From the Rabbi

Dreams, Memories, Strands of Thoughts

At a very young age – I can’t precisely pinpoint the year or even the precipitating event – I became aware that injustice was pervasive and widespread. I’m fairly certain it was at summer camp, because when I close my eyes and recall the feeling, I see pine trees, a dirt path, blue sky. 

All over the world, at any given moment, bad things were happening to people for unjust reasons. Once I “saw” I could not unsee. Even more, the feeling of that awareness seemed to bond with my skin, bones and breath.

Later, I became an opera singer, and then a rabbi. All along, there was the activist, who wrote, organized, led, sang, listened, learned, traveled, spoke up, and called in.

These days, dates and places, conversations, slogans, names and images rattle around in my consciousness, permeating my sleeping and waking hours. Washington, D.C. Pittsburgh. Jerusalem. Gaza. From the river … Am Yisrael … Hind Rajab. Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Organizations, too. The ones I have stood with – Truah: A Rabbinic Response to Human Rights; more recently, Rabbi for Ceasefire; always, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and Reconstructing Judaism – and the proliferation of groups that claim to stand and speak for me as a Jew, including the governments of Israel and the United States.

I used to read and listen to several news outlets daily. Not so much these days, just a few trusted sources. There are reporters, analysts, activists, politicians, academics I turn to and follow. There are those whose diatribes, speeches and reports, along with so many horrendous and cruel decisions, I follow as well, not to emulate, but to witness.

Once I wanted to be a part of that enterprise – to write, research, report, and also advocate. Alongside student and opera singer, I explored journalist. But music was too compelling. Yet I feel – I hope it is true – that I abandoned neither within, though I chose, eventually, not to earn my living by the column inch or the stage.

Back in time again, but just to the winter of 2013, in a room with about 25 members of ORH. It was time for me to ask questions, so I asked: are there any “bottom lines?” The most common litmus-test realms for rabbis at the time were, and still are in many spaces, interfaith officiation and stances on Israel. The answer was: there are none. 

It is with gratitude that I continue to celebrate my “freedom of the pulpit,” even as I wrestle with this ever-thickening maelstrom of an atmosphere around how we speak together, or whether we speak or even listen together, about Israel. I’m grateful to the small group, experimenting with me these days, in a stretched-out yet intensive exploration of interacting across difference with respect. No position-enforcing. Lots of values.

The principles, as I understand them, of justice and witnessing, lead me, guide me, impel me. Some of you will resonate with the path I take personally, and most of you, I hope, resonate with the ways our denomination grapples with these and other matters through values-based parameters. 

These days, I hope to once again sleep well in a safe place for which I am immensely privileged, and dream fulsomely, to wake into another day of being and witnessing, and then dream some more:

May all children live in safety.

May all mothers hold their children in peace.

May all people see their own humanity reflected in the other.

May we know that there is no such thing as Other.

There, is and will be only One.    

[excerpt from “I Am the Mother” by Ilana Sumka, October 11, 2023]

Rabbi Liz