On Being a Messy Exception

Last week, the largest funeral in the State of Israel, ever, took place. Eight-hundred-thousand people filled the streets to mourn Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who died at age 93.

Ovadia Yosef was the former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, and the spiritual leader of Shas, the Sephardic ultra-orthodox party. And he was a man of intense contrasts.

On the one hand, he was a legal genius, probably the most learned sage alive, and also a deeply creative one. He was a jurist who found creative, new, and liberalizing possibilities in Jewish law. He opened the way of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to be understood as Jewish, he brought liberalizing options to questions of the status of agunot after the Yom Kippur war, and he lent his religious support to the Oslo peace process, saying that Judaism values life and peace more than it values land and that religiously, it is acceptable to trade land for peace.

And yet, he was a person who said deeply racist and nasty things. I don’t want to repeat them now, because they are so ugly, but he blamed Jews for the Holocaust, saying they were reincarnated Shabbat-breakers, he said horrible things about Americans, about non-Jews, about Muslims, about Arabs. And it wasn’t just hot air–his rhetoric did real and lasting damage.

Since his death, I’ve seen in the Jewish community a tendency to be completely black or white about him. He was either a Torah genius, or a Jewish ayatollah. Black or white. Either/or.

One of my teachers and friends, Aryeh Bernstein, one of my real heroes of Torah, said that what is really going on here, is that we want our heroes to be heroes and our villains to be villains. We are, Aryeh says, uncomfortable with messiness. Uncomfortable with the fact that our heroes can be villainous and that our villains can be heroic. We want to pretend that Ovadia Yosef was either all good, or all bad.

And I think that this reflects a deep spiritual truth. We tend to be uncomfortable with messiness in our lives. With the idea that things don’t always line up easily. We often want clarity in our thinking, in our hearts, in our relationships, when the rule of our life seems to be: unclarity. Both/and. Messiness.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about messiness. Two weeks ago, the Pew Center came out with a huge survey, a study of Jewish life in America. Jews across the country were polled about their religiosity, their belief, their practices, their relationships, their children. And the results are, at least on the face, pretty disheartening. A large percentage of Jews identify as Jewish, but not religious–and don’t think it’s important to pass on Judaism to their children. More Jews think that having a good sense of humor is more essential to Judaism than they think observing Jewish law is. The Conservative, Reform, and Orthodox movements appear to be foundering when it comes to education, moral instruction, and continuity. No one looks good in this study.

Now, there is reason to doubt some of these statistics, and to be optimistic. Large percentages of Jews are proud to be Jewish, think that living a moral life is essential to Judaism, and observe Passover seders and Yom Kippur fasts. There’s a bright spot. But I want to talk about something else here.

One statistic, one that I feel very personally, is the statistic about intermarriage. More and more Jews are intermarrying–that is, marrying people who are not Jewish–and in too few of those households, are people raising their children as Jewish.

And this is very messy for me, because I was raised in an intermarried house. As many of you know, my mother is Jewish, and my father isn’t, and something that is a very important value for me is embracing interfaith families. In fact, I think another word for intermarriage could be: marriage. Or Love. And I don’t think it is the desire of the Torah, or of God, to interdict love between two people. I think it is our goal to bring people closer to the Torah and to God in the context of their emotional choices.

But again and again, this week, I have read people blaming intermarried Jews for all of the problems of American Judaism. And I feel blamed. I also feel, once again, like I have to argue loudly about the importance of embracing interfaith families. There are voices in the Jewish community, in the demographic world, that love to paint interfaith families as the problem. And to my response, that this is not my experience? To my response that I grew up in an interfaith house with a Christmas tree for eight years and still became a rabbi? I get told: that’s merely anecdotal. You’re an exception. You’re an anecdote.

This week we’re reading Parshat Lech Lecha. And it’s the story of the biggest exception of all, Avraham Avinu and Sarah Imeinu. Avram, which is his name at the beginning of the story, is called by God to go forth, to leave his land, his birthplace, his father’s house, to the place, God cryptically tells him, “that I will show you.”

Avram and Sarai are the very first Jews. And you know what? From the beginning, they’re losing the numbers game. If they had phones, and were called by Pew, we’d learn the following about them: they are in their 70s and have no kids. They don’t identify as Conservative, Orthodox, or Reform, but as “Just Jewish.” And there are only two of them.

Yet Avraham and Sarah, we are told, are the center of what it means to be Jewish. They are the exemplars of faith. Living in ancient Babylonia, among the ziggurats and the strange temples and idols, Avraham and Sarah thought their way out of idolatry and came to a sense of God. They found God even in Babylonia.

And we tell this story again and again, because what matters in Judaism is the content of your belief, the depth of your engagement, and the distance of your journey–not the number of people who are like you. Look, if we really wanted to win at the numbers game, we’d all be Christians. But what Judaism stands for is that numbers are not what it’s about. What it’s about–is being an exception. What it’s about is saying that I believe that being true and loving and good, that loving God and keeping the Torah and living an authentic Jewish life are what drive Judaism. Not looking over our demographic shoulder.

Avraham and Sarah didn’t even have a successor until their 90s. Talk about messy! Judaism is a religion where we say that we learn from the exception, not fom the statistic. We determine what matters in the world by imagining what can matter, what should matter, not by saying: here’s what the statistics say matters.

And this gets back to our fear of messiness. We love statistics because they look clean. They’re not, as any good statistician will tell you, but we imagine that there is a clarity to numbers. It isn’t there. We often make what’s called an ecological fallacy, assuming that broad statistical data describes individuals. But it doesn’t. We’re searching all our lives for numbers, for signs, that say: here is what is succesful in the Jewish world. Here is what works. Here is what doesn’t.

But that is manifestly not how Judaism works. We need to be brave, to be confident that what our religion tells us matters–that it really matters. In the Middle Ages, there was a bizarre Jewish mystical practice called “Shiur HaKomah,” where mystics would measure God. They would read texts and look at symbols, and say, “God’s arm is this long.” “God is this tall.” And you know what is the problem with that, aside from the fact that God doesn’t have an arm? That it’s trying to put human certainty on the ineffable. That it’s trying to take something that belongs in our hearts, and turn it into a thing.

Lech Lecha. It means, Go Forth. It means, Be Brave. It means, Trust in God. What we are doing, as Jews, is trusting in God that what we do really matters. What we are praying for is a world where אבן מאסו הבונים היתה לראש פינה–where the stone the builders ignored becomes the cornerstone. What we are keeping is the Torah, the laws that suffuse our world with meaning and that connect us to the past and the future.

If we throw out what is true to our hearts, because we’re scared of a number? Then we’ve already given up. We have to be brave enough to accept the messy reality that we don’t know what things look like for the Jewish world ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, five hundred years from now, but what we can do is practice and love and pray in our world. Because the promise that God made to Avraham and Sarah still lasts–that our religion will be preserved if we do right.

So it’s not the time to blame people. It’s not the time to blame interfaith families, or Orthodox Jews, or Reform Jews, or Conservative Jews, or secular Jews. It’s the time to double-down on love of Torah, on living a life of mitzvot, and of bringing into our world a more manifest and real sense of the Kadosh Baruch Hu.

Lech Lecha me’artzecha. Go forth from your land. We’re going into the future as Jews, to a place we don’t know–but that we trust God will show us.

Shabbat Shalom.