My sermon from Shabbat Chol Mo’ed Pesach:

I have a question today. What is truth? People came up with various definitions: emet, (or emes as someone said), something that can be proven, something that is absolute, something that is real, not fantasy, a fact.

This week we mark the 450^th anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare. A known anti-semite. Or so we “know”. But what if he is not. We all know this passage from Merchant of Venice:

“To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and indered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by

Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

What’s going on here? We can read it like we read Torah. On the simple level, the pashat level, Shylock appears to be a despicable character and Shakespeare anti-semetic in his portrayal. But we need to go beyond that to uncover truth. We need to look at the midrashic level, the remez level, providing a hint of what is going on and the sod level, the hidden level. Then we will find the truth. And then, like when we study Torah, we will enter Pardes, paradise.

Shakespeare himself probably didn’t know many Jews. It is a fact that Jews were expelled from England in 1290. They were allowed back into England only in 1655, not in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Could he have known some hidden Jews? Certainly possible.

Michael Radford, who directed the film version of Merchant of Venice asks important questions: “Would you call Do the Right Thing a racist film? Or Bend It Like Beckham? Or Ken Loach’s new film A Fond Kiss? All these films deal with the tense relationships between immigrant communities and the broad majority, but none of them would be considered racist just because of the subject matter.”

I have heard the same thing about West Side Story, written by Leonard Bernstein when compared with In the Heights. Radford continues: “Why then has Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, which deals with the relationship between the Jews and the Christians in sixteenth century Venice, been tainted with accusations of anti-Semitism? Is it because we know the Nazis took the play and used it for their own purposes?  Yet we know that any great play is susceptible to being coloured by the age in which it is performed…”

Yep I learned this too. Any film is more reflective of the time period it is written in than that it is written about. Take the movie Munich. Many people said that Speilberg was anti-Semitic in his making of it. Speilberg, really? The one who has done so much to document the Shoah in film of survivors’ first hand accounts? Just because Munich questions Israel policy of political assignations? I don’t think so. If you look really carefully at the end of the movie, there are the Twin Towers gleaming on a bright sunny day, a stark reminder of the world before 911. No, I think Speilberg was writing a polemic about US Government policy and retaliation after 911.

As Radford says, “Of course we shall never know what Shakespeare really intended, nor in the long term does it really matter. We have the play before us now, and, if we respond to it, we can only do so through the eyes of our own society. We do know certain facts however. We know that the play was written in and about the time of the execution of Roderigo Lopez, Queen Elizabeth I’s doctor, one of the few Jews in London, and a man wrongly accused of conspiring against her. We know that there was an outburst of anti-Semitism in London at this point. There is no doubt too that historically, Christians were intolerant of the Jews both for their perceived part in the death of Christ and for their money lending activities. They were an immigrant community who kept their own customs and were therefore to be treated with the darkest suspicion.” Radford concludes that a man who could write,  “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die…?” or “You, that did void your rheum upon my beard, and kick me as you spurn a stranger cur over your threshold–money is your suit. What should I say to you? Should I not say: Hath a dog money? Is it possible a cur can lend three thousand ducats?” or “You have amongst you many a purchased slave. Shall I say to you: Let them be free…?” possibly be an anti-Semite? The answer is of course no. It is absolutely impossible. This is not just a nice bar of music written by a man who hated Jews (as Wagner did). This is not just a poem in the abstract, written by a Nazi sympathiser (like Ezra Pound). This is a deeply considered piece about humanity, written from the core of his soul. Could such a man be a racist? I don’t think so.”

So after careful consideration, this oft quoted piece to document Shakespeare’s anti-semitism is not in itself anti-semetic. Where is the truth?

Truth is even harder than that to find. Who really wrote Merchant of Venice? For years, scholars have speculated that there must be more than one person who wrote under Shakespeare’s name. Personally, I was intrigued by an article that appeared in Reform Judaism in 2010. It suggests that maybe one of the Shakespeares was a Jewish woman!

In 1922 the Shakespeare Authorship Trust was founded,  “to seek, and if possible establish, the truth concerning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and poems,” It has identified a dozen or so possible candidates including: Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney, Roger Manners and Henry Neville. Or perhaps, like we sometimes say about the Torah itself, there were many hands, many authors, a group of editors.

In April 2007, the Trust added a new name to the list: Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645), daughter of a Venetian-born court musician and converso (a Jew who is forced to convert to Christianity but remains secretly Jewish). The major proponent of Ameilia Bassano Lanier being Shakespeare is John Hudson , a graduate of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, England. He has written an 800-page dissertation in support of his contention that if Amelia Bassano did not author all of the works, she was a major collaborator, influenced them all, and contributed their underlying allegorical plots.

At first I was unconvinced, and in truth, I haven’t read the full manuscript but several of the articles. What was most convincing to me was the fact that Shakespeare, whoever that is, seems to quote the Mishnah, Tractate Nedarim, in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, by using the same terms and in the same order to annul a marriage, beauty, fairness and height. It also alludes to the apocalypse in very Jewish terms, citing dew, which appears in the Zohar. How could Shakespeare know of this?

For me this is all interesting, fascinating stuff but why are we talking about it here today?

Let’s go back to my original question. What is truth?  It is true that there is still anti-semitism in the world. We have seen dangerous examples of it this week. In Kansas City and in the Ukraine.

But what really happened in the Ukraine. We all saw the documents posted on social media telling Jews that they needed to register, pay $50 or face deportation. JUF put out a release late yesterday afternoon. Listen carefully:

“On the evening of April 15, official-looking documents were circulated in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, calling on Jews to register with the Nationalities Commissioner and pay $50 or lose their citizenship and face deportation. Three individuals wearing ski masks and the flag of the Russian Federation were seen distributing the flyers near the Donetsk synagogue.  The flyers were signed in the name of Denis Pushilin, the leader of Donetsk’s pro-Russian separatists, who led the takeover of several government buildings and claimed the city as the Donetsk Republic.

NCSJ has contacted the Donetsk Jewish community leaders, who called the flyers a provocation. They said that all authorities have denied any connection to the flyers, and that Pushilin has denied authorship.  Several members of the community went to the Nationalities Commissioner, who repudiated the flyer, and said that the leaflets were distributed to cause unrest among the Jewish population.  Similar leaflets were distributed targeting international students at the local university.

In addition to the local community, NCSJ has been in regular contact with the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Kiev on the issue of the flyers.  NCSJ will continue to monitor the situation in Donetsk and throughout Ukraine.”

A similar article appeared in New Republic and on Snopes. I have never seen Snopes put out something so quickly.

So again, what is truth? Those of us who have a paranoia streak, and that includes me, we  did exactly what the thugs in ski masks wanted us to do. We jumped to a conclusion that this story must be true. We posted and reposted it on social media and it spread like wildfire as if it were true. Even Secretary of State Kerry got into the mix calling the flyers grotesque. While we cannot be naïve. Anti-semitism is on the rise in Europe, including the Ukraine and Russia, France and Hungry as well as here in the US, just look at Kansas City, we cannot panic either. We have systems in place. We, here in Elgin, have a police force that cares, as evidenced by their response to my phone call earlier this week.

This raises huge questions for me about how we get our news. In a previous life I was a journalist. For me journalism failed this week. As journalists, and even as private citizens, we need fact check. We need to determine what is true, even if we happen to be a national official. On the other hand, that any flyers were passed out, even as one media outlet called it, a hoax, it is reprehensible, grotesque and we should all be aware. We should all speak out.

So again, what is truth and how do we know it. This week’s Torah portion—really I am getting there, gives us a clue. This week we chant the 13 Attributes of the Divine. This is a portion I know very well. 40 years ago today it was my Bat Mitzvah Torah portion. It is the reason that I became a rabbi. It sustains me as a leader. G-d will go with Moses and lighten his burden and give him rest. When Moses argues with G-d, G-d hides Moses in a cleft of the rock. G-d made G-d’s goodness pass before Moses.

G-d has a face, that Moses can’t see. A hand, which shelters Moses, and a backside, whatever that means. G-d has a nose, erech apayim which we translate as slow to anger or endlessly patient, really means long in the nose—apparently that’s what anger looked like. Good journalism? A first hand account? Truth? Anthropomophic? Anthropopathic. You bet, but the Torah is trying to describe something beyond language. Maybe even reminiscent of the Skylock monologue. Hath not G-d eyes? Hath not G-d hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Apparently even though we believe that G-d does not have a body and isn’t male or female, here G-d has a face which cannot be seen, a hand, a backside and a nose.

We know these Attributes: Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum v’chanun. Erech al payim, v’rav chesed v’emet….Full of lovingkindness and truth. Truth there it is. G-d is true. The word itself is one of my favorite words, Aleph, Mem, Tav. Another name for G-d, the first the last the middle letter of the Hebrew alef bet. Taking all together they are truth.

Emet can be translated as “faithfulness” The root of Emet is also the root for the word Amen. So be it. So may it be true. The Conservative Movement’s defining document is called Emet v’emunah, Truth and Faithfulness. Etz Hayim, the Conservative Movement chumash that we use here says that, ḥesed v’emet often appear together to “emphasize a single concept. ḥesed involves acts of beneficence and obligation that flow from a legal relationship…. Emet, usually translated ‘truth’ encompasses the notions of reliability, durability, and faithfulness. When used together, the two words express God’s absolute and eternal dependability in dispensing His benefactions.”

Therefore, in this pairing of attributes, we see there is a connection between ḥesed, the obligation that comes with beneficence and mercy and emet which brings with it the obligation of justice

 And maybe this then is the point. There is something beyond us that is beyond description that is ultimate truth. That ultimate truth is G-d.