Step back, I know who I am
Raise up your ear, I'll drop the style and clear
It's the beats and the lyrics they fear
The rage is relentless
We need a movement with a quickness
You are the witness of change
And to counteract
We gotta take the power back
[From "Take the Power Back," by Rage Against the Machine]
These lyrics were used as the opening to the d'var Torah from our Bar Mitzvah - Max - this past Shabbat.
Max told us how his rebel lifestyle - as exemplified by those Rage lyrics and in music of Kurt Cobain - finds expression in our tradition in Korach's rebellion in the Book of Numbers.
Korach rebels against Moses' authority and, although he loses, the Torah portion is named for him as a sign of the importance of role of the rebel.
Max found himself in that Torah portion, and his role - the rebel, like his idol Martin Luther King Jr. - validated as a necessary part of the community; those with the courage to seek the truth.
Max's Kippot
Rabbi Niles Goldstein, the founding Rabbi of The New Shul, has called upon us to reclaim our rebel roots. And, The New Shul is in many ways a rebel shul. We want to do things, observe, pray, worship in our own way. In a way that is both authentically Jewish, yet speaks to who we are as real thinking people in the 21st Century.
Listening to Max, got me thinking about the rebel rabbis that have influence me. Perhaps, the greatest rebel rabbi of the last century, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, began his career at The Jewish Theological Seminary but later left to form Reconstuctionist Judaism.
"If we do not wish to be cut off from the stream of living thought," Rabbi Kaplan wrote in 1915, "if we do not want to be spiritually starved, we Jews must know not so much what Judaism meant twenty centuries ago, nor even a century ago, but what it is to mean to us of today."
Rabbi Kaplan was known for re-imagining services and for altering worship in a way that made sense for his community and the way in which he understood his world.
However, as most rebels are, Rabbi Kaplan was met with resistance. In 1945, Rabbi Kaplan was formally excommunicated by the Orthodox Rabbis of New York, and they went as far as to set fire to a copy of his prayer book.
Rabbi Kaplan said, in response, "the real issue is not how to render our ritual in keeping with the requirements of modern life, but how to get our people sufficiently interested in religion to want a ritual. If we are not prepared to do much more for Judaism than revise the prayer book, we should leave the prayer book alone."
It is this spirit, this rebel spirit, that speaks to who we are at The New Shul.
As Max said at the end of his speech -
"All the people I mentioned, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Korach, Kurt Cobain and me have one thing in common. We all question what others take for truth. We look for different ways to express our opinions and ourselves. In doing this we hopefully get people to see things differently."
- Rabbi Dan Ain
