Via The Rabbi

GENDER, MODESTY, AND TALMUD- RABBIS LINZER AND MAGGID DEBATE

2012-01-27T13:32:00.000-05:00

Rabbi Shaul Maggid wrote a very important response to Rabbi Dov Linzer’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. I urge you to read both. Rabbi Linzer suggests that the Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox Jews) justify approaches to modesty that are fanatical and unsubstantiated by the Talmud. He writes:

“But the Talmud, the basis for Jewish law, offers a perhaps surprising answer: It places the responsibility for controlling men’s licentious thoughts about women squarely on the men.”

In other words, Rabbi Linzer argues that the Talmud teaches that inappropriate feelings about a woman’s sexuality are a man’s problem to control through his own inner work, not a woman’s responsibility to control through unfair dress codes and behavior modification. Rabbi Linzer is correct about this. But Rabbi Maggid points out a deeper problem. It is true that the Talmud suggests that men must control their own desires, but at the same time, the Talmud itself weakens this very claim by creating many other systematic ways of putting the onus of sexual appropriateness solely on women. Rabbi Maggid writes:

“While the Talmud, as you correctly assert, puts the responsibility of male desire toward women squarely on the shoulders of the males, it simultaneously constructs a legal and devotional framework that in many ways undermines that very assertion.”

Ultimately, Rabbi Maggid envisions a new Modern Orthodoxy that dismantles “the very legal structures that serve as the foundation of the problem” that Rabbi Linzer seeks to solve. In other words, egalitarianism requires a complex approach to analyzing the ways in which halacha (Jewish Law) systematizes and perpetuates a Judaism that limits full participation of women in Jewish life and perpetuates troubling attitudes about them. It is not clear if Rabbi Maggid is intimating that the entire system of Halacha must be disregarded, or that we can work within the system to uphold the sanctity of Jewish law while shaping it in a way that supports and nurtures the inner religious and spiritual lives of women. I hope that it is the latter.

Take some time to read Rabbi Linzer’s op-ed piece and Rabbi Maggid’s response. You will get a sense of how comfortable the Modern Orthodox world is/will be in pushing boundaries and reimagining gender relationships as well as the limits of Halacha.

REMEMBER WHEN TALMIDEI CHACHAMIM WORKED FOR A LIVING?

2012-01-05T14:03:00.002-05:00

This poster is brilliant. It portrays all of the rabbis in the Talmud who worked and what their job was. It calls to mind a joke. A woman gets on a bus in Measharim headed for Bnei Brak. Her dress does not reach her ankles. She sits down next to an ultra-Orthodox man who pulls an apple out of his bag and gives it to her. "What's this for?" she asks. He responds, "Until Eve ate from the apple, she did not know that she was naked." The next day, the same woman gets on the bus and sits down next to the same man. As the bus pulls away she removes an apple from her bag and hands it to him. "What's this for?" he asks. She says, "Until Adam ate from the apple, he did not know that he had to work for a living!"

It is remarkable how truly depressing this joke seems these days.

Today is the 10^th of Tevet, a minor fast day in Judaism. We fast from before sunrise until sundown (it is not a 25 hour fast like Yom Kippur or Tisha B’Av) in commemoration of the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Ultimately, this siege led to Jerusalem’s destruction.

It isn’t always easy to find the motivation to fast in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem now that it is under Jewish sovereignty. The events in Beit Shemesh of the past few weeks have highlighted the tensions between the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities and the larger Israeli society. These tensions are certainly not new, but they have been inflamed. Anyone looking for new motivation to fast for the destruction of Jerusalem need not look any further than the erosion of Jewish values that flourishes in parts of the haredi community.

Before I write one more word, I do want to be clear that the haredi world is complex. There are many different haredi communities, many of which have significant disagreements with one another over issues of Jewish law. Not every sect shares similar views about women, Law, theology, Gentiles, secular Jews, etc. Not all haredim impose their religious norms on other people. It is important to become educated about these differences, and this is a good place to begin.

There are, however, certain issues about which most Israeli haredi sects are univocal: larger civil and secular society is problematic to the extent that it should be completely shut out of their world. There should be no social or civil interaction between these communities because that would lead to a weakening of the haredi faith. This, in my opinion, is a demand that must never be accommodated in Israel. It will lead to the destruction of the Jewish state. In many ways, the greatest threat to Israel’s future exists from within.

Haredi communities, with some exceptions, contribute almost nothing to the state. They should be permitted to object to the mandatory army service on religious grounds, but that should not exempt them from fulfilling their national service in other ways. The notion that they are serving the country by studying Torah is an exploitation of Judaism, the state, and their fellow citizens who must bear the burden of supporting them. One who objects to national service and on principle, contributes nothing to the national civic community abuses the welfare system which is meant to be a safety net, not a paycheck for Torah study.

Haredi schools do not teach science. They do not teach intellectual history, mathematics, or other subjects that children must eventually master to become productive contributors to the larger society. According to economist Dan Ben-David, head of the Taub Center for Social Policy Research, “There are two states of Israel in one. One is a state of high-tech, universities andmedicine at the forefront of human knowledge. And then there are all the rest,who make up a huge and increasing part of Israel and who do not receive theskills or conditions to work in a modern economy.”

You may think that this is their right and that I am over reacting. Consider this: the haredi population makes up 8-10% of Israel’s 7.8 million people. They have, on average, eight children per family, and comprise one fifth of all primary school students. In other words, the fastest growing Jewish population in Israel is receiving a haredi education. You can work out the implications of this.

In large part, this is all made possible thanks to the government of the State of Israel. They finance these schools. The segregated bus lines in which women are relegated to the back (something that the Israeli Supreme Court ruled to be illegal, by the way) are state funded public buses. The government gives exemptions for “compulsory” national army service to haredim. The deeper one looks into these issues, the more it becomes clear that the state of Israel is either tacitly approving haredi values by looking the other way or funding them.

Can anyone control the misogynists, extremists, anti-Zionists, and zealots within the haredi community? No. No more than we can control them when they are part of non-haredi communities. But the State of Israel can wage a cultural war against attitudes of intolerance and fundamentalism. They can stop funding their projects and cease enabling their public sexism; not doing so is a choice.

I am not advocating making haredi Judaism illegal. I am arguing that the choice to be haredi doesn’t exempt one from all other obligations of civic life, such as work, national service, and paying taxes. I am arguing that if a school wants to teach that evolution never happened and eschew the study of history, they should not receive a penny from the state. I am arguing that public signs that threaten women who dress a certain way should be illegal. I am arguing that bus lines insisting on gender segregation must be private.

There are organizations that are fighting for the survival of an open Zionist soul for the Jewish Homeland. We should support them. The Masorti movement is waging this campaign on a daily basis with constant challenges, especially financial. They made the brilliant posters that you see on this post. They are waging legal battles and trying to shape the intellectual conversations. They are on the front lines in the battle for the future of the State of Israel, and to the degree that we are able, I think we should support them (click here to do so).

On this fast day, read the words of the ancient prophet Jeremiah who knew that the holy Temple could not protect the Jewish people from destruction when the pious were stealing, murdering, committing adultery, and swearing falsely. He tried to remind his fellow Israelites that if they engaged in such immoral acts, their “piety” was false (see Jeremiah 7:1-15). I will end with Jeremiah’s words in the mouth of a modern Jeremiah, who tried to share them in Beit Shemesh and Measharim and at the Kotel saying,

Hear the word of the Lord, all you of Israel who enter these gates…Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place. Don’t put your trust in illusions and say, “the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these [buildings].”... See, you are relying on illusions that are of no avail. Will you spit on eight year old girls, relegate women to the back of the bus, call women in jeans whores and prostitutes, shun national service, and refuse to work and contribute to society, and then come and stand before Me in this House which bears My name and say, “We are safe”? – [Safe] to do all these abhorrent things! Do you consider this House, which bears My name, to be a den of misogynists? And now because you do all these things – declares the Lord – and though I spoke to you persistently, you would not listen; and though I called to you, you would not respond – therefore I will do to the House which bears My name, on which you rely, and to the place which I gave you and your fathers just what I did to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of My presence as I cast out your brothers, the whole brood of Ephraim.

If Israeli society does not act now, we may be witnessing the beginning of the walls being breached by the new Babylonians, only they are dressed in shtreimels and believe that science and math are treif. Boy, would Dr. Maimonides turn in his grave…

TEBOWING, WHISPERED PIETY, AND THE TRUE MIRACLES OF HANUKKAH

2011-12-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

Tebowing is sweeping the nation. To tebow means to get down on one knee and begin praying, even if everyone around you is doing something completely different. The act is named after Tim Tebow, the quarterback for the Denver Broncos who has led his team to some of the most exciting come-from-behind victories of the year. Tebow is a deeply religious man, and we know this because he is fond of displaying his piety on the field during games. In college, he would wear Biblical verses on his face by writing them into his eye black. During games, he drops to one knee, places his fist to his forehead and prays. During a recent game, the Chargers lined up for a 53 yard game winning field goal. When Tebow was interview about it after the game he said, “I can’t say I saw too much of it. I was praying.” “Praying for a miss?” he was asked. “I might have said that,” Tebow laughed. “Or maybe a block. Maybe all of it.”

The truth is, I find something quite beautiful in the religious impulse to stop what you are doing in order to pray. Creating space for a moment of reflection in the midst of chaos can be quite poignant and centering. But two things make me uncomfortable about tebowing. The first is the advertisement of one’s own piety. Why can’t Tebow recite a prayer without attracting attention by dropping to a knee right in the middle of a game? If his posture must pray along with him, he could bow his head ever so slightly while praying. But the more troubling element of this phenomenon is the reductionist, and to me, repugnant theological notion that God actually cares about field goals. Imagine the overwhelming arrogance it takes to petition God for a missed field goal while so many people are being ravaged by treatable illnesses, starving to death, and slaughtering one another! Praying for a touchdown does violence to the concept of the divine and reduces God to a magical goblin meant to serve our most ridiculous whims.

In the book of Genesis, Joseph finds himself in need of God, not for a trifling field goal, but in order to find the strength to live. His brothers kidnap him, throw him into a pit, and eventually sell him into slavery. He is brought down to Egypt and placed in the household of Potiphar, a powerful noble of the Pharaoh’s inner circle. Joseph is essentially saved from one pit only to land in a new one, as he is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. A haunting verse in the Psalms evokes the humiliation of Joseph’s imprisonment and the way it crushed his spirit. “They bruised his feet with shackles,בַּרְזֶל בָּאָה נַפְשׁוֹ an iron collar was put on his neck, or read literally, iron crushed his soul.” (Psalm 105:18) Joseph’s future was bleak. The Torah, however, hints at a little spark of hope through a phrase that repeats itself four times in this narrative: וַיְהִי יְדֹוָד אֶת יוֹסֵף “Adonai was with Joseph.” The Torah states this when Joseph is brought down to Egypt, and then repeats it again when he is in prison. Adonai was with Joseph.

A simple reading of the text suggests that for a reason unstated, God dwelt with Joseph in his despair. It sounds a lot like Grace. What did Joseph do to deserve this? Why did God simply choose to be with him? For many of us, this may ring in our ears with some resentment. “After all,” we wonder, “why isn’t God present when we need Him, when we feel imprisoned by forces far stronger than we can bear?” But, the midrash (Genesis Rabbah 66:5) softens our question; it offers an interpretation of God’s presence with Joseph that shifts our attention away from Grace.

Rav Huna said in the name of Rabbi Acha, אחא אמר מלחש ונכנס מלחש ויוצא “Joseph whispered whenever he entered and whenever he went out.”

What was he whispering? One suggestion is words of Torah; another is God’s name. Imagine this servant moving around Potiphar’s home, in and out of rooms, whispering God’s name as he serves his true Master while he waits on his earthly one. Rav Huna is teaching something profound here. God doesn’t simply appear to Joseph; Joseph works to cultivate and nurture a consciousness of God’s presence. This requires active work. Rabbi Brad Artson points out that “by continually repeating God’s name to himself and regularly invoking God’s love and involvement, Joseph trained himself to perceive the miraculous in the ordinary, to experience wonder in the mundane (The Bedside Torah, p. 63).” Religion is not synonymous with magical thinking; God doesn’t simply appear in order to be present with us. Just like every other meaningful aspect of our lives, we have to work hard for that privilege. Very hard.

Joseph knows that life is shrouded in the miraculous. Not even the deepest pit, not even the most isolating prison cell can change this fact. Our circumstances often obscure the marvels of life, but they don’t obliterate them. As the 11^th Century Hebrew poet Shlomo Ibn Gvirol wrote, “Of what avail is an open eye/ if the heart is blind?” Joseph’s heart is open to experiencing the wonder of God. Even locked away, isolated from the world, a man can become conscious that the very breath he breathes is miraculous. We are surrounded by miracles, and we even see them, but unless our hearts remain open to them, they will go unnoticed.

For many Jews, the straw man of Hanukkah is the miracle of the oil. We relegate Hanukkah to a child-centered, juvenile holiday because our notions of God and miracles are themselves juvenile. We tell ourselves: “God never made one day worth of oil last 8 days, and even if He did, He doesn’t perform these miracles anymore anyway!” So we wrap another gift or fry another latke.

What would happen if we simply rejected the definition of a miracle as a supernatural event that defies logical explanation? What would happen if we stopped praying for miracles like field goals and touchdowns, for ‘A’s on tests, and deathbed magic? What would happened if we understood a miracle to be an experience that shakes us, something at which we marvel, that crushes our sense of the routine, that fills us with a sense of wonder? If we do this, our faith will mature and we won’t be able to dismiss Hanukkah as a sweet little children’s story but rather, we will have to confront the terror and overwhelming beauty of being alive. Even with all of our worries and despair and warts, we are alive (!), and this realization forces us to recognize (as we say three times a day) the miracles that daily attend usעל ניסיך שבכל יום עמנו .What do these miracles look like?

Loyalty from a friend that spans many decades.

An act of unexpected hesed (loving-kindness) from a stranger.

Experiencing the human power to create life unleashed before your eyes.

The glory and majesty of the natural world.

The capacity for your body to heal from significant wounds.

The surprise that you feel when love bursts through your veins as you look at a person you have looked at thousands of times prior before.

These sound cliché, but only because we know them to be true and we take them for granted. These are the miracles we should pray for, not extra points and field goals. “Of what avail is an open eye/if the heart is blind.” Hanukkah is a time to open our hearts again so our eyes may see. It is a time to cultivate a consciousness of the miracles of our lives. Even those of us who find ourselves in pits of anguish, like Joseph, we can train ourselves to see the miraculous in the ordinary. Doing so begins with a whisper.

Why a whisper? Why does Rav Huna suggest that Joseph whispers God’s name instead of saying it out loud? Because devoutness is private. He does not need to broadcast his piety through speaking a word at all; it is expressed through his deeds. In prison he notices that the cupbearer and baker, his fellow inmates, appear distraught. He asks them, “Why do you appear downcast today?” He is interested. He notices. He sees their pain and he wants to help them. Though he whispers his prayers to God, his concern and empathy for his fellow man is broadcast loud and clear. Piety is private because it is a deeply personal yearning that we shudder to share with others. We know that others will judge us, so we whisper softly to God. In this whisper is an invitation for presence. Tebowing on a football field reeks of arrogance, self indulgence, and reduces God to a goblin of sorts, but it is not that far removed from our own tendency to dismiss God for not splitting seas or punishing bad guys. This year on Hanukkah, give yourself the most meaningful gift imaginable: begin cultivating an awareness of the daily miracles that envelop your life. Acknowledge them. Instead of imagining that God should simply be present in your life, invite Him in. All it takes is an open heart and a whisper.

HOW TO SUPPORT A FRIEND IN THE HOSPITAL

2011-08-18T12:35:00.000-04:00

There are certain questions that I hear often as a rabbi: “Do you really believe that the Torah is the Word of God?” “How old should my child be before I talk to him about the Holocaust?” “Why isn’t there toilet paper in the women’s bathroom?” The question that tops the list is probably “How can I help so-and-so who is in the hospital?” It is a tough question, because “so-and-sos” are all different so their needs vary. Some people have wonderful support systems in place and others are alone. Some folks are private about their illness and others welcome company. It is tough to have an answer that can apply to all people.

With that said, I read a wonderful blog post (Loosing My Boobs) that offers a very clear articulation of what a woman needed while she was in the hospital recovering from a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. Though some of her suggestions relate specifically to her surgery and condition (Button front, comfy pajamas. The softer the fabric, the better!), others can apply to anyone who is stuck in the hospital (Altoids. I just felt icky all the time and for 3 days, I wasn’t even able to get out of bed, so brushing my own teeth was impossible).

Read the list. It may come in handy one day when you want to know how support a friend or loved one who is struggling through a hospital stay.

RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE

2011-07-29T03:47:00.001-04:00

It is difficult to analyze and understand all of the thoughts that swirl through my mind as we explore the many complex issues that crash into one another here in the Russian Jewish community. As one of the directors of an NGO here said, the Jewish community here is post-assimilationist. To wit, the young adults here know nothing about Judaism because they are the children of people who knew nothing about Judaism because they were the children of people who knew nothing about Judaism. This chain of ignorance is several generations long. The Soviet Union destroyed all Jewish knowledge, familiarity, and practice; Judaism was a vague entity that was not an identity to be explored or experienced. At most, it was 'line 5' of one's identity card, which of course, was a ticket to ostracism and persecution. When the iron curtain fell, Jewish identity did not suddenly fall from the sky and infuse Jews with pride and connection. There has been a slow crawl back to their history, but I would not exactly describe this as a reclamation of identity. Reclamation implies an active pursuit. In many cases, that's not quite what happens here.

The generation of Jews who lived through KGB oppression and suspicion are (understandably!) uncomfortable revealing their Jewish lineage. Many have kept this a secret from their own children. It is thus, not uncommon for a child to learn that he is Jewish as a fifteen year old kid. Often, this is revealed because of pragmatic reasons, not because of a desire to reclaim one's heritage. For example, there is a Jewish summer camp that is very affordable (it is funded by the Jewish Agency and UJA Federation), so a parent may say to his daughter, "We are sending you to this camp in a few days for three weeks." "But Papa, this is a Jewish camp." The father responds: "Yes, I know. My grandmother was Jewish, which means you too are Jewish." Two days later, this child finds herself at a camp full of Jews who are learning Hebrew, having a Shabbat experience, learning about Israel, the Bible, Jewish history, and so on. It is earth shattering. We went to one of these camps and one of the counselors explained precisely this situation- this was how she learned that she was Jewish. She described it as feeling like her head was exploding.

These camps are the entryway into a new / old identity. It is remarkable to see. You can watch the pintele yid, the Jewish spark ignite, and a Jew is reunited with the last three thousand years. I have ever seen anything like this. About five years ago, 16,000 kids were at these camps throughout the former Soviet Union. Because of a drop in funding, this number dropped dramatically to about 4,000 kids, and over the next few years, it has plateaued at 6,000. This drop is purely a reflection of funding, not interest. There are thousands of kids who want to go to these camps but simply can not afford it. Of course, the goal of world Jewry must be that any child in this situation who wants to go to such a camp must be able to go, period. I could not help but see the irony of the situation: in America, we are throwing money (not enough, but its a healthy start) at families to try and get them to send their kids to Jewish summer camps but our numbers are quite small, while here, thousands of Jewish kids want to (need to!) attend Jewish summer camps but the money is not there.

We were blessed to explore these issues with a very knowledgeable guide: Natan Sharansky flew in from Israel to bring us to this camp. We met him and his wife Avital at the train station in Moscow and travelled to St Petersburg together. It was surreal, really. To be in Russia with one of my heroes, a man who withstood nine years of imprisonment as a Refusenik, and to learn about these complex issues through his eyes was an experience I will always cherish. Seeing these young Russian Jews walk by him and have no idea who he is or what he went through was almost unimaginable. A good sign, no doubt. A sign that the plight of Jews here has moved away from victimization and is heading toward something new. Yes, it is troublesome that these kids seem to be oblivious to this history, but are they any different than American kids who know so little about our own history? Probably not. There's always Wikipedia, I suppose.

I will conclude, for now, with a surreal moment at dinner. A young man who just graduated from university here and was active in Hillel shared a bit about his own journey. He found out that he was Jewish a few years ago when his dad saw an advertisement for a top notch leadership training seminar and suggested that he attend it to become more skilled. A resume builder, to use our language. The only catch, his son noticed, was that the culminating project had to involve the Jewish community in some way. "But dad," he said, "that has nothing to do with me." His father responded by informing him that his father was actually Jewish, which in his eyes, made his son Jewish. This was the beginning of this young man's Jewish awakening. Now, according to Jewish law, this young man is not legally Jewish because his mother is not Jewish, but here, this is a meaningless distinction (outside of Chabad, of course). He cares deeply about his Jewishness but the construction of identity here is so different than what we are used to. Listen closely: He said that his dad is Jewish and his mom is Russian. He said that he identifies as a person from St Petersburg but not as a Russian. He is Jewish but he is in love with and wants to marry a Russian (Gentile) but she has agreed to raise their kids Jewish. In other words, according to Jewish law, we have to people who are not Jewish, committed to raising their children as Jews with Shabbat observance, holidays, day school education, and so on. Is your head spinning yet?

Questions of identity here are complex, and this is of course, not limited to the Jews of Russia. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews here, maybe over a half a million, who have not discovered that they are Jewish, or at least, have not revealed their Jewishness. Jewish law seems to have little to do with defining the boundaries of who is a Jew. These things are far more fluid here. The question that sits beneath all of this for us (and is largely unspoken) is whether or not we are looking at the future of American Judaism in a few generations. That remains to be seen...

With warm wishes, on a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

A WIN IS A WIN!

2011-04-22T10:58:00.002-04:00

The Phillies won again last night, but it was a lethargic win. They hit two solo home runs and their third run was scored on two walks and an error. Explosive energy and thoughtful hitting were absent. The Fightin’ Phils went 1-for-9 with five strikeouts with runners in scoring position in the first four innings, stranding seven runners on base. Oswalt threw a gritty six innings giving up only one hit, which was quite beautiful to watch. (I particularly enjoyed his showdown with Jorge Cantu who fouled off nine pitches. The brilliant 14 pitch at-bat ended in a 3-2 strikeout, and this series of pitches included an inventive 61 mph slider that Oswalt invented on the spot in order to fool Cantu). Outside of Oswalt’s performance, the Phillies seemed anemic. “A win is a win,” people keep telling me. I understand what they mean, but something about this notion bugs me.

As a fan of the game, you want your team to win because of good baseball. Smart hitting, daring base-running, strong defense, cunning pitching, and explosive energy should be behind the movement toward victory. Inning by inning, you want to watch your team build momentum with an intense focus on smart baseball. When people say that a win is a win, they are saying that none of this matters. A win is a win means that we expect little during the game. A win is a win means that the athleticism, grit, and gracefulness that can drive a team to victory are less important than the bottom line. But the joy of watching a batter work a walk from a pitcher, steal second base, get bunted over to third, and then be driven home by smart hitting far transcends the satisfaction of winning because the other team lost the game.

Right off I want to acknowledge how obnoxious this may sound to, say, a Mets fan (the Mets are currently the worst team in baseball). I understand that when your team is a cellar dweller, a-win-is-a-win-is-a-win. As a Phillies fan, it is possible that I have gotten spoiled over the past few years and now take winning for granted. But this is unlikely, since after all, I am a Phillies fan. I have thrown my lot in with the losingest franchise in all of professional sports! I have endured many years with my team way under .500. If pushed, I suppose the hardest question to answer is if I would rather the Phillies win a game that is ugly and handed to them by game-losing mistakes, or lose a game that was well played and elegant, a game in which their athleticism and instincts were on clear display. I’m not sure I can honestly say the latter, but I know that I should strive for that. First and foremost, I should privilege the beauty of the game over a win for the local tribe. But, I am not there. Not yet.

I know that as I move through life, the grace, intelligence, and integrity that I should be cultivating are far more important than any accomplishment or “win” that I can put on a resume. Professionally, I know that my daily interactions with congregants, lay leaders, colleagues, and other clergy matter more than anything else. A win is not a win if it means stepping on toes, being guided by ego and not values, or amplifying a false sense of importance. I need reminders of this. We all do. The way we play the game does matter.

I am a loyal and devoted fan of the Philadelphia Phillies and I LOVE when they win. But I am working on becoming a better fan of baseball, and that requires me to learn how to enjoy a beautiful game, even when they lose. Baseball can be more than a game when it begins to seep into our lives as inspiration for integrity. It can teach us to value beauty, elegance, and skill over our more dishonorable desire to simply win. Of course, I wouldn’t complain if the Phillies are blessed with both skillful playing and wins, but hey, what do the baseball gods owe Phillies fans? Enduring over 10,000 losses doesn’t entitle us to elegant wins... Actually, I think it does, and maybe a few more world series titles while we are at it.

THE ATHESIM TRAP

2011-04-06T01:26:00.001-04:00

I tend not to wade into the atheism / theism debate, largely because I find that it adds little value to a thoughtful approach to questions about human experience. These debates tend to lack nuance and they reduce complex questions to “gotcha” traps. Sam Harris, a brilliant thinker and skilled debater, wrote a disappointing blog post committing the offense of oversimplification. He criticizes Rabbis Wolpe and Artson for being unwilling to confirm the Truth of an afterlife during a recent debate. He writes:

Most modern Jews are rather noncommittal on the afterlife, and this queasiness was in evidence throughout our exchange. Hitch and I were expected to say that (1) we do not know what happens after death, or (2) we are reasonably sure nothing does—and we struck both of these notes by turns. The problem, however, was that our friends in the clergy were eager to assert (1) as well.

It seems to me that they needed to do more than this. If they couldn’t give us some assurance of an afterlife—indeed, if they couldn’t promise the bodily resurrection of the dead—they at least owed us an explanation of why they couldn’t.

According to Harris, a modern religious thinker must assert total certainty that an afterlife exists because different thinkers have made this claim within the canon of Jewish thought. But this is a trap. Should someone proclaim the certainty of the afterlife, Harris would dismiss him as an illogical quack. When rabbis suggest that they do not know what happens after death, he dismisses them as being unfaithful to their tradition. To Mr. Harris, belief in the resurrection of the dead is a prerequisite for being a religious Jew:

People of faith tend to ignore the coming resurrection of the dead—perhaps because the idea is so obviously preposterous. And yet this is precisely the form of afterlife one must expect if one is to be a serious Jew, Christian, or Muslim.

So the trap has been set. Either you believe in the resurrection of the dead and you are preposterous, or you don’t, and you are therefore not a person of faith. Yet many of us are unwilling to commit to a black and white answer to the question. Maybe there is an afterlife but we simply do not know. Why can’t Mr. Harris imagine that there are many religious people who simply can’t answer this question with certainty, yet still find the paradigm deeply meaningful?

Why is science permitted to learn about the world and continuously evolve in its canon of accepted norms / assumptions, but religion is not? Human beings have been asking questions about the afterlife and god since we were conscious of our humanity. Some of the answers to these questions have been troubling and even foolish, and many of them have been sophisticated in their willingness to claim metaphors and images for something unknowable. If contemporary religious thinkers must accept as True all previously articulated notions within the religious canon, then science must be forced to accept what it once determined to be its norm as well. Has anyone forced Mr. Harris to defend 19^th Century Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz’s scientifically racist claim that races were created as separate species (or Creationism for that matter)?

The imagination, flexibility, and non-literalism of modern religious thinkers is dismissed as unrepresentative of a religious tradition by public intellectuals like Mr. Harris. It seems that he would like to marginalize religious moderates in an attempt to define religion as inherently extreme, thus leaving reasonable people with only one option: to dismiss religion as a problematic threat to all rational people. Religion is not going to disappear because of the arguments of the New Atheists, so it would serve the world better for them to be open to religious expressions that are pluralistic, moderate, historical, and non-literal in nature. Why waste their time debating rabbis like Artson and Wolpe when their real disagreements are with Yitzhak Shapira and other rabbis of his ilk?

WHERE ARE WE ALL HEADED?

2011-03-29T15:37:00.000-04:00

t-shirt from zazzle.com

History shows us that every mature Jewish community has reformulated classical Jewish eschatology in terms relevant to itself and its particular circumstances and, surrounding this eschatology, a new body of midrash and homiletics.

-from “Translating the Tradition” by Gerson Cohen, R.A. Kallah 1972

In a class on the Prophets that I am teaching, we struggled with the question of what acharit hayamim means. In chapter 4 verse 1 of Micah, the Bible states, “But in the acharit-hayamim (days to come or latter days) it will come about that the mountain of ADONAI's house will be established as the most important mountain. It will be regarded more highly than the other hills, and peoples will stream there.” This verse also appears in Isaiah. The cultural context of the time suggests that Micah was comforting the Israelites in exile, and that his vision reflected a political and religious move back to Jerusalem, but it ends with the rebuilding of Jerusalem. The rabbinic tradition is quick to reformulate this passage to suit the relevant circumstances in which it found itself as well as the theological / religious concepts of the day. To wit, the rabbis read into this a messianic eschatology, and they are in good company with the Christians who interpret this as an end of days scenario with the second coming of Christ.

What is the reformulation of this verse for our day? When the Tanakh suggests that the mountain of Adonai’s house will be established as the most important mountain, do we understand this in a political context? Can the State of Israel work to construct a place in which all peoples will stream to the great city of Jerusalem and worship together, side by side? Do we have to rely on the fantastic dream of a supernatural figure bringing this about or can we be empowered to build this with our own hands? Do we have to be in Israel to do this? What role do Diaspora Jews play, if any at all?

To be a mature Jewish community, we must create a body of literature that brings meaning to our slow march toward acharit hayamim. If we are not talking about what this looks like, if we are not telling ourselves the story of what this is, then we will only get there by an act of Grace, and to me, that’s a bit of a long shot.

THINGHOOD VS. HUMANHOOD

2011-03-25T11:46:00.000-04:00

In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.

-Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, page 5

Thinghood comes in so many diverse shapes and sizes. Some people wake up in beautiful homes filled with visual wonders and gadgets of convenience and entertainment. Others wake up to cracked walls and peeling paint, maybe even prison bars. What our eyes perceive and our fingers touch is so varied that we become lulled into a false sense that we are profoundly different from one another. Heschel reminds us that there is a reality beyond these experiences of space. When we close our eyes and look beyond thinghood, we perceive humanhood. This we see with our souls and hearts, not our eyes. Humanhood is strikingly un-diverse. All of us wake up with the very same yearnings: a desire for love; a longing for meaning; a craving for stillness; and for many of us, a connection to the Transcendent. Shabbat is a vehicle that helps us close our eyes to thinginess and open our hearts to humanness.

It is then that we realize that despite our different things, in the end, we are all so similar.

It is then that we realize that as we gaze into the eyes of another, we are truly looking in the mirror.

SILENT CHOICES

2011-03-04T13:10:00.004-05:00

I will never forget the first time that I entered a supermarket shortly after returning home from living in a small Indian town. I stood frozen in the salad dressing aisle for about ten minutes, unable to move. I had been living in an impoverished town with open sewers and starving children. The fact that I could choose a bottle of salad dressing from fifty options felt revolting. I simply could not process this contrast. The choice left me paralyzed; I left the supermarket.

We live in a culture that provides personalized options for just about every possible scenario. We are forced to make choices every hour of our day. There are moments when we can’t properly process our options, so we default to the lowest hanging fruit. My teacher Ann Ulanov describes the consequences of this on one’s spiritual life in her book Primary Speech: A psychology of prayer:

Choice presents itself early on in prayer. We discover levels to our desire. We want lesser thing; we want greater things. Smaller satisfactions beckon just as loudly at first as large contentments…We would settle for a lifetime of detective story thrillers and deny ourselves the nourishment of great novels and poetry. Spiritually, we fasten on junk food, giving up the sweet smell of a fresh cucumber or juiciness of a ripe red tomato…We prefer to stick to gossip with acquaintances and refuse the soul-stirring conversation of real friends…We reach out for inferior things this way and turn from the best. We may come then to refuse God’s love…And God’s answering wrath is to leave us to our choice-to languish in these lesser pleasures since we have refused the greater things he offers.

The final line of this excerpt is heartbreaking. We imagine that divine wrath shakes mountains and rages forth with fire and destruction. Dr. Ulanov suggests otherwise: it is manifest in the silent choices that we make to neglect our better selves, to pursue trifling matters instead of pushing ourselves to greater heights. I need reminders to give up spiritual junk food. Should you as well, consider this message that sweet tap on shoulder, that friendly reminder that it is up to you to choose the juicy tomato over that always regretful bag of salt and vinegar potato chips.

MOUNTAINS MELT LIKE WAX

2011-02-25T14:08:00.005-05:00

His lightening lights up the world; the earth sees and trembles. Mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth.

-Psalm 97

We sing these words in Kabbalat Shabbat every week. Two traditional commentators, Radak and Ibn Ezra, suggest that these melting mountains is a metaphor for great and towering leaders. Leaders who become deluded with their own sense of grandeur will eventually "melt like wax before the Lord."

These words have particular resonance today, as one of the most dreaded and repressive leaders is faced with what appears to be his inevitable crumbling into history. The trembling of the earth that is melting this mountain is the result of the pounding feet and fists of very courageous protesters. The price they have already paid is heavy.

It may be meaningful to make some time to reflect on how fortunate we are to live in freedom. The Psalmist reminds us that life is cyclical, and that ultimately, what appears to be permanent may soon crumble into the sea. We are reminded that a grand life is a simple one.

THE BREATH AND PRAYER- REFLECTION ON THE IMPOSSIBLE

2011-02-16T09:32:00.016-05:00

With lowly spirit, lowered knee and head
In fear I come; I offer Thee my dread.
But once with Thee I seem to have no worth
More than a little worm upon the earth.
O Fullness of the World, Infinity –
What praise can come, if any can, from me?
Thy splendor is not contained by the hosts on high,
And how much less capacity have I!
Infinite Thou, and infinite Thy way;
Therefore the soul expands to sing Thy praise.

-Solomon Ibn Gabirol (11th Century Spain)

The irreconcilable problem of liturgy is that it is comprised of words. No matter how one strings letters together, they cannot capture God’s infinitude. In this poem, Ibn Gabirol expresses this frustration: “O Fullness of the World, Infinity- what praise can come, if any can, from me?” Art, music, poetry (even liturgical poetry), and architecture can all function as vehicles to express awe and radical amazement, but all of them fall short of capturing the true essence of God. As Professor Raymond Scheindlin points out in his book The Gazelle, even King Solomon expressed this after he built the holy Temple when he says, “Even the heavens to their innermost reaches cannot contain You; how much less this house that I have built (I Kings 8:27)?”

The poet’s crisis is that he stands before God armed with hopelessly ineffective tools for expressing his wonder. This lowly, worthless spirit (ruah) with which he begins the poem symbolizes his mortality, and when he faces this fact of human existence (that death is inevitable), he feels no more superior than “a little worm upon the earth.” How can man, a lowly creature whose time in this world is finite, stand before the presence of the Infinite God and offer up meaningful praise? If “the hosts on high” cannot comprehend and contain God’s splendor, than we humans certainly can’t. This problem appears to be impenetrable.

How does he resolve his crisis? The reductive notion that human beings are somehow deficient because we are just physical beings whose breath will one day cease is encapsulated by the term Ibn Gabirol uses for “spirit,” which is ruah, a word that also means breath. The resolution of the problem rests entirely on this word and its metamorphosis into something glorious by hearkening back to Genesis in which man is animated when God “blew into his nostrils the breath of life” (nishmat hayyim). Ibn Gabirol ends his poem by transforming the lowly breath (ruah) into a lofty soul (neshamah) that expands and successfully “sings Thy praise.” In the words of Professor Scheindlin, “Since the soul of man is of divine origin, man does in some sense contain God. For all of man’s smallness and insignificance as a creature of the material world, he is entitled by virtue of his soul to speak of Him” (The Gazelle, p.180). It is when we realize that our very breath was blown into our nostrils by God that we find the strength to stand before God and sing His praise, not through our words or song, but through our breath.

We do not need to know the right words to praise God.

We do not need to know the right tunes to praise God.

We do not need to know anything to praise God.

We need only to breathe.

Remembering that our breath itself intimately connects us to the Holy One enables us to stand before Him not as lowly creatures, but as the zenith of His creation, even higher than angels. Try it. Stand before God to pray your deepest desire; reach toward Him, but do not utter a sound. Just breathe.

THE GRANDEUR OF THE UNIVERSE AND INTIMATE SPACES

2011-02-11T10:40:00.012-05:00

There is an intriguing exhibition under construction by Situ Studio at the Brooklyn Museum, which to me, feels like a deeply religious undertaking. It is entitled reOrder. The Great Hall in the museum will be transformed by the exhibit. On the blog Hyperallergic, Kyle Chayka writes,

“Designed by McKim, M ead & White , the late 19th century structure is a dazzling example of Beaux-Arts architecture divided by a 4 by 4 grid of large central columns. Now, the hall will be colonized by 16 new columns designed and fabricated by Situ Studio. Built from bent steel tubing and plywood rings, the basic structures have fabric draped and stretched over their architectural bones. The studio confronted the massive space with a sense of artistic play. They worked to introduce “another scale to this space,” Samuels says, “The profile of the columns create more intimate spaces within the original.”

Why does this strike me as an expression of a religious sensibility?

One of the great aims of religious life is to somehow, shrink the massiveness of the universe into spaces in which we feel intimate connections. Part of what shakes us when we are out hiking or experiencing the grandeur of the world is that we are so small, so insignificant. It is reminiscent of the moment the spies scout out the Promised Land and report back to the Israelites in the Book of Numbers. They say,

וְשָׁם רָאִינוּ אֶת הַנְּפִילִים בְּנֵי עֲנָק מִן הַנְּפִלִים וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם:

And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

In this moment of promise and hope, everything appeared overwhelming; they felt insignificant. The spies were terrified by the promise of sovereignty and responsibility that was at their fingertips. The world is always much bigger when you must take responsibility for it. The universe is grand, and when we become aware of just how massive it is, we confront how inconsequential we are to it.

So we work to build spaces of intimacy. Places in which we can affirm the radical idea that despite our insignificance to the universe, we matter deeply. Our presence makes an imprint on the lives of our loved ones and our eventual absence will leave them somehow incomplete. Without building spaces for intimate connection we will be swallowed up by the universe. This is what we try to do in synagogue communities every day. Whether we succeed or not matters.

The exhibit opens in March. I would love to hear your thoughts if you make there.

JILL LEVY'S SENIOR SERMON DELIVERED AT THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

2011-02-03T18:52:00.006-05:00

PARASHAT TERUMAH 5771

Writing application essays for rabbinical school can be anxiety provoking and intimidating. Part of what is so challenging about this process is that you have to answer very difficult and complicated essay questions. While almost all of the questions were hard to answer, there was one which was not as challenging as the others. “What do you see as the biggest challenges facing Conservative Judaism?” I had a lot of answers to this question. The most compelling, for me, was that I am an observant, egalitarian, text study loving Jew and I had no desire to daven in a Conservative synagogue. Now that I am preparing to graduate from the seminary I am reflecting back on where I was five years ago and I realize that coming up with an answer to this question is not as easy as I once thought.

When I answered the question the first time I had not yet worked at Congregation Etz Chayim in Huntsville, AL, a congregation with 60 members, mostly over 60, where I learned the definition of what it means to be a vibrant congregation. I had not yet worked at the Southwest Orlando Jewish Congregation where the definition of the word family extends to anyone who walks through the doors. I had not yet worked at the Pelham Jewish Center where learning, spiritual growth and community are valued more than the number of members on their list. And, I had not yet worked at the Germantown Jewish Centre where I have witnessed congregants drive their homebound friends to morning minyan.

I am humbled now by the short sightedness of my original answer; I didn’t understand that our notion of what makes a synagogue vibrant is incomplete. The number of people who observe Shabbat and Kashrut, the quality of the davening, and whether people have heard the word Talmud are all important. Large membership numbers and beautiful buildings can be important too. However, Parshat Terumah reminds us that a sacred community includes other essential elements that we too often overlook and undervalue.

In the parshah we receive the first instructions for the building of the Mishkan, the portable tabernacle, used for sacrificial offerings and divine communication while the Israelites were in the wilderness. God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites וְיִקְחוּ לִי תְּרוּמָה מֵאֵת כָּל אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִדְּבֶנּוּ לִבּוֹ תִּקְחוּ אֶת תְּרוּמָתִי: “Everyone should take for Me an offering. Every person whose heart makes him willing shall take My offering.” According to Rashi’s interpretation of this verse, there are three types of terumah or offerings that each person was asked to give. These offerings are the elements crucial to all sacred communities that we so often fail to recognize as vital.

The first type of terumah comes from the phrase, “each person should take for me an offering” -- וְיִקְחוּ לִי תְּרוּמָה מֵאֵת כָּל אִישׁ - Rashi says that this first Terumah refers to the ½ shekel that the Torah later requires everyone to give. The Lubavatcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson explains that each person gave an equal amount, exactly a half shekel, as a symbol of their equality. He wrote, “People differ in their intellect, character and talents, in the unity of their material resources and the timbre of their spiritual sensitivities. But all are equal in the very basis of their bond with God.” The ½ shekel symbolizes the egalitarian nature of humanity. Regardless of our wealth, Jewish education, or level of halachic observance, all human beings are equal because before God, the value of each human being is identical.

A wide-spread and I believe fair critique of our Movement is that there is a wide gap in knowledge and practice between our rabbis, our most active lay leaders, and everyone else. It can be difficult to enter a prayer space in which many congregants do not have a fluid understanding of the liturgy or in which others attend because they are more interested in socializing than they are in learning Torah. But there is a mysterious element in a person’s motivation to be in synagogue. While we should strive to promote religious and spiritual growth, we should not dismiss other people’s connection with God. The ½ shekel reminds us that we must equally value each and every person who comes in the door, regardless of their learning, observance, or wealth.

My congregants in Huntsville took pride in reading responsively in English. They almost all drove to Synagogue on Shabbat and to somewhere else after services. If I valued their contributions to the community based on their observance alone, they would have been a Godless bunch. However, in the absence of a full time rabbi, Bill spends countless hours ensuring that there will be weekly Shabbat services, that life cycle events are facilitated, and that the synagogue’s relationship with friendly and hostile neighbors is appropriately negotiated. Dorothy and the other women in the sisterhood spend days in the kitchen cooking a communal lunch for the shabbatot on which the rabbi is present. The ½ shekel contribution demands that Bill, Dorothy, and the other members of Etz Chayim have no less of a claim on God or Jewish tradition than the most frum, wealthy or connected among us.

Rashi states that the second type of Terumah given for the mishkan was a voluntary offering. He derives this from the statement “from every person whose heart is willing” - אֲשֶׁר יִדְּבֶנּוּ לִבּוֹ The term nedivat lev - volunteerism of the heart teaches that having excitement for communal participation is essential and significant.

This is reiterated in a midrash found in the yalkut shimoni. The verse after ours says… “and this is the offering that you shall take for them. Gold, silver and brass”. The midrash states:

God showed them three offerings: one of tabernacle, one of the First Temple, and one of the Second Temple, as it says: gold, silver and brass.

Gold- to reflect the Tabernacle that Moshe made, which was beloved by God as gold.

Silver-this is the First Temple that Shlomo built of which it is written: silver was not valued at the days of Shlomo at all (Chronicles 9).

Brass- this is the Second Temple that was missing five things: the Ark, the Ark-cover, Cherubim, (heavenly) Fire and Holy Spirit.

According to the Midrash, the mishkan was the most beloved structure by God. It was created solely by the will and excitement of the people to donate their time and money, because of their Nedivat Lev. The 1st and 2^nd Temples were built by forced labor, small groups, and wealthy Kings. The midrash reminds us that despite the opulence and size of the second and first temples, it was the mishkan that was compared to gold. It is not the size of our congregations or the grandiosity of the building that matters most, but rather the spirit that goes into constructing them. It is the communal effort that emerges from the generosity of spirit that is deeply important to God.

The Southwest Orlando Jewish Congregation has an amazing philosophy. Everyone who enters should be welcomed. Congregants go out of their way to make sure that new people are greeted. The first time that my family and I went there for Shabbat we were greeted by a welcome sign from all of the congregants, my name was on the door, and my office was filled with baby supplies. My entire family felt welcomed by the synagogue. At the same time, there was a communal insecurity within the synagogue which sometimes overshadowed its friendliness. Many people felt that pride in their shul was connected to membership numbers and until they increased, they felt that the shul was floundering. To some degree their sense of worth was connected to their numbers instead of the deep values they already held. The SOJC is like the Mishkan: small, under construction and beloved by God. The principle of Nedivat Lev reminded me that it was my job as their rabbi to teach them that the spiritual might of their 120 member congregation can be at least as powerful as that of a 1200 member congregation.

The third and final type of Terumah comes from the phrase, “take my Terumah” -- תִּקְחוּ אֶת תְּרוּמָתִי: - Rashi says that this was the contribution people gave toward the various communal needs of the mishkan. This terumah reminds us that we must care for every need and every person within our communities. When we dismiss people that we see as on the fringe of Conservative Judaism, or when we prioritize our large synagogues over our small ones, then we are not meeting all of our institutional needs.

In my experience, being a fifth year student is even more anxiety provoking than applying to rabbinical school. Placement evokes a number of difficult questions, one of which is what makes a congregation prestigious. The most sought after jobs are often the synagogues with the largest buildings, membership bases, and famous people who attend and not the shuls with an expansive character of heart or greatest communal need. This year, I am sure we are more likely going to be competing over the assistantships at Temple Sinai in LA and Har Zion in Philadelphia then over Temple Beth El in Odessa, TX or Bnai Shalom in Huntington West Virginia. We must not forget that we can learn just as much about how to connect to God from someone in Huntsville, AL as we can from our chevrutah. We must also hold our professionals in small congregations in as high esteem as we do our colleagues in large congregations, so that we will excitedly choose to serve these smaller communities and provide them with strong rabbinic leadership.

This week, instead of focusing on the problems of our Movement, I am imagining what it can look like at its best. Imagine if Etz Chayim in Huntsville was on the list of 25 most vibrant synagogues because their 60 members work so hard to ensure that the Jews of Huntsville have a spiritual home. Imagine if synagogue boards could value the strengths they already have despite low numbers. Imagine if job competition were based upon how much the synagogue prioritizes the values embodied by this parsha. Imagine yourself within a community where the frustrations are real, but where the power of nedivat lev can be felt so fully that it transforms your experience in the moment. This is the challenge of parshat Terumah, to learn how to open our hearts and feel God’s presence in all of our mishkans of gold. It is comprehending this that enabled me to deepen my own prayer experience while davenning with these inspiring and profoundly beautiful communities - communities I would have dismissed five years ago as I was writing my application essays. This realization is one of the most powerful lessons that I carry forth with me as I head out of JTS and into my emerging rabbinate, and for this, I am deeply grateful.

Jill Levy was the rabbinic intern at the Pelham Jewish Center from 2008-2009

ARE WE STILL RUNNING FROM EGYPT?

2011-01-10T15:54:00.005-05:00

Solomon Northup was born a free black man in New York at the turn of the 19^th Century. He was kidnapped, brought down South, and enslaved for twelve years until he escaped. He wrote an account of this ordeal entitled Twelve Years as a Slave in which he describes a moment when his master is so enraged that he raises a hatchet into the air in an attempt to kill Solomon. He writes, “It was a moment of life or death. The sharp, bright blade of the hatchet glittered in the sun. In another instant it would be buried in my brain…there was but one course to take. Springing towards him with all my power…with one hand I caught his uplifted arm, with the other seized him by the throat. We stood looking each other in the eyes. In his I could see murder. I felt as if I had a serpent by the neck, watching [for] the slightest relaxation of my grip, to coil itself round my body, crushing and stinging it to death…” When I think of slavery, I think in images. They are dark, sinister flashes of heavy chains, bloodied fingers from picking cotton, and instances of spontaneous violence like the one I just recounted. These images account for the brutal physicality of slavery, but they don’t capture the vicious and corrosive psychological impact of slavery. It is hard to depict the utter brokenness of a man’s soul through any image, but this element of slavery is equally barbaric. Judaism has always been very careful to acknowledge that slavery casts its cruel tentacles on both the physical body and the human spirit.

The images of our enslavement are physical- the brutal beatings by Egyptians taskmasters; newborn Israelite baby boys being thrown into the Nile; and so on. The question that lingers beneath Parashat Bo and the remainder of the Torah is whether or not the Exodus from Egypt was a deliverance of the soul along with these broken bodies. The Torah hints at an answer in its description of the redemption. The ritual of the Passover sacrifice that we were to perform the night of our redemption must be eaten in a specific way. The Torah states, “This is how you shall eat it; your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand;

וַאֲכַלְתֶּם אֹתוֹ בְּחִפָּזוֹן

And you shall eat it hurriedly.

The Passover sacrifice that symbolizes our new found freedom is to be eaten hurriedly with our sandals on our feet and our walking sticks in hand. This makes total sense. Outside The Angel of Death is passing over their homes and attacking Egyptians. The cries were certainly horrible, yet the elation at a long over-due apportioning of justice must have felt satisfying. The fervor that accompanies the prospect of their freedom probably caused their hearts to race. This Passover meal was eaten quickly, with one foot in the doors of enslavement and one dangling into the horizon of their liberation. As the sun rose, these shattered bodies marched toward freedom.

There was one problem: in the words of Rabbi Bradley Artson, “…a rushed liberation is bound to be incomplete. To be free physically does not necessarily mean one’s spirit is free…While the slaves’ bodies were taken away from their servitude, such a hasty freedom left both their souls and the larger society unaltered. The liberation from Mitzrayim was unfinished” (The Bedside Torah, p. 109). The Israelite journey to the Promised Land is riddled with the consequences of this half liberation. Golden Calves, insurrections, and romantic revisions of the good life in Egypt characterize the desert journey home. The bodies were present, but the souls remained deeply enslaved. Contrast our immediate construction post-redemption of the Golden Calf to the moment of Solomon Northup’s escape from the hatchet poised to kill him. About his fist moment after his escape he wrote, “Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it. At that moment it was dear to me, enslaved and treated as I was…I was desolate, but thankful. Thankful that my life was spared, - desolate and discouraged with the prospect before me. What would become of me? Who would befriend me? Whither should I fly? Oh, God! Thou who gavest me life, and implanted in my bosom the love of life who filled it with emotions such as other men, thy creatures, have, do not forsake me. Have pity on the poor slave-let me not perish. If thou cost not protect me, I am lost-lost! Such supplications, silently and unuttered, ascended from my inmost heart to Heaven.” Despite the degradation he suffered, Northup’s soul remained nurtured and connected, even if he was unsatisfied with God’s response. It is possible for a man’s body to be battered and abused while his spirit retains an inner grace and dignity. This is nothing short of miraculous. In the case of the Israelites, the degradation of the body was mirrored in the decay of the soul. Their liberation was rushed; their souls needed time to be nurtured again. As Artson says, “true liberation never follows an external schedule, [it] unfolds at its own pace” (p. 109).

I often feel that we have not slowed down since that night 3,000 years ago that with sandals on our feet and staffs in our hands, we rushed through that meal and out of Egypt. Our bodies are still running and running while our souls remain enslaved in a new form of Egypt, begging for some attention. When I speak to people in our community about feeding their souls and intellects, more than anything else, they tell me that they so wish they could but they are simply too busy. They can’t find the time to attend a class or program because they are running ragged from work and family obligations. Believe me, I get it. I often feel that I am too busy to find the time to actually prepare the class! But we must slow down; we must stop running. We have to liberate our souls that are still stuck in those slave huts of Egypt. At this time of the year we make lots of resolutions- we will care for our health better; we will be better children to our parents or parents to our children; we will be more romantic. How about a new resolution: to take better care of our souls and intellects, to liberate our souls that remained chained and enslaved. To do this, the spirit that we bring to our loves but be manifest in the exact opposite manner from our ancestors: we need to take our sandals off, put down our walking sticks, sit down, and feed our souls.

There is a story entitled “Brevity” written by J Robert Lennon that I will summarize for you. A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about his region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages. Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told that it would have to be cut by nearly half. Though daunted by the work ahead of her, the novelist was encouraged by the publisher’s interest, and spent more than a year excising material. But by the time she reached the requested length, the novelist found it difficult to stop. In the early days of her editing, she would struggle for hours to remove words from a sentence, only to discover that its paragraph was better off without it. Soon she discovered that removing sentences from a paragraph was rarely as effective as cutting entire paragraphs, nor was selectively erasing paragraphs from a chapter as satisfying as eliminating chapters entirely. After another year, she had whittled the book down into a short story, which she sent to magazines. Multiple rejections, however, drove her back to the chopping block, where she reduced her story to a vignette, the vignette to an anecdote, the anecdote to an aphorism, and the aphorism, at last, to this haiku:

Tiny Upstate town

Undergoes many changes

Nonetheless endures

I love this story. How many of us could trim the fat out of our lives and whittle our essence down to a core sense of who we are and what we stand for? How many of us are still running and running, partly because we feel that life in a suburb of New York City can be no other way, and partly because we are a bit scared at what we may find if we trim 1,000 pages down to a haiku?

As we start 2011, think about ways that you can stop running and slow down a bit. Make your soul a priority. You will not be a good parent or spouse or child or friend if you do not take care of yourself, and I am speaking about your intellect and soul as much as your physical health. Resolve to take advantage of your shul membership as much as you do your gym membership. Enroll in a class; join our bikkur cholim committee and visit a home-bound senior; cook for someone who is down on his luck in the soup kitchen; attend a lecture, share a communal Shabbat dinner; make time for reflection and prayer; support folks who are in mourning. Do something, one thing that you know would enrich your life for which you have not made the time. We are only as free as our souls, and if yours remains chained down in Egypt, resolve to unlock these chains today. When you nurture your soul, like Solomon Northup, you will see that nothing, not even a glittering hatchet raised above your head, will be able to destroy your gratitude for being alive. And your supplications, silent and unuttered, will ascend from your inmost heart to heaven.

Childhood Swallowed Up by Education Culture- Sermon inspired by Race to Nowhere

2010-12-28T10:49:00.002-05:00

From the moment that our children are conceived, we imagine the person they will become. We dream: “My son will be loyal and strong. His compassion and sensitivity will surprise people; his charm will dazzle them. He will be committed to justice. People will love him, and he will love many people. He will say thank you. He will be fiercely gentle and forgiving.” We can spend hours imagining his laugh lines and growing body, but these dreams are more than just beautiful and entertaining projections. They guide us in our parenting. We steer our children toward the values that we believe are deeply important, values we discover are important to us through these imaginings. And then, when they are 5 years old, we put them in school, and for the majority of their waking hours, we hand the sacred project of their development over to a terribly broken educational system. We should not think for a moment that we are entrusting this task to teachers, because the art of teaching has, for the most part, been hijacked by school boards, politics, a detached legislature, and finances. Our educational system is in terrible distress, and change will only come when we as a society demand it.

In order to begin understanding the problems, we have to know what we think education is meant to do. This is by no means a modern question. A dramatic and exquisite response to this question is the driving force that animates the final chapters of Genesis that we just read. Jacob is dying, and he is dying in Egypt, the paradigmatic symbol of exile. How will he transmit his values to his children if they settle down in exile?

This fear terrorizes Jacob, so he spends his final hours sitting with each son, bestowing on them a mixture of blessings, predictions for their future and assessments of their character. Jacob’s testament is a deeply felt expression of his dreams for their future. He has one last chance to dramatically reinforce his values to his sons. To Ephraim and Mensasheh he says,

הַמַּלְאָךְ הַגֹּאֵל אֹתִי מִכָּל רָע
יְבָרֵךְ אֶת הַנְּעָרִים
וְיִקָּרֵא בָהֶם שְׁמִי
אֲבֹתַי אַבְרָהָם וְיִצְחָק וְשֵׁם

“The angel who has redeemed me from all harm, bless the young boys. In them may my name be recalled and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac.”

In them may my name be recalled. This phrase points us directly to his anxiety. The names Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are synonymous with the values they brought into the world, their innovations: faith, hesed (or loving-kindness), justice, and truth. He is afraid that everything that he and his father and grandfather dreamed for them will become extinct. Nachmanides suggests that Jacob is expressing the hope that these values will be mentioned in connection with his children forever. To wit, Jacob is speaking about you and me. We are his descendents, and he is terrified that a few thousand years after his death, we will no longer embody the concepts and ideals that he worked hard to bring into the world.

As Aviva Zornberg writes, “If, to Hamlet, Denmark is prison, then to Jacob, Egypt is a grave that threatens to swallow all his family’s aspiration for a distinct identity…In a reality of exile and diffusion, how is the identity of this family to be preserved?” This is the purpose of education. To preserve identity. To transmit values. To create a space for children to develop life skills. To engender in them a love of learning and the pursuit of knowledge. To cultivate a sense of humility and connectedness to humanity. If these are the over-arching goals of education, then we are failing our children. The state of our education system should create in us the same panic and anxiety that exile generated in Jacob. We too are in exile, exile from real and meaningful education without which our dreams for our children will be rendered mere fantasy.

On Tuesday, I watched the documentary Race to Nowhere. The movie illustrates the misery and despair that our schools are leaving behind as they plow ahead, creating automatons who can ace tests without learning a thing. Everyone is suffering: parents, teachers, administrators, and most especially our children. As a form of art, the movie isn’t especially brilliant. As a social critique – it is painfully illuminating and I think, terribly important for everyone to see. The impact of an education culture built on testing and performance instead of learning and moral development has been devastating. To quote a clinical psychologist from the film, “These kids are so over-scheduled and tired. I’m afraid our children are going to sue us for stealing their childhoods.”

When I went to a son’s parent teacher conference, his teacher sat us down with the results of all of the testing they did in order to assess his development. He was exactly five years old that day. I learned that he was able to write an A, B, C, D, etc, but that he mixed up his Qs and Ps. He was able to sort shapes and recognize the sounds that letters make. Most of the meeting was about the curriculum. You know what, I don’t care if he knows how to write the letters of the alphabet. Is he kind to other children? Does he work well in groups? Does he transition from one task to the next appropriately? Is he having fun? Is he exploring things and beginning to discover his passions and interests?

None of this is his teacher’s fault: she is forced by the school system to approach his learning in this way. She has been teaching kindergarten for many years and my sense is that this shift to focusing on these standards and skills instead of the whole child upsets her. But what can she do?

In the film, a teacher broke down crying and said, “If you are teaching things you love, you cannot do this job.” She has since resigned from teaching. A teacher who teaches in Southern Westchester told me recently that her salary will soon be adjusted according to the test scores of her students, and that last year, on the major standardized tests, two of her colleagues cheated by giving their students the questions ahead of time in order to boost their scores. Her salary will now be evaluated against the scores of students whose teachers are cheating. If she wants to engage and teach her students, she can only do so by risking her economic stability.

By high school, we are mostly teaching children one skill: how to pass a test, period. We are not teaching kids how to think or solve problems. We are not helping kids learn how to collaborate with other children. We are not assisting kids in the formation of the important elements of their moral character. When children learn simply to pass a test, they retain very little. 40% of all college freshman have to take remedial classes because by the time they get to college, they have not learned basic Math and English skills. They figured out how to pass their tests in high school but they didn’t learn or master the material.

We are preoccupied with performance, and this message is internalized by our children at a very, very young age. In order to pass these tests and perform at what we call high levels, there has been an explosion of cheating amongst our kids. According to a recent study, 95% of the 24,000 high school kids surveyed cheated during the course of their education? Kids do not develop an internal motivation to learn when the utility of learning something is to get a grade.

More important than any of this is the fact that our children are miserable. We are enslaving them with homework. For elementary school students there is no correlation between the amount of time spent on homework and achievement, and by middle school, there is only a moderate correlation. Yet between 1981 and 1997, the amount of homework assigned to kids between 6-9 years old has tripled. 9-13 year olds revealed that the stress that they experience stems from academic pressure more so than anything else, including families in crisis and bullying by their peers. A nationwide survey of kids in grades high school found that 15% of students reported seriously considering suicide, 11% reported creating a plan, and 7% reporting trying to take their own life in the 12 months preceding the survey. Kids who appear happy and well adjusted are often falling apart on the inside. I didn’t need the movie to teach me this. I see it all the time in our kids here at the PJC.

How did we get here? Why are we fighting with our kids, damaging our precious bonds with them to get them to do homework for hours everyday even though it has little proven academic value? At what point did we sanction spending $45,000 a year for a college education so that our kids can graduate without finding work? Some of you may be thinking, “Hey, I don’t have kids or my children are grown now. This is not my problem.” Well guess who will be your new doctor or your child’s dentist or your grandchild’s engineer? Someone who can only work from a memorized script and has no ability to think out of the box or solve complex problems or navigate intricate moral quandaries. This problem belongs to everyone. It has societal, financial, and cultural implications for our country. We need a rebellion. The necessary changes to this problem are complex and require a grass roots societal effort. This will not happen from the top down. As a PJC member recently wrote me in an email about the movie, “It's very upsetting that my generation cancelled childhood without first taking a vote. I am prepared to join any revolt or underground movement against the Admissions-Industrial Complex!” Though this was written humorously, the sentiment is absolutely correct.

Remember the dreams that enchanted us from the moment our children were conceived? Remember the values that we promised Jacob on his deathbed we would do our best to pass on to our children? We are rapidly drowning them in a mess of tests, anxiety, performance pressure, and misery. If we want to give our children a fighting chance to love learning, nurture an inner moral life, and develop a system of values in which we believe, we must begin by raising awareness. We will continue this conversation on January 25th with a screening of the movie Race to Nowhere which will be followed by a panel discussion. Tell everyone you know about this. The film begs us to ask ourselves what it will take to create a happy, motivated, creative human being, and then do everything possible to ensure that we do this. It is time to resuscitate childhood with boredom, unstructured play time, and deep experiences of learning.

We owe this to Jacob.

We owe this to the dreams we had for our kids, dreams we dreamed before they were even born.

And of course, we owe this to our beautiful children and their future children.

Just as Jacob’s sons survived a brutal exile and grew into a people who cherish study, we too can survive this present exile from real learning. We just have to take this on, and start today.

TAKE OFF YOUR DINNER JACKET!

2010-11-24T13:21:00.007-05:00

"A modest wish: that our doings and dealings may be of a little more significance to life than a man's dinner jacket is to his digestion. Yet not a little of what we describe as our achievement is, in fact, no more than a garment in which, on festive occasions, we seek to hide our nakedness."

Dag Hammarskjöld in Markings (p.41)

Hammarskjöld's simple eloquence reminds us to consciously wrap ourselves in the garments that truly keep us warm. Almost all of the leaves have floated onto the hardened earth. Our clocks now invite the dark to creep in far too early. The crisp winds will soon bring tears to our frozen faces. We need to stay warm, and on this festive occasion, leave your dinner jacket in the closet. Keep warm by surrounding yourself with the people whom you love. Your relationships are your greatest achievements.

As you gather around tables tomorrow, give thanks that the people whom you love are present in your life. Remember the empty chairs at the table and reminisce about the people who once filled them. We are constantly astonished that nature is unaffected by our dreams. We realize this (alas!) when it is too late. Don't let the exquisite gift of today remain wrapped and unopened. Spend your time this weekend with the people you love deeply; tell them how truly blessed you are on their account.

Gratitude requires knowledge of the self. We cannot be thankful for our blessings if the dinner jackets that hide our nakedness obscure precisely what matters most. In the end, that which unifies humanity and transcends history is the fact that what always matters most is the same: the privilege to love another and be loved in return. If such a person is at your table, kiss him. Hug her. Hold his hand. Touch her cheek. Be really present with him. Tell her how grateful you are for the simple fact that she is in the room. You must.

This is the purpose of Thanksgiving. It is an invitation to be together differently: not through rushed meals; not through glimpses on the way out the door; not in between activities; not through half hearted conversations. Just "be" with them. Be present.

Take off your dinner jacket this weekend....you will never be warmer.

Happy Thanksgiving.

PRAYER AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI

2010-01-19T13:35:00.009-05:00

This is a sermon that I delivered on Shabbat Va-era that others may find useful in thinking about their own struggles with prayer after a tragedy like the one caused by the recent earthquake in Haiti.

These have been difficult days for me to pray. Somehow, watching the images of the utter devastation and chaos has placed a trace of cynicism in my heart, a cynicism that pierces the words I say, shattering them into individual letters. These letters float toward the heavens alone, isolated from one another, empty of meaning in their solitude. I intuit that prayer is the right response, but it has felt different, a bit more strained and angry. But really, what else do I have? I can donate money and organize relief shipments, but after that check is sent, my soul is left to stir about restlessly in that same dark room into which it retreated as each new story of destruction and trauma made its way out of Haiti. But sometimes, prayer is not about me. It is not about my soul, with its angst and anxieties and its wonder. Sometimes, prayer is the telling of a story, the beginning of which was recorded thousands of years in our Torah, the middle of which was written on the parchments of our chachamim, the ancient sages, and the latest chapter is added in our voices. In this way, prayer is like the weaver’s quilt, with many patches of clashing colors and un-corresponding designs, yet somehow complementary to one another. These discordant patches need not be harmonized. It is precisely because they are discordant that the story prayer tells is simple while nuanced, intelligent and passionate, hopeful yet skeptical. Prayer is not univocal because human experience is not predictably singular. People are not emotionally steady from year to year, month to month, or even day to day. When we remove the doubt and anger from the story in order to sanitize it, we end up doing violence to the very notion that prayer is avodah she’balev, the utterance of the heart.

One of the patches on this quilt was written by Moses. In the two verses before our parsha, he lashes out at God in anger and frustration. He screams:

?אֲדֹנָי לָמָה הֲרֵעֹתָה לָעָם הַזֶּה

Lord! Why did you bring harm upon this people?

?לָמָּה זֶּה שְׁלַחְתָּנִי

Why did you send me? Ever since I came to Pharoah to speak in your name he has dealt worse with this people, and you still have not saved your people!

Moses is furious with God. “Not only didn’t you redeem your people, but you made their pain and suffering worse! It would have been better to leave them enslaved as they were!” Moses doesn’t hide his anger. He doesn’t beat around the bush with God, he prays his anger. God responds, but with a seemingly detached rejoinder. “I am Adonai! I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make name Adonai known to them.” What? What kind of response is that to Moshe’s protest? It sounds a lot like, “Hey, I am God- who are you to question me?”

In 11th Century France, Rashi sews the next patch onto our quilt, right next to Moshe’s patch that blazes with anger and disappointment. Rashi’s patch has a different tenor to it. It continues the story and adds to the prayer by revealing a deeper well of God’s compassion than was apparent to Moshe. Rashi tells us that when God says these words to Moshe, he doesn’t intend his words to be taken literally. Rashi suggests that in saying, “I am Adonai,” God is saying that He did not make certain characteristics associated with that name known to the patriarchs. The actual words that Rashi put into God’s mouth and sewed onto our quilt are, “I did not make Myself known to them in My aspect of utter truthfulness and reliability, which is represented by my name Adonai, for I made them promises but I did not fulfill them.” According to Rashi, God’s response to Moshe is stunning in its compassion and support. God is pointing out that He made promises to the patriarchs that they did not see fulfilled in their lifetime, but Moses, he will see these slaves redeemed and brought into the land he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He tenderly reassures Moses that this plan will come to fruition; he will see his people escape the brutality of slavery.

Prayer contains both of these voices: the anger and fury of a man who watches injustice swell throughout the world and a God who seems to only make matters worse, and the hope felt by the man who knows that redemption is at his fingertips, that it is a dream that he will one day see with his own eyes and feel with his tired fingers. We live with both of these emotions at one in the same time, and because they oppose one another, we grow weary trying to sort them out and keep them separate. It’s better not to try. It’s okay to be furious with God. It’s okay to look at the chaos and destruction that this earthquake wreaked and still feel hope, that redemption is around the corner. It’s okay to feel both of these things at the same time. That is, after all, part of our story. Even the angels live with this conflict. Rabbi Barry Katz pointed me to a teaching of Elie Holzer, a wonderful Jewish educator. He points out that in the kedusha for Musaf there is a curious literary and thematic construct. The angels declare that God’s presence is everywhere as they boldly assert: Kevodo Malei Olam, “God’s glory fills the earth.” Yet without missing a beat, they quite literally doubt this assertion when they immediately ask one another, “Ayeh mekom kevodo? Where is God’s glory?” Even the angels live in the tension of feeling the absence of God’s presence while simultaneously sensing the immanence of Gods’ glory. In the rabbinic imagination, the creatures closest to God, God’s heavenly court, sanction this human experience of feeling both doubt and connectedness at the same time.

As I said earlier, I was reminded this week that prayer isn’t always about me and the longings and uncertainties of my soul. Prayer at its best forces us to do tzim-tzum, to contract our own needs while we focus on others. In Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book Between God and Man, he suggests that even for the most inward focused person who prays the longings of his soul, prayer must transcend his own personal needs. He writes, “Genuine prayer is an event in which man surpasses himself. Man hardly comprehends what is coming to pass…At times all we do is utter a word with all our heart, yet it is as if we lifted up a whole world.” This is what we desperately need today. We can startle ourselves and each other with the realization that we human beings have the power to lift up the world, to place the power of healing on Haiti. During these days, prayer is an act in which our personal needs disintegrate as we attempt to lift Haiti out of the depths of the hell into which it has been shattered. With Heschel’s words, I am reminded that prayer in its most potent form is an expression of solidarity.

Today, I find Moshe’s accusation, Moshe’s prayer to God from a few thousand years ago on my lips:

?אֲדֹנָי לָמָה הֲרֵעֹתָה לָעָם הַזֶּה

Adonai, why did you bring harm upon this people, this nation already living impoverished and in desperate need of your outstretched arm and your compassion?

In the silence after my prayer, I take comfort in the heights not of heavenly compassion, but of human kindness and solidarity.

As we lift Haiti up from its wreckage by praying with our feet, by aiding and digging and collecting and giving and rescuing and hugging and crying, I take comfort.

As we mark Rosh Hodesh, the new month of Shevat, I take comfort. The waxing and waning of the new moon reminds me that rebirth that always follows death, that redemption is built into the natural world.

I will conclude with a prayer written by an Israeli writer, Bradley Burston, as a reminder that during these difficult days, prayer, somehow, is a beautiful human response.

"A prayer for the people of Haiti"
By Bradley Burston

A prayer for the people of Haiti,
who, on a good day,
must take heroic measures just to wake the next,
And who must now find a way
to live through the end of the world:

Lord who speaks in earthquakes
Speak now in miracles.

I thank you, that first prayer begins. Modeh Ani. The words spoken for the marvel of having woken up alive.

Lord whose relief work is beyond our capabilities
Breathe life today into those buried alive

I lie grateful before You, this King who lives and endures, for having brought me back this soul inside me, and with compassion.

Lord who speaks in childbirth, hear Your children now.

Hear those who have yet to be saved,
Hear those who have been saved but whose limbs and lives are crushed, Hear those who pray for those who can no longer pray for themselves.

Lord who invented the language of love
Teach those who, in Your name, who, calling themselves men of God, can find it in their hearts to speak only blasphemy and cruelty and scorn.

Lord who speaks in apocalypse
Armor the souls of those who call out now in rescue
Lord who has taught us by example the language of loss
Send strength to those who, with their last strength
Now seek nothing more than finding loved ones

Teach Your children by example, to comprehend the last line of that first prayer:

Your faith
is immense.

THANKSGIVING INTERFAITH SERVICES- A CHALLENGE

2009-11-26T09:49:00.011-05:00

This piece was printed today in the Journal News as a Community View. Oddly, they do not name the writer. You can read it by clicking here.

Churches, synagogues, and mosques across our county will come together this month for Interfaith Thanksgiving Services. When we plan them, we will schedule them around the town's recreational youth sports schedule, NFL games, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. We clergy are smart: we know that if we don't schedule them around these things, nobody will show up. Really, who can blame people? At least in reality television one can actually glimpse moments of emotion, even if manufactured. At your standard interfaith service, the absence of emotion, innovation, and drama tends to lead to such a mind-numbing, soulless experience that scheduling a root canal in its place is a good alternative. At least in the dentist's chair one may actually pray.

After the terror attacks of September 11th, interfaith work had a clear mission: we felt compelled to highlight the universal qualities of all religious traditions. This made sense in the moment. We needed to believe we were unified in order to commence the healing process. Islam is Christianity is Judaism. We are all the same. But this is patently untrue; we are not all the same. Though all religions share some universal elements, they differ significantly in theological doctrine, the nature of community, and ritual practice. The mandate of interfaith work is to cultivate the courage to face these differences and explore them with tolerance and respect, not gloss over them. If we want to build a society in which we can be neighbors and not just people who live next door to one another, we have to acknowledge the significant differences between us.

The typical interfaith service removes all potentially offensive references, which on the surface seems sensible. But in doing so, we create a medley of insipid readings that barely resemble prayer at all. For example, one of the forbidden fruits of such services is Christological references because they make us (the Jewish community) uncomfortable. We are particularly sensitive to notions of supersessionism, proselytism, and forced conversion, so attending a service with explicit references to Jesus as savior has echoes of a troubling and threatening past. But let's be honest, what is Christian prayer without references to Christ? When we construct the liturgy of these services in order to find a common denominator, we eliminate the compelling elements of prayer that have moved generations of people to feel connected to something infinite. We end up with something closer to trite, adolescent poetry than artful masterpieces of a liturgical tradition.

Community organizations that sponsor interfaith events often measure success by the bottom line: the number of people who showed up. But this type of work requires more than the presence of warm bodies. We must build enough trust between disparate groups so that they will be able to speak to one another about the differences between them, differences in theology, spiritual resonance, and moral boundaries. This happens when small groups meet consistently over time in order to cultivate relationships. It is important that the Westchester community is aware that this happens among our clergy on a regular basis. Through the Westchester Inter-Religious Clergy Network (www.wicn-ny.org), clergy of all faiths and denominations study together and forge collegial and professional relationships. There is great value in large programs in which sizeable swaths of the community come together: they can be deeply moving demonstrations of solidarity. But this solidarity can be fleeting when it is not founded on sincere and meaningful encounters of the otherness between us, which by definition, must happen in small groups over time.

As each town and city across the county plans their Thanksgiving Interfaith Services, perhaps we can re-imagine them as opportunities for each faith tradition to communicate the elegance of an unedited liturgical piece. Everyone present will have moments of being on the outside looking in, which will undoubtedly be uncomfortable. But it is through this discomfort that we grow, that our own beliefs and dreams come into clearer focus, and that we begin to understand our neighbor's "peculiar ways." Minimally, folks will walk away actually feeling something during the service. At a time when the rhetoric in our political and civic life is increasingly divisive and listening is a rare commodity, religious communities are poised to build bridges and unify. We can lead the charge for restoring civility to our public discourse, not by hollow expressions of unity, but through the cultivation of relationships strong enough to transcend the substantial differences between us. This would be the paramount veneration of Thanksgiving.

A HOAGIE SWIMMING IN A SEA OF YANKEE FANS

2009-11-03T18:26:00.005-05:00

This is a sermon delivered on October 31st at the Pelham Jewish Center.

It is now official. A new question sits on top of my list of “Questions Most Frequently Asked of a Rabbi.” If I am an adequate measuring stick of such things, rabbis are most frequently asked some version of, “So rabbi, how does a Phillies fan handle being the rabbi of a congregation full of Yankees fans?” I am so glad that I spent six years of my life studying Aramaic so I would be prepared for such questions! The question suggests that I may be experiencing some form of an existential crisis, and I suppose that to some degree, I am.

For starters, throughout the baseball season most congregants have been very supportive of the Phillies’ trajectory to the postseason. “Way to go!” “Wow, it’s nice to see Pedro pitch so masterfully” or “Ryan Howard has an unstoppable bat” were common things for me to hear throughout the season. Suddenly, all of that changed. No more congratulatory pats on the back after a Philly victory. Such niceties have been replaced by things like, “May the Phillies bats go silent.” Congregants have resorted to forwarding me pictures of Phillies ballplayers in skirts from that bastion of quality news reporting, the New York Post. But don’t worry about me. I am dealing with this situation in a very healthy way: I have found refuge in the Jewish tradition, in our mamaloshen, Yiddish. For example, I have found modern and relevant ways to employ Yiddish aphorisms, like, “May all of CC Sabathia’s teeth fall our except for one, so he can be in pain.” Or “A-Rod should own a hundred houses with a hundred kitchens in each house, and the finest, most expensive foods, and be served breakfast fit for a king each morning in a different kitchen in a different house, prepared for him special by a hundred different chefs, and get into a different car, driven by a different driver who should drive him to a different doctor ... and not one should know why he chokes on every bite!"

In all seriousness, baseball has many similarities to religion. It is a largely communal experience with its own rituals, language, narrative myths, and of course, followers who are zealously committed to their team. Like religion, baseball has endless possibilities for obsessive behavior and over-intellectualization, which is why I can ask you the following question and some of you will know the answer: “What modern player has the most hits without ever appearing in a World Series? Answer: Rod Carew- with 3,053. Not intellectual enough? Try this one from Robert Cover’s baseball quiz coda to his book Narrative, Violence, and the Law: Which baseball player is most like the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.?

(a) Stan Musial

(b) Mickey Mantle

(d) Casey Stengel

The correct answer is (d) Casey Stengel. Both Holmes and Stengel had enormously varied and long careers, in each case serving the game for 50 years. Despite great success in purely legal or baseball terms, each achieved immortality for his use of the English language. Both men put the game they loved in the perspective of the skeptic’s view of the eternal search for truth: “Logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man....” “So it’s possible a college education doesn’t always help you if you can’t hit a left handed changeup as far as the shortstop....”[1]

Baseball should not be dismissed as a silly game that grown men cannot seem to outgrow. That would be a gross underestimation of the passion it engenders. Because of this passion, it is strange to be the spiritual leader of a community in which so many people avidly hope for the precise opposite outcome of that which I desire to see. There is a gap between us, even if it is not over an issue we would call religiously or theologically substantial, it is substantial sociologically speaking. I am now the other. We are adversaries. So buried within all of this humor, what is it really like for me? Is there anything to be learned from this experience?

In today’s parsha, Abraham is told to go forth from his native land, from his father’s home, to an unknown land that God will show him. He is given the task of introducing God to the world, a world that until Abraham, only knew the gods of the sun and moon, of music and dancing, of animals, and so on. As soon as he leaves, he knows that he will encounter people who will feel threatened by his message, who will reject it, who may even wish him harm. This is always the story of belief which is why its twin brother is danger.

לֶךְ לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ:

GO FORTH FROM YOUR NATIVE LAND, FROM YOUR BIRTHPLACE, AND FROM YOUR FATHER’S HOUSE TO THE LAND THAT I WILL SHOW YOU

Why didn’t God just say, “Go forth to this land that I will show you.” Why did God tell him that he had to leave the land in which he was born as well as his father’s house? Rabbi Lawrence Kushner offers the following answer, “The great, unending psychospiritual task of every human being is separating from his or her parents. Loved or hated, near or far, living or long dead, it’s never done. We spend our days trying to be who we imagine we want to be and not who they wanted us to be… [but] the text is clear: Doing business with the new, imageless, and yet unnamed God means to leave home, to commence the struggle…”[2] Abraham can’t bring God into the world, as it were, until he breaks free from what Kushner refers to as his psycho spiritual world, a world that was defined by his parents. He must inhabit a space of otherness in order for him to fulfill his task- he must be other from his parents, other from the polytheists he will meet along the way, and ultimately, other from himself, the person he had become all those years growing up in Ur. The experience of being the “other,” of being different from the people around us and the culture from which we came is a necessary step toward forging a new self.

So here I am, 12 Turnpike exits north of my Ur, my father’s home. In many ways, since I turned 18 years old, I have tried to remove my native land from who I am, from who I wanted to become. I had some successes doing this. At first, when I go back to South Jersey to visit, I feel like I have come home. All sorts of warm and loving memories and feelings return. It feels safe. But after about….five minutes(!), I feel largely “other,” different than the natives who reside in that seemingly foreign land. Kushner reminds us that even if we feel like strangers in our native land, we can not entirely remove our birthplace from the people we become, and for most of us, this creates moments in which we feel simultaneously at home and other. The same is true for our new homes. When, like Abraham, we leave our parents’ homes and travel into the unknown territories of our journey, we find that although we are strangers among the people we encounter, we begin to make some of their peculiar ways our own. Life is a continuous experience of coming home and being other at the same moment, which is confusing and lovely at the same time. I think this is the best way to answer the question I have been asked by so many people in the past week. What’s it like trying to meet the psycho spiritual needs of a community in which, for the next four days, I am largely your opponent? It’s disconcerting and beautiful at the same time.

It is disconcerting because even though it’s just a game, even though we are talking about baseball and not questions of morality and ethics, it’s still somewhat stunning and distressing to feel so out of sync with one’s community, or to put it another way, to be “other” in your own home. When I moved to New York City from Israel 12 years ago, I began to identify as a New Yorker, an identity which has become deeply important to me. I am at home here in New York more so than any other place in the world, except for Israel, of course. But for the past few weeks, I have been reminded that I am still “other,” even here at home. The Philadelphia / South Jersey stuff that I tried to leave on my parents’ porch when I left home at 18 is still inside of me. As Buzz Bissinger wrote in the New Republic yesterday, “The [Phillies have] the opportunity to become the first National League team to win back-to-back World Series since the Cincinnati Reds did it in 1975 and 1976. But finding comfort and peace in that, as most cities instantaneously would, is not so easy here. Philadelphians…actually enjoy wearing a chip on their shoulder. They like venting and feeling lousy and fatalistic, life a Sisyphean struggle.” This really resonated with me. This is why despite every desire I have to say otherwise, I just know the Yankees will win in 6… You can take the boy out of South Jersey, but you can’t take the pedestrian, middling, pessimism out of the boy.

Yes, being other from my community is disconcerting, but it can also be magnificent. In the middle of Game 1 of the World Series, my friend who is a die-hard Yankees fan texted me as the Phillies were winning. He called me a cheese-steak and then continued with a bunch of other words that can’t be repeated from the bimah. But when the game was over and Cliff Lee had pitched a gorgeous complete game with 10 strikeouts, the same friend texted me back and said, “That was really special to watch.” Even in our moments of being “other,” of wanting contradictory things, we are reminded that we appreciate most the art itself, an art whose beauty should always transcend the tribal impulses and loyalties that separate us. This truth is not limited to baseball. It is one of the most important lessons to apply to the way in which we live our lives. There are many differences between us, between our spouses and ourselves, between neighbors, family, and friends. But on a regular basis, we rise above them and engage one another around the principles that all human beings share: a desire for closeness, respect, and curiosity. This is the blessing of humanity, and we share this despite differences in race, religion, sexuality, and baseball loyalty. This is also the conclusion of our parsha. About Abraham, the quintessential “other” who lived among people as a foreigner, a strange tribesman with a radically new and untested idea, God says,

וְנִבְרְכוּ בְךָ כֹּל מִשְׁפְּחֹת הָאֲדָמָה

ALL THE FAMILIES OF THE EARTH SHALL BLESS THEMSELVES BY YOU

The universal is blessed by the particular. Regardless of which team wins (and may God let it be the Phillies), regardless of which team you want to wear the World Series ring, we are all united through the love of the most wonderful pastime since tohu vavohu, since Adam and Eve, since the invention of Shabbat and the creation of the universe: the great game of baseball. We’ll end with a traditional Shabbat custom: making a bet. If the Phillies win it all, next week I will buy soft pretzels for everyone at the kiddush if you agree to provide knishes should the Yankees win (y’mach sh’mam spit, spit, spit). May the underdog win! Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The essays of Robert Cover, Ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat, p. 251.

[2] Five Cities of Refuge, Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet. p 11.

REMEMBERING

2009-09-11T16:10:00.010-04:00

The sadness of this day burrows deep into the pits of our soul, but the confidence that we know how to commemorate it runs thin. Some pundits and politicians justify the choice to "go on with life" with naïve projections:

"The victims of this horrific act would have wanted us to go on with
our lives."

"We can't shut our country down for the day because then the
terrorists win."

Really? I'm not so sure we know what the victims would have wanted from us, and it seems odd to suggest that "business as usual" hands a swift defeat to terrorists. What I am sure about is that on this day we experienced a horror so extreme that eight years later, its ripple effects continue to tear families apart and further rupture already broken hearts. If we have learned anything from our ancestors, people whose lives were always squeezed between bookends of violence and hostility, it's that remembering matters. The way we remember a loved one is in community, together with other people, people who by virtue of being human, have also encountered the searing pain of loss. We are not permitted to recite the words of the Mourner's Kaddish unless we can be embraced by at least nine other people immediately after our prayer books are closed. Remembering does matter; how we remember matters too.

As the sun starts to fade on this difficult day and we trickle home from work, take some time to be in a state of togetherness as an act of remembering. Reflect, perhaps by yourself, but then share a Shabbat meal with family and friends; invite neighbors over for tea and conversation; or come to synagogue to be with your community. No fancy speeches. No resolutions. No political pledges. Just human beings engaged in the most dignified human act: honoring the pain that still reverberates through our world on this day, while being grateful for the blessings that we do have. Together with other people, we will have the strength to sit in the silence triggered by our sadness, as well as the privilege of singing the song reflective of our hope for the future.

May their souls be bound up in the bond of life.

Rabbi David A. Schuck

THE DANCE OF GIVING GIFTS AND "CONNECT TO CARE"

2009-06-16T17:30:00.017-04:00

The following is a sermon that I delivered last shabbat. I thought many folks may find the practical piece helpful during this tumultuous economic time.

We think that one of the universal truths about human beings is that children love receiving gifts. This may be true for most, but I distinctly remember feeling terribly uncomfortable with getting presents. It was not because I lacked self esteem. I certainly felt that I was deserving of gifts and gestures of kindness. I was just uncomfortable with the possibility that my reaction to the gift would somehow disappoint the gift giver. In an article entitled “Learning to Lie,” Po Bronson reports that one reason kids lie is because their parents teach them to. He writes, “Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile.” It seems that I was not the only child who felt the pressure to react in a way that would validate the choice of the gift-giver rather than in a manner that reflected my honest feelings. Giving and receiving gifts is a complicated dance, and as one grows older, the dynamic gets even more complex. When a gift is inappropriately offered, the offer itself can insult the integrity of the one meant to receive it.

It seems that this is what may have transpired between Moshe and his father-in-law Yitro in today’s parsha. As the Israelites prepare to leave the sweet, revelation flowing life at the bottom of Mount Sinai for the perilous journey into the unknown desert, Moses asks his father in law, a Midianite, to join them. Before we examine this exchange, a little background is important. Yitro is not the dreaded, testy, father-in-law of popular perception, but a man of sage counsel. After seeing the way in which Moses dealt with all of the problems of Israel by himself, Yitro suggested that he create a hierarchy of judges in order to support him in adjudicating his overwhelming load of disputes. Yitro’s admonishment is firm and wise, yet also loving and compassionate. He says,

“The thing that you are doing is not right. You will surely wear yourself out, as well as your people.”

כִּי כָבֵד מִמְּךָ הַדָּבָר לא תוּכַל עֲשׂהוּ לְבַדֶּךָ

“For the task is too difficult for you; you cannot do it alone.”

As a result of Yitro’s counsel, Moshe created the judicial system that became the basis for the way in which we dispense justice. This is a tremendous achievement and legacy, most especially because Yitro was a Gentile, an outsider by national tribal, standards.

With this in mind, Moshe’s desire to have Yitro accompany the Israelites through the desert makes great practical sense. He was a judicious counselor whose guidance proved to be exceptionally important. Yet the content of Moshe’s request of Yitro was off-putting. He makes the ask, so to speak, with the following words, “We are setting out for the place which the Lord promised us. Come with us and we will be generous with you; for the Lord has promised to be generous to Israel.” Yitro’s reply is blunt: “I will not go but will return to my native land.” His response is unexpected. Moshe responds by rephrasing the ask. He says, “Please do not leave us, inasmuch as you know where we should camp in the wilderness and can be our guide. So if you come with us, we will extend to you the same bounty that the Lord grants us.” In a remarkable narrative twist, the Torah does not provide Yitro’s answer, though in later books of the Tanach, his descendents, the Kenites, are present in the Holy Land, which suggests that he did accompany them. Their interaction begs the question: Why did he initially refuse and what was it about the nature of Moshe’s second request that addressed Yitro’s concern?

The Or Hachayyim, an 18th Century Moroccan commentator suggests that Moshe’s first invitation included a promise of a gift: “Come with us and we will be generous with you.” This insulted Yitro’s dignity. He wouldn’t throw his lot in with the Israelites because of the promise that they would be generous with him. Were he to accompany them on their journey, it would be out of the acknowledgement that he felt connected to them and their God. Should there be a reward down the road, it would be compensation for the value he added, not a gift bestowed upon him. Once Moshe rephrased the invitation to suggest that the Israelites needed him to guide them, Yitro was able to accept the offer. Framing the invitation to join as a present was patronizing and alienating.

This past Thursday I was privileged to have a tour of the Connect To Care project site, a UJA Federation project providing support to people in the Westchester Jewish community who are struggling from the impact of our current financial crisis. This project enables people to obtain legal assistance, financial, emotional, and spiritual counseling, and individual career counseling, all free of charge. People who take advantage of these services stand to save thousands of dollars while receiving the support that they desperately need. The most moving aspect of the work they are doing is that the entire set up provides these services while preserving the dignity of the clients. The physical space, the comprehension of client needs, and the respectful, non-patronizing manner in which they interact with and advise clients is sensitive, without belittling the experience, talents, and dignity of those with whom they serve. They do not perceive their mandate to be one of bestowing gifts; they are helping capable people figure out how to navigate through a crisis. Like Yitro, they “know where we should camp in the wilderness and can be our guide.”

Many of us are in need of guidance and support right now. Our financial struggles and the tremendous pressures with which many of us live spill over into our marriages, and into our relationships with our children and friends. We need a place to go for emotional support, and some of us have found that in the synagogue community. But others are not yet comfortable with their community knowing about their struggles and seek to be more private about them. Connect to Care provides all of these services and support with some of the anonymity they seek. Through Connect to Care, one can schedule private counseling sessions with a social worker, receive medical advice and prescriptions from a psychiatrist, utilize legal assistance from Harvard trained lawyers for a variety of crises (such as avoiding foreclosure and renegotiating credit card debt), receive professional career counseling, learn strategies of dealing with impossibly unaffordable health care and insurance coverage, and take advantage of access to financial advisors. For many people, such services can mean the difference between life and death, between the destruction of a marriage and keeping a family intact, and between job paralysis and finding meaningful employment. They run workshops every day on things such as succeeding in an interview, successful career transitions, how to speak to one’s children about the family’s new economic reality, how to utilize a variety of formats for successful networking, and learning stress reduction techniques. Every one of these opportunities for support are free of charge to members of the Westchester Jewish community- no strings attached, no questions asked. This effort of the UJA is a compelling example of the power of the Jewish community to care for its own as well as others. We should all know about this project. Tell everyone you know about it. For many it is a lifeboat amidst a raging storm that is currently wreaking havoc through our community.

These services are for everyone. They are working with women who have not worked outside of the home but who are now forced to re-enter the workforce, for some, after 25 years of not working. They are working with hedge-fund managers who have to confront extremely difficult decisions of remaining in the job market or accepting a new job at hundreds of thousands of dollars less than they have previously earned. They are working with people right out of college or professional school who can’t seem to find work despite their best efforts. They are working with blue collar workers who have lost low paying jobs and remain out of work. They are working with people who have spent 25 years in one profession that is no longer sustainable and who need to entirely reinvent themselves. Information about connect to Care is on the table outside of the sanctuary. I ask that everyone take it regardless of whether you need the services so as to preserve the privacy of those who do. Please take it and share it with anyone in need. Or, feel free to contact me and I will discreetly get the information to you.

Connect to Care services are offered in ways that reflect the values of dignity, respect, and integrity; they are not doled out in arrogance or in a manner that belittles the recipient. This project is an example of our community at its best, taking care of one another with sensitivity and compassion. Trying to navigate through these perilous times alone will not work. As Yitro said to his son-in-law, Moshe Rabbeinu,

כָבֵד מִמְּךָ הַדָּבָר /לֹ תוּכַל עֲשֹׂהוּ לְבַדֶּךָ

“The task is too difficult for you; you cannot do it alone.”

Through Connect to Care, the Westchester Jewish Community has mobilized in one of the finest displays of compassion, brotherhood, and support I have ever seen. Please take that first step of walking in or picking up the phone; you will immediately see that you are not alone.

May we grow from strength to strength.

Shabbat Shalom

Wishing You A Hag Urim Sameah, A Happy Hanukkah!

2008-12-21T13:04:00.018-05:00

Dear Friends,

I wanted to take a moment to wish you a happy Hanukkah. We have a long textual tradition of answering the following Hanukkah question: If the miracle we are celebrating is that the oil lasted eight days even though there was only enough for one night, then what is the miracle of the first night? Nobody was surprised that the oil lasted for the first night since from the beginning, there was enough oil for just one night. So why do we light the hanukkiah on the first night? What is the miracle we are commemorating?

Rabbi Yosef Karo, the 16th Century posek (decisor of Jewish law) and author of the code of law called the Shulhan Aruh, suggested 100 different possible answers to this question. I'd like to hear from you. What is the miracle that you think we are commemorating on the first night? Be as creative as you would like. Post your answers to this blog (click on the envelope at the bottom of this post)- it would be a wonderful treat to see the variety of answers we come up with.

Every year, people ask me to remind them how to light the hanukkiah- which way we place the candles, in which direction do we light, etc. So, I have ushered myself into the 21st Century and I made a little YouTube video for folks who want a refresher. The video includes the transliterated words and the melody for the blessings. The video is a bit dark but you can get the basic point. You can see the video by clicking here. Please remember that I was trained to be a rabbi, not a videographer (that will be immediately apparent)!

You can download written directions by clicking here and opening them at the bottom of the downloads section of the page.

Have a wonderful Hanukkah! Hag Urim Sameah!

Rabbi David A. Schuck

Thanksgiving Shmanksgiving!

2008-11-26T22:54:00.009-05:00

So here we are, Thanksgiving 2008.

We live in good times, don’t we? We can cure cancer at a faster rate than ever. On average, people live to blow out 67 candles on their final birthday cake (77.8 candles if you only consider Americans) compared to Aristotle and his Greek friends who blew out only 25-30 candles (though I imagine much more robustly). Science has opened the door to a deeper understanding of the universe. We can travel the world safely and quickly. The mere existence of faxes, the United States Postal Service, MRIs, pod casting, arthroscopic surgery, super antibiotics, GPS, Fairway, lasers, contact lenses, prosthetic limbs, Google, and the retro yet still somehow efficient telephone, is mind bogglingly wonderful! So why, despite these good times, are we singing the blues?

One villain is certainly the long list of poor decisions leading to the malfunction of the economy: no regulation; the derivatives-hedge funds market; subprime lending; credit default swaps; etc, etc. Choose your poison. Thanksgiving Shmanksgiving! Pretty soon, the unemployment rate will reach 8% and beyond. It’s hard to demonstrate gratitude when there are un-payable bills to pay and life savings lost.

So how do we sit around the Thanksgiving table this year without weeping into the cranberry sauce?

Well, there are no magic pills and truthfully, we all know that. It’s so easy to romanticize a lack of wealth. Henry Miller’s unforgettable opening in Tropic of Cancer, as seductive as it may seem, is a dangerous romanticization of being broke: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” The seduction of this sentiment lies in the notion that when we rid ourselves of dreams of consumerism, we can begin to direct our attention and energy to living in ways that are deeply meaningful. This is seductive because there is some truth to it. What do people do when they don’t have the money to buy lots of stuff and spend their evenings at the theater or the movies or at fancy restaurants? They sit together, have tea, and talk. The less we have to distract us from one another, the more we move toward deeper connection.

When I officiate at a funeral of a person who lived through the Great Depression, there is an almost predictable story that unwinds as friends and family describe him. They use phrases like: incredibly hard working; his word was his bond; nothing mattered to him more than family; he read books and valued ideas. Cliché? Maybe. But it’s humbling to bury a person with such deep wells of integrity. Such people are largely shaped by their circumstances, and during the Depression, the devaluation of money led to the valuation of things more eternal, things far more extraordinary.

None of this means that losing one’s house, retirement savings, or living with unbearable financial stress is just a golden opportunity for growth. No! These pressures can ruin marriages and tear lives apart. They are real, and they are extremely serious. The “silver lining” never justifies the pain and suffering. Never. Yet there are moments in a culture in which a shift takes place not because of ideological intent but because of necessity. It is possible that we are entering such a moment. The earth does feel like it’s beginning to shift and for most of us, our attention will have to move from the acquisition of things to something else, something that will be, quite literally, more affordable. Perhaps that vacuum will be filled by the creation and nurturing of deep relationships.

On Friday morning, instead of flocking to the stores to be “good Americans” by buying and buying, give one another the gift of time, the gift of real togetherness. We do live in good times. In fact, we live in fantastic times. Being poor is not the greatest affliction for humankind. It is not living without “things.” It is not even illness. The ultimate human affliction is being alone. There is no hardship more intolerable, more excruciating than being in this vast universe of ours alone, abandoned to our solitude, sloshing our way through life as a deserted soul. So this year, if you are sharing your cranberry sauce with someone else, go ahead, weep into it. But don’t weep because of the market. Weep tears of fortune, because at the end of the day, there is more than one place setting at your table. For that easily overlooked fact, we can surely be grateful.

I wish you a meaningful Thanksgiving.

David

The Election of Barack Obama and Parashat Lech L'cha

2008-11-10T09:44:00.009-05:00

Below is the sermon I delivered this past shabbat. A number of folks asked for a copy so I figured I would share it on the blog. I'd be happy to hear your reactions.

On Wednesday morning, my two boys were cuddling with Tali and me and we were talking to them about what had transpired the night before. We told them that Senator Barack Obama won the election and we opened up the laptop in order to show them videos of their new president. Every time a new person appeared on the screen, our three year old Nadav pointed to him or her and asked, “Is that Barack Obama?” Eventually, in an attempt to show off his political acumen and to end the non-stop questioning, Noam said, “No Nadav. Obama is the one with the dark, dark skin.” Tears welled up in my eyes. It was a spectacular moment because Noam had no idea just how radical that statement was. He could not fathom that describing the President elect of the United States of America as a black man was but a laughable fantasy even one year ago. I felt that in some way, without an ounce of cynicism, the world was a bit different. I found myself crying a lot Tuesday night and during the day on Wednesday, and they were not tears shed in political elation. They were in fact, not connected to policy or politics or campaigning; as a rabbi, I have never stated, nor even hinted at which candidate I supported. I was not crying because “my candidate” won. They were tears of American history. They were tears full of shame that electing a black man was so monumental, and at the same time, they emanated from a tremendous surge of pride that my country had evolved at a speed that I sincerely believed I would never see in my lifetime.

Leon Wieseltier wrote a deeply moving reflection on Obama’s victory entitled “That Night.” In it, he wrote that the day after the election, he too was surprised by his emotions. He wrote, “…I remarked a little sheepishly to a friend that from the way I had surrendered to my emotions, you would think that my own ancestors were slaves. And then I saw it: I had surrendered to my emotions because my own ancestors were slaves. How can a Jew…not rejoice at the election of Barack Obama? Not politically…but historically, spiritually. We, too, remember the pharaohs; and we, too, choose never to hate the world…” When I read these words, I understood better my own outpouring of emotion. I identified with the disbelief and pride that black men and women all over our country felt as they watched the Obamas take their first steps toward becoming our nation’s first family. It was deeply moving to watch rallies of thousands of African Americans all over the country weeping at the sight of a black president. I know what it’s like to see one of my own ascend to heights that my grandparents could never have imagined possible. Every person who has been a part of a group that has suffered the unbearable pain of evil, persecution, and hatred can feel the chains of bondage loosen a bit as they begin to wrap their brains around the fact that the next President of the United States of America is a black man.

It is auspicious that this change that still feels unreal coincides with Parshat Lech L’cha. This is a parasha about the journey one takes into the future with nothing in his suitcase but faith and God’s voice as his GPS. God appears to Avraham with a command that has echoed in the ears of the Jewish people throughout our history:

לֶךְ לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ

GO FORTH FROM YOUR NATIVE LAND, AND FROM YOUR FATHER’S HOUSE, TO THE LAND THAT I WILL SHOW YOU

The brevity of this command belies the great distance of its reach. Many of the most remarkable journeys throughout history began when an individual found the courage to leave all that was familiar and venture into the cold, dark, unknowable future. It is a command that requires deep wells of trust and faith. The hope of the Jewish nation in its pre-corporate stage was balanced on Avraham’s ability to act on this charge. And he did. He heard the voice that spoke and created the world, and with astonishing swiftness, he picked himself up and marched forward into history without a clue where his journey would take him. Each step on a journey whose end is unknown is ridiculous. The midrash suggests that in Avraham’s consciousness, all who encountered him believed he was crazy. He heard their voices saying, “Look at this old man! Traveling through the country, looking like a madman.” The midrash goes so far as to state that when Avraham did arrive in the promised land he was shocked to learn that he had arrived. Obama, the son of a black man and a white woman, the son of a Muslim and a Christian, a child raised by a poor single mother, was in almost every way, the most unlikely candidate to become president of the United States of America. In order to be the man he is today, he too had to embark on his own “Lech L’cha journey.”

The journey of the African American community required the same type of courage and faith displayed by Avraham, but what makes their path so much more unbelievable and agonizing is that unlike Avraham, God did not urge them to leave their homes and land and follow God’s guidance. Other human beings put them in chains, stole them away from their moladitam, their native lands, brought them to America, and broke their backs through gruesome acts of enslavement and degradation. They endured horrors for generations, yet pushed forward toward the promised land of their freedom without as much as a clue as to when they would arrive. Just as Avraham was shocked to learn he had arrived in Canaan, I think many Americans were shocked on Tuesday night as we discovered that despite all of the obstacles that our nation has placed in their way, the African American community has arrived in the promised land. This does not mean that suffering and inequality have vanished. When Avraham arrived in Canaan, he was met with hostility and warring kings. Arriving in the promised land does not mean achieving perfection; it means discovering that one’s existential reality is so radically different than it had been that a new chapter in history is beginning, one characterized by an explosive potential for healing and growth. Avraham’s first act after God told him he had arrived in Canaan was terribly important. The Torah says,

וַיִּבֶן שָׁם מִזְבֵּחַ לַיקֹוָק הַנִּרְאֶה אֵלָיו

AVRAHAM BUILT AN ALTAR THERE TO THE LORD WHO HAD APPEARED TO HIM

Upon his arrival, before he did anything, Avraham acknowledged the monumental achievement of just arriving. He did not erect this altar in an act of naiveté suggesting that everything was flawless and his journey had ended, but in an act of gratitude. Today, we too assemble an altar to recognize this historic moment in our nation’s history, to be grateful to have almost suddenly arrived in this moment against all odds, and to realize the great triumph that this moment truly is. In Wieseltier’s words, “…this was a triumph for all of us, but before it was a triumph for all of us it was a triumph for some of us, and I was happy for them, for my black brothers and sisters before I was happy for me. They had borne so much and waited so long. On this night they had overcome. And so my happiness was quickly complicated by a solemn sensation of respect: what were the tears in my eyes compared to the tears in their eyes?...somehow I felt also like I was being included in their American narrative, and I was honored to have a place in it. Their elevation elevated me, too. Equality is universal, but the paths to equality are particular.” We can not know the pain and trials of their path, but we can acknowledge that this past week, the violence with which they were stolen from their native lands, from their father’s homes, has been significantly countered by their first steps into the land of Canaan at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The journey is far from over, but it is also far from its origins.

Earlier in the service, Henry skillfully shared with us the significance which our tradition wraps around names. Barack Hussein Obama is a name that only a few years ago, no American would have imagined could sit on a plaque on top of the resolute desk in the Oval Office. Only names like Ronald, George, William, Theodore, Franklin, John, and Thomas could be engraved on such plaques. American Jewish history is replete with Jews who felt that to make it in America they had to change their names, and there certainly was a time in which this was true. But in the act of changing their names, a beautiful part of their heritage was lost. As African Americans continue to integrate deeper and deeper into the halls of power in this great country of ours, they now know that they need not lose their names. Though the tenacity of prejudice may be a tempting catalyst for acculturation, the moment one abandons her name she forsakes her history and thus begins the painful path toward divorcing her soul from her future. African Americans now know that their destiny can be shaped by people with names like Barack Hussein Obama, and so can ours.

So I stand here today and share these thoughts with you not because I think the journey toward equality has ended. If there is anything that the Jewish people know with certainty, it’s that waiting for total acceptance in order to acknowledge our successes would lead to a solely mournful existence. In Wieseltier’s words, “It is hard, but it is heroic, to believe the best when you are regularly commemorating the worst.” He’s right. So today, we take a moment to celebrate the best of ideals and we rejoice in the grandiosity of this historical moment. We have achieved something so powerful, so righteous, so unparalleled in our history in the election of a black man to the office of President of the United States of America. Regardless of one’s politics, we take a moment to celebrate this, to stand in awe and wonder at this radical shift in our history, to remember the lives of the many people who gave their lives for the sake of this moment, and to thank God that when our children grow up, they will have no clue as to why we made such a big deal out of this moment.

I will conclude with a few of the verses of a poem that Maya Angelou recited the morning after Obama’s election in an emotional interview on CBS News:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise…

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries…

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise…

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

BARUCH ATAH HASHEM, ELOKEYNU MELECH HAOLAM, SHE’HE’CHIYANU, VIKYMANU, V’HIGIYANU, LAZMAN HAZEH. PRAISED ARE YOU ADONAI OUR GOD, WHO RULES THE UNIVERSE, GRANTING US LIFE, SUSTAINING US, AND ENABLING US TO REACH THIS MOMENT.

SHOULD WE PRAY FOR OUR SOLDIERS?

2008-06-19T12:55:00.005-04:00

About two years ago we began saying a prayer for the American Military Forces each shabbat in synagogue. People have asked me over the years why we "politicize" our prayer service, and some have expressed discomfort with this decision. A few weeks ago, I delivered a sermon explaining my decision to recite this prayer. The sermon is below for you to read in the event that the topic is of interest to you. Feel free to share your comments on the blog.

Rabbi David A. Schuck

In 1790, The Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island wrote a message of welcome to George Washington, articulating their prayer that God would protect the first president of the Unites States of America. Washington wrote a letter in reply saying, “All possess alike the liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support…May the children of…Abraham sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Washington’s complete reply is quite effusive in its praise of the Jewish people and in expressing his hope that they will find life in America fruitful. But he reminds them that the civil and religious liberties for which they are grateful have a price: one has to demean himself as a good citizen. What a fascinating expression! What does he mean by this phrase? Aren’t acts of civic duty themselves quite the opposite of demeaning? In the romanticized version of civic duty such acts are dignified, but Washington reminded our people that to be a fine citizen is hard work, work that we would sometimes rather not do, work that we may think is beneath us (try volunteering as a poll worker when the lines are long, the rain is pouring down, and the voters are wet and impatient). Citizenship is born out of toil, out of humbling one’s self. For the Jewish people this was a small price to pay for religious liberty and freedom, things that historically, we had never been truly granted for thousands of years.

In his letter, Washington argues that to demean one’s self to be good citizens requires us (minimally) to support the United States of America. Not a radical idea. The difficult question is defining what it means to “support” a country. Support of a government comes in many forms and looks differently across the political spectrum. At times, support is reflected in a willingness to join a country in fighting for a cause. At other times, support is expressed through thoughtful protest of a government’s policies. But in a very basic way, supporting a country requires its citizens to acknowledge its national and collective experience of the present moment. Americans who ignore what is happening in their country are indeed, in George Washington’s words, not demeaning themselves to be good citizens. Undoubtedly, there are many Americans who don’t care about being good citizens, and I do not begrudge them that choice. But Jews really do not have this luxury. Never before in the 3,000 year history of our people have we been afforded the privileges and liberties that we experience as Americans. For many Jews, their citizenship, whether an accident of birth or the choice of an emigre‎‎, meant the difference between life and death. As Jews, I believe that we have a moral obligation to be grateful for our citizenship, and as an expression of our gratitude, I believe we should demean ourselves to be good citizens. I realize that many of us would do this in different ways, which is of course one of the beautiful things about the diversity of political thought and identification. But the ikkar, the essence of the issue is that we actively embrace our citizenship rather than disdain it.

In parashat Bamidbar, the Torah recounts an incredibly detailed census and the arrangement of the Israelite camp, tribe by tribe. The census is equivalent to a draft. Now that the Israelites were freed from Egypt and received God’s word at Mount Sinai, they prepared for their long journey through the wilderness. This journey would naturally bring them into conflict with other nations, so a military force was a necessity. Parashat Bamidbar describes this draft. So we begin our journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land with the creation of an army- not exactly the spiritual harbinger that we would like, but it begs the question of how the military fits into our religious life.

I feel very conflicted about what should happen within the sacred walls of our synagogue. At times, I want this space to be a spiritual oasis, a place in which we take refuge from the demands and events of the outside world. Wouldn’t it be beautiful to have a space in which we leave it all behind: the wars, the famine, the earthquakes, the pain and suffering, even if just for the few hours we are in synagogue? On the other hand, if we can’t bring the outside world into these walls then we further compartmentalize our Judaism and make it into a pristine fantasy. Leaving the world out of the synagogue is like a boy who does not want to hear teasing so he holds his hands over his ears and screams out that he can’t hear his tormentor. It doesn’t really work. We have to strike a balance. In synagogues we need to create spaces of comfort and reflection amidst the tumult of the world without placing our hands over our ears and pretending that we can’t hear what’s going on around us.

Every sovereign people needs a military. Countries must be able to defend themselves. Along with the creation of a military force comes a deep moral responsibility to struggle with determining when and how to use this force. But as American Jews who I believe must demean ourselves to good citizenship, we have a responsibility to acknowledge that outside of the sacred spaces that we have created, our country is at war. Many of us feel that this war is unjust, that our government abused its power and failed in upholding its moral responsibility to be sparing in its use of force. Others in our community believe that this war is just and is an act that will in the long run, strengthen democracy and protect our citizens from future acts of terror. Regardless of one’s position on this question, I believe that we have a moral imperative to acknowledge that American men and women put their lives on the line each day for our country. It is this reason that we recite a Prayer for the American Military Forces each and every Shabbat.

Acknowledging that we are at war and praying that our soldiers will escape harm does not in any way imply that we wish harm on anyone else in their stead. This acknowledgement also does not impede our path toward the creation of a spiritual oasis here. When we acknowledge within the walls of our religious institutions that wars are dangerous and brutal, and we pray for Americans fighting these wars to remain safe and return home, we create a greater sensitivity to the moral quandaries of war. Ignoring it is irresponsible.

People have asked me why we recite this prayer and suggest that by doing so, we are making a political statement that we support the wars or the policies of the Bush administration. I understand why people would feel this way at first, but pay close attention to the words we say. We ask God to bless the soldiers and we pray that they not falter. We pray that there will be harmony among all soldiers and that they will find the faith and courage to survive the brutality of war. We ask God to protect them, and we ask God to return them speedily to their families, alive and unharmed. In essence, we are praying for peace. The prayer reminds us, as we live our lives in a bubble (for the most part), that we are at war and many of our fellow citizens and their families have sacrificed a great deal for what they, at least, perceived to be the good of our country. Mentioning this as a set part of our liturgical experience does not in any way condone the war, support the Bush administration, nor does it glorify violence. I see no hypocrisy or conflict in praying for our military forces and then attending a protest of the war.

Instead of the precise details of the census, the Torah could have just given us the final numbers and explained the tribal formations in a few sentences. Why did it insist on such detail? Why include each tribe, their clans, and each name of the decedents twenty years and older? Nachmanides, a 13th century Spanish Torah commentator suggested the following answer: “The holy One blessed be He, ordered Moses to number them in a manner that would confer honor and greatness on each one of them, individually…All of them should pass before you in awe and with the honor due to them and you should number them.” When we recite a prayer for our military, this is what we are doing; we are numbering each and every soldier. Washington’s advice to the Jews of Newport in 1790 was to stretch their comfort zone- to do things for their country that may feel foreign or did not fit their sense of self; to wit, demean themselves for their country. I find his advice quite compelling. As a religious community grateful for all that this country has given our people, the least we can do is shake up our spiritual oasis a bit and let the reality of the outside world into our communal consciousness for a moment each Shabbat. By doing this, we confer honor on those who give their most precious commodity to our country by remembering them, and most importantly, by praying that one day soon, we will have no need to recite this prayer any longer.

YOM HASHOAH 5768

2008-05-01T15:19:00.005-04:00

To read, click on the cartoon

This cartoon is so powerful because it highlights that which is truly unbelievable to us: soon, children may not know much about the Holocaust. Today, when we think about the millions who were murdered during the Shoah, the suggestion that children may soon be oblivious to these atrocious events is astonishing. We have repeated the mantra “Never Forget” for the last fifty-odd years; alas, repeated declarations won’t preserve memory. In fact, maybe such pronouncements actually make it more likely to forget – by saying the words “we have not forgotten,” we lull ourselves into thinking that like God, we speak and thus it is so. But mantras are not enough.

We have experienced a backlash from an over-emphasis on the Holocaust. My parents and I grew up raised on the Holocaust. It was the zeitgeist of Jewish education. I was told in Hebrew School that I had to care about Judaism for the sake of the six million. Eventually, we discovered that teaching children that they should care about being Jewish because people were killed and tortured for being Jewish just did not work. It doesn’t take a philosopher of education to figure out that such lessons scare children, push them away from Judaism and teach them that being Jewish is a hazard. So now we focus on the joy of being Jewish, as we should. But it takes very thoughtful education (from both parents and teachers) to ensure that the pendulum does not swing too far in the direction of minimizing the importance of internalizing our history of persecution. How do we accept this history without glorifying it and without minimizing it?

Judaism has an answer to this. The rabbis of antiquity and the Middle Ages skillfully incorporated mechanisms into Jewish life meant to enable us to hold the pain of persecution alongside with the joy of being connected to our humanity and in relationship with God. When we experience one of the greatest joy of our lives, standing under the chuppah, the wedding canopy with our beloved, we crush a glass in memory of the destruction of the Temple. When we build a house, we leave a portion of it “unstuccoed,” thus remembering the Temple every day as we enter and leave our homes. When we mourn the death of a loved one, the rabbis command us to make their eulogy central to the mourning ritual, thus creating a scenario in which we encounter a deep sadness at our loss while at the same time, reflect on the joy that we experienced as a result of their life. When we work to remember the good along with the bad and vice versa, we unify the emotional and psychological rollercoaster of Jewish life. We don’t have separate compartments for the elation and anguish of our Jewishness. This balance is important to impart to our children and grandchildren; we teach them that life has its bliss and its sorrow, and we accept both into our identity as Jews. Such balance will enable children and adults to encounter the pain of our history because it will be tempered by our joys. This is how we ensure remembering. When we remember all throughout the year, Yom Hashoah does not have the pressure of being wholly transformative, as its not the sole annual moment of reflection on this part of our history.

Of course, today we remember not the mere pain and sorrow of our past, but the absolute horror of an event that eludes comprehension. Today, we are reminded that modern civilization, which we assess as the climax of cultural evolution and moral development, failed. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg writes in an essay entitled “The Shoah and the Legacy of Anti-Semitism,”

“Limits were broken, restraints shattered. Science and technology – the accepted flower and glory of modernity – climaxed in the factories of death. The humanistic revolt for the ‘liberation’ of humankind from centuries of dependence upon God and nature has been shown to sustain capacity for demonic evil. Twentieth-century Western civilization, in part the product of the Enlightenment and liberal culture, was a Frankenstein that authored the German monster’s being.”

Today is so full of agony because in addition to remembering the slaughtered children, women, and men, we have to confront the moral failure of modernity, really, of ourselves. And in remembering, we are silent. We have nothing to say about this catastrophe, because as Rabbi Greenberg writes, “no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.” When bereft of words, we still have one another. So we come together, listen to and confront the horrific stories, light candles, and recite prayers of remembrance. And we keep the stories that we learn alive by telling them throughout the year, not just today. This way, like the above cartoon, we remind our little ones who are so dear to us that this story is their story, and as we tell them our scary stories, we hold them close with our stories of the joy and wonder of being Jewish, the stories of our prosperity of spirit and moral grandeur.

May the memory of every soul taken from this world be remembered today, both by us and by the heavens above.

I hope to be with you tonight at our Yom Hashoah Ceremony at 7:30 pm.

Rabbi David A. Schuck

HANUKKAH THOUGHTS FOR 5768

2007-12-04T21:53:00.000-05:00

-By David A. Schuck

When we give something that we own to someone else, by definition, we lose the object. This means there is some type of loss involved in the giving. Often, the loss we experience is offset by the joy that we experience by seeing this object in the hands of its new owner. When a mother gives a daughter candlesticks that were used to usher the Sabbath into her family’s home each week, she is thrilled to know that the home that her daughter is building will be lit up with the same candlesticks, and that one day she may give those candlesticks to her child. But in many cases, the mother received the candlesticks from her mother when she got married and parting with them may be difficult. Despite the joy of giving such a gift, the mother will experience loss, and may even experience that loss in a profound way. This is the conundrum of giving. Even if it is time that we give, we will never have that time back, so we are careful about what we give to others and to whom we give our time.

Light is different. When you light a candle, the light of the candle fills the room; it enables us to see things that would otherwise remain unseen in the dark. Despite the giving of the candle, the light is not diminished. It is one of the few exceptions to the rule of giving. A candle gives and gives, it illuminates everything in its vicinity, but loses nothing. We stand before the candles and we are bathed in their light. There is no shame in taking that light. The more of it we take, the more we will then emit. We will be moved, in a sense, to imitate the candles and learn how to give without feeling loss, without feeling that in some way we are diminished by the act of giving. This is very difficult, but it is a path on which those who work to refine their moral character must set out.

The light of the candles can also illuminate within us things that we carry around, hidden from ourselves and others. Things like jealousy, cruelty, insensitivity, and insecurity. They are difficult to see so we prefer to keep them anonymous, in the darkness of the deep wells of our soul, unseen and invisible. This is a way of denying their very existence. It can be terrifying to see these things because we become overwhelmed with the feeling that we will not have the power to change them, or even scarier, that we will not have the compassion to accept that they are a part of who we are. But if we keep them in the dark, they fester and grow and begin to take up too much room in our hearts and souls, pushing more and more light out. The Kabbalists speak of this internal battle as the conflict between the yetzer ha’tov (good inclination) and the yetzer ha’rah (evil inclination). It is hard work to minimize the yetzer ha’rah, and we can’t do this alone. Hanukkah, as codified by the rabbis in second blessing we say as we light the candles, suggest that the power of Hanukkah is a reminder that through a connectedness to the divine, we can find unbelievable reserves of strength to overcome things that we believe require miracles. As we watch the candles burn, we say, “Praise are You Adonai our God, who rules the universe, accomplishing miracles for our ancestors from ancient days until our time.” Hanukkah reminds us that nothing is impossible, most certainly, not the refinement of our moral character.

Tonight, and for the other seven days of Hanukkah, stand in front of the candles and absorb the light. Try to be conscious of the experience of taking something that is in no way diminished by your act of taking. The more aware we are of the wondrous act of giving without feeling like we are losing something, the more skilled we will become in learning to give of ourselves without feeling that we are in some way diminished. Allow the light to illuminate the parts of who you are that are a bit unsightly, aspects that lurk around in self imposed darkness. The story of Hanukkah suggests that the weak can overcome the powerful. No matter how dominant these parts of you may be, use the light to inspire within you the strength to overcome them, and be good to yourself: learn how to accept that their very existence makes you human.

Hag Urim Sameach! Have a wonderful Hanukkah!

David

GOD IS IN THIS PLACE

2007-11-19T17:55:00.000-05:00

-By David A. Schuck

This D’var Torah was inspired by a chapter in Lawrence Kushner’s book God was in this Place and I, I Did Not Know.

Every Thursday the kids of the Learning Center come down to the sanctuary at 5:30, we daven together, I tell them a story or talk about the parsha, and then we sing. I asked the kids a question this week: “If you were out all day with your friends and then your dad picked you up to bring you home in the late afternoon, how would you know if your mom was home when you walked into the house?” One boy said that he would check to see if the lights were on. What an interesting answer. We then spoke about the mysterious story in our parsha in which Jacob, having left his home, comes upon a certain place and stops there for the night because the sun has set. God appears to him in a fantastic dream in which angels ascend and descend a ladder that points to the heavens. God makes a covenant with Jacob in this dream, and when he wakes up, he declares the most unbelievable cry of incredulity:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ יְדֹוָד בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי

“Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!”

How is it possible that Yakov Avinu, one of the founding patriarchs of our family, did not know that God is everywhere? Perhaps it’s because he forgot to turn the lights on in his home.

He is quite literally in a home in this moment, at least according to his own experience. After he sets up a monument of stones to mark the spot of this awesome incident, he names the site in which all of this occurs Beit El, the home of God. Jacob realizes that even though he has left his parents’ home in Beer Sheva, the wilderness is also a home of sorts, none the least because it contains God’s presence, which of course, saturates every inch of the world. Jacob just forgets to turn on the lights in this new home of his, and he discovers that even as the sun sets and darkness blackens the world surrounding him, through awareness, it can be as light as day and God’s presence can be intimately felt. In that anonymous spot between Beer Sheva and Haran, Jacob learns a very important lesson: to be human is to forget to turn the lights on, and this forgetting can lead to loneliness.

The Torah seems to be teaching us the first step in knowing about God: we have to wake up; we have to open our eyes; we have to turn on the lights. Reading the Torah is not a dispassionate intellectual exercise. When we read these words, they are supposed to rouse a similar chord of astonishment in us when we come to the realization that like Jacob, we too are asleep. As Lawrence Kushner states this problem, “For most of us, most of the time, the lights are on but nobody’s home.”

There are lots of questions floating around the Jewish world right now about how we are going to “fix” the problems of American Jewry, more specifically the Conservative Movement. We have dwindling numbers of Jewish observance, affiliation, and passion. Judaism is on the market now, competing as it always did, with many salespeople hawking their wares. Some of the answers pouring in tell us to make Judaism relevant to people and then they will move toward it. They will return. They will come home, as it were. But this assessment makes an erroneous assumption: that Judaism is irrelevant and it must in some way be massaged and shaped and formed into something pertinent, something related to contemporary culture. Judaism is a gigantic corpus of literature, wisdom, rituals, symbols, and metaphors that help us learn how to react to the world in meaningful ways. As long as humans stay human, Judaism will remain relevant. Judaism is not the problem. It’s even a cheap shot to suggest that our modern American culture is the problem, because in fact, every generation of wise elders decrees the foolishness of the youth. The problem is in our teaching.

Our rabbis and theologians and Hebrew school teachers and youth group leaders have forgotten that Judaism as a civilization is meant to awaken an awareness in each of us, an awareness of the splendor of our world, of the beautiful complexity of the human condition, the richness of belonging to a group of people with a vivid history, a people who has breathed the same air we breathe and asked the same questions we ask, and an awareness of the intense power of the divine that radiates through our existence. Keeping Shabbat is meant to compel us to experience time in a way that is profoundly different than every other day of the week. We shut down cell-phones, computers, televisions, and all of the gadgets that make us experience time in lightening speed. This 25 hour radical shift in time restores an awareness of the magnificence of the trees as we stroll past them on the way to synagogue. We become aware of how much we appreciate and value our family and friends with whom we share the precious moments of reflection, food, prayer, and study. When we pray we are not meant to simply recite the same words over and over again. We have to pray the words, invest them with personal meaning and reflection, with emotion and sincerity. We can’t do this every time we pray, but we can do it sometimes. We have laws about how and when and what we may eat. These laws are meant to raise our awareness, to acknowledge just how fortunate we are to have food, to remind us that we are taking food from God’s world and this is no less a gift than any other.

Things Jewish are meant to wake us up to the interconnected beauty laced throughout our world, to help us live in this world with open eyes, with the lights on. Our rituals, and symbols, and language, and Law, and history, and culture are meant to be vehicles for this awareness, but when we teach about them, we have forgotten to help people use them as tools to live in the world with a heightened awareness of God and things precious and valuable to a meaningful existence. “Keep Shabbat! Keep kosher! Pray! Come to synagogue!” is what we instruct people, but these things are vehicles to transport us into a unique and focused consciousness of the world. They were never meant to be ends in and of themselves. We have successfully frozen rituals, customs, and mitzvot into unchanging idols. So in effect, the paradox is that for the modern Jew encountering this type of Judaism, the most religiously valid thing to do is reject Judaism since the elimination of idolatry is the Jewish religious expression par excellence. If our Judaism is not equipping us with the tools to live with a heightened sense of awareness then it is stale, romanticized, and hollow.

To know that God is in this place requires work. It is through work that we gain a heightened sense of awareness. Alas, to turn the lights on is not as easy as flipping a switch. There are many midrashim about the splitting of the Red Sea. Most suggest that it was the miracle of all miracles, God’s 98 mile an hour fastball. But one of them tells the story of Reuven and Shimon who experience this moment in a radically different way. When they walk into the place where the sea was, they are looking down at the muck and mud that was everywhere. They walk into it and get angry about the mess through which they now have to trudge. Reuben shouts, “This is just like the slime pits of Egypt!” Shimon whines, “Mud here, mud there; it’s all the same.” When they cross over they have no idea why the rest of the Israelites are singing and dancing because they did not look up while they were walking through what they saw as giant pits of mud. They did not realize that there were enormous walls of water that had split open in order for them to cross. As Rabbi Kushner puts it, “For Reuven and Shimon, the miracle never happened!” Kushner uses this as an example of the difference between epistemology and piety. He writes, “In epistemology if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, it may or may not make a sound. In piety if a miracle happens and no one notices, it did not happen. Each miracle requires at least one person to experience the miracle, even if, like Jacob, only in retrospect.”

We want miracles, and I really do believe that we are surrounded by them. They may not be as breathtaking and life shaking as the splitting of the sea, but they are present. Judaism is not an external thing that we do when we walk into a synagogue. It is a tool to help us build an awareness of the daily miracles of our world. It helps us cultivate patience, pay attention, see and hear things that may have been invisible to us even just a few moments before we encounter them. Being present reminds us that we are all already in the place that we need to be. We don’t need to run into the woods or meditate in the desert or join drum circles. We don’t need to package Judaism in new hipster ways. We need only turn the lights on in our homes and we will discover, like Jacob, that God is in this place, and we did not know it. This discovery and awareness is worth every second of work it will take to bring us to the present moment.

David A. Schuck is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center.

MY FIRST YIZKOR

2007-10-18T15:42:00.000-04:00

It is striking that after an intense month of non-stop holidays, we move into a stretch of time in the Jewish Calendar during which there are no holidays. It is not always easy to dive right back into life after having spent so much energy celebrating and reflecting. In an effort to hold onto the sacred just a little bit longer, I share with you a moving description of the observance of Yizkor, something we will not do again until Passover.

My First Yizkor

--By Abbi Sharofsky

In March of 1995 I celebrated my Bat Mitzvah and reached the age of Jewish majority. With this celebration came new obligations in my life. One of these obligations would arise a few weeks later, during Pesach. At that point, I was obligated to say Kaddish for my sister’s yahrzeit and participate in the yizkor service at the end of Pesach.

I am the oldest in my family and have two younger brothers. What I don’t always share is that I also have sister who died in infancy. I don’t often tell people that because I don’t want the looks of pity and the requisite apologies that will follow. My sister’s death is a part of my life, just as the birth of my brothers is part of my life. The impact of this loss in my life is difficult to explain. Not because it is painful, but because of my young age at the time of her death. I was four years old and truly don’t remember a lot about that time. What I do remember is tied closely with Jewish ritual. My relationship with my sister has manifested itself over the years through yahrzeit and yizkor. Primarily yizkor.

Shortly before my Bat Mitzvah, my mother explained my obligation to me. This year, I would stay in the room for yizkor on the eighth day of Pesach. At 13, I saw this as an invitation into a very adult world and took on this obligation with a sense of pride and duty. While I can’t remember my first yizkor service, I can remember that for years, possibly until I came to JTS, I was always the youngest person in the room.

Being the youngest person in the room for yizkor evokes stares. It causes people to turn and look and motion for you to leave the room. My parents were standing next to me and didn’t I realize that my very presence in the sanctuary during this sacred time was a slap in their faces? I didn’t pay attention to these stares, because I had an obligation to remember my sister.

Yizkor is a time to remember. Its very name is self-explanatory. The purpose of the service is to recall the memories of the ones you love who are no longer on this earth. For those of you who have never stayed in the room during yizkor, it is a service that begins with personal prayers and ends with a communal recitation of the Kaddish Yatom (the Mourner’s Kaddish). The yizkor prayers for your loved ones are prescribed in the siddur. Siddur Sim Shalom gives the following prayer for a sister:

May God remember the soul of my beloved sister who has gone to her eternal home. In loving testimony to her life I pledge charity to help perpetuate the ideals important to her. Through such deeds and through prayer and remembrance, is her soul bound up in the bond of life. I am grateful for the sweetness of her life and all she accomplished in her lifetime. May she rest forever in dignity and peace. Amen.

I have read this or a similar paragraph for almost 13 years. It has never made sense or brought me any type of spiritual comfort. My sister did not accomplish anything. She did not have ideals which were important to her. Most babies don’t. The liturgy is failing to provide an adequate means of mourning the loss of an infant.

How do I reconcile my need for tradition as my connection to my sister with the blatant lack of a prayer memorializing a baby?

I continue to wrestle with this and don’t foresee any easy solutions. Perhaps I should throw out the liturgy entirely. Many people would say to do just that and to create my own, more appropriate prayer. However, this is not an adequate response for me. I hold on to the prayer because it is something that other people who have lost sisters can say. I may not have many memories of sweet times, but I have a relationship with my sister, nonetheless. It is a relationship which stems from my obligation to commemorate her brief life. It is a relationship which is dark and complex and tied up in the words of the Kaddish.

Glorified and celebrated, lauded and worshipped, exalted and honored, extolled and acclaimed may the Holy One be, praised beyond all song and psalm, beyond all tribute that mortals can utter.

Beyond all tribute mortals can utter. The prescribed words of yizkor do not appeal to me. They are a tribute that is not applicable to my situation. But according to the words of the Kaddish, I don’t need a spoken prayer…my faith is enough. My lack of memories, lack of experiences, lack of time, leaves me, amazingly enough, with a deep seeded faith in God. Yes, a God who allows infants to die, but also a God who gives me the strength to stand in this room and explain my connection to yizkor. The yizkor formula leaves me feeling empty and bereft of a true commemoration, but the kaddish revives me with a sense of tradition and the belief that I am fulfilling my obligation to my sister, to remember her, to pray that God remembers her, and is watching over her, as I cannot.

Abbi Sharofsky is in her first year of Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as completing her final year of her Master's Degree in Jewish Education from JTS. Abbi is also David Schuck's camper from a cross country trip in 1998.