[Previous sermon: "Shabbat Tazria Metzora- April 20, 2007"] [Next sermon: "Balak - June 30, 2007"]
May 18, 2007- Parashat B’midbar
Teach us, O God, to number our days that we may acquire a heart of wisdom. We, Jews, have numbers on the brain this week. For starters, tonight we mark the 46th day in the counting of the Omer period, a 50 day accounting which takes us from redemption at Passover to the celebration of the giving of Torah at Shavuot. Jews also recognized that today is Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the Hebrew month Sivan, and the beginning of the monthly phases of the moon by which Jews mark time and create our sacred calendar. And finally, tonight our Torah reading starts off the book of Numbers, aptly named for the census head count of the whole Israelite community by family at its beginning. One question is why does the book of Numbers start out needing to tediously organize and count the people? Perhaps it is because the Israelites were finally ready to leave the foot of Mount Sinai where they had received God’s laws and continue on into the desert towards reaching the Promised Land. And at this juncture, it was time for everyone actively to step forward, be counted, and invest themselves in the journey that lay ahead of them.
And yet, that answer doesn’t account for the fact that the Torah doesn’t just say a census was taken. It painstakingly records all the ancestral houses and clans and the numbers within each, which makes for very laborious reading. The only way I can make meaning out of all those lists of numbers and names is that the Torah wanted to leave us a record of all those who took those steps, who counted themselves in, who threw their life and destiny into the future of the Jewish people. In stepping forward, they began a powerful legacy. And so this text, with all its lines of calculations, invites us to make our own accounting of how and in what we are counted and what might be our enduring legacies. This week, we had the opportunity to reflect on the legacy of televangelist Reverend Jerry Falwell. On the one hand, Falwell was an amazing success who leaves an extraordinary and lasting legacy- a mega-church with seating for 6,000 headed now by one of his sons and Liberty University that boasts 10,000 students led by his other son. How many people could do what Falwell did, building Thomas Road Baptist Church by knocking on 100 doors a day with Bible in hand to seek out new members, with only $1000 dollars and the help of 35 volunteers? With the face to face contact and a weekly radio broadcast, Falwell had 864 people attend services on the church’s first anniversary.
Any congregation might have an important lesson to learn from this personal and direct approach to membership. But congregations are not simply about numbers, they are about what means something to their members, what people rally around, what counts for them. And so the fact that Falwell’s mission became to change the moral landscape of America and he was able to mobilize a fundamentalist Christian flock which was, in the seventies, alienated from participating in politics, is a testament to how influential and innovative Falwell was. By establishing the Moral Majority, and harnessing the political power of conservative Christian America around such issues as abortion, homosexuality, and family values, Falwell played a pivotal role in electoral politics and agenda setting in this country for nearly 4 decades.
On the other hand, there are great scars in Falwell’s legacy. In March of 1964, the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America when many church leaders responded to the inequalities this country’s racist Jim Crow policies, and began protesting for change, Falwell preached “if as much effort could be put into winning people to Jesus across the land as is being exerted in the present civil rights movement, America would be turned upside down for God.”
About a decade later, he would give up his line that preachers were not called to be politicians but soul winners, after the Supreme Court decided Roe versus Wade in 1973 and he began his political mobilization against abortion. His more recent assertion that Tinky Winky, the purple teletubbie, had a subversive homosexual message was simply ridiculous, reflective of his fear and condemnation of gays. Along those lines, many of us will never forget his suggestion that the terrorist attacks on September 11th reflected God’s judgment on an American spiritually weakened by gay rights activists, the ACLU, and abortion providers.
But even more significant problems reside with us Reform Jews when considering Falwell’s legacy. And it doesn’t necessarily stem from the fact that he didn’t share our specific religious beliefs. Most disturbing to us should remain his assumption that the end goal of injecting religion in politics is to make uniform values for everyone in America, an assumption clearly stemming from his fundamentalist perspective. Frankly, the Moral Majority’s aim was to make America a Christian nation. Every year, I take high school students to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism so that they can learn Reform Jewish values on issues on the floor of Congress and then lobby those positions with our Senators and House Representatives. But the difference between Rabbi Meiri and Reverend Falwell is that I don’t wish to shape policy to reflect only my view. My project as a Reform Jew is to make sure that public policy guards the public from hazards to their health and safety and yet at the same time protects each citizen’s privacy. It is our job as Jewish American citizens to support initiatives that don’t favor the wealthy or handicap the poor. And most importantly, I believe the responsibility of religious citizens in this country means watching out that our laws reflect the Constitution’s foundational assertion that our nation never turn into a religiously narrow place and that everyone, regardless of creed be able to exercise their particular religious conscience in freedom. In particular, it is anathema to Reform Jewish values that abortion be outlawed for everyone at all times. That is not to say that Jews encourage terminating a pregnancy, either. Rather, our religious voice, with its deep concern for life, respects a woman’s privacy to make that decision in consultation with her medical professionals and her religious community and doesn’t view that as a threat to society. The problem with Jerry Falwell’s message has always been that what makes sense in the black and white world of fundamentalist morality doesn’t always ring true, and isn’t even necessarily plausible in the diverse, ambiguous, and multicultural world of American political life.
And, with our strong vigilance and a little good luck, it should and will stay that way. No one, not even a person as influential to as many folks as Jerry Falwell was, will speak for everyone. And the best way to preserve our democracy and ensure our own rights are counted in the things that are important to us, is to stand up and speak out our views. We Jews already have a distinguished legacy in the history of the Civil Rights movement, the movement for choice and women’s rights, and for the protection of Lesbians and Gays under the law. We need to continue to make Jewish values be heard in the public space, and be sure that all other views are similarly heard. By achieving that delicate balance, we can attain the moral high ground, for we will never achieve that when we suppress the rights and voices of others. We can only be safe in our own freedom when we find a way to have each person find a place within our larger society.
So who is not counted in this week’s Torah portion? All the people who didn’t belong to the Israelites, the stranger who resided among them, the other. And while our Torah doesn’t count them as part of the family of Israel in this week’s reading, we are commanded elsewhere in Torah to love the stranger, to know the heart of the stranger, to include the stranger in having rest on Shabbat, and to leave the corners of the fields for them to glean.
By acknowledging the “other,” the Torah, makes room for others within the society of which it dreams. And it teaches us Jews, all these thousands of years later that our tradition never imagined that everyone would be just like us. Rather that we’d be us, and there would be others unlike us. And that the “other” makes demands on us and we have a responsibility to them and have to make a place for them. It is up to each of us to craft our legacies by the way we live, standing up and being counted for what is important to us. And measuring our life and legacy on how well we achieved the dreams of our heritage and made room for others.
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
