From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

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Shabbat Sermon: We Are Cosmos 482 with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz May 17, 2025

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Fifty-three years ago, on March 31, 1972, the Soviet Union launched a spacecraft that was supposed to go to Venus. But it never made it to Venus. Some malfunction in the rocket prevented it from leaving the earth’s orbit. The Soviets named this spacecraft Cosmos 482—which became code in Soviet lexicon for epic failure. For 53 years, the spacecraft that could never make it to Venus circled the earth. Year after year never getting to where it was meant to go. Year after year stuck in a perpetual orbit. But it turns out that every year it lost a little bit of height in its orbital wanderings so that, last Saturday, on Shabbos, Cosmos 482 could finally find rest. Last Saturday, Cosmos 482 fell back to the earth, into the sea, without causing harm to people or property.

I am not a space person. I don’t follow NASA. But the minute I heard this crazy story, I thought to myself: There is a sermon in that! Because what happened to Cosmos 482 happens to every one of us in our own way.

Talmud Class: Loving Critics May 17, 2025

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Loving critics. The phrase feels like an oxymoron. In fact it is a willed double entendre.

Perhaps it means that critics are loving. Their words of critique flow from a place of love. In fact, they feel that suppressing their critique, going along to get along, would undermine that which they love.

Perhaps loving critics means that people who are not critics should nonetheless love and appreciate people who are critics. Perhaps they have something to say that we and others need to hear.

Should we become loving critics? If we have never before been fans of critics, should we reevaluate and gain a new respect for loving critics? Perhaps loving critics might be helpful for this current fraught moment in America and in Israel.

Tomorrow we will examine three sources from two thinkers. Elana Stein Hain recently taught the two texts we will encounter from Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago from the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, to a CJP Mission in Israel. And Larry Bacow wrote a piece in Harvard Magazine entitled Loving Critics, from which the title of this class comes.

How do we love the lands we love in their winter of discontent?

Complicated.

What Does It Mean To Be Pro-Israel in 2025? Conversation with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz and Adina Vogel-Ayalon, J Street Chief Of Staff May 13, 2025

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Adina Vogel Ayalon – an Israeli citizen who has lived and raised a family in Israel and worked for decades toward building peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians – and Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz are uniquely positioned to unpack some of the difficult questions facing our communities today, including:

How can American Jews most effectively advocate to bring about the return of the hostages, sideline Hamas and promote a peaceful and safe future for Israeli and Palestinian families alike?
What constitutes anti-semitism on campus and how can we best combat it?
How should our community encourage the US government to address Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support of terrorism throughout the region?
How would the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel affect Israel’s security?

Shabbat Sermon: L’Chayim with Rabbi Michelle Robinson May 10, 2025

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May 10, 2025

Talmud Class: Local Imperfect Peace Part 2: Mipnei Darchei Shalom (Being Nice to Promote Peace) May 10, 2025

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Last week we encountered one kind of “imperfect peace,” to use the term coined by our teacher, Sara Labaton of Hartman: shalom bayit, domestic harmony, made possible by a lack of transparency in a marriage. We read the ruling of Ovadia Yosef that a wife not disclose the fact of her abortion before she had met her husband so that their marriage could continue.

This week we encounter another complicated rabbinic category of imperfect peace: mipnei darchei shalom, the things we do for the sake of peace. Tomorrow morning we will encounter the Talmudic teaching that encourages Jews to be nice to gentiles: to bury their dead, to visit their sick, and to provide financial support to their poor, for the sake of peaceful relations. Is that transactional or relational? Is that practical or admirable? Is that aspirational or calculated? We will compare the Talmudic teachings of mipnei darchei shalom to Donniel Hartman’s most frequently taught text about a person who does the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, without calculating any benefit, and in fact losing out financially by doing so.

Is local peace, whether transactional or relational, an adequate response to a world on fire?

Shabbat Sermon: When It Just Is with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz May 03, 2025

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A woman in Israel approached her rabbi with the following dilemma. When she was a younger woman, she was not religious. She had relations with a man and got pregnant. She had an abortion. She then became religious. She did teshuvah, repentance. She committed herself to learning Torah, doing mitzvot and joining an observant community. She moved to a new town, where she was not known, met a young yeshiva student who did not know about her past. She did not tell him. They got married. She got pregnant and delivered a healthy baby boy. Her husband wanted them to do a special ritual ceremony called pidyon haben, redemption of the first born, where they thank God for the gift of their first-born. Under Jewish law, however, the family could not do this ceremony because of her prior abortion, which the husband did not know about. So this wife and new mother approaches her local rabbi to ask: Should she now tell her husband about her past, that she had had an abortion, and that this baby was not eligible for this ritual? Doing so would have spared her husband from saying a prayer at the ritual that he should not have said, a ritual infraction known as a berakhah le’vatala, a blessing made in vain? But doing so might also have endangered their marriage. Or should she permit her husband to say a blessing in vain which would preserve the marriage and family peace, even though doing so perpetuates the omission?

Talmud Class: Is a Small Peace, a Local Peace, an Imperfect Peace Worth Pursuing? May 03, 2025

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Sara Labaton, the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently taught a group of local rabbis. She observed that the prophetic ideals of peace (lion lies down the with lamb, nations will beat swords into ploughshares, neither will they know war anymore) are so lofty as to be unattainable. Would we be better off looking towards rabbinic ideals of peace?

The good news for rabbinic ideals of peace: not lofty. Not utopian.

The bad news: rabbinic ideals of peace are small, local, and very imperfect.

On Shabbat we will consider a fascinating source about a most imperfect, indeed troubling peace. Three things about this source are striking.

One the genre. It is sheilah u’teshuva, a legal question and answer, a responsum. Not a genre we have studied before.

Two, the author is Ovadia Yosef, zichrono livracha, who was the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community in Israel and throughout the world. He was incredibly learned and inspired passionate devotion among his followers. When he died in 2013, 800,000 people attended his funeral, the largest funeral in the history of Israel.

Three, the fact pattern. A young woman has sex outside of marriage, gets pregnant, and has an abortion. Later, she becomes very observant, marries a yeshiva bocher, gets pregnant, has a baby boy. She never tells her husband about her abortion. When their child is born, the husband wants to do a ceremony called pidyon haben, the redemption of the first-born boy. Since she had had an abortion, she was not eligible for the pidyon haben. But he did not know. Would it be better to tell the truth, and not have the pidyon haben? Or to perpetuate the omission, and have the pidyon haben that she was not eligible to have, in which case the ceremony would contain a blessing that should not have been said?

Read this short, saucy case. What did Ovadia Yosef decide? Why? Do you agree with his decision? How would you assess pros and cons? What do we learn from his decision that could apply to our very different world?

Is an imperfect peace worth pursuing? Is local peace an adequate response to a world on fire?

Talmud Class: Between the Holocaust and Israel Apr 26, 2025

Show notes

God is always confusing. We never know what to think. But that is especially true now in this fraught theological season between commemorating the Shoah (April 24), honoring soldiers who fell in Israel’s wars and victims of terrorism on Yom Hazikaron (April 30), and celebrating the birth of the State of Israel on om Ha’atzmaut (May 1).

Tomorrow we are going to study a modern Jewish philosopher that we have never before studied, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who came up with a new scheme: the Three Eras of Jewish History.

It is new. It is thoughtful. It is engaging. It gives us what to talk about.

But does it work? After all, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel happened within three years of one another, very much in the same era.

We will also look at the special insertions in our Amidah for Yom Hashoah and Yom Ha’atzmaut to see what statement they make on God’s relationship to the Jewish people and to history in 1941-45 and in 1948. We will also examine an important text from the Talmud that shows our sense of God’s presence or absence is very much affected by what is actually happening in the world.

Spoiler alert: it’s not about the answers. There are none. It’s about the wrestling. One other alternative: Who needs God? Since there are no answers, since the wrestling never leads to an answer, are we better off if God is not all that important to us—which, by the way, is what the vast majority of Temple Emanuel members will say about how they actually lead their lives. “I’m not a God person. I am here for the community.” Maybe that is the wisest posture of all?

Shabbat Sermon - April 26, 2025 Apr 26, 2025

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Led by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

Pesach Sermon: Our Unfinished Love Story—A Yizkor Sermon with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Apr 20, 2025

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What happens when we lose our loved ones before we lose them? This happens to so many of our families. Our loved one experiences a slow decline, cognitively, or physically, that takes place over years that feels like forever. The decline crowds out earlier chapters.

Our mother has not been herself for so long I can’t even remember what she used to be like.

It’s been so long since my father was who he really was, I can’t remember him before his dementia set in.

What do we do with this pain when we lose our loved ones before we lose them?

We are about to say Yizkor. Yizkor offers us a poignant way to flip the script.

It is true that we sometimes lose our loved ones before we lose them. But because of Yizkor, it is also true that after we lose our loved ones, we still have them.

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