Valley of Dried Bones

God lifts up Ezekiel and carries him to the “Valley of the Dry Bones.” There, the prophet gazes about himself and sees a vast human graveyard. As far as the eye can see, remains of dried up bones cover the entire valley.  And God speaks:

"Can these bones live again?”

Ezekiel thinks and responds,

“Oh Lord God, only you know.”

Then, God commands Ezekiel to prophecy over the bones with these words: “Oh dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: thus says the Lord God to these bones: ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. And I will lay sinew upon you, and cover you with skin and place breath in you and you shall live.  And you shall know that I am the Lord’.”

The prophet speaks these words and a tremendous noise is heard.  It rises from all around as the bones reassemble and flesh begins to cover the newly re-formed bodies.  Then, in a second command, the winds of the earth stir and flow in to the lifeless dead.  They come alive, an army of the resurrected.

In this remarkable episode, God, through Ezekiel speaks to the people in exile. These are the ones who lost their homes; these have lost their land. The blackened skies would not always be dark but would ultimately reveal hope. The exile would end and people would return to their ancestral home. There maybe sorrow but there must also be hope.

Awed into silence, Ezekiel hears the voice of God once more. His words are the message to mankind, not just to his community.

"Behold I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people; and I will bring you to the land of Israel. …And I will put my spirit into you and you shall live…”

Life must be full of hope. God gave Ezekiel the tools to teach this crucial lesson. Israel knew that eventually they would be returned to their homeland. Just as the bones knit together with flesh and sinew and fused with the breath of life, we are meant to understand the underlying message of hope.

The parable of Ezekiel is powerfully relevant.  It is this stirring message that we read every Passover.  We reaffirm the prophet’s words each year as we sit down to recite the narrative of the Haggadah. We are, as Yehudah HaLevi called us, “the people of hope.”  Time has tempted us to squash our will to live as free people, free Jews.  Throughout the long years of persecution and hatred we have survived with an almost burning fervor not to relinquish our heritage. Despite the long history of anti-Semitism we refuse to become pessimists; but instead we are the people of HaTikvah, “The hope.”  We end every service with the Aleynu prayer which contains the words, “Therefore we hope…”.

“Hell,” wrote A.J. Cronig, “is a place where one has ceased to hope.”

Pity those who have lost ability to help. In hope, lies life. Without it, we are but bones.

I've Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night

The sun governs our lives.  We adjust our watches to the lengthened days at this time of year to compensate for more sunlight hours.  Later we will reset them.  Days are measured not only by the placement of the sun overhead but by its anticipated appearance.  For example, we call the midpoint between sunset and sunrise, midnight.

We adjust the years to the rotation of the earth around the sun using the “leap year” as a Band-Aid to remedy the true year of 365 1/4 days.  Otherwise, we would eventually end up with New Year’s Day being where Thanksgiving is now.

For ancient man, time was more easily calculated by observing changes in the celestial bodies.  Each evening the star change their positions ever so slightly.  Yet those slight changes enable us to grasp the passage of days and weeks and seasons.  The sun, however, remains basically the same.  The days grow warmer or colder but the brilliant orb does not radically shift its position.

In Judaism, time is marked by the waxing and waning of the moon.  While Jewish holy days always seem to come on different days each year, the always appear on the same days of the lunar cycle.  Rosh Hashanah, for example, always is marked by a new moon.  The Festival of Booths, Sukkot, falls when a full moon is visible in the heavens.

In this way, the seasons ebb and flow according to a lunar cycle which is both predictable and visible.  Interestingly, the eastern churches also celebrate the holiday of Easter using the same cycle, unlike their western counterparts, which have adopted the solar year as the yardstick for the passage of time.  For the eastern sects, Easter invariably coincide with Passover while most American churches celebrate the holiday on a consistent solar date.  And we know the solar calendar really makes our days slightly longer than twenty-four hours.  A complete revolution of the sun necessitates adding a full day to our calendar every four years.

Still, the moon, like the sun, is not a completely accurate measure of time either.  The moon revolves around our planet every twenty-five hours, not the twenty-four hours of the sun’s day.  Left alone for long stretches of time, spring would gradually slip into winter and winter into spring.  So, to keep our lunar calendar in “sync” with the solar calendar it too is adjusted every now and again.

When the moon catches up with the sun at the beginning of a new cycle (and it will do this approximately every twenty-nine days) we witness a “conjunction” or “new moon.”  When the old moon has faded away and yielded a new view of itself in the heavens, we celebrate a “Rosh Hodesh.”

A mystical quality hovers around the moon.  It is not unlike the shadow of our personalities.  To us, the moon appears to have strength all it sown.  Hence, we call someone under an unknown power, a lunatic or a looney.  But that too may be lunacy for the moon has no power of its own.

The sun casts its own light over the world while the moon is merely reflective.  The only reason we can see the moon at night is because it reflects the light of the sun on the other side of the earth and, like a mirror, returns it to us in the darkness.

The moon therefore becomes a paradigm for humanity.  Just as the Divine exists outside of us, each person is endowed with a reflective quality to mirror the brilliance of the Holy One, blessed be He.

Conservatism

Conservative Judaism is reactive.

Originally, our movement began as a reaction against Reform Jews, who were awash with all possibilities that the freedom allowed in the late 1800s. Germanic Jews arriving in New York brought with them the Reform movement. Reform grew at an alarming rate, for those of a more traditional bent.

Wanting to conserve the core of Jewish values, a few committed Jews banded together to form Conservative Judaism. Their goal was simple; preserve traditional Judaism while allowing for integration into the fabric of American society. One of the early cogitators of conservatism, Solomon Schechter, called our brand of Judaism, Catholic Israel. Schechter used this term to indicate that we are at once a community with our own practices, which must be preserved while allowing for modern and thoughts and additions to be considered. It was, in short, a reaction against Reform Judaism and a worn and complacent Orthodoxy.

The truth is, Conservative Judaism has created many changes in our century and the one before.  Did you just have occurred over four generations. Yet, and our generation, there is a greater Porsche than ever for more rapid change. I am amazed for example that while a new prayer book is “hot off the press” new versions are already being circulated.

The major changes in this new edition are the move toward alternative rights and practices. The prayer book that we use now contains only the Shabbat and festival liturgy. There are no weekday prayers found.

In the past few decades or movement has seen many changes.  Questions for you to consider: do you feel we are too slow to embrace change? Or to quick?