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May 30, 2025 - 3 Sivan 5785 This Shabbat, we are delighted to welcome Avi and Diana Yacobi back from their trip to Israel. In place of my usual Shabbat morning sermon, I will invite Avi to the Bimah to share his perspectives, reflections, and insights on the atmosphere and prevailing sentiment in Israel. Avi will also provide some color commentary on what it is like to be on the ground in Israel these days and offer his thoughts about what he sees for the future. I hope you will join us tomorrow morning for Avi's Update.
I hope you will also join us on Sunday morning at 11AM when we begin our celebration of Shavuot with a learning session that we are calling, “Fathers Know Best.” We will learn from Pirkei Avot, or the Wisdom of our Fathers, which points us toward a practical, everyday living of Jewish values and teachings. It will be a fun, insightful, and inspiring morning, so please join us for the learning, but stay for bagels, blintzes, and cheesecake!
Parashat Bamidbar - What's in A Name
Dear Friends, Until I reached high school, I hated my middle name, Hillel. I didn't even like my full first name. I went by "Josh Strom," not "Joshua," and certainly not "Joshua Hillel Strom." I still remember a library card I had in middle school that had my middle name on it but which cut off the last letter, so that my family used to jokingly call me "Hille" (like "hilly.") Somewhere along the way, in high school, I started to put "Joshua Strom" on my papers. By college, for one reason or another, I started putting my full name on everything. It became a badge of pride, so that upon completion of substantial works, I wanted it known clearly who the creator of it was. It must be because I learned more about Hillel, one of the greatest Sages of Jewish tradition. I knew he was, to put it mildly, a pretty big deal within the annals of Jewish history, whose teachings and reputation had not merely withstood, but transcended, the many millennia of our people's existence. But as I learned more about his indelible imprint on Halacha and, for me even more importantly, on the way a person can live their best Jewish life, I came to appreciate him so much more. And, as such, I became ever more grateful to my parents for blessing me with the name of such an extraordinary figure. As Shavuot begins on Sunday evening, when we mark our receiving of the incredible gift of Torah, Jews all over the world will read, examine, debate, struggle with, and, hopefully, internalize the multi-faceted and many-layered lessons offered by our rich tradition. And many of those folks will study the wisdom of our Sages, including, of course, Hillel the Great. On many occasions, Hillel rose to the challenges of skeptics to summarize entire texts from our tradition, intent on making them look foolish. The most famous occasion was when a man dared him to sum up the entirety of Torah while standing on one foot, which he did. Hillel stood on one foot and said, "What is hateful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." While I have long eschewed such challenges of summing up tremendous wisdom in a pithy quote, I do have one such text that is the closest thing in my life to a credo. It just happens to be one of Hillel's, and it happens to come from Pirke Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, which many study as they count the Omer towards Shavuot. In Pirke Avot 1:14, we read: "[Hillel] used to say: 'If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" For me, these three phrases sum up what one needs to balance in order to be a good and productive member of society. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" I have a responsibility to take care of my physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional needs, and I shouldn't ever have to apologize for doing so. I also have an obligation to protect myself, to keep myself safe, and, while I hope for the support of others in doing so, I cannot expect or rely on anyone else but myself in this. "But if I am only for myself, what am I?" My favorite part of this is that the rhetorical question asks "what am I?" rather than "who am I?" as if to say, a person who is only focused on himself, solely concerned with his own wants and needs to the complete exclusion in his mind of those of anyone else, what kind of being is that? Surely, I need to take care of myself, but if that is where it ends, then I am hardly different from an animal fending for itself. "And if not now, when?" This is so terrific, so nearly-universally applicable, that even Doritos used it in an ad campaign years ago. Everything comes back to this question, or at least it should. If I'm working on the balance between the first two parts of the quotation, and need to make greater efforts to do so, when should I begin implementing that change? "If not now, when?" If there is an opportunity to good for the world, or myself, or both; if there is a chance to make the world better through Mitzvot, or to make myself better through T'shuvah and self-improvement, when should that start? "If not now, when?" These are the questions I ask myself on a daily basis. Hillel speaking to Hillel, if you will. When I challenge myself with this wisdom from my namesake, I know that my answers will return me to the path of being the best person, husband, father, rabbi, and friend I can possibly be - for myself and for the world around me. Perhaps Hillel's sage advice can be of service to you as well. Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom and Chag Shavuot Sameach! Rabbi Joshua Strom
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