Rifkind Lunch 2020

 

It’s my honor to welcome you all—albeit virtually!—to this year’s Judge Simon H. Rifkind Award Luncheon. I want to thank you for supporting JTS, and most of all to thank John Finley and Jonathan Youngwood for allowing us to honor them and join their good names to those of Judge Rifkind and of JTS. I know that others will be paying tribute to John and Jonathan, so I will say only that, singly and together, they bear witness to the values for which JTS stands and transmits to the students who will lead our community in coming decades.

 

Faith in the promise of America as a democratic and pluralistic society has always been at the very core of JTS’s teaching and practice.  The founders of our institution included “America” in its name to designate far more than geographic location in the new world. They believed, rather—and we still do—that our society depends on commitments to meritocracy and inclusion. These commitments bore the promise, to generations of immigrants and children of immigrants, of a better future than Jews had ever enjoyed before in the long history of the Diaspora. JTS has taught from the outset that fidelity to Jewish tradition requires rather than precludes respect for, and cooperation with, other communities and traditions. The commitment to justice, pluralism, and mutual respect attracts students who want the tradition they will represent and serve as professional and lay leaders to be a force for unity rather than division, cooperation rather than intolerance.

 

People used to say of Judge Rifkind that the law was his religion.  The judge would often quote the Biblical verse, “A day in thy courts, [O Lord] is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.” But he would always amend the verse slightly, in what he called “prayerful recitation,” to read, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the law, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.” I know that devotion to law as an instrument of justice is shared by our honorees and the participants in this Rifkind lunch. Permit me to take a few moments to explain—through reference to this week’s Torah portion, and to the holiday of Purim that Jews celebrated two days ago—why that same devotion to justice and the law has long been a particular hallmark of JTS.

 

Let’s start with Purim—a holiday that is perhaps the most fun-filled of any on the Jewish calendar and features the reading aloud of a book of the Bible, Esther, that provokes more laughs by far than any other. Yet Purim, as the rabbis recognized two thousand years ago, is also one of the most serious holidays on the Jewish calendar. Our sages lavished more commentary on Esther than on any other scriptural book, and in a deadly serious pun (itself a signal of what is at stake) noted that the holiest day of the Jewish year is called (in Hebrew) “Yom Ha-Kippurim,” literally, “a day like Purim.” The day we fast is “like” the day we feast. The day on which we atone for sins is like the one on which we recall that a wicked counselor to a feckless king almost received license to kill all the Jews of the Persian Empire. The wicked counselor, Haman, sought and nearly won that permission by arguing that “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them.”  Note the logic here, all too familiar to us from history books and recent world headlines alike: They are different from us; their laws are not our laws; so they do not deserve toleration.

 

Jews, who for nearly two millennia lived everywhere as a small minority, “scattered and dispersed among other peoples,” have always appreciated the need for law, justice, and equity to protect the weak from the strong. We have frequently owed our very existence to the sway of legitimate authority over brute force—and of course have suffered greatly when law was perverted by those in power. Fidelity to justice under law is also a cardinal principle of Judaism. The Torah repeatedly commands fair treatment of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—even love for them—in God’s name, and identifies God with the causes of justice, compassion and law. The point is perhaps stressed so often because, as the Book of Esther shows with dark humor and cruel satire, the rule of law can easily be perverted when “it is not in [someone’s or some group’s] interest to tolerate” whoever “them” is in a particular society.

 

Students at JTS are taught to understand why our sages bent over backwards to provide what they called “fences around the law;” why the Torah and subsequent teachings took care to translate general ethical principles like the Ten Commandments into laws that gave them force; and why rabbis over the centuries constantly adapted the law to changing circumstances, lest it fall into irrelevance and disrepute. Our students become part of a living tradition of ethical thinking, legal reasoning, and communal activism in pursuit of justice and so of service of God. You see why Judge Rifkind was drawn to JTS and served it faithfully for so many years.

 

I don’t have to tell this group that navigating the path of just and compassionate law is never easy, certainly not in a time of rapid and dramatic change such as ours. This week’s Torah portion suggests that there is another source of difficulty: the powerful human drive for certainty in the face of human frailty and mortality. In a different time, one might have passed right by this element in the weekly Torah portion, Ki Tissa (Exodus 30:11 -34: 35), but it stands out in boldface as we confront the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The Israelites are scared to death because Moses, the prophet of God who has led them out of Egypt, across the Red Sea and into the wilderness, bound for the Promised Land—“this man Moses,” as they call him, has not returned as promised from his latest encounter with God at the top of Mount Sinai. Without him, and so perhaps without God, the people are lost, in every sense of the word. So they make an idol, a golden calf, pronounce it divine, and begin to bow and dance before it.  

 

The relevant point at this Rifkind lunch is what happens next.  Moses, who simultaneously acts as God’s prosecutor and Israel’s defense attorney, presents God’s indictment to the people and then pleads their case before God. One could not imagine a more graphic acting out of the law’s commitment, the attorney’s commitment, to both justice and compassion. When God, in one of the Torah’s theological high points, calls out God’s attributes before Moses, the thirteen attributes that God names reduce to two—and these two,  not  surprisingly, are Justice and Mercy. The way to a society that lives up to those ideals, a promised land of just laws, is the very opposite of idolatrous orgy. Moses descends from the mountain one final time bearing new tablets of covenant, of law.

 

JTS trains religious and lay leaders who will keep this precious tradition relevant, and make it compelling, to a generation raised on the internet, smart phones, and tablets of a different sort. We need new kinds of educators and academics at a time when information is readily available in quantities we cannot absorb, but commitment to truth is weakening and wisdom is in short supply.

 

Thanks to all of you for pursuing this work in all you do—and for helping JTS to carry it forward through your support. Be well.