Where Jewish Wisdom Lives

Where Jewish Wisdom Lives
By Rabbi Sivan Rotholz

This week we begin the book of Devarim — "words." Eleh ha-devarim — these are the words Moses spoke to all of Israel. After forty years leading our people through the wilderness, Moses does something he has never quite done before. He stops walking, and he teaches. He takes everything that happened — the failures, the fights, the years of wandering — and turns it into words, spoken aloud, to the whole community. To quote my my hevrutah – my partner in learning and life, and one of my greatest teachers – "The Torah is always on time." And so it is fitting that we begin this book on the very Shabbat we honor those who have spent a year turning their own Jewish learning into words: shared in classrooms, debated around tables and in Zoom rooms, and now celebrated here tonight.

As a way of honoring the lessons they’ve learned, I hope you'll permit me to share one of my own.

My mother converted to Judaism before I was born. She studied under a Conservative rabbi and had an Orthodox conversion. Our home was kosher with two sets of dishes, we were Shomer Shabbos, and my Jewish community was the local Conservative synagogue.

My Aba, on the other hand, was a secular, cultural Israeli — skeptical of organized religious institutions and structures. When my mother told him she wanted to convert, he famously said, "Don't give those people power over you." (Imagine what he would have thought of me becoming a rabbi!) The Judaism I inherited from him lived in the home of my Savtah — my grandma — around her table every Friday night and holiday – in the food, delightful chaos, and people gathered there.

From both of my parents, I learned that Jewish time is sacred, and that family, food, and intentional engagement are core to Judaism. And instinctively, from two such different models of Jewish life, I understood that there is more than one way to be a Jew. But for most of my adult life, it was my Aba's version I claimed as my own. I imagined myself becoming a culturally Jewish Reform rabbi — as if that were a well-worn path, and not a contradiction I hadn't yet noticed.

So you can imagine my face when I landed in Israel for my first year of rabbinical school, met the future clergy of Reform Jewry, and was informed — for the first time in my life — that Judaism is a religion. Full stop. My classmates looked at me the way you look at someone who's just told you the sky is green when I offered, gently, that Judaism could, alternatively, be a culture.

These classmates, it turned out, had grown up inside a Judaism that looked very different from my own. To be fair, cultural Judaism isn't exactly what rabbinical school is built to produce. I was, by a wide margin, the outlier among my peers. But wisdom, our sages teach, is tested in argument, not agreement. My fellow future clergy pushed back on nearly everything I thought I knew. I pushed back just as hard. I didn't win those arguments. Neither did they. That was the point. None of us knew yet what might emerge from such a room.

Devarim opens with Moses looking back on nearly forty years of wandering, and the first thing he recalls is the moment he learned he couldn't guide the people alone. "I cannot bear the burden of you by myself,"^[1] he tells the masses — echoing almost exactly what his father-in-law Yitro had once taught him. So he asked the people to choose, from each of their own tribes, individuals who were "wise, discerning, and experienced"^[2] — and he appointed them as leaders so that no single person would have to carry a community's questions alone.

Notice what Moses doesn't do: he doesn't import help from outside. He turns to the community itself and says, in effect: the wisdom I need is already here, distributed among you.

Our sages carry this same instinct forward. "Make for yourself a teacher," Pirkei Avot tells us, "and acquire for yourself a friend."^[3] Torah learning, the Talmud adds, comes through "critical give and take with friends,"^[4] and through "fine argumentation with disciples."^[5] "I have learned much from my teachers," the Rabbis offer, "more from my colleagues, and most from my students."^[6] Torah is not information absorbed by one individual – sitting and studying alone. It is relational and reciprocal: built through back-and-forth discussions and debates among teachers, friends, colleagues, and students, across generations.

I did not, in the end, leave rabbinical school having disavowed cultural Judaism — quite the opposite; it's become a celebrated piece of my rabbinate – along with the core religious piece. I am endlessly energized by helping American Jews take real pride in a Judaism lived in the home and at the table, not only in the sanctuary. (Although, it’s hard not to find religion in this incredible sanctuary.) And my classmates didn't get ordained into some new movement of Cultural Judaism, either. What emerged, instead, from that room full of unresolved arguments, was an understanding of Judaism none of us could have arrived at alone.

Which brings me to tonight.

This year, our Adult Learners debated their way to discovery and wisdom together, too. From people in their 20s to their 90s, from those born Jewish to those who joined Am Israel, from all backgrounds and walks of life, you came to us holding opinions varied enough to make the Talmud itself do a double take. Some of you found each other in a classroom on a Tuesday night or on Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon; others gathered around a table that became something more than a class. Some joined for Wrestling With Tradition – where dinner and community-building live alongside Judaism's big questions. And others deepened Jewish literacy and a sense of belonging in our newest class, ‘Doing Jewish,’ where students learned together and then lived that Judaism out in the field. But whatever you studied and whichever classes you took, none of you did this alone.

You found yourselves your own teachers this year. And you acquired friends. I know I did both, right alongside you — and I know that, as Talmud offers, while "I have learned much from my teachers [and] more from my colleagues," I have learned "most from my students."

This year you have taken Torah Study, Bible & Bagels, and Talmud Study. Hebrew. Critical Conversations About Israel and Israeli Elections. Talmudic Tales with Joe Septimus. Interfaith classes with St. Bart's. Sewing Seeds of Spiritual Awareness with Yiscah Smith. Haute & Holy with R' Arielle Stein. Art and archaeology with R' Sarah Berman. The Madwoman in the Rabbi's Attic with Gila Fine. Wrestling With Tradition. And Doing Jewish.

If you have been a student in these classes this year, I invite you to rise.

Look around you. This is what a year of Jewish learning looks like.

We now invite this incredible community of Adult Learners to come up onto the bima – or to join us for a virtual aliyah. Let us bless all that we learned, together.

^[1] Deuteronomy 1:9

^[2] Deuteronomy 1:13

^[3] Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 1:6

^[4] Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 6:6

^[5] ibid

^[6] Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit 7a (also cited in Makkot 10a)