Blogging Elul Day 24: End

On this last Shabbat, even as the drums of war sound, a bit of hope:

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.
~Sheenagh Pugh

Blogging Elul Day 23: Love

From my Yom Kippur Sermon back in 2011

At my installation I shared a story with you about a rabbi named Nathan Finkel, who lived towards the end of the 19th century and headed a yeshiva in Slobodka, a small town in Lithuania. On cold, dark winter mornings, it is said, the rabbi used to get up early, cross over the bridge and go into town. He would stop off in all the shtibelech, all the little prayer houses and places of study, one after another. And in each small, dark room, he would light a fire in the oven and stoke the flames before continuing on his rounds. 

“Why did he do it?” His closest friends would ask. And he would say: If all the prayer houses and places of study are warm early in the morning, then coachmen, porters and all kinds of working people will come in to get warm - and then they will find themselves in a sacred place. [Norman Lamm, The Good Society: Jewish Ethics in Action, p.31]. 

To bring people into holy space is an act of love, but what makes it a holy space? The act of love itself. 

They will come in and get warm. How we light the fires of the stoves, how we stoke the flames of commitment, will be up to all of us.

 

Blogging Elul Day 20: Judge, Unetaneh Tokeph (or, Who Shall I Say Is Calling?)

Excerpted from a sermon I gave a couple of years ago:

Once a student of the Ba’al Shem Tov decided he was going to play a trick on his teacher. He caught a butterfly in his hands, cupped them very carefully together so the butterfly was hidden, and brought it to his teacher. He asked the BESHT, is the butterfly in my hands alive or dead? If his teacher said alive, he would kill it. if he said dead, he would release the butterfly into the air. So how did the ba’al shem tov respond to schrodinger’s butterfly? He looked at his student and said, “whether it’s alive or dead is entirely in your hands.” 

We live in a society with an ever-shorter attention span that seeks to minimize the actual import and impact of our actions. The High Holiday liturgy, especially unetaneh tokeph, takes us and our choices seriously. They remind us that what we do has cosmic significance. And in a world where everyone is trying to sell you something, to coddle you and fawn over you, to be disturbed and challenged is a luxury. Again, to quote [Larry] Hoffman: 

prayer is not supposed to satisfy us. It is intended to get us in touch with centuries past, minds that are not our own, and attitudes that we may find difficult, but that should not on that account be trashed as if they must obviously be less cogent than what we, nowadays, take for granted. 

Unetaneh tokeph challenges us. As we read of God opening the book of our lives, we open that book as well, and recount all the events of the past year we’ve signed off on. As we read the various ways people die, we’re reminded of our mortality, a fact we flee constantly, afraid to acknowledge  the truth that all of us are afforded limited time. And as we read of how prayer, repentance and charity soften the harshness of the decree, we are reminded that, to quote Rabbi Soloveitchik, “one’s mission in this world is to turn fate into destiny.” None of these things take away our mortality; we are finite, a dream soon forgotten, but this prayer and those like it show us that frailty and humility are not sources of weakness or failure, but of wisdom and strength. And that while we may experience loss, and pain, and bitterness, we can take comfort in a strong community of worship, find love though acts of forgiveness and repentance, and remove bitterness from our lives and the lives of others through the charity of our hands. Or, to quote someone far wiser than me:  we are moral creatures, we are vulnerable creatures. Vulnerability wins. This is the realest thing anyone anyone will tell us in ritual. 

Blogging Elul Day 19: Ask--How Can You Help?

In a few hours, I'll be taking 15-ish individuals to dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery. It's a thank you for responding positively to a question: "Can you help?"

Each of them (plus several others who can't make it tonight) helped lead services this summer. Some lead Torah Study discussions, or read Torah, or sang, or lead the service, or gave a D'var Torah. Some worked with partners (many hands make light work, after all), and some worked solo. Some had lead services many times; some, a few years ago, hadn't led since their bar or bat mitzvah (if ever), and couldn't imagine being responsible for a congregation's worship experience. All of them, to a person, found the experience meaningful (some more challenging than others). Most importantly, all of them, whether they were eager or intimidated, were glad to be asked.

The best congregations are those that ask questions. Sometimes we ask the wrong ones. We spend more time asking how we can make the experience better, or what people want. But the most important question in any community is "can you help?"

Asking to help allows people to have real ownership over the experience, to learn, to connect with others in a deeper way, to feel empowered. Of course, asking new people, or different people, can involve the possibility that we'll have to do some teaching, or that people will make mistakes, or that it won't be perfect. But then, if we don't, we miss out on the opportunity to learn something ourselves, to see a different way of doing things, to get fresh perspective, to expand our world.

Yesterday in Torah study I asked the congregation what they're carrying into the new year. I'm going to add an additional question, for each of you in your own communities: what gifts do you have to share, and can you help?

Blogging Elul Day 19: Ask

In a few hours, I'll be taking 15-ish individuals to dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery. It's a thank you for responding positively to a question: "Can you help?"

Each of them (plus several others who can't make it tonight) helped lead services this summer. Some lead Torah Study discussions, or read Torah, or sang, or lead the service, or gave a D'var Torah. Some worked with partners (many hands make light work, after all), and some worked solo. Some had lead services many times; some, a few years ago, hadn't led since their bar or bat mitzvah (if ever), and couldn't imagine being responsible for a congregation's worship experience. All of them, to a person, found the experience meaningful (some more challenging than others). Most importantly, all of them, whether they were eager or intimidated, were glad to be asked.

The best congregations are those that ask questions. Sometimes we ask the wrong ones. We spend more time asking how we can make the experience better, or what people want. But the most important question in any community is "can you help?"

Asking to help allows people to have real ownership over the experience, to learn, to connect with others in a deeper way, to feel empowered. Of course, asking new people, or different people, can involve the possibility that we'll have to do some teaching, or that people will make mistakes, or that it won't be perfect. But then, if we don't, we miss out on the opportunity to learn something ourselves, to see a different way of doing things, to get fresh perspective, to expand our world.

Yesterday in Torah study I asked the congregation what they're carrying into the new year. I'm going to add an additional question, for each of you in your own communities: what gifts do you have to share, and can you help?

Blogging Elul Day 19: Ask: Angels and Humans

The rabbi of Kobryn once looked at the Heavens and cried: “Angel, little angel! It is no great trick to be an angel up there in the sky! You don’t have to eat and drink, beget children and earn money. Just you come down to earth and worry about eating and drinking, about raising children and earning money, and we shall see if you keep on being an angel. If you succeed you may boast—but not now!”

-From Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim 

Blogging Elul Day 18: Pray

People expect a Jewish prayer book to express what a Jew should believe about God, Israel and the Torah, and about the meaning of human life and the destiny of mankind. We must not disappoint them in that expectation. But unless we eliminate from the traditional text statements of beliefs that are untenableand of desires which we do not or should not cherish, we mislead the simple and alienate the sophisticated.

Kaplan viewed prayer as an expression of dogma: say what you mean, and mean what you say. But the great theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, writing in the same period as Kaplan, pointed out the difficulties with Kaplan's proposed solution of radical editing: "True, the text of the prayer book presents difficulties to many people. But the crisis of prayer is not a problem of the text. It is a problem of the soul. The Siddur must not be used as a scapegoat. A revision of the prayer book will not solve the crisis of prayer. What we need is a revision of the soul, a new heart rather than a new text.... What we need is a sympathetic prayer book exegesis." Although Heschel never fully articulated what a "sympathetic prayer book exegesis" might look like, I want to offer one possibility grounded in the most basic Rabbinic prayer in the siddur: the Amidah.

-Rabbi Elie Kaufner, Empowered Judaism

Blogging Elul Day 17: Awaken

…Jewish leaders today, more and more, have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential of all things. They have become God-wrestlers, surprising even themselves. They know instinctively what they did not always know: that the Jewish people cannot be a secular entity - it is a circle with God at the center. And they speak a language that is unabashedly religious. In a culture where celebrity secrets and the big thrill matter most, Reform Jewish leaders are asking the right questions: What type of Torah lives in our souls? How do we bring our people back to Sinai?

…Is there anyone in this room who would not agree that there is a literacy problem - indeed, a literacy crisis - that exists in our community? Everyone knows the deficit from which we suffer. Ours is a uniquely ignorant generation, a generation truly without precedent in all of Jewish history. And the great irony of our ignorance, of course, is that we are simultaneously the best educated generation of Jews that has ever lived. Wonderfully educated in the ways of the world, we are abysmally ignorant in the ways of our people.

Too many of us can name the mother of Jesus, but not the mother of Moses. We know the author of Das Kapital, but not the author of the Guide for the Perplexed. And when we do study, we have too often have been satisfied with a kind of learning that is largely cosmetic, and which, if you were remarkably stupid, would be edifying. But of course we are not remarkably stupid; we are remarkably smart, and hungry for the intellectual splendor and the deep humanity of our heritage.

And why is this so important? Because Torah study is the motor which drives Jewish life, and whenever communities neglect it, they have already started on the road to decline. Because you do not wake up one morning and say: "I'm not going to be Jewish anymore." Disengagement from Judaism is a process, and it always begins when we turn our back on the study of Torah.

                                                -Eric Yoffie, UAHC, Biennial address, Dallas 1997