From the Rabbi

Lechayim! To life! Our shul is 120 years old. For Jews, 120 is a special number that symbolizes completion, a complete life. Scripture tells us that Moses, our greatest rabbi, lived 120 years. “Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated.” (Duet. 34:7) According to Rashi, “his vigor unabated” means the life-sap that was in him did not depart, and the
appearance of his face had not changed. (Sifrei Devarim 357:35).

The connection between Moses’s lifespan and completion is not accidental. In order to mitigate man’s propensity to sin and become corrupted, God limited the life of a person to 120 years. The Lord said, “My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years.” (Gen. 6:3) Onkelos, echoed by other commentators, explains that God set a time for mankind to repent. Ramban expands: “…The purport is to state that ‘God made man upright’ (Ecclesiastes 7:29) to be like the ministering angels by virtue of the soul He gave him. But he was drawn after the flesh and corporeal desires; ‘he is like the beasts that perish’ (Psalms 49:13), and therefore the spirit of God will no longer be sheathed in him for he is corporeal and not godly. However, He will prolong for them if they repent.”

Before departing at 120 years, Moses summarized the 42 journeys in the 40 years the People of Israel had spent in the desert. “Moses recorded the starting points of their various marches as directed by the Lord. Their marches, by starting points…” (Num 33:2) At first glance, it is clear that the people endured much.
However, Moses reminded them where they had begun, and that their difficulties are actually their future’s building blocks that imbued the experience with a value that has endured, much like Moses himself.

Similar to the People of Israel, Congregation Tifereth Israel has experienced many different stops in time. We can look back at the amazing journey and see how far we’ve come. Like Moses, CTI is still in full vigor — an ode to the past 120 years and prayers for 120 more.

—Rabbi Gadi Capela

On May 25, many Black communities and their supporters commemorated the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. I participated in the local candlelight vigil at the Clinton Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in Greenport. It was a well-organized and respectful gathering, presided over by Pastor Natalie R. Wimberly. It included several local clergy, a mufti, and Christian and Muslim lay leaders. The charge by Pastor Natalie was “The time is now for uncommon courage.” She added that we should never stand idly by, that we should mention the victims’ names, not forget them. “Say my name, say her name, say his name, say our name,” she called out.

The vigil took place just a couple of weeks after I had returned from my trip, driving almost 13,000 miles across America. Seeing police all over the country, I often thought about the expression, “Driving while Black.” How awful it is for someone to have this feeling of constant exposure and vulnerability. I thought of my relationship with God. As a faithful man, I don’t want to be afraid of God; I am in awe of God. Similarly, I don’t want to be afraid of the police; I want to respect them. We need the police, of course, and we need them to be confident. The police should see themselves in us and we should see ourselves in them. They shouldn’t see anyone as “the other,” and we shouldn’t see them as “others.” It is a vast and beautiful country. One of the reasons it is beautiful is because of its godly diversity.

The vigil happened to coincide also with the conflict in Israel and the Guardian of the Walls Operation. I suspected that a connection would be made between the two, just as I had heard had happened in similar gatherings. At the end, as it was starting to get dark, windy, and chilly, Habeed Ahmed, chair of the Islamic Center of Long Island’s Board of Trustees, spoke. Quickly, he drew a parallel between what he perceived as the oppression of Blacks in America and the Palestinians in Israel. This, of course, is an ignorant, offensive, and dangerous comparison. It is ignorant because it is a different conflict, impossible to judge from afar, as impossible as making a judgment based on a person’s external look or skin color. It is offensive because educated Jews, who largely support Israel and the historic and current struggle of Jews to live peacefully in their land, also support the Black outcry of injustice in this country. And it is dangerous because this false parallel has provoked acts of anti-Semitism in streets across America—from NY to LA.

I spoke last, to chant Psalm 23 and make a few comments. Pastor Natalie’s call for “uncommon courage” resonated with me. Something had to be said. I began by sharing my thoughts about what it would be like to “drive while Black,” also our journey through Birmingham, our visit to the site where four girls were killed in the 16th Street bombing of the Baptist Church in 1963, our drive from Selma to Montgomery, and our walk with my friend, the Rev. Jerria Martin, across the same bridge where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel locked arms in 1965 during the Civil Rights protests. We visited those sites to show our support, even six decades later. Seventy percent of non-Black supporters of the Civil Rights Movements were Jews, among them, the current Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s own parents.

It is a welcome development, finally, to make Juneteenth a national holiday, to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., and the 700,000 who lost their lives in this battle. We should denounce prejudice in any form — anti-Jewish, anti-Black, anti-any particular group. In the words of Dr. King, “Injustice somewhere is injustice everywhere.” It was important for me to reiterate that Jews identify with this discrimination out of their own struggles, that there are always reasons to hate Jews and Blacks if one is looking to hate. All of us need to understand that we are in this together.

I concluded my remarks at the vigil by saying that I am visibly Jewish because of the yarmulke I wear. Many Jews now are afraid to be visibly Jewish, that all of us should be outraged at the surging anti-Semitic violence. Let us not allow this country to become a place where it would be dangerous to be “walking while Jewish.”

May the light of this summer shine upon all of us,

—Rabbi Gadi Capela