YOM KIPPUR 5773 - 2012 - JONATHAN BLAKEwrtemple.org/.../KOL_NIDRE_YOM_KIPPUR_5773_-_2012_-_JONATH… · War and a newly minted rabbi during the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War…

KOL NIDRE & YOM KIPPUR 5773 / 2012

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION… TO GENERATION

RABBI JONATHAN BLAKE

WESTCHESTER REFORM TEMPLE, SCARSDALE, NY

Today, and every day for the next 18 years, 10,000 Baby

Boomers will reach the age of retirement.

I am a member of Generation X: more Madonna and Michael

Jackson than Beatles and Stones, more Back to the Future than The

Graduate, more Michael Jordan than Mickey Mantle.

Gen-X’ers are now entering the prime time of their lives. Gen

X’ers in positions of prominence include Larry Page, CEO of

Google; Jordan Roth, one of Broadway’s most innovative

producers, and CNN’s Rachel Maddow. And for the first time,

we have a Gen-X’er on a major presidential ticket, Paul Ryan.

This historic moment prompts us to ask: what can Judaism

teach us about healthy transition from one generation to the

next?

JONATHAN BLAKE - YOM KIPPUR 5773 / 2012FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION… TO GENERATION - PAGE 1 OF 21

The answer to that question begins with a wonderful word,

palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or

book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be

used again.

Ancient Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be

smoothed over and reused. Vestiges of the earlier writing can

often be seen underneath the later composition. What emerges

is a conversation among generations.

What a palimpsest is to a scholar of literature, a tel is to a Biblical

archaeologist. The Hebrew word tel refers to a hill created by

different civilizations living and rebuilding in the same spot.

Over time, the surface level rises, forming a mound. Excavating

a tel reveals buried structures.... They often overlap, horizontally,

vertically, or both.1

In a metaphorical sense, all sacred Jewish texts are palimpsests

because they superimpose conversations from one generation to


1 This definition from Wikipedia, “Tell.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuscript

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuscript

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(parchment)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(parchment)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell

the next, the way a tel reveals the architecture of bygone

generations, side-by-side and overlapping.

These images offer Jewish ways of contemplating how one

generation leaves its mark on the next, and a new generation

builds on the words, the wisdom, the foundational structures left

behind by the previous.

The job of the rabbi has always been to nurture a conversation

between the generations, “determining how the Judaism

treasured by one generation will be received and transmitted by

the generation that follows,” as our colleague Rabbi Elliot

Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue puts it.

Consider Moses in our Yom Kippur Torah reading. He says:

You stand this day, all of you, before the Eternal your God… to

enter into the covenant of the Eternal your God…. I make this

covenant… not with you alone, but both with those who are

standing here with us this day before the Eternal our God and

with those who are not with us here this day.2


2 Deuteronomy 29:10-14.

...meaning both those who came before and those who will

follow. Moses is nurturing a conversation among the

generations, a conversation that will last for generations.

“It is a delicate conversation to manage,” Rabbi Cosgrove

acknowledges. And I would add: one person cannot manage it

alone.

Still, “[o]n the one hand I need to assure one side that what is

most important to them will be passed down unchanged and

untarnished. Yet I need the next generation to know that the

Judaism I invite them to practice is a response to them and their

moment, not that of their parents and grandparents. It is not

easy to manage this balancing act, but there is no conversation

more important, not only to this synagogue, but to the future of

American Jewry.”3

Our country has its generations, each with unique identities and

identifying characteristics, shaped by history and fate.


3 “Dialogue Between the Generations,” June 2, 2012, as cited on http://pasyn.org/resources/sermons/dialogue-between-generations.

http://pasyn.org/resources/sermons/dialogue-between-generations




The Generation of the Depression, desperate to shore up every

penny. I think of the cabinets in my late grandparents’ little

apartment kitchen in Trenton, New Jersey, spilling over with

paper napkins and Sweet & Lo™ and ketchup packets hoarded

from McDonald’s. They were also The Greatest Generation,

having defeated fascism on two great fronts.

The Baby Boomers, molded to hopefulness on the one hand by

the liberation movements of African Americans and women;

inducted to disillusionment by the assassinations of King and

John and Bobby Kennedy, by the Vietnam War and Watergate.

And now, Gen X’ers, raised in an era of two-income households,

rising divorce rates and a faltering economy; ever-more

enmeshed in our technologies; anxious about the future in a

post-9/11, post-2008 reality; coming to terms with the fact that

we may never achieve the success or security of the generation

that came before us.


We can also pinpoint Jewish generations, each with unique

identities and identifying characteristics, shaped by history and

fate.

“[W]hat we are is more than what we individually plan on

being,” says Rabbi Larry Hoffman. “We are regularly buffeted

by waves of history that we neither plan nor anticipate. They

mold our generation, and they define our project.”4

So as I stand here today, nurturing this conversation between the

generations, I reflect on the particular projects of three

generations of American Jewry because, as our Torah portion

says, Atem nitzavim ha-yom, “you all stand here today.” Three

generations, in one sanctuary, side-by-side and overlapping.

As a third-generation Jewish American I will speak to the three

generations born on these shores--my grandparents’ generation,

my parents’, and my own--and how each of their projects

interrelates.


4 “From Ethnic to Spiritual: A Tale of Four Generations” by Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman. From the Synagogue 2000 Library.

A distinguished senior rabbi recently shared with me his mission,

the animating idea of his rabbinate. In a word, he declared:

Survival. The Survival of the Jewish People.

It was not a surprising pronouncement. In a sense, this rabbi,

who is approaching seventy years of age, speaks for his entire

Jewish generation. Even a cursory glance at the defining Jewish

moments of his lifetime would explain a mission of survival:

born during the Shoah, childhood witness to the establishment

of the State of Israel, a rabbinical student during the Six Day

War and a newly minted rabbi during the outbreak of the Yom

Kippur War…. He has been branded with the hot iron of Jewish

history and his sense of mission burns with an ever-present

awareness of existential threats to the Jewish People and the

State of Israel.

Could there be a more important generational project than

Jewish Survival? Rabbi Eugene Borowitz who is approaching

ninety still teaches at Hebrew Union College. In 1976 he

authored a definitive statement of his generation at a gathering

of Reform Rabbis in San Francisco.


“Previous generations of Reform Jews,” he wrote, “had

unbounded confidence in humanity’s potential for good. We

have lived through terrible tragedy and been compelled to

reappropriate our tradition’s realism about the human capacity

for evil. Yet our people has always refused to despair. The

survivors of the Holocaust, being granted life, seized it, nurtured

it, and, rising above catastrophe, showed humankind that the

human spirit is indomitable. The State of Israel, established and

maintained by the Jewish will to live, demonstrates what a united

people can accomplish in history. The existence of the Jew is an

argument against despair; Jewish survival is warrant for human

hope.”5

For many of us, the project of Survival still fuels our Jewish

energies. Many affiliate with a synagogue, give tzedakah, stand up

for Israel, insist that their loved ones observe holidays and marry

inside the faith, because theirs is the project of Jewish survival.

Still, I wonder: does this project resonate today? How does my

generation--and, even more, the generation after me--feel about


5 “Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective.”

the project of Jewish Survival? To a teenager growing up in

Scarsdale, New York, growing up in the nucleus of Jewish Success,

does a mission of “Jewish Surival” even make sense?

All four of my grandparents were born on American soil, a few

years after their immigrant parents--my great-grandparents--

landed on these shores. The immigrant generation had its own

project: making it in America. The effects of that project

continue to ripple down the decades.

Solomon Schechter once wrote that “every generation must

write its own love letters.” For the immigrant generation, so

eager to make it here, a commitment to education was its love

letter to the next generation.

Thanks to that commitment, my grandparents were destined not

to be street peddlers but pharmacists and factory managers and

teachers and administrative professionals, and their children

would become accountants and doctors and… well, you know

this story, because it is your story too.


An image comes to me from earliest childhood, of five wooden

Russian nesting dolls all in a row, on a bookshelf, their rotund

bellies and babushka’d heads framing a purse-lipped smile on a

peasant woman’s face.

We still have these Russian dolls; I spotted them keeping vigil

atop a dresser on a recent visit to my parents’ new house in East

Greenwich, Rhode Island. There was, I recall, an identical set

in my grandmother’s house, and when we would visit, my sister

and I would place one doll inside the next, until the big fat doll

stood alone, all the other generations of her family within her.

I thought, what an appropriate image for the transition from

generation to generation, which is often mistakenly described as

a “chain of tradition.” A chain of tradition implies that each

link is a thing complete unto itself, utterly dependent on the

integrity of the link that comes before even as the one that

comes after hangs on for dear life.

Perhaps the conversation between one generation and the next

looks more like a set of Russian nesting dolls--each successive


generation containing something of the previous, an echo of

itself….

Recent scientific studies have explored “whether the history of

our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected

ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls

genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field,

known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and

that the lives of our grandparents—what they breathed, saw and

ate—can directly affect us decades later.”6

Each generation shapes the next, imparts its commitments to the

next, lives and breathes the hope that another generation will

arise to take up its banner, so that when we shuffle off this

mortal coil, we will rest secure that our project does not die with

us.

To the the older generation we owe a debt of gratitude. Even

more, we owe a promise that their commitments will be

remembered and thereby live through us. We have no gift to


6 Doreen Carvajal, “In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories,” New York Times, August 17, 2012.

http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mental-status-tests/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier

http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mental-status-tests/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier

offer our children and grandchildren more precious than a

lifetime supply of precious Jewish memories.

When we light Shabbat candles, the next generation grows up

warmed by the glow of Shabbat, enchanted by its beauty and

power. When we take a family trip to Israel, the next generation

grows up imprinted by the experience, reflexively bonded to our

ancestral land. When we introduce our children to tzedakah; take

them on a march for social justice; volunteer with them at a soup

kitchen or after-school program, the next generation grows up

appreciating that what we earn, we share; that what stirs our

hearts must also stir our hands and feet.

In this way the project of one generation lives on within the next

and achieves its immortality.

In like fashion the generation whose Jewish project was

Survival--prompted by the Shoah and the uncertain first decades

of the State of Israel--never abandoned their parents’ dreams of

making it in America. Their optimism about, and ceaseless


devotion to, this country continued to ripple through them, even

down to the next generation.

But post-War children would have their own Jewish project, one

forged in the suburbs. “When… newly affluent Jews flocked to

developing areas outside the great cities, the first institution they

created was usually the synagogue.”7 America of the 1950s was

already undergoing a great religious revival. “Under God” was

added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Joining a church or

synagogue became almost a national obligation, American as

Mom and apple pie. Never before nor since has America seen a

period of synagogue building like the 1950s and 60s, and WRT

is living proof.

Here in the suburbs, we embraced the project of this new

generation: to live for our children.

This project was not exclusively Jewish. Everything from the

advice of Dr. Spock to the exploding consumer culture identified


7 Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1995, p. 354.

children as the most important residents of a household, around

which life would revolve.

Synagogues followed suit. If you look at synagogues from

around this time you will see that the school wings often dwarf

the sanctuaries. The focus of a rabbinic education began to shift

from preaching skills to teaching skills. And in countless other

manifestations, the project of living for our children continues to

shape Reform Jewish synagogue life.

I am the happy product of this child-centric project, born six

days before Rosh Ha-Shanah and sixteen days before the

outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. My father who had not set

foot in a synagogue for more than ten years, returned to shul for

the High Holidays the week after I was born, which means I’ve

been nudging people to come to temple for a very long time.

Still, I wonder: does this project resonate today? How will my

generation, just entering parenthood, and the generation after

us, with one foot still in childhood, relate to the child-centric


enterprise which has dominated the Reform Jewish landscape for

60 years?

What will it mean to those in this sanctuary who are empty-

nesters, or who have not parented children, and who still want a

Judaism that still matters? Religious school education continues

to drive synagogue affiliation. But what will drive our

generation’s Jewish project now that the kids are grown? What

will capture the hearts of Gen-X’ers who regard with suspicion

the notions of “affiliation” and “membership” in general?

We cannot be museum curators for the Judaism of the past.

“Museums,” said Bob Dylan, “are cemeteries.” What he meant

is that a project of pure preservation can never sustain a new

generation. Our Reform Jewish heritage is founded on the

premise that change keeps Judaism alive, that each generation

must become not just guardians but innovators.

Too often we find ourselves rehearsing the old ways, then

wondering why a meticulously preserved religious practice fails

to inspire us or our children.


A funny little film called Gefilte Fish! The Movie introduces us to

three generations of women preparing for Passover Seder. The

grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe requires the triumverate of

whitefish, carp, and pike. She chops it by hand and cooks it in

its own stock. We even learn about her mother who would buy

live fish at the market and keep them in her bathtub until it was

time to get cooking.

Her daughter, a mother herself, makes her mother’s gefilte fish,

but sometimes leaves out the pike, or the carp. She does not

chop by hand. She uses a Cuisinart.

Her daughter also likes gefilte fish. When she wants a piece, she

opens a jar.

Our Judaism will require new recipes. We cannot reach for

something in a jar. We have to create it. Think about it: the

word “generation” comes from “generate”: to create. Our

shared Jewish project is one of Generating Meaning. “We seek

something to hold us together and connect us beyond ourselves,


as we go about choosing the paths that will take us through the

labyrinth of life,” observes Larry Hoffman.8

We now go beyond survival, beyond living for our children, to

generate a Judaism that calls us to intentional living.

In the Judaism that we will create together, many of the

ingredients will remain the same--in our worship, in our study, in

repairing the world and building community--and many will

taste new and unfamiliar.

We are all in this. Atem nitzavim ha-yom. We all stand together

today--all become partners today--three generations, side-by-side

and overlapping.

From the Hebrew prophets, to the titans of social justice whom

your parents and grandparents venerated, to the mission of this

synagogue, Judaism has never wavered in its insistence that when

we work together, generations aligned, we can make this world a

little more like the one it ought to be.


8 “From Ethnic to Spiritual.”

Some projects know no generational boundaries.

In prayer we announce, “L’dor va-dor nagid godlecha, from

generation to generation we will proclaim Your greatness.”

Every generation bears witness that an Eternal project endures

long after our wordly concerns have gone to dust, a project that

connects the generations each to each.

Call that connectedness Spirituality; call it God; either way it

means a Power that gives our lives meaning and direction and a

reach beyond our fleeting years.

Over the past decade I have come to know so many of you and I

can say with confidence that each one of us seeks a spiritual

anchor for our lives--a sacred purpose--no matter our age. You

may have come to WRT under Rabbi Stern of blessed memory,

or under Rabbi Jacobs who leads our Movement with strength,

or you may have joined us only days ago, and we welcome you.

However and whenever you came to our synagogue, if you are

standing here today, you now can seize the opportunity to


generate an authentic Jewish spirituality that goes beyond

survival, beyond teaching our children.

Abby Pogrebin, an up-and-coming author who presented at

WRT a couple of years ago, puts it this way: “I have come to

believe, in my middle age, that Jewish feeling doesn’t land in

your lap or get sprinkled on your head like fairy dust. More than

I realized, it does take more than a dash of Seder and synagogue

twice a year…. I’ve come to feel this tradition is more relevant,

more challenging, and more interesting than my parents ever

showed me. Each Jew makes a choice – to let it go or keep it

going.”9

You came here to honor the past. You also came to see the

future.

In two years, our Reform Movement will produce a new machzor,

a High Holiday prayer book. We explored a draft copy on the

second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. Some of the words come to us

from sages of antiquity; some frame the voices of today’s


9 Unpublished quote courtesy of Rabbi Michael Friedman.

promising poets. Some of the melodies are said to have been

heard at Sinai; some have yet to be composed.

Not long after, in a time many of us will surely live to see, prayer

books will give way to tablets and e-readers; and beyond that,

who knows? Who can say what the Hebrew School classroom of

tomorrow will look like? Who can say what opportunties will

present themselves to collaborate with other congregations here

and abroad, to become ever closer to Israel in an ever-more

globally interconnected world? Who can say what urgent and

emergent global crisis will impel our ardent action, compel our

moral fiber, propel our philanthropic reach?

What we can say today is this: WRT will always be a place

where meaning resides in the cornerstones of generations past,

in the welcoming of new generations born every month. But

perhaps most importantly, WRT will continue to be a living

laboratory of Reform Judaism, a place where meaning is

generated.


We will be a palimpsest, where the love letters of each

generation are written atop the last; a tel, where layers of history

intersect and cause the entire enterprise to rise from the ground;

a Russian doll, where one generation’s reason for living is

embraced within the next, inspiring it to grow greater still.


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YOM KIPPUR 5773 - 2012 - JONATHAN BLAKEwrtemple.org/.../KOL_NIDRE_YOM_KIPPUR_5773_-_2012_-_JONATH… · War and a newly minted rabbi during the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War…