Standing at Sinai

Delivered at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles on the occasion of Rabbi Cosgrove’s father’s second Bar Mitzvah

Of all the possible memories to retrieve at this moment, the one that strikes me as most relevant is my memory of the Cosgrove Shabbat table. The sound of the front door to our home opening and closing signaling my father’s arrival from work, the beginning of Shabbat, and that our presence, without delay, was expected in the dining room. My mother would light the Shabbat candles; we would sing Shalom Aleikhem; my father would bless his four boys, my mother, and the wine. Before hamotzi, we washed hands – n’tilat yadayim – in silence, except, of course, for the yelp-inducing flicking of the hand towel on exposed skin, an act of fraternal aggression matched only by the scrum that would ensue over the prized middle piece of pull-apart challah. No matter the season – guests or no guests, dinner early or late – what came next never changed: Nobody could eat until mention was made of the weekly Torah portion. When we were little, it could be as brief as a check-in on our Hebrew reading skills. As we grew to be teenagers, our discussions became more robust, to include a range of medieval and contemporary commentaries. No parashah, no chicken soup – a childhood tradition that no doubt explains my Pavlovian affection for Torah. As the discussion wound down, my father would pose the closing question: “So, who thinks they know what the rabbi will talk about in shul tomorrow?” Would it be some aspect of the Torah reading, politics, the news out of Israel, or something else? Everyone took a guess. Shabbat morning arrived. We walked to shul. The Cosgrove family sat exactly where they are sitting today, and the rabbi began his sermon. Looks were passed, an eyebrow raised, victory declared by way of a silent fist pump or elbow to the ribs. Ben, Danny, Jason, my mother, or – more often than not – my father had gotten it right, had predicted the sermon topic, securing bragging rights until the cycle began again the following Shabbat.

Dad, Mazel Tov on your second Bar Mitzvah! Happy 83rd Birthday! Unlike the last time I spoke on this bimah – at my bar mitzvah, when you wrote my speech – today you have no idea what I am going to talk about!

All of us, I imagine, if given the opportunity, could retrieve a memory from our youth – a childhood experience, one-off or ongoing, that serves to shape who we are today. It could be a melody that reminds us of a place we once lived or a relationship we once were in. It could be the Proustian smell or taste of a food that prompts memories to burst forth. These memories make us who we are and connect us to others who share the same associations. The thrill I experience watching the Dodgers take the field at Chavez Ravine is not mine alone; it is a thrill I share with many others. It can be the books we read. The other day my son came home from school with a copy of Catcher in the Rye – a book I read when I was his age – starting an intergenerational conversation and connection by way of literature. Shared rituals, shared stories, shared memories – the ties that bind communities – are passed from one generation to another.

For me, “standing at Sinai” is a literal description. I step into this sanctuary and the floodgates of memory open. I know that the choices I have made, the life I have built, and the profession I have chosen can be traced back to Sinai. My love of the Jewish people, of Torah, of a good sermon, of beautiful music – these are present-day commitments seeded in this room and at my parents’ Shabbat table long ago. But what for me is literal – a Jewish identity rooted at Sinai – is, according to tradition, the shared calling card for all Jews, no matter how or where we grew up. “Standing at Sinai” means that the events of this week’s Torah reading – the receiving of Torah and the covenantal bond of our people – did not just happen in any one parashah, at any one time, or in any one place. “Standing at Sinai” means that you believe you heard God’s voice and you perceive yourself, whether born Jewish or a Jew-by-choice, to be a stakeholder in an ongoing event of revelation and Jewish identity formation. No different than how the Passover Seder calls on us to affirm that we see ourselves as if we left Egypt, to be a Jew means that you see yourself as if you were standing at Sinai.

Mystical as the theology may be, it is not magical. Becoming a stakeholder at Sinai happens by means of a process of transmission from one generation to the next. The holidays we celebrate, the rituals we observe, the foods we eat, the books we read, the melodies we sing, even the tablecloths we use. Yes, some of these are mitzvot, commandments, but they are all vessels, vessels of transmission by which Jewish identity is passed on. As taught in Pirkei Avot/The Ethics of Our Fathers – from Moses to Joshua, from Joshua to the elders and so on and on until you and me. They constitute what the rabbis of old called shalshelet ha-kabbalah, the chain of tradition, the strands of Jewish DNA that reach back to Sinai. When it happens successfully – what sociologists describe as the mimetic transmission of Jewish practice – traditions are passed down one generation to the next. These vessels of identity are transformed from heirlooms of the past to proud trophies of the present. When the transmission is unsuccessful – when one generation finds itself unable, unwilling, or ill-equipped to take hold of the inheritance of prior generations – when one generation cannot hear, as it were, the voice of those who came before, the vessels become hollow and brittle, a rupture occurs, and the chain of tradition is severed.

For all the drama of this week’s scene at Mount Sinai, I think the most intriguing exchange of the Torah reading is actually the one that comes at the start of the parashah – the arrival of Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, who, having heard the news of the Exodus, pays a visit to his son-in-law along with his daughter and grandsons. The eleventh-century commentator Rashi picks up on the psychological dimensions of Jethro’s arrival by noting the ecstatic manner in which Moses greets his father-in-law – bowing down, kissing him – enthusiasm not lost on all who were present. Jethro was as close as Moses ever got to a father of his own. Lest we forget, the Torah offers no indication that Moses had any relationship with his biological father, Amram, perhaps explaining why Moses greeted Jethro so warmly. In fact, the Midrash explains that a few weeks ago, when Moses stood before the burning bush, God had to decide what voice to adopt – too loud, and Moses might be frightened; too soft, and Moses might not listen. So God adopted the voice of Amram, Moses’s father, to speak to him. (Exodus Rabbah 45:5). The most formidable obstacle Moses faced was not his stammering tongue; it was his lack of a connection to a father figure, or, to to put it another way, his inability to find his own voice a result of his not knowing the sound of his own father’s voice. It certainly would explain why, in the wake of the golden calf, Moses pleads to see God’s face, the face linked to the voice of his father. The self-doubt and insecurity that characterized Moses’s ministry reflected his lifelong quest to hear his father’s voice and see his father’s face. There is rich Rabbinic debate as to why Jethro visited Moses and whether it was before or after Mount Sinai. Perhaps the best answer is the most simple: How could it be otherwise? Before Moses could receive the Law, his brokenness, his need for intergenerational connection, had to be addressed.

I serve as rabbi to Park Avenue Synagogue, what people in this room refer to as the Sinai Temple of the East Coast. My rabbinate runs parallel to that of your rabbi, my colleague Rabbi Wolpe. We share congregants, we visit the pope together, and it is one of the great blessings of my life that when faced with tough decisions, I do not just ask myself, “What would Rabbi Wolpe do?” I text or call my friend for advice. But beyond our friendship, beyond the fact that we share our pulpits with the two best cantors in America, we and the institutions we serve are all committed to retrieving for this generation the voice of prior generations, to rebuilding the severed link between Jewish generations, to guiding an American Jewry seeking desperately to “stand at Sinai” but not quite sure how to get there. The experience my brothers and I shared at our parents’ Shabbat table is not the shared experience of American Jewry. Most American Jews do not actually hear their father chant the Ten Commandments as I did this morning.

So how did we get where we are? It could be the rupture wrought by the the Holocaust or the challenge of reconstituting an immigrant Jewish community in a new land. It could be the failure of Jewish education or the skyrocketing costs that keep it out of reach for so many. It could be the challenge of living in an open society, that seventy percent of non-Orthodox American Jews will marry someone not born Jewish, that you can do everything “right,” and there is still no promise as to who your child will sit next to in freshman English. The fault could lie with the past; it could lie with the present. There is no shortage of explanations as to how we got where we are, no lack of finger pointing as to who is to blame. But far more constructive than complaining and blaming is asking what to do now. This is the project to which my synagogue, your synagogue, and all self-respecting synagogues are committed. How to inspire, enable, and empower an alienated American Jewry to lay claim to their rightful inheritance, to hear the voice of their fathers, and to stand proudly at Sinai.

But the synagogue cannot do it alone. Our children are reflections of the homes in which they grow up. You can stand on your soapbox and tell your kids to eat healthy, to be kind, and to live Jewishly. But your kids see you snacking late at night; they experience firsthand if you forgive freely; and they know better than anyone if you truly live Jewishly. You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool your kids for eighteen years. There are no promises in this world, but if you want your children to live Jewishly, it is you, not the rabbi or cantor, who will make the biggest difference. I, for one, know that if the Judaism of my own home is traditional and enlightened, reverential and warm, aspirational and humane, proud but not parochial, I need look no further than my parents’ table to see how it happened. And on a day like today, it strikes me as both accurate and appropriate to reflect that if these qualities also infuse the community I lead, it is to the credit of the man who modeled them for me – my dad. Of all the possible expressions of the fifth commandment – kaved at avikha v’et imekha, Honor thy father and mother – perhaps the most obvious is the degree to which we make our parents’ values evident, even when, if not especially when, they are not present.

I recall one Shabbat years ago, when I lived in Chicago, walking to synagogue with my daughter, then five years old, now on her way to college. As we walked hand-in-hand, I turned to her and said, “You know what, Lucy, here we are walking hand-in-hand to shul together and when I was a little boy, I walked to shul holding my daddy’s, your grandpa’s, hand. And you know what is even more fascinating, when grandpa was a little boy, he walked to shul holding his daddy’s hand.” On and on I went – confident that she had lost track and interest in what I found to be so fascinating – until the moment she paused, tugged at my hand, and responded with a question as pure as it was unexpected. She looked up at me and asked: “Daddy, did Moses walk to shul with his children?” I answered her the only way I knew how: “Yes, Lucy, Moses walked to shul with his children.”

The path ahead is not an easy one. Challenges abound, the terrain is shifting, and the roadmap is not always clear. Let’s at least commit to doing the one thing we can all do. Let’s reach out our hand to the coming generation with the hope that they extend theirs in return. Let’s lead by example, spending more time showing and less time telling. Step by step, hand-in-hand, generation to generation – until we are all standing together at Sinai.