Okay, does everyone want to stand up and sit down just to stretch your legs? Because the rabbi's gonna speak now. You're welcome to if you want to. I know it's hard to sit for a long time. I would have taken advantage of that if I were in the cajun. Shabbat Shalom. Last chance. Okay. Men's club Shabbat, graduation Shabbat, and Parshat Naso. What do these things have in common? I'm not sure. But let's find out. I'm gonna start with an extreme story, an extreme example, and I don't want you to be alarmed by this. I want you to bear with me, and I hope it'll be clear why I'm reminding you of this story. Some of you might be familiar with the name John Walker Lind. Is that a name that's familiar to you? He's known as the American Taliban. There was a novel written by Pearl Abraham about him based on his life. He grew up in an affluent family in Marin County, California. And at age 16, he converted to Islam and moved to Yemen to study Arabic. And over a period of three or four years, he studied and became radicalized in the process. He joined the Taliban and he fought against the United States until he was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in December of 2001. And when many of us, myself included, learned this story, we wondered how is this possible? How is it possible that a child of this country, born into the freedoms, the affluence, the opportunity of America, raised in an open-minded liberal home, how can such a person come to embrace such an extreme ideology that's violent and hateful and antithetical to American ideals? And not only Lind, but there are other young men searching for meaning and find it, unfortunately, in violent and extreme parts of our society. And some of these men go on to do awful things. And it causes us to wonder: where are we losing these young people? How are they falling between the cracks? Where did we go wrong? Where did we fail them? And I think, again, bear with me, one possible answer to where we might do better comes from Parshat Naso. In this week's Parsha, as I mentioned earlier, we receive the interesting and somewhat perplexing laws about the Nazir, the Nazirite. The Torah says, Ish oisha ki afli lindor neder nazir le hazir la dunai. This is the process for a man or a woman who decides to take a Nazirite vow and to separate themselves for God. Now the Torah goes on to provide a framework and a series of rituals and restrictions for a person who chooses to become a Nazir and in the process chooses to draw closer to God. No one is obligated, no one is commanded to become a Nazirite, but if one wants to explore this path, it comes with greater demands on a person's life and observance. A Nazirite may not drink wine or even eat grapes or grape products, no raisins for Nazirites. They are prohibited from cutting their hair, and they're not allowed to come in contact with a corpse. Now, this last one you might be familiar with, it's similar to the Kohanim, the priests who are not supposed to come into contact with a dead body, but it's even more restrictive for the Nazir. A Kohain may come in contact with a corpse if it's an immediate relative for the purpose of burying that person, but a nazir cannot even come in contact with the corpse of a close relative. So imagine during this period of time not being able to attend the funeral of a sibling or a parent or a spouse. Such is the level of restriction connected to the vow of the Nazirite. Now, just as an aside, I was teaching this one time in my former congregation, and there was a person in the congregation who himself was a recovering alcoholic, and he said to me, This is recovery. A person who takes a vow of sobriety, a person who chooses to separate himself, impose additional restrictions that remove him from the normal social environments of the world. And he said, I found a lot of meaning in the idea that such a person draws closer to God, that there's actually a process of recovery and restriction that you impose that puts you in a place that is nearer to the divine, even more so than your average person who's going about their daily life. Rashi points out that the word nazir, it means prisha. He translates the word as separation. And indeed, in this person's physical appearance, they let their hair grow long. In their social behavior, they have a more restrictive diet. They can't socialize in the way that many people do. And even in their ritual purity, they are separate. They're set apart from the normal ways in which people behave and interact. You might call them extra from. They're extra strict or religious about certain things. Rabbi Shimson Raphael Hirsch, great 19th-century German rabbi, he expounds upon Rashi saying, the task is to be completely holy to God, to belong with the whole of his being and will exclusively to his God. Why he uses the male pronoun, I'm not sure, the Torah explicitly says man or woman, but let's stay with him. He wishes to draw a circle around himself in which only God is to be present. That's the Nazir. Now, we might ask a question about the Nazir. Is this something aspirational? Is this someone to be praised and lifted up as a model? Or is there some ambivalence about this institution? I think our Eitzhaim commentary sums it up well. When it says opinions are strongly divided concerning the Nazarite, is he a saint aspiring voluntarily to the highest levels of holiness, or a person with trouble controlling his impulses, who therefore has to impose limits on behavior beyond what normal people do? I think the answer is both, or neither. I think the Nazir was created for somebody like John Walker Lind. Now I didn't know him, and I don't know if this would have helped him to avoid his fate, but I'll explain how I think this might have helped in his case. I think many young people, maybe especially these days, but maybe always, and perhaps especially young men, and even some older people, they yearn for a place where they belong, a framework, a structure that gives them purpose and meaning to their lives. All of us at some level want to feel like we belong, like we have some kind of important purpose in the world. And religion and Jewish community, those can be an outlet for that. A career, work can be an outlet for that. Being part of a team or an affinity group, that can be a way to find purpose and meaning. Joining the military, that can be a way for people to find purpose and mission. Being part of a social organization, a fraternity, all of these structures can provide that kind of belonging and purpose and identity that many of us seek. And many of these institutions harness that need for belonging and leverage it for good purposes, for a higher purpose, to be more charitable, to be more connected, to be more of service to your community, to your country, to your God. But what happens when a person is lonely and doesn't find that sense of purpose in productive ways? Well then it's easy to find a group that offers belonging and mission, but harnesses it towards a more destructive end. Our rabbis famously warn us, Alti Froch min hatsibour, don't separate yourself from the community. Don't become so frum, so pious that you're out of step, more than maybe two standard deviations away from the norm of your community. And we all know some people who maybe go down that path and who are looking for more, looking to be more pious than their neighbor. I think in those cases, the Torah offers us the nazir. Okay, you want more? Have at it. Here's a structure that can provide you more purpose. You'll be closer to God this way. And maybe it does so with some ambivalence, but I think it's responding to a natural emotional need, a spiritual need, and it also provides a pathway back. A person is not supposed to be a nazir forever, but is supposed to be a nazir for a period of time. Take a month and an ashram if you need it. Go study in yeshiva for a year, but don't stay there forever. Come back to society, come back to the normal ways of our community. The haftara, which Ronin read so beautifully for us this morning, I think it's brought here today to offer a cautionary tale. When you take the Nazir too far, this is what happens. As I mentioned earlier, Shim Shon Samson is the Bible's only known Nazir. So that shows you how widely it was practiced. Not so often. Only his Naziriety, is that a word? His Naziriety doesn't follow the path of the Nazir that is outlined in the Parsha. His is a strange kind of Naziriety. In theory, a Nazir chooses this path for him or herself. They'd consecrate themselves, not so for Shimshon. Shimshon's mother encountered an angel of God who told her, make your son a Nazir. And she did so even before he was born. As it's laid out in our Parsha today, being a Nazir is for a defined period of time. And there's a whole set of rituals for how you end that period of time and come back. Shimshon is a Nazirite his whole life. And sure enough, if you read the whole story, which wasn't in our Haftarah, but go on and read it in the book of Judges, Shimshon violates all of the prohibitions of the Nazir. He drinks wine at feasts, he slaughtered Philistines by the dozens, and thus become ritually defiled through contact with a corpse. And in the most famous part of her story, Delilah cuts his hair. Now, to be sure, he was sleeping at the time. This wasn't intentional, he didn't choose that. But I think it's not for nothing that the Bible wants us to know that he wasn't able to follow through with these restrictions on his life. And his story ends in tragedy. So what can we learn from the story of Shem Shon? I think it's be a nazir if you want, be a nazir if you feel you must, indulge that need for more, but don't do it forever. All things in moderation, even experimenting with pious forms of religion. Now I'd like to think or hope that if John Walker Lind was a Bar Mitzvah student in our community, he wasn't Jewish, but in any event, if he had grown up here, I'd like to think that one of us, one of all of us, might have noticed his need for more, his feeling lost or looking for something to give his life meaning or purpose. Maybe we would have encouraged him to go to Israel for a year. Maybe we would have encouraged him to find himself in more constructive ways. Maybe he'd get connected to our men's club and find the fellowship he sought. Maybe he'd volunteer with Susan Work or become a part of one of Cantor Kaplan's choirs. Maybe he'd find purpose in our daily minion or become a regular Torah reader. And I hope he might have found meaning and purpose in those pursuits. Or maybe not. But for even for all of us, not those extreme cases, there are ways to find meaning and purpose in constructive ways that are service to our community. All of us want to belong. All of us want to challenge ourselves towards more piety, I hope. Towards more piety, involvement, inclusion. All of us want to give more of ourselves for something greater. And I'd like to hope that we could find some of that here. There's been much talk recently of a crisis of masculinity. In response to feminism, in response to me too, men and boys are struggling to redefine what it means to be a man in this world. And the pressures and challenges facing boys are significant. From violent video games and corrupting content on the internet, a culture that commodifies and objectifies everything. It's hard to raise a boy to be a mensch in this society. In a recent article in the Sapir Journal, Adam Teidelbaum argues that bar mitzvah education, and he's talking specifically about boys at this point, he says it needs a makeover. The title of his article was Boys to Mensches. For those who like the 1990s RB group, me included, that should be a nice title. I liked it. We should, according to uh Titelbaum, be putting boys at the age of bar mitzvah or a little bit before into groups of other boys, together with older young men, and maybe with some older men, to learn and talk about what it means to be a man in this world, not in the ways that they might encounter on the internet, but in ways that our Jewish tradition can offer them frameworks, to talk about their struggles, to talk about their personal lives, their seeking for a place and meaning and purpose. And in that way, they would define together through their relationships what it means to be a Jewish man, not based around entitlement or opportunity, but about obligation and service. Not about indulging impulses, but about mastering them. Maybe the men's club wants to look into a model like this for our Bene Mitzvah program. I hope that the Nazir offers all of us something to consider. How do we balance this need for self-fulfillment, this need that to be holy or close to God with a desire to stay in step with community and family? All of us have probably encountered someone in our lives who becomes from and will no longer eat in your house on your dishes. That common? How do you provide a way for that person to get what they need spiritually, religiously, but also to stay and also to stay connected to family and community? Each of us in this community gives up something of our ideal vision of religious life in order to be part of something better, something larger. This minion is not exactly the way I want it to be. Because we make compromises in community. There's an old joke. I have a perfect idea for a Jewish community for a minion. The only problem is I need nine other people to join me. The truth behind that joke is you can do it the way you want to do it, but then you'll do it alone. When we strive to build a Jewish community, each of us gives up a little bit of the perfect idea of what we want as individuals so that we can create what we want as a community together. How do we create outlets where everyone belongs and finds meaning and purpose in service of God and gets also what they need as an individual? So, as we celebrate our graduates and we celebrate the mensches of the men's club in our community, let's hold on to these questions and perhaps we might be able to offer the society around us a more positive relationship to religiosity, to obligation, to being a mensch to masculinity than much of what we see around us today. Help us figure this out, because it's something we all have an invested stake in. Shabbat shalom.