‘For Such a Time as This’

The basic Purim story is familiar to most Jews.

King Ahasuerus banishes his wife, Queen Vashti, when she refuses to appear at a banquet. A national contest, held to find her replacement, is won by an orphan who is a great beauty. Her secular name: Esther; her birth name: Hadassah. Mordecai, her foster father, advises that she keep her Jewish identity secret.

Unfortunately, Mordecai angers the king’s new chief minister, Haman. As revenge, Haman convinces the king that all the nation’s Jews should be executed. Mordecai asks Esther to intervene.

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What I didn’t know (or didn’t remember) is that at first Esther refuses. She is not permitted to enter the king’s presence uninvited under penalty of death, and she is afraid for her life. But Mordecai says silence means “you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows? Perhaps you have attained to a royal position for such a time as this.”

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, the spiritual leader of the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan, tells that story in his new and appropriately titled book, “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today.”

It is provocative, comprehensive, and eye-opening, and tries to make sense of the illogical times we find ourselves in.

“The themes of the book predate October 7,” Rabbi Cosgrove said in a Zoom interview “Diaspora-Israel relationships, hyphenated identities of American Jews, the porous line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the generational divide between younger and older Jews. All these things preceded October 7.”

Yet that day changed everything. He writes: “It led to the unnerving realization that perhaps Jews are not quite as secure in America as we had thought we were.”

He wonders how an America where black, Asian, and LGBTQ+ lives matter “cannot bring itself to declare Jewish lives matter.”

While he doesn’t believe that “genocide of Jews is around the corner,” it is a slippery slope, he said. The movement from the higher — that is, more subtle — forms of antisemitism to lower forms — violence — “can happen easily, imperceptibly, and quite quickly.”

It’s complicated, as illustrated by another story he tells in the book.

A rabbi “is asked to settle an argument between a husband and a wife,” he said. “The rabbi listened to the wife, nodded his head, and said, ‘You’re right.’ Then the husband stated his case, and the rabbi nodded his head and responded, ‘You’re also right’. The rabbi intern who had been there the whole time, blurted out, ‘But Rabbi, how can they both be right? To which the rabbi responded, ‘You’re right too.’”

(This story has many variations. One of them is in “The Wizard of Oz,” when the scarecrow, still on his pole, crosses his arms, points in both directions, and says, “People do go both ways.”)

On the one hand, Rabbi Cosgrove said, Jewish religious observance has been in decline while intermarriage has been on an upswing. “We are willing to stand for hours and stand on the sidelines at our children’s club sports, but we find ourselves unable (or unwilling) to sit next to them in a synagogue on a Friday night,” he writes.

Yet, he tells me, there has been a surge in Jewish identity since October 7, “and while it has not come from a reason I would choose, and frankly we don’t know how long it’s going to last, but across American Jewry is a reawakening of identity. “

And yet there is a disconnect between some mostly young American Jews and Israel, too many generations removed from the Holocaust. “The progressivism of young American Jews is at odds with a state of Israel that doesn’t always represent those same values,” he said. “Young American Jews see an Israel that is a Goliath to the David of the Palestinians. A young American Jew only knows a policy of settlement in the West Bank. He only knows an Israel led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is beholden to extreme elements of Israeli society whose values —- whether it’s on LBGTQ, religious pluralism, or
Palestinian self-determination — are at odds with young American Jews.”

I ask him what role we should play in influencing Israeli policy. “Right now the war is still raging with Hamas,” he said. “The north is boiling over.” (This interview was conducted before Israeli bombing and invasion of Lebanon.) “The threats to Israel are increasing in number and intensity.

“American Jews do not send their children to the IDF. American Jews do not pay taxes or vote in Israel. So at the moment we need to express solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are fighting the good fight against enemies who would see them destroyed

“That said, I think American Jewry has a prophetic role to play, to seed a vision of a shared society with the Palestinian community, even if that is not a vision to be had today. I think we can be the ones keeping the light on, as it were, for when the time is right. I don’t think we can have those conversations now. I don’t think the time is right for a two-state solution, but it remains my fervent hope that Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in peace.”

You may not agree with everything Rabbi Cosgrove says. When I didn’t, he bristled a bit — “you’re not the one being interviewed,” he said — but you’ll enjoy the ride.

Interestingly, Elliot Cosgrove did not set out to be a rabbi. “I came from a very traditional letter-of-the-law Jewish background, but being Jewish is always something I did at home,” he said.

He attended the University of Michigan. During his junior year, a grandfatherly figure in his life died. “I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to do something,” he said. “So I went to the Hillel on campus. I already had plans for later that Friday. I was a proud Jew, but I wasn’t a terribly engaged Jew.”

Rabbi Cosgrove said Kaddish and then he jumped up to leave at the end of the service, but he was intercepted by Michael Brooks, the director of the school’s Hillel, who said: “‘I notice you’ve never been here before.’ And I said to myself, ‘This man has an astute sense of the obvious.’

“Then he said, ‘Well, I’d like to invite you for Shabbat dinner.’ I lied, because I figured he didn’t want to hear about dollar-pitcher night at Rick’s, and just said that I had other plans.

“He said, ‘Well, do you have plans for next Shabbat?’ I was stopped in my tracks. I said no. And he said, ‘Good. So you’ll come for Shabbat dinner.’

“I came and got involved on campus. I led a delegation to D.C. for Israel advocacy. I got on the Hillel governing board.

“It was that one moment that stayed with me forever, and it very much shaped my rabbinate.

“You know, it’s a retail business,” he continued. “It’s all one-on-one, and you need the ability to look around the room and see the person for whom it’s new. They’re a little awkward, a little uncertain of where they are. Giving a warm hello greeting to that person, an invitation for Shabbat dinner, can make all the difference in the world.

“In that one moment I got engaged in Jewish life in a way I hadn’t imagined — doing so professionally. I was either going to law school or I had a job offer in D.C. But I decided to go to Israel that year, and two very important things happened.Number one is I applied to rabbinical school, and number two is I met the woman who would become my wife.”

His wife is Debbie Cosgrove, an educator who also is active in the Jewish world, particularly in Manhattan.

Elliot Cosgrove studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was ordained, and went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He was headed for a career in academia until one of his “teachers said to me, ‘Elliot, you have to decide what you love more, Jews or Judaism.

“If you love Judaism, then go be a professor. If you love Jews, then you have to work in the community.”

Rabbi Cosgrove applied for and was hired by the Park Avenue Synagogue. He felt it was the right choice for him. His teacher had been there for him, for exactly that time and that decision — and now he is that teacher for others.