Interfaith Thanksgiving 2023

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

            Good evening everyone.  When I was in my early twenties, a lifetime ago, I was planning to move to Israel, and attended a weekend gathering with about 30 other young Jews, all of whom had the same dream.  I was studying at the time to become a reform rabbi, and the organizers of the weekend asked me to enter into a dialogue, in front of the entire group, with a guy I had never met before, who was studying to become an orthodox rabbi.  I think they thought it would be entertaining.

I had literally never spoken with an orthodox Jew before, and he had never met a reform Jew in his life.  The dialogue quickly became more of an argument than a conversation. It became heated, but we kept going.  Eventually, the time allotted for the program ended, and everyone watching slowly got up and left and the two of us continued to argue, in the empty room for hours.  By the end of the night we had become friends.  That night I learned something about the power of honest speech to bridge a vast distance between two human beings.

            I do not actually remember any of the details of our debate, but I do remember a story that he told, which he claimed was a Zen story.  Here is a condensed version. Two frogs fell into a pail of milk. The sides of the pail were steep and slippery and they couldn’t get out.  One frog made a couple of half-hearted attempts to jump out but there was nothing to push off of, and he quickly saw that it was hopeless.  So he accepted his fate, gave up, and drowned in the milk.  The second frog, for whatever reason, did not give up.  He jumped and jumped and jumped, never succeeding but never giving up.  At last, after many hours, he felt himself succumbing to utter exhaustion, and began to slip beneath the surface of the milk.  He gathered the last ounce of his strength for one final attempt and as he did so, he realized that with his jumping, he had churned the milk into butter and he was standing on solid ground. 

            That story made a deep impression on me, and I’ve never forgotten it.  It’s a silly story, but it expresses a profound human hope.  That we might somehow survive the turbulent waters rising around us, and in some unforeseen way find ourselves miraculously standing on solid ground. 

I’ve always wondered where my orthodox Jewish friend heard it, and whether it was truly a Zen story.  Recently, I did a google search and this story showed up on a Muslim religious webpage, and a Buddhist webpage, and then another site which said that it was an old Russian folktale.  At its core, it is the same story as our ancient Biblical narrative of the parting waters of the Red Sea, in which the children of Israel walk through the sea, on solid ground.  There is something universal about this old story describing different human responses to finding ourselves in an impossible predicament.

            We find ourselves right now in so many impossible predicaments.  The unspeakably brutal Israeli-Palestinian disaster.  Our own broken political system.  Our climate disaster.  The terrifying proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most of us want to be the leaping frog of faith, who ends up standing happily in the butter.  But what would it look like, in any of these real-world disasters, to continue leaping when things seem so hopeless?

      Last winter, our congregation went looking for a temporary home, while our Temple building was being remodeled.  It was a tall order, since we were planning to be out of our building for at least 18 months, and we are a congregation of over 800 households, with a very full calendar of programs, worship services, Bar and bat Mitzvahs, classes and meetings. 

Our community was feeling anxious about becoming nomads. At exactly the same time, on multiple occasions, whole neighborhoods of Santa Barbara were blanketed with fliers accusing us, the Jews, of being the driving force behind the porn industry and behind the 400 years of the slave trade.  So on a Friday night last February, when we held our first Shabbat service in Trinity Lutheran Church, I said to my community: 

“To offer a simple antidote to any fear we may be feeling, I would like to speak about where we are tonight.   We are here in a church, whose members have welcomed us into their home.  As you can see, the cross--which declares the essence of their faith-- is concealed by a curtain.  Our friends here at Trinity have allowed us to obscure their most sacred symbol during our services, so that we can feel at home here.  It is a breathtaking, inspiring, heart-warming gesture of hospitality.  Here at Trinity Lutheran, we have been reminded that the world is still full of sane, healthy, loving people.  I hope that if and when we are asked to open our home to another community, we would respond with the same spirit of warm generosity.” 

I said this nine months ago, I still feel it tonight and am happy to express our gratitude again, before all of you, to my friend Pastor Mark Marius and any other members of his congregation who are here tonight.  The people of Trinity have given us an island of solid ground in the midst of the rising waters of antisemitism.

            It has been a real-life example of what it looks like to be a frog leaping in the milk.  In what way does it make sense for the people of Trinity to give up their sacred space to us, week after week?   We are for them a massive inconvenience: the guests that arrive and stay for two years!  It would be much easier for them if we were not there.

Likewise, Mr. Jamal Hamdani and Imam Wa’el Hegazy of the Islamic Society of Santa Barbara reached out to us, in friendship and sympathy after the attacks of October 7th in the south of Israel.   And I composed a letter expressing our grief and compassion for those in the Muslim community with family suffering and dying in Gaza. That was a real-life example of leaping in the milk.  In the context of all the immense suffering in Israel and Gaza, what difference is made by an exchange of letters in Goleta, CA? We Jews and our Muslim brothers and sisters find ourselves threatened by a shared disaster; and none of us at this time can see our way to solid ground.  But we know that we are going to be in this impossible predicament, together, for a long time to come. 

            The power of the old story, I believe, lies in the fact that the frog brings about his own deliverance, without understanding ahead of time how it is going to unfold, simply by not giving up.  We cannot understand this vast, swirling, turbulent story in which we find ourselves.  But we know what we need to do.  We need to keep reaching out toward each other.  We need to keep leaping.

            An old Jewish teaching observes that “When senseless hatred reigns on earth, and human beings hide their faces from one another, then heaven is forced to hide its face.  But when love comes to rule the earth, and human beings reveal their faces to one another, then the splendor of God will be revealed.”

            We are blessed to live in this Santa Barbara community, in which human beings have not forgotten the great spiritual gesture of turning toward each other and revealing our true faces to each other.  Through our acts of turning toward each other, with honesty and with love, the splendor of God may be revealed.  May the splendor of God shine forth from our little town and give light to the entire world.