Dover Emet: Speaking the Truth

My grandmother had a good death. One that any of us would hope for. She was 99 years old. She had seen her children, her grandchildren, and great grandchildren grow and flourish. She never lost her mental abilities, or her wicked sense of humor. She lived her life devoted to her family and her people. One of the greatest lessons of her amazing century of life came at the very end itself. My Grandma lived her life with great simplicity. She neither had riches nor required them. She never craved extravagance. Whenever a milestone, an accomplishment or a special event came up through the years, she and my grandfather always marked the occasion in one special way. They would sit down together and have a little vanilla ice cream in a glass of ginger ale . By the time Grandma died, she hadn’t had this treat in many years, maybe not since Grandpa died 20 years ago. But that final day of her life, she told the woman caring for her that she was having a craving: coul...

Last week, President Obama delivered a message when President Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down from his place of power. Obama said “while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can’t help but hear the echoes of history -- echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice. As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note.” These are beautiful and inspiring words of our president in the face of extraordinary change in the middle east. As Jews, we have watched the images on television, read the reports in the newspapers, and we heard Obama’s remarks. And we can’t help but have a terribly ambivalent reaction. This isn’t just any popular uprising for the sake of democrac...

I am endlessly amazed by our great city. It is one of the most exciting places in the world to live. People in our congregation, people you run into any day on the streets around here, are committing to changing the world, and making it a better place. Perhaps that’s why it’s all the more shocking to realize that Washington DC is a city racked with terrible poverty and injustice. You wouldn’t know it walking around this lovely Northwest section of the District. But you only have to go a couple of miles from here, to other neighborhoods, and the city looks radically different: dangerous neighborhoods, crime, drugs, desperation. When you study the statistics, the numbers are staggering: one out of eight households in the District of Columbia struggles with hunger-related issues. The number of families on the foodstamp program in the District is at an all-time high, with 120,000 residents—one fifth of the population of this city—using foodstamps. In recent months, perh...

Perhaps you have heard some Jews laugh and brush off Hanukkah : “If only people knew how relatively minor and insignificant Hanukkah is,” they say, “they would never make such a big deal of it.” Have you ever heard this before: “It’s not that Hanukkah isn’t important—of course, it’s an important holiday about a miraculous victory of the Maccabbees,” they say. “It’s just that, compared to major holidays like Rosh Hashanah , Yom Kippur , and Pesach , Hanukkah can’t—if you’ll excuse the expression—hold a candle!” I grew up hearing this message about Hanukkah , that it’s a nice, pretty holiday, but it’s not that important. And implied in this is the rather guilt-provoking message: You know, Jews of America, if you were more serious about your commitment to observance, you’d know that Hanukkah is getting more press than it deserves. And more than this, the secret that we Jews have to acknowledge is that the only reason Hanukkah gets all the attention it does is because of Christmas. All...

It’s very difficult to open the newspaper these days and not feel depressed and overwhelmed. I recently read how the national economy is inexorably careening toward ruin. By the year 2020, he writes, the United States will need to pay one trillion dollars a year just to keep up with interest on the national debt. The national leadership here in Washington looks forward to years of partisan politics and struggle over basic issues of taxation and healthcare. There seems to be no end in sight for on-going struggles in Israel and the Middle East. What are we supposed do to do when we come up against news like this—on a daily basis? We understand that each of us has a responsibility to do something to help our country, our society, our planet. But in this fast-paced, globalizing world, it’s all coming at us so fast. It’s hard to resist the reaction of simply going numb, into denial rather than face the onslaught of unthinkably frightening prospects for us and for...

There is something eternally fascinating about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are endlessly amazed by Adam and Eve’s foolhardy giving-in to temptation and eating of the forbidden fruit. In many ways, it’s the perfect story. Every time we circle back to it, there’s some part of us that wants to shout out to Eve—‘don’t do it!’ It’s an eternally relevant story because we know that we’re just like Adam and Eve. Somehow, just like them, we eat of that Tree too, despite our better judgment: we mess up, we stumble over ourselves, we fail—just missing the perfection we almost had. It’s also a perfect story because it allows us to get angry at God: what was God thinking? Why put that tree right there in the Garden and then forbid it? It’s the perfect set-up! It’s the proverbial placing-of-the-cookie-jar right in front of innocent hands and eyes, after all. And yet, despite the maddening frustration of this story, it is the perfect typology for our hum...

There’s a true story told by Jacques Lusseyran, a member of the French Resistance during World War II who was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald. While there, he was put in Prison block 57, a building meant to hold no more than 400 men, but which housed over a thousand men, literally pressed together with no room even to lie down. It was, of course, a living nightmare—daily beatings, brutal slave labor, and no place even to sleep with decency. Even so, explains Lusseyran, there was one old man in block 57 who managed to move around—all the men instinctively gave him a tiny bit of space, in some kind of gesture of reverence. The old man’s name was Jeremy, but his nickname was ‘Socrates,’ because somehow whenever he opened his mouth, the simplest most beautiful words and stories of wisdom emerged. Unlike all the other men, who often screamed and fought and cried out in anguish, this Jeremy, this ‘Socrates’ was always peaceful. Lusseyran writes, “He observed things o...