The Torah of the World

One of the resources we hope to create on this blog is a collection of sermons/divrei torah in which rabbis integrate the wisdom of another religious tradition into their teaching of Torah.. Rabbi Brant Rosen, a wonderful homilist and --luckily for us--a dedicated blogger, recently posted the following dvar torah on his blog(see Connections below to access the blog.) In this short piece, Rabbi Rosen approaches a question from the Torah text and brings to bear a teaching from a practitioner of Buddhism. Please send us your talks, sermons and divrei torah to add to our collection.


Where are the Peacemakers?
In this week’s Torah portion, Hukkkat, we read of the death of Aaron:

Moses stripped Aaron of his vestments and put them on this son, Eleazar. When Moses and Eleazar came down from the mountain, the whole community knew that Aaron has breathed his last. All the house of Israel bewailed Aaron thirty days. (Numbers 20:28-29)

It is noteworthy that Aaron was mourned by the entire people of Israel - and that their period of mourning lasted for thirty days rather than the traditional seven. According to the Midrash, this reflects Aaron’s status as an unusually and universally beloved leader - even more than Moses:

Only the men showed lovingkindness to Moses, as it is said, “And the sons of Israel wept for Moses.” (Deuteronomy 34:8) (But) the men and women and children showed lovingkindness to Aaron.

Why? Because he loved peace and pursued peace, and passed daily through the entire camp of Israel and promoted peace between a man and his wife and between a man and his neighbor. Therefore all Israel showed lovingkindness to him, as it is said, “And when all the congregation saw that Aaron was dead, they wept for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel.” (Pirke De’Rabbi Eliezer 17)

The Midrash thus presents us with a decidedly ”revisionist Aaron.” While the Aaron of the Torah is the venerable High Priest of Israel, the archetypal Aaron of Rabbinic tradition is portrayed as the quintessential “Ohev V’Rodef Shalom” - “Lover and Pursuer of Peace.” Witness also this well-known verse from Pirke Avot:

Rabbi Hillel said, be a disciple of Aaron: “loving peace and pursuing peace, loving all people and bringing them closer to Torah.” (Pirke Avot 1:12)

Who are today’s disciples of Aaron? Invariably they are the one’s whose love and pursuit of peace comes at great personal cost. In honor of this week’s Torah portion, I’d like to spotlight the work of one courageous peacemaker:

Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient who has spent more than ten of the past seventeen years in some form of imprisonment or detention under Burma’s military regime. Like many important peacemakers (she has cited MLK and Mahatma Ghandi as personal influences) Aung San Suu Kyi’s struggle for justice and human rights is grounded in a profoundly spiritual vision. Here is an excerpt from one of her writings, which was quoted in her Nobel Prize Presentation Speech:

Where there is no justice there can be no secure peace. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundations of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

The Burmese associate peace and security with coolness and shade:

The shade of a tree is cool indeed.
The shade of parents is cooler.
The shade of teachers is cooler still.
The shade of the ruler is yet more cool.
But coolest of all is the shade of the Buddha’s teachings.

Thus to provide the people with the protective coolness of peace and security, rulers must observe the teachings of the Buddha. Central to these teachings are the concepts of truth, righteousness and loving kindness. It is government based on these very qualities that the people of Burma are seeking in their struggle for democracy.

Do you know of other Disciples of Aaron? I encourage you to write and share the stories of those whose efforts are contributing to a more just and peaceful world.

Limits to Dialogue?

Recently(June 13 and again on June 18 ) four rabbis from different denominations have been discussing the question of the limits of dialogue on Beliefnet's blog, Virtualtalmud. (blog.beliefnet.com/virtualtalmud). The whole conversation should be of interest to readers of this blog. Here is a sampling from the response of Rabbi Joshua Waxman(Reconstructionist).

Wednesday June 13, 2007

The Power and Perils of Dialogue

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, the Director of the Religious Studies Program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a seasoned participant in interreligious dialogue, relates a telling incident that took place at an interfaith conference hosted by the Emir of Qatar in 2005. Rabbi Fuchs-Kreimer was one of four rabbis who had been invited to participate in panel discussions–a list that pointedly did not include any Israeli rabbis. The American rabbis debated whether they should participate when their Israeli colleagues were specifically disallowed and, in the end, chose to participate, taking every opportunity to reiterate both publicly and privately how much they hoped Israeli rabbis would be able to participate in the future. The following year, Israeli rabbis were invited to attend and participate in panel discussions.

Rabbi Fuchs-Kreimer’s point, and one that Rabbi Stern makes as well, is that the most important and meaningful dialogue doesn’t take place with people we agree with or even necessarily like. If we truly seek to make a change, to open up the possibility for transformation, then we must engage with those who don't share our beliefs. (We can, of course, decide that there are people we wish for one reason or another to declare ‘beyond the pale’ and make a point of not engaging them. When we do this, we’re generally making a gesture for internal consumption–to gain points or bona fides with our own constituency–and not to create meaningful change.)

Rabbi Hirschfield’s caveats about maintaining one’s own integrity, of course, are well taken (you can’t possibly encounter the Other in dialogue if you can’t bring yourself as well). And speaking from personal experience, I know how painful it is to enter into genuine dialogue in good faith and find that others are unwilling to extend the same courtesy or are merely grandstanding. Besides, there’s always the risk that you’ll come to acknowledge the rightness of somebody else’s view. Yes, there are so many spiritual and intellectual pitfalls to engaging in dialogue, that if it didn’t contain so much power and potential, it might be far easier to skip it altogether.

Rabbi Rolando Matalon, another of the rabbis on that fateful trip to Qatar, acknowledged the difficulty of dialogue with people whose views are so antithetical to one’s own. “I would rather negotiate [about Israel] with the Swedes,” he remarked, “But they’re not the ones we have to deal with.”

Muslim Americans: An Important New Study

Last month the Pew Research Center issued a survey report entitled, Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream." This is an important new resource

The first-ever, nationwide, random sample survey of Muslim Americans finds them to be largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.

The Pew Research Center conducted more than 55,000 interviews to obtain a national sample of 1,050 Muslims living in the United States. Interviews were conducted in English, Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. The resulting study, which draws on Pew's survey research among Muslims around the world, finds that Muslim Americans are a highly diverse population, one largely composed of immigrants. Nonetheless, they are decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes. This belief is reflected in Muslim American income and education levels, which generally mirror those of the public.

Key findings include:


Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live.

A large majority of Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off in this society. Fully 71% agree that most people who want to get ahead in the U.S. can make it if they are willing to work hard.

The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.

Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims in the U.S. were born elsewhere. A relatively large proportion of Muslim immigrants are from Arab countries, but many also come from Pakistan and other South Asian countries. Among native-born Muslims, roughly half are African American (20% of U.S. Muslims overall), many of whom are converts to Islam.


Based on data from this survey, along with available Census Bureau data on immigrants' nativity and nationality, the Pew Research Center estimates the total population of Muslims in the United States at 2.35 million.

Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified. Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world.

A majority of Muslim Americans (53%) say it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most also believe that the government "singles out" Muslims for increased surveillance and monitoring.

Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism, and many doubt that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Just 40% of Muslim Americans say groups of Arabs carried out those attacks.

To read the whole document, go to http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=329