if you can, the frenetic energy of a busy night in the country’s capital city, Accra; taxis, and trucks, bicycles and bipeds each of them clamoring to take up their own space on the small and windy streets. The rich red earth, in which they grow their corn and their shallots, peaks out from every crack in the pavement. When the rains come, as they often do in the summer, the red earth softens and then flows down into the sewer. And there, lying away from everything else is the languishing body of a baby girl, innocent by anyone’s account. Her distended stomach and jaundiced eyes, her painful look of despair and tragedy, signify both her innocence and the failure of someone somewhere to care for her. This little girl, with no name, lying quietly as the red earth pours past her in the warm rain is a powerful symbol of how often we fail as builders of our world.

The image of the girl makes us feel ashamed of the bright colors and cheery optimism of that mural on the side of the school; which is so close in proximity and yet seems a world away. That difference in these two experiences still touches me; it continues to shape me and my understanding of the two different worlds we live in. Over there was Quame, building, working, and singing under the sun. Over here is this nameless girl, starving, suffering, and dying in the dark sewer.

On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the most unlikely event in the history of Divine-decision making. Five thousand seven hundred and sixty nine years ago, according to rabbinic accounting, God decided to create the world. Hayom harat olam the liturgy tells us, that day, today, Hayom is the world’s birthday. Try to imagine with me what went through the mind of God when deciding to create the word. What did God aspire for the world? For us? What did God dream for Creation?

In an address to Georgetown University, the Archbishop and Nobel Laureate, Desmond Tutu, argued that God did indeed dream, and continues to dream for us, to have aspirations for us. Tutu said:

You and I are made for goodness, for love, for transcendence, for togetherness. God has a dream that we, God’s children, will come to realize that we are indeed sisters and brothers, members of one family, God’s family, the human family – that all belong, all white, black and yellow, rich and poor, beautiful and not so beautiful, young and old, male and female, there are no outsiders, all, all are insiders gay and straight, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Americans, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Afghans, all, all belong. And God says, “I have no one to help me realize my dream except you- will you help me?

God’s dream for us is nothing less than social harmony like the mural on the school - all of us working together to build a better world in partnership with each other and in partnership with God. This is God’s dream. This is God’s world. This is the way the world should be. This is paradise.

Yet, on that hot night in Africa, when the air clung to my throat, and I saw that dying girl, the chasm between the world of God’s dreams and our reality became jarringly clear. The way the world should be, reflected in that mural, the ideal world of learning, of labor, and of love, what the rabbis call olam haba the ideal world, was far off. In its place, is the world we have, the world where moral failings allow children to die and cities to flood, a world stricken by hunger and by poverty, and by strife. This is the world we live in, what the rabbis call olam hazeh this world. A world that has yet to realize God’s dreams, in rabbinic language, a world that is unredeemed or broken.

On that night in Africa I realized, perhaps for the first time, how far away olam hazeh is from olam haba. Seeing this girl dying before me was the demarcation, in real time, between God’s dreams and our actions. And that’s what this sermon is about. It’s about the chasm between what we value and how we act. It’s about, how as Jews we have a special responsibility, inherited from our ancestors to bridge the world as it is with the world as it should be.

I believe that this not a mere religious aspiration, a legalistic or a halachic category, nor an agreement or social convention, but something much deeper, something that inheres in our very nature as people, and in particular as Jews. It is for us, our inheritance as Jews, as descendants of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, of Jacob and of Leah and Rachel. It is what we have come already encumbered with when we activate our Jewish souls. It is our Jewish conscience, it is our birthright.

By birthright, I do not mean the program that takes marginally affiliated Jews to Israel in the hopes that the ten day experience is enough to engage young Jews. That is not what I mean by the term birthright. What I mean is what Sheldon Wolin, the professor of political science at Princeton means when he says birthright. It is “our capacity for developing into beings who know and value what it means to participate and be responsible for the care and improvement of our collective life” (“Contract and Birthright” p.139)

Our birthright, is our capacity to grow, to use our best selves to dream with God, to improve this world, bringing us closer to the next world.

There is a very old and famous story in our Tanach about two brothers who struggle over birthright. These two boys, Esau, the strong wild- man, who feels comfortable outside, a true hunter and the other, Jacob, a city slicker and mama’s boy who stayed back by the tents. Their struggle over their birthright began in utero, according to the rabbis.

The midrash relates that when Jacob and Esau were in their mother’s womb, Jacob said to Esau, “Esau, my brother, our father has two of us, just as there are two worlds before us – olam hazeh, this world and olam haba, the world-to-come. …If it be your wish, you take this world, and I will take the world to come.” Thus it came about that Esau took this world as his portion, and Jacob took the world to come as his.

On the one hand, Jacob dared to dream with God, taking the ideal world for his inheritance, for his birthright. The world to come, olam haba. Who wouldn’t want it - it’s the world we all want to live in, It’s the world of the prophetic voice, It’s principled, valued, steadfast, and ideal, full of optimism. It’s the world that God dreams for us. And it’s what we are good at as leaders and participants in the institutions and synagogues in the Jewish community; education of our children, studying for ourselves, worship and meditation. It’s what we normally consider to be the Jewish voice in this world.

On the other hand, our midrash indicates that by choosing the world to come, Jacob gave away olam hazeh his world. He gave up his inheritance of this world for that of the next, leaving the work of this world in the hands of his brother Esau. By making our birthright a zero-sum game, Jacob risked something significant. He wagered the ability to act in this world, for the values of the next. He let Esau lay claim to the strength and power while he held onto to his principles. It’s no wonder that for the beginning of his life Jacob dwelled in the tents, while Esau went out into the field. Jacob was the first cosmopolitan; the first Woody Allen the first Billy Crystal. But All of the love in this world, all the education in this world, all the study in this world, all of the Divine dreams in this world that we teach and we pray for….if it is not coupled with our ability to act on our teachings, without our power, our work, then what is it for? For knowing what the world could be, without acting to bring about that world is just the same as not knowing at all.

Love without Power is mere sentiment.

And this, my friends, is our great folly. Many of us, my self included, live, thinking only of the way the world should be, lamenting the tragedies in this world while remaining in our tents.

We watch these failings of our community pretending that the space between our sofa and the TV gives us the appropriate emotional distance to say “not my problem.” Or to say, “that’s the government’s job.” Or to say, “I don’t have the power to change this, so what’s the use?” We all do this. I do this. It’s how we stymie the pain of tragedy. Sometimes we medicate that pain with a prayer in our synagogue. A mishebarach for those in dire straights, a poem about fear or death or hope. As your rabbi, I am here to tell you God does not want only prayers. God wants partners. God does not want us to dream from our tents, when we can act out in the world. Rationalizing our unwillingness to help another person especially s stranger allows us to watch our world falter before our eyes. And that is not Jewish. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of what it means to be Jewish.

In the Mishnah, the phrase, ma sheli sheli u’ma shelcha shelcha. “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours” is attribute of the people who are the anti-Jews. The symbol of all that is bad about humanity. It is the attribute of those who choose to live in Sodom. Midat Sdom is saying the rabbinic phrase that says that we can watch the world go by and realize that our redemption is not tied to someone else’s because what is my problem is mine and what is your problem is yours.

It allows us to watch children starve, and levies break. We watch as 50,000 children everyday starve to death across the globe. We watch as 900 million people in this world suffer from malnutrition.

We watched as Katrina wreaked havoc, nearly 100% destruction on 90,000 square miles of territory. That’s approximately the same size as Great Britain. We watched as some 24,000 people in Harrison County, Mississippi are still without the homes they had before Katrina took them away.

It allows us to watch as these families are being evicted from the trailers without places to live. We continue to watch families crumble because pappa looses his job because the factory decides not rebuild after the storm. We watch them be torn apart by domestic violence, drugs, and suicides.

It allows us to watch the 45 million Americans without healthcare languish because they are not willing see a doctor out of fear that their medical bill will mean eviction.

We do not live in Sodom. We are not Sodomites, we are Jews and Judaism teaches us, it commands us, not just to watch the world, but to watch over the world.  

The story of Jacob and Esau does not end there. The boys grow, and one day Esau, the man with the strong hands, comes home tired from the field, famished. Jacob feeds his brother with red lentils. In exchange for his food, Esau, tired from his travails, gives up his inheritance, his birthright to Jacob.

            Jacob at this moment acquires much more then property, more then money, more then prestige; he acquires that which he gave up in the womb, he takes for himself the inheritance of olam hazeh, this world. Jacob, the boy of the tents, gains the power to act in this world, and yet act as a Jew should. That means Jacob purchased the knowledge that to be fully Jewish, is to use our ability to act in this world, while always looking to the next; to bridge the divide between our values and our response to those values, to bridge the real with the ideal, olan hazeh and olam haba.

Thus, when Jacob enters the tent of his blind father, dressed with wool on his forearms in order to deceive Isaac the moment which begins in suspicion ends in blessing. Isaac remarks, Hakol kol Ya’akov vhayadaim yedei Esav “This voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” In a poetic sense, his father’s description of Jacob’s deception, speaks of Jacob’s dual birthright, and ours. Jacob has added the strength of his brother’s hands, to his own prophetic voice.

            This story teaches that to be Jewish to be fully Jewish, is to realize that our birthright has two sides. The first is that of olam haba to dream with God and find the infinite value in everyone and everything. To live, to study, and to pray for a world where all value is realized. But if we only do this, then we forsake the second part of our birthright olam hazeh. For Jacob teaches us that if we only dream for a redeemed world, we are not fully Jewish until we partner with God and act on the dream.

            And so it is our birthright, our special responsibility as Jews, to connect to others in this world while improving it towards a greater tomorrow.

Our birthright is to know that my personal redemption as a Jew is bound with the redemption of the person sitting next to me.

Our birthright is to know that my personal aspirations are bound to the aspirations of the child who wants to read but can’t.

Our birthright is to know that my personal satisfaction is bound to the satisfaction of those who earn a living and still can’t pay for food.

Our birthright is to know that the personal comfort I feel inside my clothes is bound to those who have no comfort.

Our birthright is to know that my enjoyment of this world’s natural gifts is bound in gratitude for those who preserved it for me and my responsibility to preserve it for my children and my children’s children.

Before I came to Valley Beth Shalom, I had the honor of working on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. I was a Student Rabbi at a small shul named Congregation Beth Israel in Biloxi, Mississippi. After Katrina destroyed everything, I was selected to travel from my home in New York City every other week for two years to help in the physical and spiritual rebuilding of that community. Once I sat in the Beauvior Methodist Church on Friday night with a group of volunteers from Pennsylvania who had just completed a week’s worth of work in and around the flood zone. We held services in that church because the synagogue was torn from its foundation and the roof caved in. So we met in this little cinderblock church on Pass road. It was the custom of the synagogue that after services it’s common for both community members and volunteers to sit with each other and tell stories of their experiences. One Shabbos evening, this man from Pennsylvania broke down in tears, telling me that spending a week on his hands and knees resurfacing a roof was the most remarkable experience of his life. He said that on the roof of a stranger’s house, he not only found his humanity, but found his Judaism. I believe what he was saying in that moment is that he tapped into something very special, he found his inheritance as a Jew, he found a spirituality of action that he had not know existed before. He reclaimed fully, for the first time, his birthright.

           The man I speak of is not one whom we would normally think of as an observant Jew. He doesn’t keep kosher, he hardly goes to shul. And yet when he was working on that roof under the hot Mississippi sun, he rekindled his link to his Judaism.

Taking on our dual birthright is a way forward for our Jewish community to engage Jews. Our children our watching us. When our children grow the remain unaffiliated and refuse to join Jewish communities because they don’t see Jews acting on their values. They see Jews celebrating the mitzvoth of Shabbat, Kashrut, and Tefilah to the exclusion of service, charity, and community engagement.

But we can bring in our children, demonstrate to them what it means to be fully Jewish, by giving them the experience to find a spirituality of action. To give them the Jewish language, Jacob’s voice, to explain what they already know to be true. It’s an opportunity to teach that truly hard work deserves truly great rest. That’s Shabbat. And that the gratitude expressed by those with whom we work engenders the giving of gratitude in us for everything we receive from the smallest gifts to life itself. That’s Tefilah. To work with others is to be in community with others. That’s Hevre. For to be fully Jewish is to allow our hands to inform our voice and our voice to inform our hands; for study to shape our work our work shape our study.

Hakol kol Ya’akov vhayadaim yedei Esav

“This voice is the voice of Jacob, and the hands are the hands are hands of Esau.”

To be Jewish, to be fully Jewish, is to not only to build places of worship and study that help us dream with God find value in our world, but to build our institutions so that we can act on those values once we find them. That means creating shuls, and schools that value Justice as much as they value study. That refuse to hide away under the word sanctuary. That make the right choice in becoming part of their larger community, by engaging in service programs, volunteerism, and to help those in need in our local village and our global one. That is a synagogue I want to be a part of, that is a synagogue that this volunteer in Mississippi wants to be a part of, that is the synagogue our children want to be a part of, and that’s the synagogue I want you to be a part of.

Just four years ago, Rabbi Harold Schulweis stood in this holy place and proclaimed to the world:

To be a Jew is to think big.

To be a Jew is think globally.

To be a Jew is to act globally.

To be a Jew is to love God, who is global.

And VBS responded to Rabbi Schulweis’s clarion call to take watch over the world. To stand up and to not only use our voices to say “never again,” but to use our hands to prevent another genocide to live out our values and make manifest God’s dreams for humanity. To help in ensure that “Never Again” is not a catch phrase but a reality; to reclaim our birthright as Jews to use our voices and our hands to improve the world.

God bless Valley Beth Shalom and the corps of volunteers that took up the call of our birthright as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to live out Isaac’s blessing:

Hakol kol Ya’akov vhayadaim yedei Esav

“This voice of Valley Beth Shalom is the voice of Jacob, and the hands of this congregation are the hands are hands of Esau.”

It’s time to bring this message home. We are reclaiming our birthright by becoming a Justice synagogue. To work towards a flourishing life for all of God’s creatures a hundred times over. That means we must set a task that reflects our special responsibility to seek out the infinite value of life by serving others. The number 18 is a holy number to Jews. Its numerals spell the word chai, meaning life. To add our lives to others’ and to add others’ lives to our own is to setting a goal of helping others-of doing service-that adds life to life. We have established a goal of 3600 hours of congregational service, that is double chai a hundred times over. I am asking you today to join us at Valley Beth Shalom to achieve this goal. I am asking you to live your values, and lay claim to that which is already yours, by which I mean your birthright.

Let’s reclaim our birthright together by committing ourselves to serving 3600 hours. 3600 hours, it’s a lofty goal, but we do things big here, and we can do this. It’s just two hours a family when we take a look at it. But what an impact we can have on our community, on Los Angeles, and on the earth when we act together and become builders of a better world.

Come, and help us feed the hungry through the SOVA food pantry. Help us shelter those who need a home by joining a Habitat for Humanity team. Help us care for animals at a shelter.

Come, help us visit the sick and give companionship to those in our community in times of trouble by volunteering in the Healing Center. Help us bring a meal to those families with new babies, or those in need of some extra support.

Come, join one of our environmental action teams and help VBS go green.

Come, let’s help those who can’t read by joining Koreh LA. Or those kids who need some extra help by joining our Jewish Big Brothers and Big Sisters program.

Since we do not yet live in a world where everyone has the chance to live with a smile like Quame, we must strive to overcome our own failings and reclaim our birthright together and make God’s world and God’s dreams feel present in the world we have given. To close, I’ll quote again the words of Archbishop Tutu:

“You and I are made for goodness, for love, for transcendence, for togetherness. God has a dream that we, God’s children, will come to realize that we are indeed sisters and brothers, members of one family, God’s family, the human family – that all belong, all white, black and yellow, rich and poor, beautiful and not so beautiful, young and old, male and female, there are no outsiders, all, all are insiders gay and straight, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Americans, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Afghans, all, all belong. And God says, “I have no one to help me realize my dream except you- will you help me?”

Shanah Tovah

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*Thank you for your interest in my High Holiday sermon. I hope you enjoy reading it. Please note that this material is under my copyright. You have my permission to forward it in its entirety, but not excerpted, as long as you include this disclaimer. Thanks again for your interest!