Today, we are blessed to live in a time in which we believe in the value of ‘interfaith dialogue’. Different religions want to learn about each other with respect, and to discover what they have in common and how they can together, despite their differences, make the world a better place. In the Middle Ages, however, things were different. There was an infamous tradition of “religious disputations”, in which the Catholic Church would force Jews to debate Christian scholars so as to prove the “truth” of the Christian faith over the “obsolete” Jewish Law. Needless to say, many such disputations finished with a pogrom.

In those debates, Christianity would be presented as the “religion of love” and Judaism as the “religion of law”. Judaism – it would be claimed – is all about the stern and outdated laws of Moses, not about love, charity and piety.

It is interesting to talk about “love and law” during Shavuot, the holiday that celebrates the reception of our foundational law, the Torah.

Shavuot is linked to Passover by the count of the Omer. We count every day between the end of slavery and the reception of the Torah, creating a relation; an unbreakable bond between the two holidays.

Why is that?

Freedom is probably one of the main values of Judaism. We begin our journey as a people in an act of revolt against slavery and oppression. We base our values on the idea of free will. We are commanded to resist tyrants and dictators and heed the call of the Biblical sentence “proclaim freedom across the land!”  Yet, there’s another central value of Judaism: the value of interdependence. We need each other to survive; we are “social animals”; we need the assistance of others to fulfill most of our needs; moreover, we believe in the critical importance of community and peoplehood. We believe in being there “for one another” (sounds familiar?).

So we want to be free and independent, but at the same time we are inescapably interdependent. From this paradox, flows the whole drama of human existence. We are like porcupines in the winter: if we stay apart, we freeze; if we get too close, we hurt each other. The whole art of life – for societies, communities, marriages, nations – is finding the right balance between these two conflicting values.

Indeed, freedom is never a simple concept. The classic solution for the problem of upholding freedom is to use force, as centralized in a state: a system of courts, police and the monopoly of force. And then the problem that arises is ‘who is the state’ and who has the right to exercise violence and force.

But one original innovation presented by the Hebrew Bible is that force is not the only – or even the best – alternative to get people to cooperate. The alternative to force is trust. Trust happens when two parties – in full use of their freedom – establish a pact and a partnership and respect their word. They create a “covenant”, a “brit”. Not in vain the Bible describes the ‘covenant’ as a marriage: it is a partnership that bases its strength not in force, but in love, loyalty and the willingness to undertake responsibilities and keep to them. It’s based in the idea that the other person’s interests need to be as sacred to me as my own.

What happened at Sinai is a revolutionary attempt to create a society that is bound together not by force, but by the power of words. The Torah was given like an oasis of words in the dessert. These words create an open-ended mutual commitment to one another.  Jews are the first culture of the word, whose most sacred object is a book; the first nation created by a covenant of words. The Jewish idea of Freedom doesn’t need force but moral obligation. Jews are supposed to keep the law not because of fear of arrest or punishment, but because of love and concern for one another, their shared sense of past and future and the basic moral discernment between right and wrong.  One of the most fascinating facts of Jewish history is that without a land, an army or a police, we kept our covenant voluntarily for over 2,000 years. This is a unique feat in the history of humanity. Our covenant evolved, added elements, took new forms, but it remained there, binding us together and giving us a meaning and a purpose.

The medieval polemicists got it wrong: there’s no dichotomy between love and law. Judaism turns love into law and law into love. Not in vain, in Shavuot – the festival of the law – we read the history of Ruth and Boaz, one of the most moving love stories in the Bible.

So, in this cheerful holiday of law and love, let’s celebrate our freedom and our commitment to one another. Let’s rejoice in being part of a community based not on force but on love, ethics and shared values. Let’s create covenants of love and respect with each other, with our communities and with the world. In the holiday that celebrates the words that unite us, let’s learn to speak to each other with gentleness and deference. Let us understand that our words can build communities of freedom and hope. In the holiday of “bikkurim” (the first fruits that we harvest), let us count our blessings and rejoice in the fruit of our work, and let us share our prosperity with those less fortunate.

While we read Ruth’s moving love story, let us commit yet again to keep freedom and love as the ultimate foundations of our community and of our people.

Dear Friends,

Arguably, the central part of the Pessach Seder is the ‘ma nishtana’, the 4 questions.

This is highly symbolic and refers to the central nature of Passover, the festival of Freedom. Maybe nothing symbolizes more strongly that the essence of Freedom is the capacity to ask questions, to put things in doubt.

A slave doesn’t ask questions. He just obeys. A free person can doubt, can criticize; if he is to obey, he needs to understand why. Freedom, the principle of free-choice, the principle of human sovereignty over our destiny, is one of the main elements in Judaism.  Nothing in Judaism is deterministic. Our freedom is a slap in the face to the concept of fate. We are the owners and makers of our destiny, as individuals and as a people. Destiny is a flexible concept, because a free person does not accept his fate un-critically, he questions, he doubts. He puts himself in question.

Pessach is the celebration of Freedom, and as such is the celebration of questions. But questions aren’t easy. A question implies discomfort and uncertainty. It is a gallant jump into the unknown from the springboard of our own rationality. For the slave life is certain. His life has the comfort of the known because a life without decision is a life without questions. The arbitrary wishes of the master are the ultimate justification for the way things are.

In our world, that has become so uncertain, so unpredictable, so similar to quick-sand, we sometimes long for the certainties of the slave. Our world is full of fundamentalists, fanatics and followers of gurus who are so afraid of uncertainty that prefer to annul their capacity to question. They prefer to follow, instead of thinking, to obey instead of understanding. They prefer the quietness of the cemetery to the fearsome tumult of life.

And yet, our tradition pushes us out of our comfort zone. It encourages us to face the challenge of freedom. In one of these delightful paradoxes, Judaism forces us to be free. A question is not just a demand for information. A question is a quest. We build ourselves by questioning ourselves. The real question is the one that bothers, the one that threatens, that shatters certainties, the one that challenges, the one that open dialoguesQuestions are hard, they are called “kushiot” in the Hagadah. From the Hebrew word “kashe”, difficult. A true question needs to be tough. And yet, a question is the genesis of dialogue..

There is no conversation without questions.  Questions open, answers close. How tempting and reassuring answers are! We buy books with easy recipes to happiness. We vote for leaders who promise to have all the answers to our problems. And yet, the Passover Hagadah glorifies questions and abhors answers. Indeed, the four questions are never really answered. As if to tell us that each and every one of us needs to find their own answers. Every year we re-enact the exodus, and we ask the same questions time after time. Because finding answers is a lifelong quest. The answer I found today may not be relevant tomorrow.

Our tradition teaches to look skeptically at those who claim to have easy and ready answers. Good leaders in the Jewish way, are those who help us formulate questions, and look with us for good answers, knowing that there’s not a single one.

It is also symbolic that the little children are the ones who ask. We tend to think that it is up to the parents to teach them. Yet, in a subtle way, the children teach us a lesson: the capacity for amazement. “Why is this night different?!” claim the little ones amazed at the strange landscape of the family table. They are waking our battle weary senses to the amazement of the unexpected, to the million tiny surprises that life offers. They are offering us a glimpse into what Heschel called “Radical Amazement”, the ability to look at our world in wonder and awe. We start losing our freedom when we stop being amazed by the world around.  When we cannot longer be amazed, we start trading the excitement of the question for the comfort of the answer.

A question is at the same time a display of humility and a show of self-confidence, because we need a lot of strength to face the right questions. A question is a celebration of freedom and a glorification of courage. Questions are a salute to our rationality. Questions help us rejoice instead of fear the incertitude of our world. Because there is only one certainty that questions convey: that we are masters and makers of our own destiny.

Therefore questions are, above all, a celebration of life. Let’s embark on the adventure of questions, and let’s find together meaningful answers.

Chag Sameach for you and your loved ones!!!

May all the captives of Israel return to their loved ones soon and unharmed.

PS: From Isidor Rabi, Nobel prize in physics: “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “nu? Did you learn anything today? .  But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. “izzy’ she would say, “did you ask a good question today?’. That’s what made me a Nobel laureate”.

Many cultures have a ‘pre-spring’ holiday. When the first signs of spring start to be felt, people feel compelled to celebrate and rejoice in anticipation. Many have bawdy holidays of merriment and slight abandonment. For Christian Europe it’s the carnival, from the Latin “carne-vale” (meaning, ‘meat allowed’ as it takes place before the Lenten fast), for ancient Persians and Babylonians there was an early spring feast of revelry. For us, Jews, the loony day of the fool moon of the pre-spring month of Adar marks the most hilarious, noisy and buffoonish of our holidays – Purim.

But Purim’s is not a naive, gentle laughter. It’s a kind of angry humor, a violent , red-blooded laughter that celebrates the tyrant’s overthrow. For we recall how Haman would have murdered the Jews, how he cast lots with our lives and how his own stupidity and greed, together with the tenacity and wit of Mordechai and Esther ended up saving us.

The story of Purim is actually the story of two jokes, both of them laughing at tyrants and the intolerant. Haman, who wants to hang Mordechai, ends up hanged from the same pole. The King Asahuerus expels his wife Vashti because she didn’t believe that a woman’s role was to take orders from a man, and ends up taking orders from another woman. Purim tells us that dictators, oppressors, chauvinists and tyrants are evil, but above all, are ridiculous. They are not meant to be feared but laughed at, because ultimately, they are all going to end like Haman or Asahuerus.

The story of Purim makes a mockery of the pompous pretensions of all tyrannies. Haman’s contemptuous antisemitism carries him to his death. Ahasuerus’ contemptuous anti-feminism leads to his own stultification. In Purim we learn that Judaism not only despises tyranny. It laughs at it. The battle between winter and spring becomes the battle between darkness and light, the fight between good and evil that can only have a happy ending, one in which we laugh.

While visiting the former Soviet Union, I loved to sit  in long evening meeting with dissidents – yes, like in Purim, generously irrigated with spirits – in which people would tell jokes about the regime, first timidly and fearfully, then more vocally.  Laughter and humor was a force that tyranny could not control. It was as though laughter was the ultimate sign of resistance, the last refuge of the free soul.

Purim teaches us that, just as spring always vanquishes winter, ‘right’ always overcomes ‘might’. As powerful as tyrants may appear, they always end as an object of mockery.  It shows us that those that want to destroy “the different” end up being the victims of their own laughable intolerance.

In addition, Purim also teaches us that true joy can’t exist if we don’t share it. Tzedakah and sharing food are central customs in Purim, because if laughter is the central element of this holiday, we can’t laugh if our neighbor is suffering. That’s why in our community we’ll have great parties this Purim, but we’ll also have many opportunities to help and share with those in need. Solidarity and happiness are two faces of the same coin.

Purim tells that there’s a season for relaxing the rules, to make fun of even the most serious part of life. It teaches us that everything is easier with a smile… and yes, with a little bit of schnapps. It asks us not to take ourselves too seriously and it reminds us that for us Jews, the end always needs to be happy. If it’s not happy, it means that it’s not yet the end.

May this merry holiday teach us to rejoice in the countless blessings we have. May it teach us that oppression and tyranny always lose at the end. May we feel the confidence that as hard as our tribulations are, they can always have a happy ending. May we learn to abandon ourselves to the joy of the moment. With this full moon that ushers in the spring may we all be a little ‘lunatic’, and imagine that everything is possible, that the good guys always win and that every  one of the stories of our life – as hard as they are – can end in laughter. May all who still live under tyranny and oppression never lose their capacity to laugh. May this Purim inspire us to find every day something for which to be unmitigatedly happy.

Once I heard a beautiful Native American saying: “Listen or thy tongue will make you deaf.” The Greek philosopher Epictetus said something similar: “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

Judaism echoes this message. Blowing the shofar, for example, seems to be one of the most important customs of Rosh Hashanah. Or is it? In fact, listening to the shofar is what we are really commanded to do. And then, of course, there is the central formula of the Jewish faith: “Shema Israel.” “Listen, Oh Israel.”

Listening is indeed one of the most important things that we are taught to do – listening to others, to the world, to our tradition, and to our own inner voice.

And yet, in Jewish community life, many times we are not very good at listening. Admittedly, those of us in communal leadership positions sometimes talk too much and listen too little. We expect others to listen to us. We talk to instead of talking with. We emphasize providing answers rather than asking questions.

As I’ve said on many occasions, Jewish communities are changing. The world is undergoing profound transformations and our community is changing before our eyes. New generations connect differently to their heritage, they communicate differently, they have different social patterns, and they look for meaning in ways that differ from those of the previous generations. The world is changing so fast that we mustn’t pretend to know everything and have all the answers. The 21^st century is uncharted territory with many uncertainties and open questions.

In this particular context, the Montreal Jewish community set out to conduct an ambitious process of strategic revisioning. We called it Imagine 2020 because we wanted to free our imagination to dream of the community of the future; a vibrant and thriving community in which each and every Jew feels at home. But above all, we understood the Imagine process to be a listening exercise. It wasn’t going to be accomplished by a small group locked up in an ivory tower. Instead, we set out to listen to all the different segments of our community: Ashkenazi and Sephardic, young and old, religious and secular, orthodox and reform, engaged and unaffiliated, families and singles, mixed couples and new immigrants. We ran focus groups that gathered hundreds of people. We conducted the biggest attitudinal study ever by a Jewish community in Canada. In all, thousands of people were consulted. We listened and we learned a lot. We learned about our community, about the needs and desires of different Jewish populations, about immediate concerns and profound yearnings, about hopes and disappointments and about dreams and frustrations. We really listened without preconceptions.

A nice Hasidic story tells about a man that had problems with his wife. Of course, he goes to the rebbe for advice. The rebbe says, “Go home and listen to all  that your wife says”. A week later, the man returns and says “I did what you said. I listened to all she had to say, but the situation didn’t improve.” “Alright,” said the rebbe. “Now go back and listen to all she is not saying.”

In our listening, we went beyond the obvious. We tried to identify trends and patterns. We tried to see what lies behind attitudes and behaviours. If the inventors of the first car would have asked what people wanted, they would have told them, “Faster horses.” Like them, we have to innovate in order to come up with the mechanism to satisfy hidden demands and unspoken needs.

After one of the focus groups, I got one of the nicest compliments a community leader can dream of. A young man came to me and said, “I feel great that I could say all these things. It is great that you guys are listening to us.”

Within the next few weeks, we’ll be communicating the results of our Imagine 2020 process. We’ll share with you what we learned and how we incorporated your input into a vision for the future. While we learned to listen, communication is a two way street, and many of you also learned to speak up and make your voices heard. Listening is not a ‘one off’ event. It doesn’t end once our strategic plan is set in motion. It is really an ongoing exercise that never stops. It is the foundation of the relationship between Federation and our community.

We live in times of profound change. This is sometimes exciting and full of promise, sometimes scary and unsettling. But one thing is sure: to face new challenges, we need the intelligence, the input and the commitment of each and every one of us. We need the determination to listen and also to speak up. “Silent majorities” don’t count, precisely because they are silent.  As Winston Churchill once said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”