But what if you believe, like I do, that the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in ancient times was, from a historical point of view, the best thing ever to happen to the Jewish people?

Had we remained a temple cult, we would probably have long ago been relegated to the dustbin of history by now, like so many other sacrificial cults. Had we not internalized our culture and our faith, built a temple in the mind and carried it around the globe, the greatest achievements of the Jewish people would never have occured. And of course, we are no longer in exile. Any Jew who wants to go move to Israel (for now…of course, the Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel might problematize the whole notion of who gets to be a Jew pretty soon).

So why do we mourn?

Anshel Pfeffer argued in Haaretz last week that we shouldn’t. He wrote:

Mourning on the Ninth of Av in this day and age flies in the face of both secular Zionism and religious Zionism. It contradicts the right of Jews around the world to decide where they prefer to live. The exile is over, and the temple has not been rebuilt because we don’t want to do it.

There is plenty to mourn in the world for Jews and non-Jews alike, although the Exile is no longer one of those things. I believe Diaspora is a blessing, for all peoples. It made me who I am. It made my parents and grandparents. It made artists and thinkers and scientists and cultures. It is not a thing to grieve.

We can mourn violence. We can mourn the continued abuse of our planet and our neighbors in defiance of God and common sense. We can mourn that Israel, the nation to which we returned, is far from perfect, but to mourn that which made us a global people is to mourn that which created me.

I am a product of Diaspora. I just can’t bring myself to mourn my own existence.

It’s Passover, that wonderful holiday that combines story-telling, liberation, and sacred crackers.

Passover commemorates the liberation of the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt, and marks an opportunity for all to be mindful of the as yet unfulfilled redemption of all slaves. Slavery is too much with us in the modern world. In fact, according to Rabbis for Human Rights, 27 million people are currently enslaved around the world, more than at any other time in human history. Kevin Bales, founder of Free the Slaves, speaks on the problem at TED2010 and offers a simple question: Are we willing to live in a world with slavery?

This year, during the Jewish Feast of Freedom, we must acknowledge this tragedy and work to end it. Here are some things you can do:

Visit the Rabbis For Human Rights page and Act Now to Combat Slavery

Contact your elected leaders

Work hard this year to eliminate from the marketplace at least one product produced by slave labor, whether it be electronics, carpets, or even tomatoes.

Know where your dollars are going and direct them to responsible producers and away from those who profit by destroying the lives of others (pdf report).

If you want to include any of these issues in your seder, you can download a variety of Pesach materials here.

And of course, buy fair trade. I recommend Mirembe Kawomera Coffee, from the inspiring interfaith coffee cooperative in Uganda.

Thank you to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of CBST for bringing my attention to so many resources.

There is shift in the debate about homosexuality in the world right now. The discourse is changing in the political and religious sphere as people realize that the old bigotries just won’t do anymore. Fank Rich has an Op-Ed in today’s NYTimes about the waning days of anti-Gay bigotry in enshrined in U.S. Law, as a reaction to the delightfully stupid and amazingly hateful video by the National Organization for Marriage, The Gathering Storm (I’m not going to link to it).  Even Karl “the gays are coming to take your guns, vote Republican” Rove’s disciple, Steve Schmidt senses the shifting winds and has thrown his support behind marriage rights for all. And in the sphere of faith, even Rick Warren is backpedaling toward less bigotry.

So, what about the Jews? Haim Watzman at South Jerusalem has a piece up about And Thou Shalt Love, a short film about a gay Orthodox Jew who cannot abandon either of those parts of himself (for more on this, of course, everyone should see Trembling before G-D, and look at the other resources on their website).

I am especially fond of this line of the post, which sums of the problem facing Orthodoxy in all religions around this issue:

What is certain is that the process must begin by the acknowledgment that current halachic attitudes to homosexuality create an injustice that the halacha and that the community of believers cannot tolerate.

The Orthodox have to find a way to square the reality of homosexuality as a valid expression of love with their own belief systems, and this will no doubt take some time (how long did it take to resolve the number of plagues issue, after all? Rabbinic arguments are eternal…), but it is a debate that must happen because, as Watzman puts it, the current condemnation“cannot be tolerated in a system that is meant to be the practical expression of God’s immanence in the world.”

There are plenty of halachic arguments out there. Rabbi Bradley Arston, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies wrote an argument (pdf) that was accepted by the Conservative Movement some time ago, and his website has a plethora of further writings on the subject.

The key point that Rabbi Arston makes, and one that is echoed in Jay Michaelson’s long piece on reconciling being gay and religously Jewish, is that

Encouraging sexual responsibility and stability among homosexuals can only strengthen family values and traditional communities for all.  Lacking any compelling reason for stigmatizing monogamous gays and lesbians, the clear moral imperative is to take a bold stand with these innocent and seeking Jews rather than with those who would oppress them.  We must find a way to draw these people into the fabric of Jewish community, with the goal of bringing them  to a life of Torah and mitzvot.

Now, as always, we must remember the fundamental goal of Jewish law: “Clearly justice is the ultimate value to which God’s will must conform; any dichotomy between them is unthinkable.  The demand of ethics and the command of God are one.”

“The demands of ethics and the commands of God are one.” Right there is the reason that all people of faith should not only support equal rights and dignity for GLBT people, they should be leading the charge.

(in the political sphere, Israel is reaching out internationally to gay rights groups to bolster its case against Iran. This is a pretty good idea and far more hepful than calling Iran the next Third Reich)

HuffPost has a list of their Top 5 Passover Traditions from around the world. I like the literalism of the Jews of Gibraltar:

4) GIBRALTAR: In the British territory of Gibraltar, the tiny island off the coast of Spain, Jews actually mix the dust of bricks into their charoset dish, a symbol of the mortar used to hold together the brick walls the Jews built in Egypt, according to Hillel.

Don’t know where to have a seder? In Peru and don’t know where to go tonight? Chabad can help you. Chabad is hosting seders for Jews all over the world today, and they have a helpful global search function for those looking for a place to go. They are holding seders in Mumbai again, but the location is not being publicised and is only by word of mouth, because of security.

Of course, as Passover is a time to celebrate our freedoms, we have a religious duty, I believe, to remain aware of those for whome freedom is not yet a reality. There is no shortage in the world right now, from gays in Iraq, to anyone in Somalia, the Baha’i in Iran (or gays, or dissidents, or women, or secularists), migrant workers in the United States, most Palestinians, and on and on. We also must be aware of the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world right now, and use this holiday to reflect on what we, as Jews, can do to combat all of these ills. While there is not political solution to anti-Semitism, and our historical examples of dealing with it have mixed results (the assimilated were killed in the Holocaust with everyone else), our tradition does offer an ethical solution. We must care for the stranger, for the neighbor, for the world. We must remain committed to justice and to mercy and know when  the latter trumps the former, and we must do it even when those around us hate us. Hamas has a vile ideology, yes, and sadly many celebrate them, but that does not mean we are free to abandon our principles in fighting them. There is a literary example of Jews who abandoned their beliefs when circumstances were very hard, one we reflect on tonight. They ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years because of it. Let’s learn our lesson from this season, let’s remember when we eat our bitter herbs, that for so many, there bitterness has not ended.

And of course, we cannot forget that there are also many Palestinian voices calling for nonviolence. These messages must be spread, as must the peace messages from the American Jewish community and the peace groups in Israel. The interfaith peace movement is perhaps the best hope for countering the rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments around the world. People of faith are going to have to come together to counter the people who seek to destroy. In all of this conflict, interfaith statements have been sadly lacking.

Yet, until it can be asserted that efforts from Canada’s Jews have translated into measurable improvement in the lives of Darfuris and helped accelerate and boost the inadequate efforts by our government to end the genocide, we have not done enough. Taking minimal action to placate our collective guilt as a community of genocide survivors is of no comfort to those in Darfur who are praying that they, too, will be a genocide survivor instead of a statistic…In the Majdanek concentration camp there is a giant dome. Underneath it, in plain sight, are the ashes of tens of thousands of Jews. On top of the dome, there is an inscription that reads: “Let our fate be a warning to you.”

For the past six years, we have squandered their warning. Oh, how we have failed them.

While I disagree with his notion that “more so than for anyone else, genocide is a problem for Jews,” I fully agree that Jewish history and Jewish survival have valuable lessons to teach the world about social justice and about standing up to mass murder and genocide. I do agree that Jewish history demands that Jews fight to prevent the fate of European Jewry from befalling any people, and that, so far, we have failed miserably. There are many active Jewish leaders, spiritual and secular, working to end genocide, working for human rights and justice, working for peace and to repair the world, but these efforst pale in comparison to the effort put in by powerful Jewish organizations with massive political clout and funding on behalf of Israel. Israel is a state with a military, quite capable of defending itself, as we have seen. Regardless of where one stands on the question of Palestinian rights and Zionism, it is impossible to say that the citizens of Sderot are in more desperate straits than the people of Darfur (I hesitate to use the word citizen, because it implies some form of rights and protections afforded by a government–their government seeks to kill them).

Where are our millions of dollars for Darfur? Where are the statements from AIPAC? Rabbis from coast to coast decry the genocide in Darfur from the bima, and yet so many more cry out for our aid to Israel. I understand there is a fear, born of the Holocaust and of Munich and of the Intifada that if Israel does not have the full throated support of world Jewry, there will be another genocide against the Jews. This is a terrifying hypothetical, but it is just that–a hypothetical. There are very real genocides going on at this moment. In fearing only for our own survival, we squander the lessons our survival has for the world, and the power our success has given us. Are we a light unto the nations, yet? We still could be. We must make the statement “Never Again” apply not only to Jews, but to everyone.

“So let us imagine an alternative policy. If the stream of refugees does become a flood, Israel should announce that it is convening an international conference on Yad Vashem’s spacious campus. There the representatives of the nations will be asked to stand to make commitments on how many refugees they will accept. Israel, which now has one-twentieth the population that the United States had in 1939, should agree to one-twentieth the number of Jews we think America should have accepted then. Let us make something heroic of our memory.”

We could spend forever reacting to the wrongs suffered by Jews throughout history, or we could, as this article suggests, ennact the values of care for strangers that our traditions command. It is not enough for us survive as a people; we must make our survival a blessing for others, lest all our suffering be for naught.

Sarah Sayeed, a program associate at New York’s Interfaith Center, said there have been almost no interfaith statements on Gaza.
“The inability of interfaith leaders to speak in one voice on the situation … is deeply and morally troubling,” she said. “Religious leaders speaking together here could make a huge difference.”

I have seen, however, on listservs and blogs that there is a robust dialogue among Jews and Muslims, however it has not led to much in terms of broader public statements. Have the extremists on all sides managed to silence the middle? I fear they have, temorarily, but efforts like The Muslim Jewish Peace Walk will continue, and hopefully, these small scale events can create a groundswell of support, which will lead American religious institutions to come together. Strong constituencies trying to assert their own side’s unique vulnerability, however, do stand in the way. Until we can affirm the suffering of the other, and have that affirmation reciprocated, I do fear unity is far off. The amazing organization, Encounter, which puts Jewish leaders and thinkers in contact with Palestinians in a process of education and dialogue, is an essential step in the right direction. The Rabbis who founded it are truly an example of the best religious leaders have to offer in times of religous and sectarian violence.

With the launch of Transtorah.org, which aims to help Jewish communities become welcoming for people “of all genders,” another movement toward greater Jewish diversity is on the march, based on ancient Jewish principles. As Reuben Zellman, a rabbinic intern at the San Francisco Reform synagogue Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, told the Forward,  “Our sages talked about gender diversity in a much different way than we talk about it in contemporary America. They were, in some senses, much more open about what the range of human experience could really be.”

One of the reasons the Judaism is so interesting to me is because of its diversity, and its general embrace of diversity as a value*. In this religion and this culture there is room for a multiplicity of beliefs, ideas, ethnicities, ideologies, and, yes, genders. We are a veritable rainforest (part of the reason, as in biology, that we are able to survive). Anyone who would seek to say, as an otherwise admirable editorial on the Gaza Conflict by Eboo Patel did ” If you’re Jewish, that story involves words like “security”, “terrorism”, and “right to exist”…and “If you’re Jewish, that means highlighting the number of Hamas rockets fired into Israel and the number of lives lost and disrupted in cities like Sderot,” is reducing Jewish ideas and experiences unfairly. How do these statements explain Brit Tzedek v’Shalom or even J Street? How do they explain Rabbi Yisroel Weiss and the other ultra-Orthodox  in Neturei Karta, who, though a fringe in their own right, are passionate in their pleas for peace? The Jewish World is filled with people with a diversity of opinions on all things. We are a people skeptical of the binary, in gender, in war and peace, in anything. There are always many points of view and countless Jews are struggling desperately to include alternative points of view on the current crisis in the debate. The diversity of the Jewish world is one of its greatest strengths, and our long history of argument, evolution, adaptation, and creativity are great lessons to the rest of the world about how to get along, how to accept difference. Sadly, a war is an amazing way to sweep all those lessons away. After thousands of years of persecution, and especially after the Holocaust, I understand the trauma that demands any response to an attack on Jews be swift and violent, demonstrating that we are not weak and will not be marched to the gas chambers. But we have so much more to give humanity than our mere survival. I hope that this war, undertaken by a state acting in what it perceives as its best interests, does not become the apotheosis of Jewish experience. The discussion  and inclusion of a transgendered rabbi is a far more valuable lesson in Jewish values than any military victory.

* Just to undo a bit of the idea of Jewish exceptionalism that I’ve set up, at least one Muslim nation is starting to embrace transgendered people in a religious context as well.  And there are plenty of voices for a more progressive Islam.