Talmud Class: Can One Person Change the World?

God is always confusing. We never know what to think. But that is especially true now in this fraught theological season between commemorating the Shoah (April 24), honoring soldiers who fell in Israel’s wars and victims of terrorism on Yom Hazikaron (April 30), and celebrating the birth of the State of Israel on om Ha’atzmaut (May 1). Tomorrow we are going to study a modern Jewish philosopher that we have never before studied, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who came up with a new scheme: the Three Eras of Jewish History.It is new. It is thoughtful. It is engaging. It gives us what to talk about.But does it work? After all, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel happened within three years of one another, very much in the same era.We will also look at the special insertions in our Amidah for Yom Hashoah and Yom Ha’atzmaut to see what statement they make on God’s relationship to the Jewish people and to history in 1941-45 and in 1948. We will also examine an important text from the Talmud that shows our sense of God’s presence or absence is very much affected by what is actually happening in the world. Spoiler alert: it’s not about the answers. There are none. It’s about the wrestling. One other alternative: Who needs God? Since there are no answers, since the wrestling never leads to an answer, are we better off if God is not all that important to us—which, by the way, is what the vast majority of Temple Emanuel members will say about how they actually lead their lives. “I’m not a God person. I am here for the community.” Maybe that is the wisest posture of all?

Led by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

What happens when we lose our loved ones before we lose them? This happens to so many of our families. Our loved one experiences a slow decline, cognitively, or physically, that takes place over years that feels like forever. The decline crowds out earlier chapters.Our mother has not been herself for so long I can’t even remember what she used to be like.It’s been so long since my father was who he really was, I can’t remember him before his dementia set in.What do we do with this pain when we lose our loved ones before we lose them?We are about to say Yizkor. Yizkor offers us a poignant way to flip the script.It is true that we sometimes lose our loved ones before we lose them. But because of Yizkor, it is also true that after we lose our loved ones, we still have them.

In 1987 Oprah Winfrey read a book that changed her life. What happened to her as a result of reading that book, the unanticipated lesson she learned, remains fresh and urgent for her 38 years later.The book, by author Toni Morrison, was a novel called Beloved in which Morrison attempts to show what it was like to be a slave. What did slavery do to the enslaved person’s inner life, to their psyche, to their soul? How did slavery shape not only the enslaved person, but also their descendants—even when slavery was over?When Oprah Winfrey first read the novel, she fell in love with it. She just knew that she had to make a movie based on this book. Toni Morrison had never allowed any of her novels to be made into a film, but the author succumbed to the charms and persuasive powers of Oprah Winfrey.Oprah worked on the film Beloved for more than ten years. She herself played the lead. She used her power and influence to get the film made. The film was 3 hours long, was intense, hard, and sad—and did not have a happy ending.How did the film do? Alan Stone, a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard Law School at the time, saw the film in Harvard Square when it first opened. He wrote:Ten minutes into the film, I began to hear audible groans from my two companions, who subsequently predicted Beloved’s demise at the box office. They hated the film: they could not follow it…Baffled by the narrative…they like most filmgoers, missed the experience that Oprah wanted them to have.Alan Stone’s friends would prove prophetic. The film cost 80 million dollars to make. It took in 22 million dollars at the box office. The first weekend it came out, even with Oprah’s star power, the film was beaten at the box office by a horror movie called The Bride of Chucky. It took ten years to make. It was pulled from the theatres after four weeks.Oprah had been completely invested in this project. She worked on it for more than ten years. She believed in it. She really cared. And after all that personal care and investment, her beloved film Beloved did not land.The failure of her film devastated Oprah. When she learned that Beloved got beat at the box office by Chucky, she shared that stayed home and ate a prodigious amount of macaroni and cheese, and she experienced a major depression. She observed: “It was the only time in my life that I was ever depressed, and I recognized that I was depressed because I’ve done enough shows on the topic. ‘O, this is what people must feel like who are depressed.’All of which happened in 1998. Why am I bringing it up now?Author John Maxwell observed that life’s greatest lessons always come from our failures, not from our successes. The more painful our failure, the more important it is to extract a life-enhancing lesson from that failure. That is just what Oprah did.

Powerful leaders who lie are as old as the Bible. Our Haftarah tomorrow, King David’s song of gratitude to God (2 Samuel 22:1-51), contains a big fat lie—a lie so obvious, so brazen, that one wonders how he had the temerity to utter it. King David says of himself:The Lord rewarded me according to my merit,He requited the cleanness of my hands.For I have kept the ways of the LordAnd have not been guilty before my God;I am mindful of all His rulesAnd have not departed from His laws.I have been blameless before Him,And I have guarded myself against sinning—And the Lord has requited my merit,According to my purity in His sight.We know all these words are blatantly, outrageously false. King David committed adultery with Batsheba. He committed murder, having her honorable and courageous husband Uriah put on the front lines so that Uriah would be killed in battle. King David violated Uriah’s trust, having Uriah carry the executive order of the King to the general demanding that Uriah be put in the most dangerous spot in battle—Uriah carried his own death warrant because he was so trusting of his king.We also know that King David was not blameless before God. God sent the prophet Nathan to chastise King David and to pronounce a curse upon him and his household.Therefore the sword shall never depart fromyour House—because you spurned Me by takingthe wife of Uriah the Hittite and making her your wife.Thus said the Lord: I will make a calamity rise against youfrom within your own house.King David’s family life is ruined forever after.Given his egregious and well known sin and punishment, what would possess King David to lie like this? And why does our tradition canonize this lie twice? We read the Haftarah tomorrow, and we read it as the Haftarah for parshat Ha’azinu.What is the lesson here? Do lies become true when we repeat them enough? Or is there some other lesson to be learned?

How is this Passover different from all other Passovers? How is the seder we are doing tonight different from all the other seders we have ever done? Let me share a recent conversation I had with a good friend.We have a beloved member of our shul whose mother was born in Londorf, Germany. She was taken with all the other Jews of Londorf to Auschwitz. She was the only survivor from her town. Every other Jew of Londorf perished in Auschwitz. But his mother would go on to survive and thrive, to live a beautiful, joyful life and to build a family with generations of love. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. Which meant that this past January 27, 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He and his wife went to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the occasion, where they recited Kaddish for all those who perished. And it turns out that that very day was also his own mother’s yahrtzeit. Their words of Kaddish were filled with multiple meanings.I was talking to him about the unreal intensity of this experience, and he asked me a question that I had never thought about before. He asked: Can you imagine the Jewish story without suffering? A Jewish history without hatred? My initial response was no: The suffering comes with our story. As we say in the Haggadah, b’chol dor v’dor omdim aleinu l’chaloteinu, in every generation, our enemies will arise to try to destroy us.

In 1992 Rabbi Joseph Telushkin published a book entitled Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About Jews. While he dedicated the book to his three daughters, the first chapter is about how hard it is for generations in a Jewish family to understand one another; how easy it is for frictions and misunderstandings to grow. Chapter one is entitled “Oedipus, Shmedipus, as Long as He Loves His Mother.” This is the first joke in his book.Three elderly Jewish women are seated on a bench in Miami Beach, each one bragging about how devoted her son is to her. The first one says: “My son is so devoted that last year for my birthday he gave me an all-expense paid cruise around the world. First class.”The second one says: “My son is more devoted. For my 75th birthday last year, he catered an affair for me. And even gave me money to fly down my good friends from New York.The third one says: My son is the most devoted. Three times a week he goes to a psychiatrist. Hundreds of dollars an hour he pays him. And what does he speak about the whole time? Me.You might think that parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, are natural allies. That the natural energy is for the generations to get along easily. We share so much. We share a past, present, and future. We share family history. We share values. We share genes. We share a home. We sleep under the same roof. We share dreams. Your success is my success. In fact, I am happier for your success than for my success. What is so complicated? What could go wrong?And yet, it is complicated, and it often does go wrong. That is not only evidenced by the jokes in Telushkin book. The inevitability of generational tension is the backdrop for the climactic passage in the special Haftarah from the prophet Malakhi who imagines that someday, in the future, there will be a yom Adonai hagadol v’hanorah, a day of the Lord that is great and awesome—that is how today became Shabbat hagadol. What will happen on that great and awesome day of the Lord? God “shall reconcile parents with their children and children with their parents.”

Can one person change the world?That is the question at the end of the tractate Sanhedrin. The word "Sanhedrin" means the supreme judicial, civic, legal, religious authority in ancient Israel. The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin is about justice-the human beings, institutions, procedures and protocols, evidentiary rules, safeguards, that enable human beings to create and sustain a just society.Because justice in this world is so elusive, Sanhedrin's final chapter deals with other-worldly matters of the world to come (olam ha'ba) and the resurrection of the dead (techiyat hameitim). If we do not get justice in this world, perhaps we might get it in the next. Impossible to prove or disprove concepts like the world to come and resurrection of the dead might be a consolation for those living in a current reality that is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, brutish and short."Justice is so urgent. Justice is so hard. Sometimes we fail. Which leads to the last question of this tractate: Can one person change the world? Not can one person change his or her own world? Rather, can one person change the world?Sanhedrin's answer to its own question is complex. It seems to answer that question yes. But the person it talks about right before the boffo end is none other than the prophet Elijah, who famously makes his appearance at the end of our seders. Everything about Elijah is ambiguous, which the tractate itself will bring out and highlight.On the eve of Passover, we will consider Sanhedrin's question of the power of an individual to change the world by examining the complicated figure of Elijah. The subtext question in our conversation: Do you believe you can, or that you cannot, change the world?

Rabbi Mishael Zion comes from a Haggadah-filled home: he is co-author of A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices (2007) and The Israeli Haggadah (2024), together with his father Noam Zion, who is the author of A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah (Hartman, 1997). Mishael was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, has served as co-Director and rabbi of the Bronfman Fellowships, and founded the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture for Israeli Arts, Culture and Media leaders. He is also leader of the Klausner Minyan in Talpiot, Jerusalem, the neighborhood he was born in and in where his wife Elana, and their four daughters, live.

This week, I was speaking with a member who has been struggling with an intense family situation and was heading into a tense and painful meeting. She was riding in a Lyft. The driver was playing Christian radio quietly in the front. A few minutes before they arrived at their destination, she heard something on the radio that piqued her interest. "Can you turn that up?" she asked. The hosts of the Christian radio show were discussing a verse from the book of Joshua where God says to Joshua, "I will be with you as I was with Moses. I will not fail you and I will not forsake you." Just then, the car stopped at her destination.She shared that as she was riding in the Lyft, she was feeling deeply afraid and alone. Hearing that verse gave her strength. As she put it, “how freaking amazing to get that message from Christian radio of all places in the exact moment I needed it….[and] of all the verses they could possibly be discussing, they are not only discussing verses from my part of the Bible as a Jew, but they are also discussing the exact verses that I need to put my faith in right now.” When she got out of the Lyft, she stood taller and stronger, fortified by the wisdom of Torah echoing through Christian radio.Now, let’s just pause for a moment. Think about this: What if our member had just been in that car, stressing about her meeting, messing around on her phone, tuning out the world? That would have been a totally reasonable response. In a stressful situation, it is so tempting to disconnect. It is so tempting to lose oneself in music, social media, reading and entertainment, or in chemical substances. But she was sitting in that car with her phone put away, looking out the window, listening to a random radio broadcast in her Lyft. Because her eyes and ears were open to possibility, that's how she received the wisdom she needed for that moment.