The Boxes We Build

Rosh Hashanah 5787

The Box Finland Gives Every Family

Let’s talk about boxes.

In the 1930s, Finland was one of the poorest countries in Europe. Close to seventy out of every thousand babies died before their first birthday, of cold, of hunger. So in 1938, the government started sending a box of supplies to every poor new mother.

That’s the Finnish Baby Box. An actual cardboard box, filled with clothes, bedding, a small mattress that fits inside the box itself. For decades, Finnish babies have literally slept their first weeks of life in the box the government sent them. It doesn’t matter who the parents are, what they earn, or where they live. Every baby gets it, automatically, no application, just a gift.

In Finland, you can look at a crowd of children in snowsuits and know, without asking a single parent, exactly which year each one was born. Marked not by their parents, but by the same government issued snowsuit they all received the year they arrived.

There’s a team, every year, whose job is to decide what belongs in that box. What do babies born this year actually need? The team has  argued over birth control, over cloth diapers versus disposable. What they have never once argued about is whether the box itself should exist.

I keep coming back to that box because of two assumptions. One, a mother with a new baby needs support. Two, the government of mothers with new babies has a job to provide it.

To me, that is what government looks like when it’s working. Leadership oriented, at its root, toward one honest mission: what do our people actually need, and how do we get it to them.

Baby boxes have spread worldwide, more than ninety programs in roughly sixty countries, each box adapted to the place it serves. In South Africa, a plastic bathtub instead of a cardboard box because it’s sturdier in a humid climate. In Malawi, mothers rejected the cardboard box, it looked too much like a coffin, so the government switched to a woven basket.

In the United States, we tried. New Jersey launched the first state program in 2017. By 2022, federal regulators ruled the design unsafe under new crib standards. The companies folded. We don’t have a Finland-style baby box in this country, not because we couldn’t figure out the proper material, but because every American attempt has been a patchwork, one company, one state, one hospital, and patchwork infrastructure eventually meets a safety regulation or a budget line and disappears.

I am enthralled by the Finnish Baby Box because it’s a reminder that governments can and should do good.

Now don’t freak out, we’re not getting into politics, not really. Although it is election season, again, and big things are at stake.

So no, we won’t talk about politics. But can we talk about government? What it could be? What it should be? Are we completely despairing of any hope for a government that serves its people? The Finnish baby box gives me a concrete, relatively modern example of what government is meant to do, and that gives me a drop of hope.

A Government Box

Here’s a story about another box.

In 1876, as this country turned one hundred, a woman named Anna Deihm built a safe, a massive iron and glass vault, filled with objects officials trusted to tell the country’s story, sealed until the nation’s two hundredth birthday. It was called the Century Safe.

In 1976, right on schedule, President Gerald Ford opened it. By nearly every account, the contents of the Century Safe were a letdown. A Tiffany fountain pen set. A pamphlet against alcohol. A list of eighty thousand government employees. Nothing that told you what it felt like to be alive in 1876. Just the remnants of people who cared enormously about their own names being remembered.

A few months ago, the US celebrated its 250th birthday, and a new Century Safe was buried, meant to stay shut until 2276. What’s inside? Letters from governors. Commemorative coins with elected officials’ faces on them. Florida submitted coins honoring its own officials. Several states sent in, essentially, the paperwork that created the committee that decided what to send in. Another letdown. 

Surely the creatives of America could do better than a coin with a governor’s head. 

So this got me thinking. What kind of box is Judaism? A Finnish Baby Box, full of what our children actually need? A Century Safe, ceremonial but underwhelming? What would a Jewish Baby Box look like? What would a Jewish Century Safe look like?

Why the Boxes?

Why am I telling these stories, other than the fact that I love boxes and containers of any kind, yes, my go to at the mall is always the Container Store? 

Boxes are a metaphor. What boxes do we put ourselves in? As Americans, as Jews, we get boxed constantly. Pro Israel. Pro Palestinian. Too liberal. Too conservative. Think of every label you’ve encountered these past few years. Those are boxes we are consciously and unconsciously carrying.

Why are we going here, to baby boxes and underwhelming government safes? Because thinking about boxes and labels and our assumptions and biases, this is part of our work of teshuva, of heshbon hanefesh. Where have we closed up a box instead of opened a doorway? 

Today, when many of us aren’t fans of governments in general or politics in specific, when Israel is scapegoated for every wrong in the world, when every opinion feels radioactive, we need guidance. We need clarity. 

And, I’m sorry, not sorry, we need religion.

This summer I met one of my heroes, Rabbi Sid Schwarz, a ground breaking rabbi in the field of Judaism and Social Justice, and he taught something that I’ve been thinking about ever since. 

October 7th has made many of us feel that the only safe path for Jews is to “circle the wagons,” protect our own, because no one else will. That instinct isn’t hard to understand. We experienced generations of being boxed, literally, walled into ghettos by governments that were supposed to protect us.

For most of Jewish history, no government showed up when we needed one. So we built our own boxes instead. We built burial societies. Free loan societies. free schools. Community funds. No one in this room is blind to that truth that we’ve been our own best protectors and that truth is lonely but necessary.

These past three years have made plenty of us feel, for the first time in our own lives, something close to what earlier generations warned us about, that closing-in feeling, the sense that the people who are supposed to have our backs do not.

I’m not going to tell you that feeling is wrong, or to stop taking real security seriously. History has taught us not to wait for rescuers, and not to outsource our safety to any single government or ally. So when I say we have every reason to be skeptical of governments, I’m not being cynical. I’m being a student of our own story.

But Our Mission Was Never to Check Out

And still. Still, I feel obligated to teach what our tradition demands of us next, because I think we’re at real risk of losing something essential.

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who became one of the great moral voices of the twentieth century, taught that there is a right lesson and a wrong lesson to take from the Holocaust. The wrong lesson is: our only responsibility is to our own, we should stay suspicious of everyone outside our circle. That is not the Jewish answer.

Our great teacher, Maimonides taught us to think in circles of responsibility, starting closest to us and moving outward. We do have a responsibility to start at home, to help our own first. But here’s the part we can forget: we don’t get to stop moving outward once our own circle’s needs are met. We care for our own, and everyone else, at the same time. Always.

Judaism has insisted on outward motion again and again, at the exact moments it would have been easiest to circle the wagons and protect only our own.

Let’s start with the prophet Jeremiah, six centuries before the common era. When Babylon destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE and marched the Jews of Jerusalem into exile, those Jews had every reason to give up on the empire that had just demolished their home. 

Yet, Jeremiah preached the opposite: “Seek the welfare of the city where you now live, for in its welfare you will find your own.” If any generation had permission to circle the wagons, it was that one. Instead, they were commanded to build up the very city that had conquered them. Why? Because Jews don’t retreat. We rebuild.

Five hundred years later, Jerusalem was under siege again, this time by Rome, and the city had descended into chaos. Jewish soldiers, determined to fight to the last breath for the holy city, controlled the gates, and they killed any Jew who so much as hinted at surrender. 

But the great scholar Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai wanted to negotiate with the Romans. But that was considered treason to his Jewish people. He couldn’t just saunter out the gates of Jerusalem and approach the enemy commander. So he hatched a plan.  This is one of the great dramatic tales of the Talmud. 

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai let it be known that he had fallen ill and shortly after, his students announced that he died. His students laid him in a coffin and carried it toward the gate of Jerusalem. A coffin was the only thing the soldiers at the gate didn’t search, usually. 

But in this case the guards were suspicious. They wanted to drive a spear through the coffin, just to be sure. 

Rabbi Yochanan’s students begged them not to, they couldn’t allow the honored rabbi’s body to be violated. It worked. The coffin passed through the gate, past the Roman army burning Jerusalem to the ground. Past the Jewish soldiers threatening any potential collaborators. 

Once he was clear of the Jerusalem city walls, Rabbi Yochanan climbed out of the coffin and demanded to be taken straight to the Roman commander, Vespasian.

He stood in front of the man about to destroy the Jewish Temple and complimented him, he called him the next emperor of Rome. 

Within days, the actual emperor, Nero, was dead, and Vespasian became emperor. The rabbi had been right! Stunned, grateful, Vespasian granted Rabbi Yochanah one request, anything he wanted.

Listen to this, this is the genius, maybe even divine part, Rabbi Yochana did not ask him to stop burning Jerusalem. He did not ask to save the Temple. He said, “Give me the town of Yavneh and its rabbis.”

Yavneh, a little village in the middle of Israel. One small place and its teachers. That’s it. Not a temple. Not gold. A town, and its teachers. Rabbi Yochanan knew that Judaism could survive if we had Torah and our practice of Torah study. If we had debate and the structure of our calendar and our mitzvot. The essence of Judaism was never a building. And in that one prophetic request, rabbinic Judaism was born and the tradition we know and love is here today. 

If R Yochanan had been stuck in the box of the temple and fighting for its survival, Judaism quite literally would have died. 

Rabbi David Hartman, the philosopher who founded the Shalom Hartman Institute, named this same pattern: Jews facing danger have always been tempted toward one of two extremes, ghettoize completely, or assimilate completely. Wall off, or dissolve. But that’s a false binary. It was never one or the other. 

The Jewish model, from Jeremiah, to Yochanan ben Zakkai is fighting for our survival while still staying engaged with the world around us.

Which brings us to the lesson we started with. Elie Wiesel didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize for writing the book Night that is read in nearly every American classroom. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for showing compassion even when the world had abandoned him and his people. Not because it convinces anyone of how good we are. Because we need it for ourselves. We cannot let our hearts harden, even, especially, when the love isn’t returned.

We are watching that lesson play out right now, in Israel. This has been a year of moral reckoning for the Jewish state, holding two things at once: a war which at least I believe is justified, and an insistence that Judaism demands we hold our own actions to moral standard in the middle of it, even while people who wish us only harm try to weaponize that same self-critique against us.

And we can talk about airing dirty laundry for a moment – I do understand the discomfort. It never feels good. But I think the value of talking amongst ourselves about where we’ve failed and holding ourselves accountable for our own sake is better than worrying about how it will look to the outside. We know well that we have no control over what others think of us. So let’s do the work of questioning and debating out loud and in public so we can learn from each other. 

The Israel “situation” is not only hard for us watching from a distance. It is excruciating for Israelis living it, coping with security and humane relations for neighbors at the same time. And doing that in the face of a world that has turned a bitter cold, blind eye to Jewish suffering, I can understand anyone who says, I just can’t care anymore, at least not right now.

Let me tell you about Yuval Vagdani. He survived the Nova music festival massacre on October 7th. Then he put on a uniform and served, month after month, in Gaza. Last winter, after his discharge, he finally took the vacation he’d been planning for four years, to Brazil. 

One morning he woke up to his phone blowing up: eight missed calls, his mother, his brothers, the Foreign Ministry. Shockingly, a Palestinian rights group had convinced a Brazilian judge to open a war crimes investigation against him. Can you imagine – a 21 year old kid on a beach vacation!

Their entire case was a photo of him in uniform, and a video of a building exploding in the background, an act he wasn’t even shown committing. He said, “From one house explosion, they made five hundred pages. They thought I murdered thousands of children.” He fled Brazil the next morning. Being chased out of the vacation he’d waited four years for, he said, felt like a bullet in the heart.

That is what it means to be an Israeli soldier right now. Carrying the weight of a world that has already decided what you did, before you’ve said a word.

And … holding ourselves to a moral standard is not the same as being naive about a world that won’t extend us the same courtesy. Israel operates under one of the most restrictive doctrines of any military on earth, purity of arms, weighing civilian harm even against its own soldiers’ safety, against an enemy that embeds itself in hospitals and schools precisely because it knows Israel will hesitate. 

That doesn’t mean Israel gets every call right. It doesn’t. But the answer to a world that judges us by a different standard was never to stop holding ourselves to one. Even in the face of injustice and bias and anti-semitism, we keep asking the question, we keep measuring against our own moral standards, even when those judging us aren’t doing the same themselves.

Centuries before any of this, our rabbi Hillel said it in four words: al tifros me’hatzibur – do not separate yourself from the community. Not your community. The community.

We are witnessing elections at home and around the world with about as much Jew hatred and cause for real concern as any of us have ever seen.  And I know exactly what that makes some of us want to do: pull inward, protect our own circle. I’ve felt that instinct myself so many times in recent years. 

But Judaism does not let us check out. Voting, showing up, arguing hard with our neighbors, that’s still our obligation. Dr. ML King Jr said it plainly: if I hate you because you hate me, I’m no better than you are.

Social scientists have a name for what’s made these recent years so exhausting: the need for “cognitive closure.” When the world gets scary and threatening enough, our brains reach for the simplest story, good guys and bad guys. We let go of nuance and context and we boil things down to the simple black and white extremes not because we’re simple or stupid, but because we’re tired and we need it to make sense. 

At some point, we can’t debate or analyze anymore, our brains need rest and they reach for this cognitive closure.

Judaism’s real gift to human history wasn’t a Temple or a building or even a religion. It is a method of thinking and interfacing with the world. As I said last year, our passion for debate and arguing is part of our secret of survival. And I see it even more deeply this year, it’s not only the arguing but it is nuance, it is context, it is actual critical thinking. 

There’s a joke in rabbinical school that goes something like: what’s the answer to every Talmudic debate? “It depends.” Depends on who you ask, depends on the context of what’s going on? It depends on what time of day and year it is. 

Is the chicken kosher? It depends. Can I do this on Shabbat? It depends. How much tzedakah do I give? It depends.

Not because we couldn’t decide. Because we refused to stop thinking. A flat yes or no is easy. “It depends” is what critical thinking sounds like.  When the world gets black and white, polarized we say “it depends.”

That refusal, that sacred stubborn resistance to let fear flatten a complicated world into black and white, is exactly what we need right now. 

To be clear, I’m never advocating for negotiating with terrorists or trying to reason with anti-Semites. I’m not. There are people and ideologies that don’t warrant a place at our table. I’ve said that on repeat for years now. History teaches us that appeasement does not work.

But I don’t want us to lose the character of who we are as an Or Lagoyim “a light unto the nations,” because we’re sitting in a fearful darkness. 

So that’s the box I actually want us to build this year, not a government’s box, but our own holy box: open enough to hold real complexity and nuance and open enough to let other people in.

What We Actually Build

As I’ve been thinking about it, that box has a sound.

Every fifty years, the Torah instructed us to blow the shofar not for the new moon, or the new year today, but to announce something else. 

It was called the Jubilee Year and it was a government program of equalization. 

In this 50th year, debts were cancelled, servants were freed, land returned to the families who’d lost it. It was an economic reset, a rebalancing of resources so that everyone got a fair chance for financial stability. 

Every fifty years, whatever imbalance had built up, got legally undone.

And that program of rebalancing – was announced by the shofar. 

The Torah teaches: Proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. This is the Torah commandment about the shofar and it appears on none other than the Liberty Bell, our American symbol of freedom.

The shofar was never only about waking up our own souls. It was also a call for a fairer world outside these walls.

That’s why I want to call our box the Shofar Box. The shofar has always done two things in the same breath. It is a tribal sound, unmistakably ours, calling us to attention on this exact day, for 5787 years. 

And at the same time, the shofar is a communal sound, sent out over the whole land, for all its inhabitants, a call for communal reckoning and rebalancing alongside our personal accounting. 

We, my dear friends, have earned the right to be skeptical, and to protect ourselves. What we have not earned is the right to stop caring who else is struggling to be loved, to be respected, to be seen.

Right now, in this room, we are deciding out loud what belongs inside our personal Shofar Box. What wake up do we need in our personal lives? 

But let’s not forget about our communal wake up … what fair and honest and rigorous moral accounting do we need to do as a Jewish community? 

I hate to repeat myself, but this is why I said we need religion. It helps us look and redirect when we’d really rather not. 

Of all six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Torah, the one that appears more than any other, forty six times, is this: protect the stranger. 

Why forty six times? Because the Torah knows exactly where we go when we’re afraid. We circle the wagons. We oversimplify. We let our own outrage blind us to everything except our own pain. Forty six times, the Torah interrupts that instinct and says, not this year. Not the holy Jewish people. Not you and not me.

Let’s not learn the wrong lessons from the Holocaust and October 7. Our Jewish mission is not to circle the wagons. 

As challenging as it may be, I know we have the power and the compassion to build a shofar box that awakens our souls for ourselves and our people and also rouses us to action for others as well. 

Kein yehi ratzon, so may it come to be.

Shanah tovah.