Thursday, October 13, 2016

NEW EYES IN A NEW YEAR

Yom Kippur / 10 Tishrei, 5777 / October 11-12, 2016


                Gut Yontif, everyone.  It’s great to see everyone back in synagogue for the holiday and I want to wish everyone a tzom kal—an easy fast.

                So far this New Year, we have yet to play around with the Hebrew letters composing the year 5777—Tav, shin, ayin, zayin.  And the reason for this is when we take all these letters and try to read them as a Hebrew word, they come out as total gibberish.  On the other hand, were we Kabbalists, we would drop the 5000, play only with the number 777, and look for a phrase itself whose letters add up to 777.  That phrase I have for you, one with which you are certainly familiar.  It is from the first paragraph of the Shema:

They shall be for a reminder / frontlets above your eyes

The challenge of this phrase is the difficulty in translating the word “totafot.”  It’s a word that appears only twice in the Bible, both times in the Torah, and it is unclear what it means.  The notion that it refers to the tefillin of the head is an interpretation of the word, but not a translation. If the word means “reminder,” as our mahzor indicates, then one must wonder how effective a reminder placing a post-it above your eyes would be.  How can something you don’t see remind you of anything?  If a better translation is “frontlet,” you might ask yourself what exactly is a frontlet.  Just out of curiosity, I went to Amazon.com to see if I could order a “frontlet” and indeed I can.  I can purchase an item with the catchy title “Korean Style Wedding Bridal Crystal Flower Draped Rhinestone Tiara Frontlet,” for $17 plus shipping.  I’m going to stick with my tefillin, but it’s comforting to know that frontlets are alive and well in the marketplace.  I like to think of the totafot, the whatever that goes above our eyes as something akin to a third eye.  The third eye in certain mystical traditions is the eye that allows for greater insight, vision beyond the obvious.  We don those totafot in order to see deeper into reality—whether ourselves or the world around us—and we do so by placing the words of Torah, which is what the tefillin contain, close to our eyes.
Anyway, we do not wear tefillin on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah or any other Jewish holiday, the holidays themselves being vehicles of enhanced insight.  Each of the holidays present us with their own charms, and certainly that is true of Yom Kippur.  For many years now, I have been asking the B’nei Mitzvah students what their favorite holiday is and as one might well imagine, Yom Kippur does not make the grade.  Yom Kippur does not even make it into the Top Ten list of most popular holidays.  In fact, I can recall only one instance of a student actually telling me that Yom Kippur was his favorite holiday.  It is odd that a holiday which routinely fills the synagogue to overflowing each year should be so unpopular, even among kids.  On the one hand, it is a Day of Self-Affliction, and who really would rate that sort of spiritual exercise over a Hanukkah, or a Purim, or a Simhat Torah?  On the other hand, there is a Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:8) which states that the revered rabbi, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel stated that there were no better days in Israel than the Fifteenth of Av and the Day of Atonement…”  Both these days were days when young people sought each other out for romantic reasons and creating family.  Those are reasons based on hope and optimism.  One might think them out of place on a day like Yom Kippur when our apprehension about the future would theoretically be most intense.  And yet—the reality of how the Hakhamim, the Sages, viewed this sacred day is just the opposite of what one might assume.  I think we need our totafot, our Third Eye, to examine this paradox deeper.

                Yom Kippur is a day heavy with prohibitions.  It incorporates all the prohibitions of Shabbat and adds six more—we are prohibited from eating, drinking, bathing, wearing leather shoes, anointing (which probably means the use of colognes or perfumes), and sexual intimacy.  This cluster of Shabbat and Yom Kippur No-Nos encompass most of what it is that makes us alive and human.  What do people do?  We eat, we drink, we cook, we bake, we buy, we sell, we love, we vacation, and all these activities would be asur, forbidden on Yom Kippur.  There are at least two ways of looking at this corpus of constraint.  The first is to see it as playing dead, for the dead also do not/cannot engage in any of these things.

                The encounter with our own mortality is an aspect of Yom Kippur observance that is virtually undeniable.  This is a day of deliberately diminishing physical pleasure as a way of reminding ourselves that life is finite.  We all have a beginning and an end.  At the end, people tend to think a lot of what has gone on in their lives since the beginning.  Judaism has this great idea.  Why wait?  Why wait until there’s little or no time left to correct the deficiencies, or the missteps, or the indiscretions, or the pettiness?  All these prohibitions may be a way that we transform today into our last day, in order to motivate ourselves to make the necessary changes before—and God-willing—way before it’s too late.  But we needn’t think of this day as a day of death, for there is a second way of looking at all these prohibitions.  We might also think of it as a day of eternal life, living as it were like the eternal angels of Heaven above, because they, too, live daily without food or water or leather shoes and so forth.

Now before we go too far down this metaphorical path, a word on angels.  Do we believe in angels?  In answer to that question, I give you a definitive ‘yes’ and ‘no.’  Typically, any statement that begins—Jews believe in...—is almost always going to be off-base.  We are a curious, open-minded, respectful, rebellious, provocative, faithful, feisty collection of people, and we hold many contradictory opinions.  Some of us believe in angels and some of us don’t. What there is no denying is the role angels play as characters in both our biblical and rabbinic literatures and as such, there were Jews whose belief in angels was as strong as their belief in God.  Angels, in this case, were God’s helpers.  They were messengers that acted as liaison between God and humanity.  They could assume physical shape as did the three messengers who brought news to Abraham and Sarah that they would soon become parents.  They could be athletic as the angel who wrestled Jacob.  Some were thought to have wings as those fashioned over the Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments in the wilderness.  Or they could be wielding swords of fire as the angels assigned to block reentry into the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve’s eviction. 

For those of us who may have difficulty in believing in angels, think of angels like this—idealized, theoretical human beings who are completely moral and righteous, impervious to decay, and capable of flight without need for TSA pat-downs or surcharges on baggage.  Angels are very cool.  That the architects of Yom Kippur thought us capable of becoming angelic is not so far-fetched.  In Psalms we read: 

 [God], You have made us just shy of divine creatures (Psalm 8:6)

And so the biblical author’s conception of who we are:  AA’s, Almost Angels.  Today, we remove ourselves from human pleasures not because we are dead, but because we are more than alive.  All those pleasures mentioned earlier—eating, drinking, bathing and so forth—they are unnecessary and unessential.  For a 25-hour period, we are able to see our lives and the lives of those around us with the broadest of all perspectives, as if we were in heaven itself looking over our selves, our families, our communities, our nation and seeing our lives in a way that we have never seen our lives before.

                I want to tell you about an affair, a wedding—not an unusual happening by any stretch of the imagination—but nonetheless an affair, a wedding, that helps us see such a common event as extraordinary.  Do you remember in the film Schindler’s List, there was a wedding depicted in the Plaszow Concentration Camp?  That wedding was not Hollywood fantasy but the recreation of the wedding between Joseph Bau and Rebecca Tennenbaum that really took place in the camp.  It was a wedding that took place in secret, as it was illegal, but it was a wedding that took place because Joseph and Rebecca were determined to do something human in spite of the landscape of death in which they found themselves.  And besides that, they were very much in love.  Joseph Bau was a very interesting man.  He was an artist and in his youth, he learned German Gothic lettering which allowed him to create, in essence forge, German passports and identification certificates granting many Jews escape from Europe.  When asked why he did not create such documentation for himself, he said, “If I make documents for myself, who would help the others?”  Joseph and Rebecca were separated, she sent to Auschwitz, but after the war, they reunited, made aliyah, and Joseph took up his artistic ventures there.  He was actually the one who created documentation for both the Israeli spy Eli Cohen who did masterful espionage work in Syria before his execution, and also for the Israeli team that captured Adolph Eichmann in Argentina.  Today in Tel Aviv, there is the Joseph Bau Museum which features an exhibition of his work.  A couple years ago, the curators of the museum, Joseph and Rebecca’s daughters, decided to celebrate the 70th anniversary of that Concentration Camp wedding at Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery, near Tel Aviv, where their parents are buried.  Now people celebrate anniversaries all the time, and in securing the proper venue for the celebration, a cemetery is not what typically gets chosen.  But that is where the celebration took place.  Here is what their daughters, Klilah and Hadassah said:

“According to Jewish tradition, in times of deep desperation, a wedding ceremony would be held in the cemetery, symbolically linking the living and the dead,” Clila Bau told JNS.org. “The bride and groom, who had to be orphans, would stand among the dead to ask for rachmanut (mercy) from God, both for themselves and their community. They sought a promise from God, the ultimate matchmaker, for continued life.”
“Our parents were that bride and groom,” said Hadasa Bau. “We [created] this symbolic wedding so that Israel, our country, will always have love.”

When is a wedding a miracle?  The wedding of Joseph and Rebecca Bau was a miracle taking place as it did in a prison where both weddings love and even a kiss were forbidden.  But here is an equally compelling question.  When is a wedding not a miracle?  When is the decision of two people to devote themselves to each other and to sanctify that union within a gathering of friends and family not a miracle in a world like ours, wounded by corruption and bleeding from terrorism?  In a world that daily assaults our faith in the future, when is a wedding not a miracle?  And this question—When is it not a miracle?—is a question that can be asked of so many moments in our lives whether big life cycle situations like a Brit Milah or Bar/t Mitzvah, or the smaller mundane activities like mobility from one space to the next, communication between two parties, education or the growth that comes from learning new things.  Humans may not see readily the divine in all we do, but the angels view the world with much different eyes.
               
Many of the Birkot Hoda’ah, Blessings of Appreciation, are blessings that have to do with seeing.  These blessings are our tools that help us focus on those points in time when insight and appreciation intersect to create what is essentially a WOW moment.  Every blessing begins as one might expect—Barukh atah Adonai, we bless you God; eloheinu melekh ha’olam, the One who guides us through this universe, and then there is the hatimah, the conclusion to the berakhah.  The conclusion changes to fit the WOW moment.

The blessing for seeing beautiful trees or fields:  shekakha lo ba’olamo—so it is in God’s world. 

The blessing for seeing a great Torah scholar: shehalak meihokhmato lirei’av—for God has transferred wisdom to those who revere the sacred within the world.

The blessing for seeing a great secular scholar:  shenatan meihokhmato l’vasar vadam—for God has granted wisdom to all humankind.

There is even a blessing for coming to a place of a personal miracle: she’asah neis li bamakom hazeh—for having made a miracle for me in this place.  There is something extraordinary in this blessing, the blessing that acknowledges some encounter with God in an otherwise common place. 

Where is the place of your personal miracle?  Again, we needn’t think of a miracle as a supernatural event, we need think of it only as a moment in our lives when the unanticipated materializes before our eyes.  Is your personal miracle at a hospital where you had surgery? An intersection where you were in an accident?  An office building where you were given your first job?  Is it a grave where lays buried one who gave you an identity like no one else could have?  Is it, perhaps, not a place but a time like an anniversary?  The birthday of a child?  A day of retirement?  You may never have thought of these moments in time or these places in your history as moments or places of miracle, but now imagine you are looking at them with an angel’s eyes, on this day when we live as angels, on this day when we reconsider just how much we have to be grateful for.

There is a blessing we say upon seeing 600,000 Jews.  The blessing is not Oy Vey!  Someone once asked me—when are you ever in the presence of 600,000 Jews.  I told him, “You apparently have never flown El Al to Israel.  In that one Boeing 747…”  It’s the blessing you say when you are in the presence of many Jews.  Perhaps, like right now:  Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, hakham harazim:  We bless you God who walks us through an incredible universe who is the One who knows all of our secrets.   With this one blessing we can never treat a large group of people as an anonymous crowd, but rather know that each individual here is a person in her or his own right and there is a Knowing within the universe, with a capital ‘K’, that understands each and everyone one of us, our weaknesses and our strengths, our shortcomings and talents, our dreams and our nightmares, and that Knowing is God.

How many times have you had a conversation with someone and afterwards you walked away saying, “I never knew that…”?  I never knew she was in an abusive relationship.  I never knew he’s been out of work for the past six months.  I never knew she lost a child.  I never knew she had breast cancer last year.  There’s lots of things we don’t know.  We may pretend to be angels on this day, but we are neither angels nor God.   We need to walk this world with a greater sense of humility for what we rarely or cannot see far exceeds that which we can see.  Knowing how little we can see, is an important insight.  And so   we pray:

 [God], Deal with us justly and lovingly…

Cut us a little slack God because all too often we operate as if we see much more than we do and we also miss so much of what ought to be apparent—namely, the presence of God in our lives.  We apologize for our myopia, for our inability to see the miracle in our lives, the lives of our children and our grandchildren.  Cut us a little slack God and we promise to cut everyone in our lives a little more slack as well. 

                So I ask this kid:  Yom Kippur, that’s your favorite holiday?  How is that?  And he said, “I was born on Yom Kippur; it’s my Jewish birthday.”

                If Yom Kippur were your birthday, you’d love it too.  But here’s the thing.  On this Yom HaDin, this Day of Judgement, this Yom Kippur, it should be everyone’s birth day—perhaps our Re-birthday.  This should be the day when we begin to see the world with our totafot, our third eye, securely above our eyes, judging less, loving more, and always searching deeper into our lives and our own humanity for the presence of God, the energy of insight and kindness, love and optimism, the force of spirit that resides with us always. 


                Tzom Kal—an easy fast everyone.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

THE JEWISH PEOPLE’S HEARING PROBLEM, AND ITS SOLUTION


ROSH HASHANAH—OCTOBER 3-4, 2016 / 1-2 TISHREI, 5777



L’Shanah Tovah, everyone.  Midway is back together again for this New Year, 5777, and I know you join with me in prayer for a healthy, fulfilling, and peaceful New Year.

An elderly man, faced with the usual medical challenges brought on by old age, feared his wife was losing her hearing and so he decided to create an experiment by which he could determine once and for all if her hearing was failing.  One day, while she was sitting outside reading, he quietly crept up behind her, and from a bit of a distance, he said, “Martha, can you hear me?”  No response.  He crept up a little closer and said, “Martha, can you hear me?”  No response.  Finally, he got right behind her ear, and said, “Martha, can you hear me?”  And Martha replied, “For the third time, ‘Yes.’”

Hearing plays a very important role in Jewish ritual and that is certainly the case on Rosh Hashanah.  We have to hear the shofar blown and allow the blasts to penetrate our souls.  We have to listen to the words of the Torah.  We have to listen to our conscience at this time of year and confess to our shortcomings and failures.  And today, as twice every day, we have to recite the words of Sh’ma, a word which itself means “Hear:” Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.  The problem with the Sh’ma is, as with any rote declaration, after about the one thousandth repetition, we may no longer be hearing what the words are really saying.

This year, we have engaged in a very unusual—some might say foolish, others might say daring—exercise, with our prayer services.  We recited the Sh’ma in an unusual way with hopes of hearing it in a way we have never heard it before.  We read Torah in an unusual way with hopes of hearing the Rosh Hashanah reading in a way we have never heard it before.  Why should we tamper with tradition, especially in a community that respects tradition as deeply as ours? 

                We could all come up with a hundred items that distinguish us as Jews, but certainly on top of that list, or in the very least close to the top, would be how we gather for worship and study.
  
Praying is a quintessentially Jewish action, not unique to the Jewish people but certainly characteristic of the Jewish people, and when Jews come to our services and cannot follow them or worst, follow them only to find them uninspiring, that should be a problem for us all.  It’s a problem because if anyone comes to the synagogue and leaves untouched by the words of this great Mahzor, so much of which is steeped in the values we cherish as a people—that’s a problem.  It’s a problem because we have a special relationship with God.  God and the Jewish people—we’re tight!  But in order to maintain that relationship, we need the proper tools, and the tools that are right for one group may not necessarily be right for another.  How do we create a mikra kodesh, a sacred gathering on holidays and festivals, that moves people, that inspires people, that galvanizes people?  This challenge is not new.  And if you want to know just how un-new it is, let’s go back 2500 years to the days of the great prophet Isaiah.

                Isaiah was not someone you’d want to invite over for dinner.  He was testy and critical, and he was always telling us what God had to say.  That said, he was usually right about the things that bothered him.  He had a few words for the Jewish people when it came to prayer or worship.  Isaiah speaks:
My Lord said:
Because that people [he’s talking about us] has approached [Me, and here he is talking about God]
With its mouth, and honored Me with its lips,
But has kept its heart far from Me,
its worship of Me
Merely a commandment of men, learned by rote--….
So the wisdom of its wise ones shall fail
And the prudence of its prudent ones shall vanish.  (Isaiah 29:13-14)

Let me tell you in plain English what Isaiah is saying.  He’s saying that if you come to synagogue, and mumble mindlessly for three or four hours, saying what you’ve said thousands of times before, not necessarily even knowing what you’ve said, and if that is passed off as authentic worship, then eventually, good people will drift away, because they will know, as sure as does God, that prayer without sincerity, prayer with your body in one space and your kishkas somewhere else, is not prayer.

                I heard this great story about the first Chabad rabbi who made his way to the Soviet Union in 1987, when the Perestroika movement, that movement for Reform in the Communist Party was underfoot.  It was the Lubavitcher rebbe who sent one of his sheluhim, one of his emissaries to Kiev to reignite the Jewish souls there who for so long could practice their religious traditions only secretly or at great risk of losing financially and professionally.  And so it came to Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur, and the synagogue was packed for once in many, many decades.  The hazan chanted Kol Nidre and everyone was moved by the music.  But it was a very traditional service, and in spite of the Hebrew/Russian mahzorim, every word of the mahzor translated, the rabbi could tell that he was losing the congregation.  They simply didn’t know what to do.  They had been away from prayer for so long.  So the rabbi decided he would, break the monotony and tell a story about the Ba’al Shem Tov that would illustrate that you don’t need to be a Talmudic scholar to touch God.  So he tells this story. 

                Once, the Ba’al Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer, aka: Ba’al Shem Tov 1700-1760), the charismatic and influential founder of the modern day Hasidic movement, sensed that the good Lord above was on the verge of sentencing the Jewish people in a harsh manner.  And as such, the Ba’al Shem encouraged his Hasidim, in this little Polish town, to pray with all their heart, all their might and all their soul. So the Hasidim went to work—that is, they prayed fervently.  But it wasn’t working.   A poor, untutored shepherd was in the back of the shtibel and he wanted to join in, but he didn’t know how to pray.  So he opened up the prayer book, and the first page as in so many of these European prayer books was the Hebrew alphabet.  And he read the alphabet out loud and then shouted to God—Look, I don’t know Hebrew, but I know the letters, so I give You the letters and You assemble them the way they need to be assembled.”  And at that point, the rabbi in Kiev said, the Ba’al Shem Tov knew that the community was saved because all that was required for a prayer to be real was for the prayer to be recited with utter sincerity.  And that poor illiterate shepherd had pierced the heavens in a way that no other Hasid in the room could.

The Jews of Kiev loved that story.  They related.  And all of a sudden, one heard resounding through the expansive sanctuary of the Kiev synagogue someone who shouted, “Alef.”  And a few people responded “Alef.”  And the same voice was heard, “Beis.”  And now more of the congregation returned the call, “Beis.”  And after a minute or two, the whole congregation had recited the entire Hebrew alphabet.  It was a havayah—an experience, unforgettable and profound.  For that community, at that time, in that place, the alphabet was the most sincere prayer uttered that evening.  Completely unorthodox and completely genuine.

Mark Twain once remarked that, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”  Sometimes I think the way we read Torah is a good story interrupted.  It’s almost impossible to build any emotional crescendos when you break it up into five parts, as we do on Rosh Hashanah; six parts, as we do on Yom Kippur; and seven parts, as we do on Shabbat.  Moreover, because so few of us understand the Hebrew, we become dependent on the Mahzor’s translation, and the Torah reading itself becomes background music.  The reading of the Torah, so central to our weekly gatherings, was never meant to be background music.  It was meant to be the symphony.   In a pre-printing press era, when no one had humashim, and not everyone was conversant with the Hebrew, then it was the tool that we used today, the metrugeman—a person conversant with the Hebrew who would translate clause by clause, the Torah reading—which allowed people to both hear and understand and ideally feel the words of the Torah.  I witnessed this ritual myself in Jerusalem several years ago when I made my way into a tiny Yemenite synagogue, and where the Ba’al Keriah, the Torah Reader, stopped after each verse and the meturgeman translated the verse into Aramaic.  Of course, that practice in Israel is the Jewish irony of Jewish ironies.  This group, so stuck in a specific tradition, translated the Hebrew for Israelis who essentially understand the Hebrew, into Aramaic, a language that very few of them understand at all.  But there you have it: a demonstration of the grip that ritual and tradition have on people so much so that these rituals persist long after they make any sense.
 
                During the course of a service, especially one that lasts for four or five hours, one could conceivably drift; maybe even take a little nap.  Of course, this has never happened to anyone in this room, but the service being long and the Hebrew acting sometimes as a stumbling block between ourselves and the prayers, we might just find ourselves elsewhere—figuring out a problem at work, wondering who won’t show up for the yom tov dinner, catching up with a neighbor whom we have not seen in some time, and so forth.  Just as it is with every other space in the world, it is possible to be in one space physically, but to be totally absent at the same time.  And this disconnect is particularly disturbing during prayer, when the point of so many of these ancient traditions is to direct us to being present, being mindful, being aware of the miracle of the moment.  Being present means being engaged.  And being engaged, however it comes about, is a worthy if not sacred objective.

                There’s a beautiful verse in Proverbs about mezuzot petahai, “the mezuzot of God’s entrances.” (Proverbs 8:34).  Rabbi Yehudah bar Sima has a problem with the mezuzot reference (cf. Midrash Rabbah, Ki Tavo, 2).  Why?  Because we may have mezuzot on the doorposts of our homes, but where does God have mezuzot?  And if your answer is the synagogue, which is sort of God’s home, it’s not a very good answer because a synagogue does not require mezuzot.  That’s a bit of trivia everyone should know.  Mezuzot are fixed on the places where you live but not on the places where your work or exercise or even pray.  It’s not wrong to affix a mezuzah there but it is not required.  So Rabbi Yehudah searches for an answer and he explains as follows.   The verse is meant to teach us something about being present.  Just as a mezuzah never departs from the doorpost, so too we should never depart from God’s home, whether the synagogue or the Bet Midrash, the study hall.  As long as we remain present in God’s home we will attain happiness.  And that very verse intimates for all of us how to be present: Ashrei adam shome’a li—Happy is the one who can hear Me [that is, God].  If we are truly present in God’s home, we will be able to hear God.  And if we are not hearing God, it’s not necessarily because God is silent, but it may just be that we’re hearing-impaired, hampered by a spiritual protocol that obstructs our access to the beauty of the mahzor’s words, the cantor’s pleas, or the narratives of our holy Torah.  Today’s experiment was an attempt at getting us to be more present and improve our ability to hear.  Were we successful?  You’re going to let me know between now and Yom Kippur.  We’re going to be sending out a brief Survey Monkey to the congregation in order to collect your feedback on this prayer and study experience.

I understand that this type of service is not everyone’s bowl of chicken soup.  I’m actually not interested in replacing the traditional service that has been the hallmark of our congregation since its inception.  I love that service—all five-and-a-half hours of it.  That classic, unedited service is part of who we are as Jews. But what I think we should consider as a community that serves a broad-base of Jews, a community with a very wide umbrella covering Jews of all backgrounds and temperaments, like ours, is an alternative experience, not because we are trying to dumb-down Judaism, but precisely because we are trying to open it up, to as many people as possible, to all Jews who yearn for an authentic relationship with our tradition and God at this special time of year.

Will some people laugh at a Conservative synagogue conducting a service like this?  Absolutely.  But you know creativity through the ages always invites ridicule.  There’s this great song, written in 1937 by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira, “They All Laughed”?

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi
Wireless was phony
It’s the same old cry
They laughed at me wanting you
Said I was reaching for the moon…

Well, that part of the song I needn’t get into.  The point is that innovation, discovery, are rarely viewed in a positive light because human nature is drawn to the familiar, the known (whether it’s right or wrong), the accepted, and is often anxious if not downright fearful of change.  That’s not a criticism; that’s an observation and everyone in this room, myself included, almost always greet change with some degree of concern.  But then as Jews, we have this thing called the Yamim Norai’m, The Days of Awe, days during which we are actually encouraged to do that which we fear most: change.  Question the status quo and ask yourself—could it not be better?

                Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “To pray is to know how to stand still and dwell upon a word.”  Isn’t that beautiful?  Were we to take Dr. Heschel’s advice, our service would be 10-12 hours in duration.  But maybe what he is telling us is that it’s not so terrible to make some judicious choices in which prayers will be said and which we will save for another Rosh Hashanah in another year, to sacrifice quantity in the service of quality. 

                You know, I reject the idea that man created God.  To me, that’s a declaration of cynicism.  But I do believe we, that all of humanity, are capable of creating the presence of God, given the right words at the right moment.  To do that which brings the presence of God into this space is the whole point of this sacred space.  To ask God to be with us this first day of the New Year, to help us create a loving family, a caring community, an ethical nation, a world that pursues peace…  For us to emerge from this space empowered because we know our hands have become the hands of God in doing the good work of healing on this earth…  For us to begin this New Year with a renewed sense of mission that in fact, we are capable of making a difference in the lives of the people we love the most…  that is no laughing matter.  Why not be bold enough nd flexible enough to create just that sort of havahah, that sort of experience?  That is what an authentic religious experience can be if we only choose to make those changes that will make it so.

Ketivah v’hatimah Tovah—May we all be written and inscribed into that Book of Courage and Daring to do what is best for our fellow Jews and all good people wherever they may reside.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

THE POLITICS OF HATE AND ENVY

When it comes to government, almost all liberal democracies separate church and state.  Virtually none of us would argue against that.  And yet, when thinking of how we want our government to conduct business, we almost all wish that the government would reflect the values we cherish most.  Some of those values are undoubtedly rooted in Jewish tradition.  And that being the case, we may just prefer governments or vote for candidates that most closely align with our own sense of justice, our own sense of right and wrong.  As long as those values are not identified as Jewish per se, our conscience is clear in having not intermingled religion and politics.

And can it be any other way?  How much dissonance can there possibly be between one’s religious life and one’s political life before we go crazy or before someone charges us with hypocrisy?  One aspect of Jewish life I find most reassuring is that the values espoused have been put to the test over centuries.  The result is a set of values so solid, they may serve as flaring beacons in the darkest of political nights. 

We are taught, for example, to not hate Egyptians (Deuteronomy 23:8).  Really?  Why not?  The Egyptians enslaved us, beat us, and sought to kill our children.  When we eventually left Egypt, the Egyptians marshalled the troops to recapture us.  We have every reason to hate the Egyptians.  Nonetheless, the Torah forbids it, and by extension, forces us to think of the role hatred plays in our lives.  When we hate our oppressor, do we become like our oppressor?  How much personal energy do we wish to expend on hatred?  Couldn’t we use our energy in a more positive way?  Will our hatred serve as a stumbling block to a future rapprochement with our former enemy? 

Like so many Americans, we cannot turn a blind eye to illegal immigration or to the flood of refugees running from the atrocities of ISIS operatives.  Still, is the answer to these problems hatred—framing illegals and immigrants as rapists, criminals, or terrorists?  That message apparently resonates with many Americans because hatred, like a drug, affords a temporary high, a burst of feel good self-righteousness.  And like a drug, a steady diet of hatred leads one down a road of increasingly poor judgments, finding fault and criticism with everyone and anyone who doesn’t sport the hater’s point of view.  Working with the Mexican government to create local opportunities for jobs and advancement could go a long way to stemming the tide of illegal immigration.  Creating and publicizing the system whereby Arab refugees are vetted before entry into the country could allay many justified fears about whom we welcome to our shores.  That these recommendations may not satisfy the American public stems in part from the absence of a figure willing to promote them in a creative, charismatic way.  Framing “the other” as an enemy, playing on people’s fears, wielding the politics of hate, is much easier.  It may work to get votes, but it cheapens all who employ it and is as ugly as it is easy.

Our Torah teaches us to not covet (Exodus 20:14).  Everyone must be familiar with this one because it is the tenth of the Ten Commandments.  Confession: every now and then I engage in a bit of coveting.  I wonder what it might be like to eat gourmet daily, drive a Lamborghini, and fly my Leer jet for vacation at my private villa outside of Florence, or better yet, Jerusalem.  When I finally wake up, I realize I have more than enough food in the fridge, my Elantra works well (except in the snow), I can hop on a plane pretty much whenever and… do I really need a second home, even in Jerusalem?! 

For those who can afford it all, are they happier, smarter, stronger, or safer than the rest of us?  And yet, where income distribution becomes the gemstone of one’s domestic policy, it is in essence a legitimization  of envy.  That which we are forbidden to do in our daily lives becomes the hallmark of what needs to be done in our political lives.  That strikes me as a disconnect extraordinaire!  Of course, some proponent of redistribution will criticize any clergy for taking issue with the politics of envy precisely because religious people “are blind,” religion being the opium of the people.  To them I would ask: was Reverend Martin Luther King on drugs?  Was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel a crackhead?  Was Mother Theresa shooting up?  If you’re going to employ a slogan, make sure it reflects a reality and not a personal prejudice.

The issue of Jews and money has always been a precarious subject.  Jews have historically been perceived as having too much, even when they were dirt poor.  But the fact remains that Jews have never seen money as the root of any evil.  Stinginess, selfishness—those were problems.  If anything, the community would often look to the wealthy for support, and when given, those parnasim (philanthropists) were generously and genuinely lauded.  But it was never a matter of—“I don’t have enough because So-and-So has too much!”  That kind of thinking could only lead to a waste of human energy as people dream of a good others may not actually have.


Any resemblance of these political positions to the positions of actual candidates running for the presidency is purely coincidental.  And if either are suggestive of a particular candidate, that does not necessarily mean the candidate unworthy of our vote as other considerations, many other considerations, come into play when ultimately casting a vote.  Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile exercise to explore the extent to which a particular candidate reflects one’s cherished values.  And an even better exercise to explore is whether a particular party represents one’s cherished values.  Remember, a candidate for the presidency may promise this, that, or something else, but ultimately, the candidate is running not for dictatorship, but for presidency.  There will always be a Rottweiler Congress baring teeth, barking and frothing at the mouth to rip the president and presidential policies to shreds should either be in defiance of its will.  To really move policy forward, Congress and President should be of the same political persuasion.  When this is not the case, government action may come to halt as one branch vies with the other for supremacy.  None of us like that, but…  maybe that’s exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind in their attempt to limit the power of a mean spirited or imperious president who is suddenly found occupying the seat of the highest office in the land.

Monday, March 14, 2016

TRADITION AND A REALLY BIG CHANGE REGARDING KITNIYOT



Whenever I am told, as I am now and then, that there are people in the community who perceive Midway to be Orthodox, I have to chuckle.  We are about as far from Orthodoxy as the moon is from the earth.  But the unfunny dimension of this observation is that the Jewish people have moved so far away from tradition, that for many it is all but impossible to distinguish between Orthodoxy and people who are just plain serious about their Jewish identities.  Those crazy observant people—they’re all the same.  But we’re not all the same.  Midway is not Orthodox, though it is a place for Jews who are serious about their Jewish identities, and Jewish education, and Jewish tradition as well.  The sad truth is such seriousness scares a few people off.  We do our best to be welcoming, but it is a Conservative synagogue and we’ve got our standards.
We have also been accused of being Reform.  It’s a silly accusation, sort of like calling a banana a kiwi, but there you have it: condemnation from both ends of the religious spectrum.  In truth, we do change and there are those who see the specter of Reform behind ever change made.    But this is the nature of Conservative Judaism, a Judaism of both tradition and change.  We embrace tradition because it defines our congregation as Jewish.  We look to that tradition to determine how we are going to define ourselves as Jews.  And we believe that the traditions are so constructed as to enrich our lives.  The truths of these traditions are undeniable: prayer is about living life with gratitude, which alters how well we deal with adversity; kashrut demands that we think about what goes into our bodies, its importance reflected in the multi-billion dollar international business focused on nutrition and healthy-eating; Shabbat is about giving our bodies and minds a much needed break, which labor movements fought for, sometimes to the death, in order to secure that most fundamental right: rest.  And so it is important to remember that tradition endures not because of mindless habit, but because people have seen the value in it and the good it brings to life.
This preceding brief prologue is by way of introducing you to a change, a really big change in the ritual practice of Conservative Judaism:  the decision to permit the eating of rice, beans, corn, etc., during Pesah.  These were foods that were known as kitniyot—a term poorly translated as legumes—which Ashkenazic Jews largely refrained from during Pesah, and Jews of Sefardic provenance would unhesitatingly have on their Pesah tables.  
It was the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS), a committee of the Rabbinical Assembly instituted to deliberate over questions of Jewish law, that has made this change.  The CJLS examined the Ashkenazic minhag (custom) of refraining from kitnityot during Pesah and concluded that there was abundant reason to no longer promote it.  In order for a teshuvah to become an official position of the CJLS, it must garner six positive votes out of its membership of 25 voting rabbis and five non-voting laypeople.  As such, it is possible for the CJLS to adopt as official positions two contradictory opinions, one permitting and one prohibiting a specific ritual, which it has done in the past.  In the case of dropping kitniyot, the teshuvah (a paper which answers a specific question, typically translated as “responsum”) passed by a vote of 19 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstaining.  That’s a big margin of yeas.  A paper was also written in support of maintaining the traditional prohibition against kitnityot, but it failed to receive the necessary six votes, and is thus not an official position of the CJLS.  For some challenging Torah study, just click below for the full teshuvah:
So what do I think about all this? 
Among serious Jews, which I believe we all are, there is a very strong sentiment to be protective of Jewish custom.  As the phrase goes—minhag avoteinu b’yadeinu, the custom of our ancestors rest in our hands.  That is to say, if you and I do not take these customs seriously, who will?  In order to be a link in the chain of tradition, you better like to link, otherwise the chain is broken and we may alter Judaism irrevocably or worse yet, abandon it altogether.  All this is by way of saying minhagim (literally: customs) must be taken seriously.  And yet if our ancestors’ custom is in our hands, the fate of the custom also rests in our hands.  Do we ever abandon minhagim?  We do indeed.
There was a widespread minhag, for example, to rely on amulets for good fortune, or refuse to eat bread baked by a gentile, or refrain from writing down the Oral Torah.  These minhagim were abandoned because they were deemed to be minhag shtut (a silly custom) or in some other way offensive to the times, or even inimical to Jewish education.  Were the Oral Torah not written down, it could well have been lost.  So we wrote it down and ended up with 2,711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud, a continuing source of Jewish inspiration to students of Torah the world over.   And most of us no longer swing a chicken around our heads during the time of the High Holidays (kapparot), out of a distaste for superstition and huge respect for poultry.    But what about kitniyot?
No religious authority thinks of kitniyot as hametz, which is clearly prohibited on Pesah.  Kitniyot is simply not hametz.  There are only five grains that can become hametz, and they are:  wheat, barley, spelt, rye and oats.  Corn, beans and rice—not hametz.  Oddly enough, corn, beans and rice cannot be used as ingredients in matzah.  Only that which can become hametz can be used in the baking of matzah.  The Sefardic Jews who emanated from Spain and Portugal never had this minhag of kitniyot and happily could eat rice and beans over the festival.  So why did the Ashknazim adopt what can only be thought of as an unusual stringency?  Several reasons are suggested in the literature.
Some thought that it had to do with how it was made or how it was stored.  If the rice were made like a porridge, for example, perhaps it could be confused as oatmeal and then lead people to eat oatmeal, farina, etc., over Pesah, which you should not do.  Or perhaps the preparation of a bean or rice meal included its mixture with some sort of grain, and the thought of preparing the dish sans oats or absent rye was unthinkable.  Or perhaps the beans were stored in bins formerly used for wheat, in which case the beans would be covered with hametz dust.  It is interesting that the literature itself can offer no single answer on the why of the prohibition against kitniyot. 
For as many years as I have tried to explain this prohibition, I have gotten a host of puzzled facial expressions.  A photo anthology of people trying to discern the meaning of kitniyot would be most amusing.  People get hametz; they don’t get kitniyot, and they especially don’t get it when learning that Sefardim happily consume it free of rabbinic objection.  The kitniyot prohibition ends up being a gratuitous distinction between one major group of Jews and another.  The prohibition also inhibits unnecessarily the food choices available to vegetarians, some of whom use beans, corn and soy as significant protein substitutes for the meat, fish or cheese they do not consume.  The prohibition further limits everyone’s choice in Pesah-friendly foods complicating those who are adopting healthier modes of eating as they move away from red meats or eggs.  And the prohibition removes from the shopping list a host of substantially less expensive food items, which could bring down the total cost involved in our pre-Pesah shops.  Really—during the seder, when it comes to marror (bitter herbs) we could just pull out the pre-Pesah grocery receipt and gaze at it, allow everyone to scream in horror, and then go on with the seder.  That grocery receipt is one tough piece of marror.
For all these reasons, I want to let you know that I fully endorse the CJLS’ teshuvah, and over Pesah, I would happily partake of beans (if I ate them, but I don’t) or corn (which I do eat) or encourage others to do the same.  This is not a slippery slide toward Reform Judaism.  It is a decision based on the idea that Jewish law (Halakhah) is a reflection of God’s will, and that God’s will is always of value and meaning.  To the extent that the kitnityot minhag does not seem to be of value or meaning, or reflective of God at all, there is no reason to promote it any longer. But…  (isn’t there always a but?)
You know what is more important than eating kitniyot on Pesah?  Shalom bayit, peace within the home.  Now that the CJLS has redefined kashrut of over Pesah, you have to find out which members of your family can actually stomach this teshuvah (sorry—I couldn’t resist).  Just because the CJLS approves of something, doesn’t mean your family will.  Or even should.  Toward that end, as for the synagogue, I think we will keep it kitnityot-free (at least for now) so that no one is made to feel uncomfortable.  What the CJLS decision will allow all of us to do is open a conversation about kitniyot with the family.  That would be a great discussion.  Some questions to get the conversation going:
What does the observance of the prohibition against kitniyot mean to me?
How governed am I by the decisions of the CJLS?
If I abandon this minhag, what will I lose?  What will I gain?
Who within our family will we be discouraged from our Pesah table if we abandon the kitniyot prohibition?
Good questions.  Now just to throw a little reality check into this article…  I may permit kitniyot over Pesah, but my primary mission has always been and remains to increase the numbers of Jews who fully observe Pesah by refraining from real hametz for the eight days of the festival.  That concern will not make us Orthodox, but some in the community will certainly think it does.