THE PULPIT
FROM THE DESK OF RABBI SCHWAB

HOW RESPONSIBLE ARE WE?

One of the most telling statements in our tradition claims "Kol Yisrael aray-vim zeh la-zeh" - every Jew is responsible for every other Jew. The genesis of that idea comes from the biblically based notion of our common ancestry, that we are all descendents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, making us all cousins. We are family, as the 70s song put it, and family takes care of its members. Especially in view of the unfriendly reception we have often gotten from the others around us, we have made it a point to care for each other; after all, if we won't, who will? And so, throughout our long history, and in every country we have inhabited, our people has formed community-wide organizations - in Hebrew called a "kehillah" - to see to the needs of the community and of the individuals in those communities. From education to social welfare, from ritual observance to communal defense, whether for local Jews or Jews in faraway places, the Jewish communities of the past took up their responsibilities for their fellow Jews, operating from funds given as a kind of voluntary tax from the individuals in the community. To be a Jew meant to contribute to the Jewish community as a whole; to be a Jew meant banding together to meet the needs of the family.

What was true in the past continues to be no less true in the present. The needs of the Jewish community, and of individual Jews, continue to demand our attention, and there is no one else to take up the responsibilities for our family, our cousins, our fellow Jews. And so we have created synagogues, and funded them with "dues" (a volunteer tax), to see to the basic religious and educational needs of the local Jewish community. But the more general communal needs - social needs, intensive educational needs, the needs of Jewish communities around the world - have required a different institution, more broadly based, but with no less claim on the resources of the local Jewish community. In our area that is the work of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orange County, and through our local Federation, that is the work of the United Jewish Communities, the national organization of local Federations. And now is the time for us to pledge our voluntary tax for the crucial work of Jewish Federation in supporting our cousins, our family, in so many ways.

There is so much that Federation does for our common enterprise. I suspect most of us are well aware of the financial and moral backing our Federation gives to the State of Israel, which supports, amongst other things, immigrant absorption, senior citizen programs, security details for school children, and psychological and physical rehabilitation for the victims of the violence directed at our cousins in the Jewish state. Less well known, I think, are the services provided by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) for Jews around the world. For example, the JDC is at the forefront of the worldwide effort to prop up the 200,000 strong Jewish community in Argentina. At a time of incredible economic dislocation in the second largest country in South America, the 2% poverty rate amongst Argentinean Jews has risen to 25%, overwhelming the Jewish social service agencies, while synagogues and Day Schools (which serve the majority of Jewish children in Argentina since the public schools are heavily, and legally, Christian in orientation) struggle - often unsuccessfully - to pay their employees. It is the JDC that has been there, using our Federation dollars to help our Argentine cousins. In Eastern Europe, the remnants of the survivors of the Holocaust have seen their meager pensions reduced to a non-living income by the change from Communism to capitalism. The JDC provides food, medicine and social structure for elderly Jews throughout the former Soviet Union, Romania and Bosnia - thanks to us. Wherever Jews around the world are in trouble, the JDC is there to help.

Then there are the needs of the American Jewish community. Perhaps the most crucial single national Jewish organization in our time is Hillel, the Jewish presence on college campuses around the country. For it is on college campuses that our children make decisions about their future lives and their future connections with the Jewish community and Judaism, whether it is choices involving future mates or choices having to do with their practice and knowledge of their Jewish heritage. Further, it is on college campuses that our children are exposed, for the first time, to the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric that we have seen rising in academic communities. The only place for our children to gather as Jews, the only place where our children can learn about and practice their heritage, the only place where Jewish students can organize to combat the lies and bigotry epidemic on their campuses is the local Hillel. Our Federation, along with Federations around the country, supply up to 50% of the funding for those bulwarks of Jewish presence. When we add to support of Hillel the resources Federation gives to national Jewish educational efforts and to the Jewish community's outreach to opinion leaders in Washington and elsewhere, we can see how much difference our Federation makes in the continuity of the Jewish enterprise in the United States.

Finally, half of our Federation's resources stay right here in Orange County. The Jewish Family Service depends on the Federation to support its senior citizens lunch program, its counseling program for families and individuals in distress, and its outreach to the elderly and the sick stuck in their homes and anxious for human contact. The Jewish Community Center of Orange County provides a myriad of programs for Jews all over our area. The Community Relations Council is the arm of Federation which connects with local governments, whether providing school systems with information about Jewish holidays or spurring concern for anti-Semitic incidents in the area. The Youth to Israel scholarship program, and the scholarship programs for children seeking a Jewish camping experience and/or a full day Jewish educational experience, are creations of Jewish Federation of Orange County. Dozens of our own students and families have benefited from those Federation programs, as has our own Hebrew School, which receives funding from the Federation for special educational programs throughout the year. Jewish life in general in our county - and the Jewish lives of thousands of individuals in our own community - have been enriched by the collective response of all of us through Jewish Federation.

Which is exactly as it is supposed to be. For we are family; we are responsible for one another. If we will not help our fellow Jews, our cousins, our mishpachah, who will? Next month, on Sunday, February 9, hundreds of volunteers will try to reach all of us to ask us what we will assess ourselves for the benefit of the Jewish community of Orange County, of the United States, of Israel and of the world. I urge you to make your voluntary tax a significant one. Our Jewish life - our Jewish lives - depend on how much we are willing to give to this 4000 year old Jewish enterprise of ours.

SHOPPING AS A SACRED ACTIVITY

Those who know me know well my aversion to spending money on material goods. I am rather famous - or infamous, depending on the individual's perspective - in my family and amongst my friends for my dislike for purchasing everything from clothing, household items, and any kind of gadget to cars, airline tickets and jewelry. Generally I save whatever money I have to spend on books, education and others who need it more than I. But mostly I try not to spend the money at all, and if I have to spend it, I spend as little as possible.

Which is why, when we went to Israel last summer, I found myself in the crux of a severe dilemma. For one of the reasons Aviva and I went to Israel - along with our need to experience the joy of being in the Jewish state and our desire to show some sense of solidarity with our Israeli cousins - was to spend money. As you well know, because I have mentioned it perhaps half a dozen times in various communiqués with you over the last year, one of the most troubling aspects of the last two years of violence in Israel has been the sizable decrease in tourist spending in an economy which depends on tourist dollars to fuel its growth. The lack of those tourist dollars has been a major source for the rise of unemployment in Israel to 10.4% in the last quarter. If for no other reason, we need to travel to Israel simply to maintain the economic structure of a country in need of the stimulus brought in by the spending of foreigners in the marketplaces of the country.

But, of course, not everyone is willing or able to make that journey in the present uncertain climate, either financially or emotionally, despite assurances of the basic safety one would enjoy on a trip to the Jewish state. So how do we help to stimulate the Israeli economy if we aren't there? By BRINGING ISRAEL HERE!! On March 23, from 11:00 a.m. to 6 p.m., in our own social hall and gym, Jewish Federation, the Jewish Community Center of Orange County, and the Newburgh Jewish Community Center will be teaming up to bring Israel to us. Merchants from Israel, selling everything from T-shirts and Judaica to jewelry and sandals, will be creating a Ben Yehudah Mall right here. We will all - myself included - have the opportunity to spend our money in Israel, as it were, as if we were truly there. (There will even be Christian religious objects for sale - after all, Israel is the Holy Land for our Christian neighbors, and the Christian merchants in Israel have been suffering as well. So bring your non-Jewish friends; they will appreciate the merchandise as well.) And what is a mall without a food court? And what would a Jewish gathering be without eating? So be assured that there will be what to eat that day as well. And don't leave the kids at home - there will games in the gym for them, as well as the food to eat, and, after all, who else would know better how to spend their parents' money than they?

Which leads me to my sincere belief in the title of these remarks. A high school friend with whom I still correspond sent me a published sermon from Michael Schuler, a Unitarian minister in Wisconsin, which reads, in part, "…spirituality is a quality of awareness and a sensitivity of conscience that informs all that I do. The world only becomes profane when that awareness is missing, when the voice of conscience is muted. …. [Clearly, then] (f)or those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, shopping is a sacred activity." His point is not that indiscriminate shopping is holy - in fact, that is the very opposite of his point - but that, like every action we take in life, buying things is a sacred act whenever we see buying activities as infused with our values. When we choose one car over another because it delivers better mileage, reflecting our conscious effort to lessen dependence on oil bought from governments that use their money to support people who terrorize our country, we have turned purchasing a car into a sacred act. When we check the kashrut of a food item before buying, even if the purchase will cost more money than a comparable non-kosher item, we have turned a grocery trip into a sacred act. And when we choose to buy from Israeli businesses hurt by the idiotic violence of the past two years, even if the same item might cost less elsewhere, we turn our shopping into a sacred act, helping merchants caught in the middle of a no-win struggle and adding to the economic viability of the Jewish state.

But even if your reason for shopping at the Temple Sinai Ben Yehudah Mall is just to find great stuff that is unavailable anywhere in our area, that's okay also. It will be a wonderful and special day in our synagogue, and every one of us should be there. In fact, just being there will be a sacred act. See you there.

ORGANIZING A SPECIAL MITZVAH

A passage from the Talmud that is read from the siddur each morning lists the mitzvot "that yield immediate fruit and continue to yield fruit in time to come", that is, those commandments of G-d that are necessary or vital or "the right thing to do" at the moment we do them, and which then continue to bring satisfaction, joy and positive benefits well into the future. Among such mitzvot the Talmud lists honoring parents, regular study, providing hospitality and attending the dead. And stuck right in the middle of the list is the expectation that we will perform bikkur holim, that we will visit those in our community who are ill. So much did our Sages think of the mitzvah of bikkur holim that they claimed that each visit to a sick person would take away 1/60 of his illness, that is, that simply visiting the sick would help to cure that person. (Unfortunately even that formulation does not allow us to cure people completely simply by sending 60 people to visit. But we all know, from personal experience when we have been ill, how much better we feel after a visit from a concerned friend or loved one.)

As a result of this long-held Jewish value, communities over the centuries have formed societies - committees - to organize the process of visiting the sick. Just as our ancestors created a hevrat Shas to regularize the study of Jewish texts, and a hevra kadisha to assist in the burial of the dead, so too would they put together a hevrat bikkur holim, an identifiable group whose mission was to bring comfort to those laid up on the bed of illness. Bikkur holim societies now exist in many communities with a sizable Jewish presence, both in our country and around the Jewish world. Members of such organizations visit Jews in local hospitals, both to raise spirits and to provide for the Jewish needs of patients, from grape juice and challah for Friday night to perhaps a corned beef sandwich for those whose doctors might allow it. Others who are part of the bikkur holim committee might make home visits to those laid up for a few days or a couple of weeks after a hospital stay, or even for some who are housebound for months or years. And all who have participated in the work of a hevrat bikkur holim testify to the benefits, not only for those visited, but in their own souls as well. The truth of the Talmudic statement has been revealed in their own lives.

In the last month, dedicated group of members of Temple Sinai have initiated the process of creating a bikkur holim society in our community, giving us all the opportunity to participate in this most important of mitzvot right here in the Middletown area. The question that remains for them - and for us - is whether there is a large enough group of individuals in our synagogue who would be willing to volunteer to visit those "sick on the bed of illness". Are there enough members of our congregation to sustain regular visits to members of our synagogue - or, perhaps, all members of the Jewish community at large - who are patients at Horton and/or Arden Hill and/or any of the hospitals in our area? Do we have congregants who would be willing to visit our homebound members on an on-going basis?

And could that volunteer be you? Can you give a couple of hours a week to connecting with fellow Jews whose lives would be inestimably brightened by your concern? The coordinating committee will organize the training needed to visit the sick in an effective manner, which would provide our community with a trained corps of experts in this most special mitzvah. Are you willing to help out? If you would like to explore the opportunity to join in the holy work of our nascent bikkur holim society, contact the office at 343-1861. In the months ahead the committee will organize a meeting to let all of us decide whether and how we might participate. Know that if you decide to join our bikkur holim society, you will benefit personally from the fruit of your actions both in the short and the long term - and so will our community.

75 Highland Avenue, Middletown, NY 10940 (914) 343-1861 (Voice) (914) 343-4568 (Rabbi's Study) (914) 343-1915 (Fax) Rabbi Joel Schwab Cantor Lyle Rockler