Shabbat Morning D’var Torah * 16 Kislev 5783 * December 10, 2022
(Image: 2nd-century Jewish sage Ben Zoma, made for me by congregant Karen Herman!)
When I started rabbinical school I also began a special fellowship that included rabbis and other Jewish community professionals-in-training from other movements and seminaries. And I was so tickled that one-sixth of this small group grew up in the St. Paul-Minneapolis metropolitan area. Alas only I came from St. Paul; the other two came, to quote a phrase in the Pesach Seder from ever ha-nahar, from across the river in Minneapolis. I had no idea that the two of them — Rabbis Rachel Sabath-Beit Halachmi and Sandra Cohen — would become two of my most important teachers. Some of you will remember that in 2020 I brought them here on Zoom to be your teachers as well. This week I have been learning from them about the theme I named last week for the month of Kislev, the question of the second century sage Ben Zoma: Eizehu gibbor — Who is courageous?
Rabbi Sandra Cohen is truly a ba’alat midrash, a master of the learning and teaching of midrash, the imaginative explorations of crevices of Torah. She is a much sought-after adult teacher, in the Denver area where she lives and in other places.
Twenty-one years ago, as she was the married mother of a four-year-old and rabbi of a small congregation, Rabbi Cohen suffered a stroke. She was 34 years old. She recovered her speech and her movement, but the stroke left her with fatigue and frequent headaches, such that she could continue to serve in the path she had envisioned as a congregational rabbi. She walks frequently with a cane. Almost every year, Sandy comes to our annual Wexner alumni conference, with its boisterous meals and sometimes loud sessions and long hours, and essentially sacrifices week of wellbeing back home for the chance to be with us, to learn and sometimes to teach. Maybe a third of our cohort make the trip, and Sandy is one of the regulars.
She has been a terrific mother and partner and remade her career around the realities she has lived with, and she can’t say enough about her husband Ben. All of that would make Rabbi Cohen one of my models of courage.
But over the past several years in particular, Rabbi Cohen has become more outspoken about another dimension of her life, which is depression. You should bookmark her blog page at timesofisrael.com, where she teaches about living spiritually with and through depression frequently, and openly. And she teaches about it to groups, as she did for us before Rosh Hashanah a couple years ago.
It’s from Sandy that I learned that many people with mental illness carry an extra burden, which is that many of the people around them who care about them are programmed for arcs that move from illness to complete healing, refuah shlaymah. But mental illness isn’t like this, and of course now I understand better that chronic physical illness isn’t either. Suffering moves in cycles, and when she is in a deep depression often there is nothing someone else can do for her in the moment that helps, other than not abandon her. And being better is no guarantee it won’t be worse again, and it’s not because a person isn’t trying — and for the people around her the only failure would be not to show up again because you had told yourself the hard part was over.
Rabbi Cohen’s courage is in writing and teaching with brutal honesty and openness about her own experience, repeatedly centering the parts of her life that too many people would be ashamed of. She has often fused her experiences with midrash, and enriched her already-rich Torah teaching. She’s willing to risk being known publicly mostly through her symptoms, so she can help even one person in our communities. She has found her own self-worth, and solace and wisdom in the spiritual teachings of Torah, and her community of friends and colleagues and students. And thus without pointing an accusing finger, she is a Chanukkah candle shining light to help us see what we often don’t, whether we are the person suffering or the person who loves them. She is setting down a cruse of oil for others to find, in particular at this Chanukkah season — three of her most recent pieces on her blog are beautiful and courageous pre-Chanukkah teachings.
Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi, the other Minneapolis member of our Wexner cohort, is a scholar of Jewish thought and currently the rabbi of a large congregation in the Baltimore area, and previously among others roles she served as the National Director of Recruitment and Admissions for the entire Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religious system, the seminaries of the Reform movement. Rabbi Sabath Beit-Halachmi is a fascinating example and teacher around issues of Jewish peoplehood across the diversities of America and Israel and the different ideologies of religious Judaism. If you met her in various situations you might not be able to tell if she is American or Israeli, with her impeccable Hebrew; or if she is Reform or Conservative, if you went by her observance of halacha (Jewish law and practice). That’s why I brought her here as a thinker back in 2020. Rachel is in the most balanced way a powerhouse, a person of careful and clear and forceful speech who is conversational whether it’s one to one or addressing a conference. I am fascinated when I talk to her about her ability to calibrate to me, to pace me in a debate and to push me.
And in March of 2019 Rabbi Sabath-Beit Halachmi was in a front page story in the New York Times, as one of seven women describing sexual harrassment by Michael Steinhardt, who is one of the most prominent contemporary Jewish philanthropists. He is one of the co-founders of Birthright, and his money is everywhere in Jewish life. He has long been known to be obnoxious and his behavior has been dismissed as boorish attempts at humor. But the Times article and subsequent reporting revealed his demeaning and threatening behavior toward women on his staff and in projects he has funded. I won’t sully the bimah with some of the things he is accused of saying to women, other than that Rachel’s first-person article about him in Haaretz begins, “You want me to be your concubine?” She was a 27-year-old rabbi serving a congregation through a position he had funded but only for that year, and in the moment she spoke back to him. But others covered for him.
In 2019 Rabbi Sabath-Beit Halachmi spoke up, along with six other women, as a way of advancing the #metoo imperative within the Jewish community. She wrote about carrying her experience with Steinhardt with no support around her to act effectively or take the career risks that would entail, and what it took to build the collective decision to speak out, in order to stand by other women and in a way that could not be ignored. She has not hesitated to call out respected male leaders, rabbis, who made excuses for Steinhardt or shielded him. Together, Rachel and her colleagues named the crass dynamics by which Steinhardt’s money, which so many organizations depend, on twist the ethics of Jewish organizations and make many of them unsafe for women to work at. I think one measure of their success is that Steinhardt’s recently published book, some kind of manifesto about the Jewish future, has been largely met with silence.
It is courageous to stand up against someone who is powerful through wealth and gender and position and control in one’s workplaces. On top of that, Rachel’s courage, like so many who have shared #metoo stories, has been to risk being defined in the public eye by harrassment and victimhood, to have that be the professional story instead of her whole rabbinate, with all its mentoring and brilliant scholarship and activism. Like for Sandy, there is the risk of being seen in one dimension, a dimension of vulnerability as a female and risk even of shame — and the courage is deciding nonetheless to be visible so the next person will not have to suffer. Rachel and her colleagues in the Times article were a line of candles, waiting to stand in the line by the eighth one to help her be seen and to help her shine.
As I was doing my research this week, I found an interview of Rachel with Rabbi Robert Barr about the Steinhardt matter, and I was struck by her gevurah, her powerful center in situating her story as a question about community and who we are, a question of modern Jewish thought — and in that, her ability to maintain herself as a teacher and not sound like a vulnerable person defined only by the topic at hand.
Eizehu gibbor — What can we learn about being courageous, from my teachers, Rabbi Sandra Cohen and Rabbi Rachel Sabath-Beit Halachmi?
They make me think about the story of Yaakov Avinu (Jacob) and his struggle at the Yabok with the being during the night. He emerges with a wound, a limp that we are never told goes away but we’re also never reminded of — and a blessing, and a name that integrates his wounding experience into something that means more, for him and for his descendents.
They make me think about Dinah, who like Yaakov was attacked alone — she was raped — and who must have a story of courage and blessing afterward, though the men around her and the Torah’s narrator have not told it. Courage does not require a public statement or being a teacher and role model, and I don’t want the stories I am telling here to make you think that if you’re not open about your struggles or your dilemmas, if you don’t have a story you want to tell out loud that you are not courageous.
What my two teachers teach me is that courage is often about the cruse of oil that you find, in a story or encouragement you have heard about you or about someone like you, that gives you more inner power than you realized you had.
Courage is often about the candles next to you, the ones that were there from a previous day and the ones who were there from Day 1, and the ones that appear more lately or unexpectedly.
Most of all, courage comes in believing that you are a candle even when you think you might not be, when your light is so hidden by something else you are going through. It’s recognizing a you that is beyond the pain or the injustice or the public story, a you that is oh so much more powerful.