My Dear Friends,

I'll confess that at a moment like this, I often chastise myself for choosing such complicated and heavy subjects to discuss with you. I rebuke myself thinking, "It's Friday, they're tired and I'm probably the only one who cares about this stuff anyway. So why not just keep it light." And yet, the confluence at this Season of two great festivals of Jewish and Christian tradition would seem to demand some attempt at a worthy recognition from this pulpit.

We are all of us heirs of a "Two Way Street" - aren't we? Though Judaism and Christianity are often homogenized, well-meaningly but terribly inexactly, into that ever so comfortable and cozy adjectival description: "Judeo - Christian," they are nevertheless, two different and distinct faiths.

In the name of politeness and a sincere desire to at last rise above the tragic folly of bygone centuries, we understandably are quick to seek shelter in our Judeo - Christian similarity, and common lineage. Forgetting for an instant that what we suffer to view as a relationship of cordiality has been far more often one of fratricidal rage (or, at best, an uneasy snub, or anything but benign neglect). We speak of our commonality of origins.

We recognize how we Jews and Christians were profoundly linked at the navel. The elder gave birth to the younger and celebrate it or not, the philosophic and theological features of both often show unmistakable and undeniable resemblance.

Our Scriptural foundation provides an unseeable umbilicus. True, each interprets so much of Scripture in very different ways, but the imprint of Torah, Prophets, Psalmists, and sages will necessarily make its indelible impression upon any and every Christian denomination.

Our categories of celebration, our hopes and fears, our expressions of worship and vocabularies of belief and human longing - though sometimes strikingly different in emphasis - nevertheless bear a common imprint and style. Now, make no mistake. For we would do violence to both traditions were we to proclaim them identical twins, or even remotely so! But we would prove ourselves unknowledgeable fools were we not to acknowledge so much of our common heritage.

For example, this very day on the Christian calendar, the observance of Good Friday, is determined by the Hebrew, Lunar calendar and the date of Passover, if the fourteenth of Nisan (Seder Eve) does not fall on a Friday, well then the death of Jesus is commemorated on the Friday following, and Easter the Sunday after.

Fifteen centuries, approximately, separate Moses from Jesus. Both were born of the same people. Both worshiped the same God. Both lived and suffered for the same high moral Jewish principles. Yet, there were differences - not unimportant ones at that. We ought to know about them, but shame on us if we ever again let them become stumbling blocks to Jewish and Christian collaboration on deeds of united benefit to all God's children.

We have said that these differences were ones of emphasis. The faith of Moses and the Prophets of Israel and Judah was predicated on moral conduct. Jesus' concern was primarily one of a "new order," believing that the world was at any day about to come to an end. God was ushering in a new age, and all sinners and evil doers would be trapped in the birth throes of this new order. You get it? Jesus, fully aware of Moses' law and the Prophet's dreams, switched his emphasis from that of a continuing world of law, to an ethics for a world in extremis - about to break apart in dissolution.

Individual purification, preparation for the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, these became Jesus' new order. But he occupied no political power or authority did he? Jesus was an independent teacher, a Pharisee of extraordinary spiritual sensitivity and ethical insight. He was one who even associated with the poor, the downtrodden, the "untouchable" classes, and he did so with enormous charisma and tenderness.

His predecessor, the great lawgiver, Moses - Judaism's greatest of all prophets was very different. Moses was a revolutionary. He engineered the People's overthrowing of slavery. He was a statesman and a religious as well as political genius. His was a long ministry. Jesus was very brief. Both men were world-shaping personalities! Yet, one wonders what both would say to their adherents today in our ever so selfish and self-absorbed world.

No doubt, Moses would sadly yet sternly admonish his people to pay closer heed to the words we read in the Seder only a few nights ago:

In every generation it is incumbent upon every Israelite to regard himself as if he actually had gone out of Egypt...Remember you were once a slave to Pharaoh in the land of Egypt.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy!
Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

How nations as well as individuals often need to say "I'm sorry." How sometimes "I'm sorry" is a more righteous statement than "We regret."

How we suck the Promise out of the Promised Land by killing children, and mockery of belief by promulgating false faiths which call for Holy Wars or the martyrdom of school children.

And Jesus, looking out at our world from his cross on Calvary, would he condemn his followers as weak-willed hypocrites, who continue to betray him and seem intent on crucifying then virtuous and defenseless again and again?

It may well be, that neither gentleman would claim kinship with much that masquerades today as "religious." In the spirit of the great prophets they would rather "comfort the afflict and afflict the comfortable!"

Both Moses and Jesus would weep bitter tears, I feel sure they would, as sorrowfully they surveyed what has become of us and what sin has transpired in their names by those who called themselves, "the faithful":

They have delighted to seize upon the moral blemish of the other person, the other faith, the other race, the stranger, the one who, by virtue of skin or belief or sexual practice, or natronstate is not like they, and proceeded to punish them for no sin other than being different.

So it seems that the hottest fires of hell, the fullest fury of the devil of which either Moses or Jesus would have been incapable of even imagining have become in the arrogant hands of "true believers" a tortured "reality: the Inquisitor's blade, the Crusaders sword, the torch of the Pogrom, the gas of Auschwitz, the genocide of Bosnia, the rage of Gaza, the betrayal of the innocent, the complicity of the indifferent.

Moses and Jesus, might well have had their differences, even as may most people of divergent faith, but of this fact they would have had no doubt:
 

A person never rises above the god he or she worships. If the god is yourself, then that shall be ones final height and stature;
If our God be money - that will be all we'll ever be worth.
If we worship our status or position, that will be the limit of our grandeur.
But for those whose souls are fashioned, B'tzelem Elohim, in the image of the Living God, such goals are too small' such aspirations too puny and insufficient.

Passover and Easter - 5761, 2001: the legacy of Moses and Jesus is ours to cherish and to worthily live!

In every generation it is incumbent upon every Israelite to regard himself as if he actually had gone out of Egypt....

Blessed are those who remain faithful to their vision.
Blessed are the meek in heart.
And blessed are those who believe, and believing, serve in faithfulness.