Chanukah 2014: Yotzeir Or

Rabbi Eliezer said: In the light that God created on the first day, a person could see from one end of the world to the other. When God foresaw the misdeeds of future generations, God hid this light from them, reserving it for the righteous of the future.

Asked the disciples: "where was it hidden?"
He replied, "In the Torah."
They asked, "If so, will the righteous find something of this hidden light when they study Torah?"
He replied, "They will find and continue to find."
They asked, "If so, what should the righteous do when they find some of this hidden light in the Torah?"
He replied, "They should reveal it in the way they live." (From Martin Buber's Or HaGanuz)

I shared that story back at Rosh Hashanah, and it seemed appropriate to revisit it now. For one, we are in our season of Light: It seems this time of year we hear an awful lot about light. Everyone from the president to David Wolpe to every Jewish musician wants to say something about being a light, or lighting the way for others, or other really lovely ideas and images. For another, we are in our season of darkness. I don’t just mean the darkness of winter; now seems like an especially dark time in the world. From the threats Israel faces within and without to our own anxiety about our city, to the deaths of so many children in Pakistan, lights snuffed out too soon by barbaric murder, the words of Jacob Rader Marcus (z’l) seem awfully appropriate: it’s dark out there.

We need light, our prayerbook reminds us, when gloom darkens our home. And every morning we praise God as Yotzeir Or, the creator of Light. Not just at Chanukah time or in the winter, but every day. We do this in order to offer Praise to the One who began creation with the words, “Let there be light”. We do this in the hopes that God will continue to shine light on all of us: the light of renewal, of learning, of joy. Or chadash al Tzion tair: let a new light shine on Zion! But we also read this prayer as an instruction. For it isn’t only God that is Yotzeir Or; we have the power to be Yotzeir Or. It maybe God who created light, but we can bring forth light in the way we live. It would be easy to sink into the darkness of selfishness, of cynicism, the gloom of defeat. But we may not, we must not. No matter how dark our world seems, we are obligated to shine a light to those around us through the way we live Torah.

One taper isn’t enough to light a small room, never mind the world, but one taper is enough to light another. And another, and another, without being diminished itself.  We call that light the Shamash, a word that we say means ‘helper’, but is the same word as the sun in Hebrew. As we celebrate Chanukah, that holiday that means ‘dedication’, let’s rededicate ourselves to being the Shamash, to revealing the light hidden within not only ourselves but each other, the light of Torah. Thus we may chase away the darkness and illuminate the whole world with a new light, a light of hope.

She is more right(eous) than I!

One of my favorite Chasidic stories is about the Kotzker Rebbe, one of my Jewish heroes. He asked his students where is God? They looked at him baffled. Surely God is everywhere? The Kotzker Rebbe replied with a smile, God is only where you let God in.

It is a lovely story, and you’ve heard me tell it before, but what does it mean to let God in? Is it a profession of faith? Okay, well, what is a profession of faith? We usually understand it to mean a deep believe in a particular way, to to the exclusion of others. Perhaps even exclusion of other ways to a fault. Our truth is the real truth, the only truth, the only way.  Letting God In, under that rubric, might then be understood as a kind of a/b question: yes or no, right or wrong. Or as Heidi Klum puts it on Project Runway: either you're in or you're out.

That may be how we tend to understand faith and belief, but I don't know that's defensible in Judaism. Time and again we see God upholding not the one who is in but the one who is just.

Case in point: Tamar, from this week’s Torah portion. Cast aside as damaged goods by Judah, her father-in-law, because each son who married her in succession died, he never stops to think that he may be the one in the wrong. Instead, the brother who sold Joseph into slavery and left his father assumes he is right. It takes Tamar sleeping with him in the guise of a sacred prostitute and revealing his identity as the father of her children to proclaim that she is more tzedek than he. More right, but also more just.

We are increasingly like our namesake Judah. He couldn't conceive of s world where Tamar's needs were of equal values and his sons may be wicked. Likewise, we are uninterested in hearing other narratives that run counter to our own. We continue to assume the world is a/b: either you're right or you're wrong. Call it polarized, or chauvinistic, or what have you, the scenario is the same. And I repeats in the situation at UVA, in Ferguson and System Island, between Jews and Palestinians, between Jews and Jews, and here in Wilmington. But it is possible to hold more than one narrative as true. It can be true that the police mostly serve honorably and that there is a problem with race and class in this country. It is possible that Rolling Stone blew it on a journalistic integrity AND there is a problem of sexual assault on college campuses. It is possible that Wilmington has terrible problems, and is a wonderful community. And I can go on and on, not just on big social issues, but our personal relationships as well. How often do we feel we aren't listened to by the people in our circle? But we need to see the other side, EVEN AND ESPECIALLY when we disagree. Even if the other side isn't trying too hard to hear our side. Even when we know we're right.

The great theologian Krister Stendahl said, "We should learn to live in Holy Envy" - Rabbi Gary Bretton Grenatoor  understood that to mean: that truth can come from any source and to be respectful, and even open to truths that come from outside our own tradition.  Teach us, O God, to be able to say, even and especially when it’s hard, even at great cost to ourselves that he, that she, is more right than I. Teach us to put ego aside and focus on learning rather than winning. Then, may it be said they that we let God in. Amen.

Vayishlach, Breath and Not Letting Go

There’s an iyyun, a meditation that I love, that I learned from Levi Kelman of Kol Hanheshama. I use from time to time in services, especially with kids. I ask everyone to close their eyes, take a deep breath in, hold it while thinking on the past week, and then as they release their breath, they let the week go. The idea is to breathe Shabbat in, and breathe all the stresses of the week out; to draw in and hold onto that which is most sacred and precious, and release that which is most spiritually toxic, as easily as we breathe.

Breathing and the idea of breath is a powerful symbol of our tradition. God breathes life into us. It is through the breath of God that the Sea is parted. My teacher Rabbi Larry Kushner interpreted that God’s real name, the Ineffable Name, is a true, real breath, and increasingly we find the Shema recited in Reform congregations as it is at Rabbi Kelman’s congregation in Israel, as every word requiring a breath of its own. Breathing, which should be easy and natural, becomes a manipulative in meditation techniques, in Judaism and other traditions.  

Breathing should feel easy. This Shabbat, breathing doesn’t feel easy. I am, of course, speaking of Eric Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe” said as he was strangled by a police officer, a policeman who will now go free, despite video evidence that suggests there should at least be a trial. There is a palpable sense that the very right to breathe, to exist, is being undermined for a whole class, a whole race of people; that their breath is not worth our breath.

There is a struggle in this week’s Torah portion: a struggle between Jacob and…someone. Who that person is—God? An Angel? Esau? Jacob himself?—has provided much fodder for commentary, but I’m less interested in the who than in the why and the what. There is a struggle in our Torah this week, as Jacob wrestles with identity, with survival, with his blessing. He fights to a stalemate. He is wounded, permanently. He demands a blessing of his assailant—I will not let you go unless you bless me—and receives a change of name, and a change of status. His struggle changes everything, and never really goes away. There is no easy breath for Jacob, for Israel; only struggle. We are still struggling. I’m still struggling. I cannot shrug this off or let this go. I cannot, and I will not. It’s isn’t merely that we aren’t living in a post-racial America, or that we cannot hear each other’s narratives over the din of our own—though both statements are true. It’s that we’re pretending that the struggle doesn’t exist—even when the evidence is filmed and replayed over and over again. We are endlessly looking for things to be easy, for solutions to be simple, uncomplicated, without nuance. We want the answers to come easily, but they won’t.

We, of all people, should know and understand this. And it’s time for us—for each one of us—to stand up and banish any thought of ease. We need to turn outward, facing the struggle, face injustice rather than inward, away from it. We need to talk about race. We need to talk about discrimination in all its forms. We need to speak beyond mere platitudes. There is no struggle in platitudes. There is no challenge there, and therefore no blessing. There’s only empty breath. We need to wrestle deep within ourselves whether or not we are backing away from the struggle ourselves, for whatever reason, and explore why, or else every statement we make is an empty breath. Yes, when we struggle with injustice it feels like a stalemate. Yes, when we struggle we may be wounded. But through the struggle we encounter blessing, as Jacob did. Through the struggle we change ourselves for the better. Through our struggle we change everything, permanently.

We begin with breath, and we end with breath. We breathe in what is precious and holy, and breathe out what is spiritually toxic. But we cannot breathe out struggle. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, writing about Garner’s death, wrote: “At the core is the breath, instinctive, not given, not taken, it is not a privilege or a right, it is even independent of oneself.” So is the breath, and so is the struggle. The breath rises, and we rise to meet the struggle, to face it, and to receive the blessing that emerges from it. We are tempted to let go, but we dare not. We must not. We must never let it go.

Vayeitzei and Dissatisfaction

Rabbi Yair Robinson

Parashat Vayeitzei

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe,flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.  

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise. 

-Jane Kenyon

This Thanksgiving I felt dissatisfied. Not with the food, or the company. Not with my family, gathered around one table or another. I know that I am blessed beyond all reasonable expectation.  

But I’m thinking about so many communities—and families—in despair.

How could we not think about Ferguson, her people weeping, their city burning?

How could we not think about those four families in Har Nof, and the one further north, sitting shiva, crying over lost fathers and husbands?

How could we not think about our neighbors in Browntown, on 23^rd st., on Maryland Ave. who were kept awake this week by the sound of gun shots in their communities?

How could we not think of those who, in their rush to protect the Jewish state, are tearing the very fabric that holds it together with a law that is, at best, meaningless, and at worst, bigoted?

How could we not think of those who, in their pursuit of justice, merely blame the other rather than hear the pain in each other’s’ voices, and feel the pain in each other’s’ hearts?

How could we not think of those who had the no-choice yesterday of being with their family or going to a job that pays little under the threat of having no job at all?

 Tonight, I am dissatisfied. I am sad. I am wrought up.

But as Rabbi David Wolpe reminded us this week, Judaism is the religion and language of dissatisfaction. The answer is not to ‘let it go’, with a shrug of the shoulder and look of surrender on the face. No. We are meant to be dissatisfied. We are a people acutely aware that our blessings must be numbered and measured, so that we may see the suffering around us and embrace it.

I was asked this week which character of the Torah I identified the most. The answer is Jacob, for two things he says, one in this week’s portion and one in next week’s. The first: God was in this place and I didn’t know it. This is as true a sentence as any. We walk through life too often blind to our own blessings, blinded by our first-world problems, and Jacob calls us to put them aside and see what is really before us. The other is “I will not let you go until you bless me”. That is the posture and action of one who recognizes the struggle and takes it as his name—Yisrael—that we must embrace one another all the more fiercely, all the more tightly, with greater intention and intentionality. Embrace one another truly—including each other’s’ faults and foibles. Embrace one another and hold on for dear life, in struggle and love, until we see the blessing instead of the curse; until we can be the blessing for one another, instead of the curse. Embrace them: as tutors in hard-hit schools, as donors for troubled communities in need, as citizens wrought up over the injustice we see around us, but most of all as friends whose act of love and kindness can be all the difference for the person in front of us, whose struggle we cannot see.

Yesterday I was in Washington. Elishai’s grandparents—healthy, active—took him to see various places in our nation’s capital. My wife and I shared some time with her longtime friends. We called my parents and sister—all of whom healthy and well— on Cape Cod. We ate well. It might have been otherwise. We know too many for whom it is otherwise in our world, in our community, perhaps even in our own inner circle. So let’s open our eyes and see the blessing around us, and then embrace them, embrace the suffering other, and hold them, until we may be the blessing for them as well. Kein Yehi Ratzon. 

Vayeitzei and Dissatisfaction

Rabbi Yair Robinson

Parashat Vayeitzei

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe,flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.  

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise. 

-Jane Kenyon

This Thanksgiving I felt dissatisfied. Not with the food, or the company. Not with my family, gathered around one table or another. I know that I am blessed beyond all reasonable expectation.  

But I’m thinking about so many communities—and families—in despair.

How could we not think about Ferguson, her people weeping, their city burning?

How could we not think about those four families in Har Nof, and the one further north, sitting shiva, crying over lost fathers and husbands?

How could we not think about our neighbors in Browntown, on 23^rd st., on Maryland Ave. who were kept awake this week by the sound of gun shots in their communities?

How could we not think of those who, in their rush to protect the Jewish state, are tearing the very fabric that holds it together with a law that is, at best, meaningless, and at worst, bigoted?

How could we not think of those who, in their pursuit of justice, merely blame the other rather than hear the pain in each other’s’ voices, and feel the pain in each other’s’ hearts?

How could we not think of those who had the no-choice yesterday of being with their family or going to a job that pays little under the threat of having no job at all?

 Tonight, I am dissatisfied. I am sad. I am wrought up.

But as Rabbi David Wolpe reminded us this week, Judaism is the religion and language of dissatisfaction. The answer is not to ‘let it go’, with a shrug of the shoulder and look of surrender on the face. No. We are meant to be dissatisfied. We are a people acutely aware that our blessings must be numbered and measured, so that we may see the suffering around us and embrace it.

I was asked this week which character of the Torah I identified the most. The answer is Jacob, for two things he says, one in this week’s portion and one in next week’s. The first: God was in this place and I didn’t know it. This is as true a sentence as any. We walk through life too often blind to our own blessings, blinded by our first-world problems, and Jacob calls us to put them aside and see what is really before us. The other is “I will not let you go until you bless me”. That is the posture and action of one who recognizes the struggle and takes it as his name—Yisrael—that we must embrace one another all the more fiercely, all the more tightly, with greater intention and intentionality. Embrace one another truly—including each other’s’ faults and foibles. Embrace one another and hold on for dear life, in struggle and love, until we see the blessing instead of the curse; until we can be the blessing for one another, instead of the curse. Embrace them: as tutors in hard-hit schools, as donors for troubled communities in need, as citizens wrought up over the injustice we see around us, but most of all as friends whose act of love and kindness can be all the difference for the person in front of us, whose struggle we cannot see.

Yesterday I was in Washington. Elishai’s grandparents—healthy, active—took him to see various places in our nation’s capital. My wife and I shared some time with her longtime friends. We called my parents and sister—all of whom healthy and well— on Cape Cod. We ate well. It might have been otherwise. We know too many for whom it is otherwise in our world, in our community, perhaps even in our own inner circle. So let’s open our eyes and see the blessing around us, and then embrace them, embrace the suffering other, and hold them, until we may be the blessing for them as well. Kein Yehi Ratzon. 

Lech Lecha: Be A Blessing

This past week I had the blessing of driving down to Baltimore with Rabbi Beals for a special AIPAC presentation. The American Israel Political Action Committee brought in Ari Shavit to speak in the Baltimore area, and he gave a rabbis-only presentation at lunchtime. I have not read Shavit’s book yet, but I have frequently read his articles in Ha’aretz and I find him to be the most lucid writer on Israel’s current situation.

This being an AIPAC program, he could have started with a discussion of the war in Gaza, or the kidnapping of the three teenagers, or ISIS or Iran or the current ‘crisis’ in the American-Israel relationship as Yair Lapid refers to it, but instead he chose to begin with a story, a true story, the story of his great grandfather.

Shavit’s great grandfather was a proper British Victorian gentleman who found his way to the port of Jaffa in 1897. He had grown up in England as a full citizen of the Empire, then the most powerful and progressive nation in the world. He loved that Empire, loved the English language, loved the Queen, Shakespeare, had been educated at Cambridge, did very well for himself in business, and was said to even look like the Prince of Wales. Why, then, Shavit wondered, did this successful, assimilated British gentleman, the model of success, make his way to a hard-scrabble port city, unwelcoming, on the seeming other side of the world? What would make him leave?

That, my friends, is the fundamental question of Judaism, the very question that begins this epic journey we are all participating in to this very day. “The Eternal said to Avram, Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you.” Forget about the stories of the Idol Shop, and Avram being the first monotheist and all that jazz—what makes a person uproot themselves from their native land and family home to go to a totally different place, an uncomfortable place, a place where he will be a stranger, with no connections, where he won’t even speak the language, where he will be rootless, where he will be the Other?

Avram’s story is Shavit’s great-grandfather’s story, and is our own story. For Shavit’s Great-Grandfather, he left his comfortable life because, according to him, the early Zionists were prescient in two specific ways. One, they realized that Europe, where they had been—and continue to be—the ultimate Other, Jewish life was ultimately doomed. They did not—could not—see how destructive Europe would become, but they understood that a Jewish life of progressive values could no longer exist there. Second, unless you were Orthodox and willing to remain within the walls of the ghetto—even carrying the ghetto with you—the only way to create a progressive, modern Jewish identity was to be willing to uproot themselves and their families, go to a foreign place, leave everything they understood about the world behind, and even re-create an all-but forgotten language in order to revitalize the Jewish experience. Zionism, so often castigated as racist and incompatible with modern values, was actually the greatest, most just revolution of the modern era, and it saved Judaism.

Shavit’s family story is Avram’s story, is our story. Avram leaves Paddan-Aram to be a blessing, that all the families of the world shall bless themselves by him and his descendants. That blessing could not be realized in the old country, where people were set in their ways. That blessing could not be realized with the temptation of assimilation, where the lone voice of justice and light would get drowned out by the cacophony of poverty and darkness. Which doesn’t mean there aren’t dangers and anxieties: by embracing the role of Other, we are often vilified. There is no place in the world the Jew can live in isolation; even in the Land of Israel is an Arab population galvanized to seek their own destiny. Avram, for all God’s blessings, agonizes whether there will be another generation, never mind descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. We, too, wring our hands over whether our children can and will choose to be both progressive and Jewish, whether our values are compatible, or whether we should release our Otherness entirely. Zionism, born of a progressive ideal, is increasingly misused by nationalists, Jewish chauvinists and religious extremists, with results such as last week when women had to smuggle a barbie-sized torah scroll to the kotel to celebrate a bat mitzvah, or when Shavit got married by his rabbi in Jerusalem, and it wasn’t recognized, but the second ‘official’ marriage in England by a non-Jewish clerk in an office in London was.

This summer, indeed this past year, we’ve been reminded of our Otherness again and again. We have been reminded by well-meaning non-Jews who cannot relate to our experience, and by extremists in our own camp we’d sooner avoid. We have a choice before us, Avram’s choice: we could try to make a go of it and convince ourselves and them that we aren’t different. Or, to borrow a shopworn phrase, we could ‘lean in’ to our otherness, and become the blessing we are meant to be. That means leaving our comfort zones. That means speaking out against injustice wherever we see it; the soft bigotry of the European-American left, and the hard bigotry of the Ultra-Nationalist Right. We must challenge the false equivalencies of Zionism and Racism, but we must also work to combat the bigots in our midst who would maintain a status quo that satisfies no one: not the Jew, not the Palestinian, not the woman, not the young person asked to protect his country. We must own Zionism, and not let others define what that means for us.

What must we do? We have our own elections next week where we can make our voices—our progressive voices—heard. And The World Zionist Organization elections begin next month. The WZO sets the policy of the Jewish Agency—including financial policies, and it is essential that our progressive voice is heard. I encourage you to register and vote for ARZA, the Reform Movement’s Zionist organization, to promote our progressive values. And it’s not just about voting; when our kids come home challenged by a social studies project that casts Israel in a bad light, when we hear the voice of the disempowered in our own community grow ever fainter, when we see poverty and violence snuff out any hope in this world, when we see our fellow Jews attempt to enforce some romanticized version of Orthodoxy as a way of ‘keeping the peace’, we must act.  It isn’t enough to hold anxiously to our values here within our own House; we need to bring that forward to the community around us.

To be a Blessing is not easy; the challenges are legion, and there are days when it would just be easier to nod and smile. But like Avram our father and the Zionists of old, we are called to a journey—from ease to action, from comfort to justice, from darkness to light. May we find our way together on this journey, and may each of us strive to be a blessing. Amen. 

Noah and Anxiety: or what happens when we focus on the wrong thing

This past week's sermon!

So I’m at the JCC working on my elliptical and the person to the left of me, a longtime acquaintance, starts gesturing at the TVs. “Ah, I hate it! I hate coming in and seeing these things. It puts me in a bad mood all day.”

She was not angry at TVs themselves, mind you. The electrical rectangles hadn’t done anything to offend her personally. It was, rather, the content on those screens. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. And what were they showing? We’re all going to die of Ebola. That is, assuming ISIS doesn’t get us first. Or perhaps the various citizens and civil servants of Ferguson? Or the Russian army? Each screen with its own brand and style of hyperventilation, each filling the air with nothing but anxiety and, frankly, nonsense. But there it is, staring us in the face, trying to rile us up to be equally anxious consumers of more anxiety. So we steep in it, increasingly convinced that the world is falling apart, that things are worse than they used to be, that everything is failing around us. So even if we don’t become anxious ourselves, we become cynical, convinced that no good can come of it, that any solution proposed is meaningless, hype, defective in some way, or detrimental; that in fact doing some good is worse than doing nothing.

We are convinced that the sky is falling, or at least there are those working very hard to convince us that the sky is falling. At the same time, we’re being told that there’s nothing to do, nor nothing we can do, about the injustice, inequality or environmental issues that we are facing. Our voices are too small, our actions are empty, our capacity limited. As Leonard Cohen growls, “everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost.”

Well if that’s really the state of the world, I don’t believe it. I think that’s the product news media wants to sell us—crises increase ratings, after all. This isn’t to say the world is sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, either; of course we have our challenges, and those challenges are real. But I, for one, am tired of being told the problems are too big, the solutions too grandiose. And I am tired of manufactured crises that obfuscate real challenges in our world.

In the Torah portion for this week, in parashat Noach, humanity faced a real crisis: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence.  When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth,  God said to Noah, "I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth.” Again, we focus on the wrong thing—we are distracted by the Mabul, the flood that will come; we don’t look at the cause of that flood. The problem wasn’t the weather; the problem was the violence—Hamas, by the way, is the word used—in the land.

So it is with us: A few sick people in Dallas from a weak virus masks the thousands dead in Africa, and the lack of support we provide to deal with even more virulent illnesses—more people will die of the flu in America this year than Ebola. ISIS does not currently threaten our border, but it does reveal the stresses in our alliances, and soft thinking by our top diplomats about the Middle East, and reveal how we so often see the other with suspicion. I don’t know what happened in Ferguson; I do know that we have a problem with the way we treat black men, among many, many others who are both actively and passively disempowered in our society. We have challenges, friends, but the real challenge too frequently isn’t the one we’re focused on. We look on helplessly at the problems we can’t fix, taking our eyes off the ones we can and ought and must.

When God commands Noah to build the ark, he is given a strange commandment: to build a “tzohar”, which could mean roof, but also mean ‘skylight’. Who puts a skylight in an ark when the rains are about to come? Someone who needs to know the sun will come out again, and needs to see that sun rise. Someone who needs to see that it isn’t dark out there, that the good guys haven’t lost, that the war is not over, that the challenge remains, but we can step up to that challenge. Gloom may surround us; it may blare at us over the airwaves. But let us make skylights in our lives to let the sun in, for it will return again.

Erev Yom Kippur: The Dash Between the Numbers

Here's my Kol Nidre sermon.
 Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                        Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
--Walt Whitman
 Just outside of Camp Harlam there’s a tiny cemetery, the Dotter’s Corner Cemetery Association. It sits on a hill with a gorgeous view overlooking the Pocono Mountains, the stones facing east toward the dawn as it rises over the trees. If you’ve ever been to the Chapel On The Hill at Harlam, the view from this cemetery is a very close second. The field—barely the size of a back yard—is filled with an amazing collection of stones. Some date back to the early 19^th century, and clearly belong to the original Dotter family, whose farm they must have stood upon. Others reflect the evolution of the community: civil war veterans, children who died of the Spanish flu. Names like Serfass and Bruch and Martini and Schwartz reflect the diversity of the community.  Some stones are ornate, with images of the deceased, or of their careers (lots of trucks and farm equipment). Others are marked with only simple stones, marked only with initials, or sometimes a piece of slate with no name, a cross made out of iron pipe. In a few cases it’s only the plastic signs left by the funeral home from the service itself, going back to the 1970s. 

It’s a humbling place, this cemetery on Dotter’s Corner, on this hill facing the dawn. When I’m at camp I walk through it most mornings, looking at the names and the dates, or the iron cross or the piece of slate, and wondering the story of the person beneath that stone.
Every stone has a story, be it in Kresgeville or Wilmington, or Arlington, or anywhere. When we look at a marker or a headstone, we focus on the name and the dates: the year of birth and the year of death. But the most important mark in the stone is none of those things, nor any slogan or blessing that may be found; it’s the dash between the years; because it is in that dash that the story of that life is found.  In that dash are all the games the person played as a child, his relationship with his parents and friends and siblings. In that dash are his illnesses and injuries and defeats. In that dash are his first loves and broken hearts, his days of boredom and moments of learning. In that dash are the careers he made, the family he loved, the opportunities he missed. In that dash are the cars he drove and the violence he experienced, the mundane moments and the profound moments and the silly moments.

I have these same thoughts every time I go to our cemetery, or the one on Foulk Rd. I look at the stones and recognize the names of people I’ve buried, and I remember their stories. I remember our conversations and conversations with their families. I remember how they lived their values, how they cared for their loved ones, how they thought of themselves and how others thought of them. I think of those stories that reside in the dash between the numbers on their stones. That is why we are so heartbroken at Holocaust memorials and tombs of the Unknown Soldier, at mass graves of the innocent dead, at monuments by the sea. For they are dedicated to those whose names we will never know, whose dates are left blank, and whose stories are too often swept into the eddies of time, unspoken and unremembered.  And without those stories, without the dash between the dates, we are nothing. 

And you know something? Each of us, every one of us, will be marked by a stone, with our name at the top, and our dates of birth and death underneath. The question is, what will fall in the dash for each of us? Who will remember our story, and what story will they remember? Will we be remembered for blessing or curse, for helping someone in a time of need, or an unkind word that cut to the quick? Will we be remembered for our vanities or for our sacrifices? I raise this not to be morbid, but to tell a truth. It is others who will tell our stories for us, whether we like it or not—our friends, our family, our children and grandchildren, and we’ll never know if they get it right. But we do get to decide what happens inside that dash, how we live our lives, how we live up to our values so that perhaps, when others see that dash on our stones, we will be remembered for blessing.
Tomorrow we will stand and confess our sins, our mistakes, the times we went astray. We will recite Unetaneh Tokeph, which reminds us that we do not control the dates of our lives: “On Rosh Hashanah it is written and Yom Kippur it is sealed: who shall live and who shall die…” We wish we had some control over those numbers, but we do not, and we chafe and groan and rail at how unfair life seems. And tomorrow we will also hear the words of Moses, who tells us that we should choose life that we may live. Not life in general, but what sort of life is worth living! We cannot choose the numbers on the stone, but we can choose what happens inside the dash. We can choose a life worth living. What is the life we will choose? What is the life we are choosing? No one has control over that but us, each one of us. And we owe it to those stones that await us to live our lives most fully. 

The powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. Tonight we recommit ourselves to writing that verse. May we write them with care. Amen. 

Doing The Best I Can: Yom Kippur Morning

Friends: below you'll find my second sermon for Yom Kippur.

Who am I? I am me.
Where am I? I am here.
When is it? It is now.
What am I doing? I’m doing the best I can. 

The time has come. The gates of prayer and repentance are open; they have been open for ten days. Today is the last day. Soon, too soon, as the sun descends, as we ourselves grow exhausted physically and emotionally and spiritually, the gates will begin to close. We have had a whole year to make amends, to correct our wrongs, to look deeply within ourselves and do the hard work of turning toward the right path, the path we know is right. Now we have had a week-and-a-half sprint to the finish line, an intensive. The year is new—will we be new, or bogged down by the same old same old, the same rag and bone shop of the heart that weighs us down year after year, the same old hurts, the same old grudges, the same old patterns of behavior? Or will we seek to change our ways, to change ourselves, to realign our expectations within and without? Will this be a new year, or same stuff, different day? 

Who am I? I wish I could say I was new and renewed, but I am not. I try, I strive, I work against my nature. Perhaps this year I can tweak at the corners some little habit or tic; but I am me. And I don’t want to accept me for who I am. I don’t want to own it. I want the idealized me, the platonic me, the me I want other people to see. But what would it mean, instead, for me to accept myself? Not accept what’s wrong in order to change it, but be totally aware and pay attention to who I really am, what my needs are, where my soul lives, rather than focus so much on what I think other people need to see? Would I be happier? Would I be more at peace? Instead of fighting against my nature, would I then give myself the opportunity to do real transformation? We read in Torah this morning—God’s expectations are not in heaven, nor across the sea. They aren’t baffling or beyond our reach—my reach. God’s expectations are in my heart, in my mouth. If God’s expectations are within, why do I continually look outside? Nachman of Bratzlav wrote: the day you were born is the day God decided the world couldn’t exist without you. If God needs me in the world, me, why can’t I accept that—why won’t I accept me? What am I afraid of? So we pray with all our hearts for things to be different. We hope that prayer, repentance and charity will change our lives, change ourselves. But as Alan Lew writes: “The liturgy, however, makes a very different claim, namely that prayer, righteousness, and Teshuvah will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us. We will understand what happens differently… Spiritual practice won’t change what happens. Rather, it will help us to experience what happens not as evil, but simply as what happens.” And I would add: spiritual practice doesn’t change me; it helps me see and accept the real me. 

Where am I? This year I treated myself to a new tallit, a new prayer shawl. And rather than the beracha on the Atarah, rather than the blessing, I had my favorite words of Torah embroidered: Achein yesh Adonai b’makom Hazeh v’anochi lo yadati—surely God is in this place, and I didn’t know it, the words Jacob says when he awakens from his dream. They are the words I live by, they are my maxim, the realest truth that I know. God is here, in this place, in EVERY PLACE, and we, to quote Chaim Stern, walk sightless among miracles. We are caught up in our daily habits and routines and are blind to each others’ true selves and the spark of the divine each of us brings forward. Or, perhaps, we stifle that spark, afraid that others will not understand or appreciate it, or fear it. We are surrounded by God in every moment, for we are surrounded by each other, and we know that God is present only through us. But we tune God out. As that great rabbi Yoda says, we are always somewhere else, always thinking about the future, and never where we are, and what we are doing. 

When is it? Who can tell? We fill up our schedules, and our children’s schedules, to make sure we appear busy, to make sure we are busy, for if we rest but one moment we might reflect on how we are squandering the holiness of our lives. We are blind to the day of the week; every day is the same, filled to the brim, and each one ends the same, with our collapsing from exhaustion. We bring our work with us on vacation, our phones are at our sides constantly, our laptops ready to go. We miss what is in front of us because we are afraid that if we looked and saw and took a snapshot of the moment, it might be too late. We think time is linear; that our lives are straight lines that shoot out toward the horizon. But they are not. Yeats had it right: the years are gyres, spinning us again and again back to the same moments. There is no perfect time; it is never too late. There is always now. Every moment is Sinai. We stand this day, not only us but all those who ever were and all those who ever will be. That is what our Torah teaches. We need merely to be fully present in that moment. 

What am I doing? A story by Alan Lew: Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba’al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot—secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms. All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba’al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba’al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man... He choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba’al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously—how utterly—he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept. All right, you’re hired, the Ba’al Shem said. But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah. So the Ba’al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba’al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax—the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, wherever he may be—the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.” 

I want to have all the answers. I want to change the pain other people feel. I want to be God’s partner in every way. Yehuda Amichai sat looking at his children sleeping and whispered to himself, “I am not God, I am not God.” Nor am I. Nor are any of us. I am going to fail, but in my failure I pray that I find the key. 

The time has come. We are here in this place, in this moment, unabashedly and truly ourselves. We stand—sometimes in our own ways, making our tshuvah, our returning, harder for ourselves.  We are brokenhearted. Good. That means we have the ax in our hands. “The heart is always breaking, the gates are always clanging shut. It is always the last minute.” Now is the last minute, the last minute as the gates are open to pray and be with all our hearts. So I ask you to join me in meditation and prayer, the prayer I recited at the beginning:
 Who am I? I am me.
Where am I? I am here.
When is it? It is now.
What am I doing? I’m doing the best I can.

Rosh Hashanah Morning 5775: A Congregation Of Learners

Once there was a student who struggled with his learning. (I know, right?) His father watched and grew more and more exasperated. He cajoled, he threatened, he took away every privilege he could think of but nothing seemed to motivate the child, who slipped further and further in his studies. Finally the father brought his son to the teacher. He complained mightily how nothing worked, nothing motivated him, and he expected the teacher to show his son what for. The teacher looked at the student, and said, ‘leave, I’ll take care of this.’ The father, satisfied that his son would learn real discipline left the room. The teacher went over, wrapped his arms around the student, and held him close for a very long time.

For more years than anyone dares count, Myrna Lawrence has been that embracing, calming, loving presence. Every year the students return knowing that Myrna will be there to encourage them, motivate them, and sometimes rebuke them, but always in a loving and supportive way. She has a way of bringing out the best in her students, be it in the classroom or the bar mitzvah lesson. She has calmed the nerves of many an anxious parent wholly focused over their child’s performance, while Myrna redirected that focus quietly and subtly to the child’s growth as a human being and a Jew. She has had the blessing of seeing students who knew her as Mrs. Pollack come back as teachers and as parents of new students themselves. And now, after more than thirty years in education and more than a decade as our Religious School director, Myrna is retiring. It is a rest well earned, and her legacy here is secure, having touched the lives of so many people—parents and children—in our congregation. It is bittersweet, as it places us at a crossroads, a crossroads between who we are and who we want to be.

Change, as Myrna has often joked, is a four-letter word, at least in this congregation. We get nervous about new directions. We are very proud of our history, and, as befits a more than century-old community, often focus on preserving who we are rather than thinking about who we might become. And with those challenges in mind, I feel like this moment provides us an opportunity, and as we begin our search process, we must embrace that opportunity to think about learning in our congregation.

Notice I didn’t say ‘the religious school’ or ‘education’; I said learning; congregational learning, lifelong learning. One of the reasons I came to this congregation is because of its varied and joyful learning experiences: the school and bar mitzvah programs to be sure, but also confirmation, youth group, the adult education programs, brotherhood and sisterhood, our speakers, the choir, and all the independent learning groups scattered throughout the community. Each one is wonderful and engaging, and each one has been cut off from the other, removed into its own peculiar silo separate from the rest of the congregational experience. I know this, and you know it too. I know this by the way many of you began to tune out the minute I mentioned the religious school. ‘What does that have to do with me? My kids are grown, out of the house; I did my part, after all.’ I know this by the way parents and younger empty nesters hear the words ‘adult ed’ or lifelong learning and assume we’re talking about someone else, someone other than them, someone retired, older, with different interests and needs. And I feel this most palpably in those brief moments when those siloes come down; when a confirmation class kid comes to Torah Study, when the 7^th grade comes to hear a Brotherhood speaker, when an older person comes to volunteer in a classroom or offers to teach, or just comes to participate in a program supposedly geared toward the parents. In those moments I see a brief image of who we might be: a congregation of learners.

What is a congregation of learners? It’s a congregation that starts from a place of learning. Okay, rabbi, you put the words in a different order, what does that mean? It means that we become a place of curiosity, that doesn’t assume answers but asks questions, indeed a place that omeid b’she’elah, that stands as a question mark, that seeks out opportunities to engage from a place of inquisitiveness.

The obvious way to see what that means is as a place of solid, engaged, and interactive learning experiences. We should ask ourselves, why don’t religious school, adult education, sisterhood, brotherhood and youth group do more joint experiences? I’m not talking about surrendering ownership—each group does different programming that is incredibly successful and meaningful—the brotherhood speakers, the adult education classes, Torah study, books & bagels, etc. And each is good at saying the other, non-obvious participant is welcome. But that’s not the same as cross-pollenization. Why aren’t there more opportunities for the kids and adults to learn together? Why aren’t there more moments of shared learning? Why isn’t there more interactive learning? Not all of us learn with our tuchus in a seat—why isn’t there more art, more movement, more DOING? Why aren’t there more opportunities to learn with the other congregations, or the JCC, in a collaborative fashion? Because kids and adults can’t learn together? Because it’s too hard to find people interested to teach or engage more through movement or tactile learning than discussion? Because we’re just too different from the other congregations? Let me share three experiences that suggest otherwise.

When Beth Ranauto, one of our parents, sat down with me for coffee last fall (a conversation that emerged from my invitation to all religious school families to sit down one on one), she mentioned that she feels her most spiritual when she’s moving—yoga, but also hiking and running out doors, and she said wistfully “I wish Shabbat could be more like that. Why can’t Shabbat be outdoors moving?” To which I responded, why couldn’t it? So we planned a Shabbat hike for a Saturday morning. No Torah study, no service, but a hike with moments of meditation and study, and a Torah reading and Kaddish all built in. We’ve done three now, and each one has seen around 30 people—twice as many as we get on a typical Shabbat morning—and different people than might have come to a conventional Shabbat experience. There was Torah learned, there was Shabbat experienced, but out in the world, allowing us, to borrow a phrase from Abraham Joshua Heschel, to pray with our feet.

At Shavuot this past year, we were exploring how we could make it more meaningful, when the Cantor suggested that, since the holiday is commemorated with a ‘flower offering’ we plant something, maybe at a local nursing home or the like. Sonia Sloan suggested that we reach out to local community gardens that might need volunteers. That led us to a meeting with local leadership (herded by Sonia’s boundless energy), and dozens of people descending on Harlan Elementary school with supplies, tools, food (always food), and energy, to sing some songs and share with each other and with our local community. We got dirty with the students, none of whom were Jewish, and we explored what it meant to connect to a holiday and to Torah in a very different way—living Torah rather than just talking about it. And again, it brought out folks who would never have come to a Shavuot service, or a conventional study session.

Finally, this summer, Beth Emeth, along with Adas Kodesh and Beth Shalom, took a trip to Israel together. 33 participants from three congregations, including 7 children aged 6-14. Total age range was 6-80-something. So many things could have gone wrong, and everything went right. Conservative and Orthodox and Reform got along beautifully. Older participants adopted the kids like they were their own nieces and nephews.  From time to time we split apart—while the adults went to Yad Vashem, the kids went to the biblical zoo, and the like—but there was a sense that we were learning, each at his or her own level, together.

We could say those were unique, one-off experiences, and that’s true. But it also tells me that we can capture that energy and experience it in all our congregational programs. There’s no reason the 80 year old can’t learn with the 8 year old, no reason we can’t turn the learning experience on its head, no reason we can’t engage with our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community and wider community. No reason that we can’t build relationships with each other even as we learn and explore Torah together.

Those examples are a good start. I’m getting excited just talking about those programs and their potential and I hope you are too. But there is more to being a congregation of learners. As I said before, it’s not just about the programs, it’s about the attitude. We must stand not as if we know all the answers but bring forward good questions. That’s true about Torah and Jewish practice, but it should also be true about our interactions with each other. We should be curious about one another, engaged with each other in fellowship. The best study groups are the ones where, like Cheers, everybody knows your name, and people are genuinely concerned for each other’s welfare. While it’s certainly true that nosy is Delaware for “I care about you”, and the more private among us might chafe, part of being a congregation of learners is learning not just about the subject material but each other. I’m not speaking about more programs or organized projects. I’m talking about noticing when a participant isn’t there and calling her up to make sure she’s okay. I’m talking about offering rides to one another. I’m talking about sharing photos of grandkids and stories about trips and asking for help with work or the number of a favorite babysitter. I’m talking about being genuinely interested in one another’s welfare.

What does that have to do with learning trope or Talmud or listening to a speaker? When we engage with one another, when we’re curious about each others’ lives, that’s where trust happens. And when we trust one another, that’s when we can go deeper in to learning—we can encourage each other to challenge and push and get beyond our limits. That’s when we become a real community in the fullest sense of the word.

So what would that look like? I’m not entirely sure, but let me paint a picture for you. Imagine for a moment a congregation filled with opportunities to learn: weekly Torah studies, ongoing learning experiences, and short or even episodic encounters, classes for children and parents and adults, Jews and non-Jews, led by clergy, by laypeople, by teens. Imagine some of those offerings being collaborative, where instead of one person at the front of the room telling people what and how to learn, the participants shared their best selves and supported one another. Imagine if there were online materials—not just schedules but articles, videos, interactive materials—that were posted that supported those experiences. Imagine if all those learning experiences were held together with a theme that stretched from religious school to adult ed to youth group, sisterhood and brotherhood. Imagine if they were open to the community, and we cross-listed our programs as well as learning experiences throughout the community with our own. Imagine if there were opportunities for adults to learn with the kids and kids—especially those post bar mitzvah or confirmation—to come learn with the adults. Imagine if, through these experiences, we grew close to one another, building relationships, friendships between and among generations. Imagine if these experiences led us to build deeper understanding within ourselves, that what we learn cultivates in us different ways of interacting with the world and how we see our Judaism. Now imagine this vision was being shaped and guided by a person, a director of lifelong learning, who was knowledgeable, loved this congregation fiercely, and loved the learners who are a part of it. And by learners, it is understood that everyone in the congregation, from the newborn babe to the 100-year old great grandfather, is a learner. And loved and embraced each learner the way Myrna does, speaking to them in the way they needed, embracing them for who they are and gently nudging them to go further, deeper, to challenge themselves.

It’s a lofty vision, in some ways not so different from what we are already doing this year and previous years, and in some ways very, very different indeed. And we as a congregation are going to be looking for someone who can create this vision, enhance it, make it their own, and put it into practice with love of Torah and love of Israel and love of each of us, every single one of us. I know we can find that someone. We have a search committee, led by Susan Detwiler, and a leadership team filled with competent people, loving people, knowledgeable people, each committed to what’s best for us as a congregation. They’ll be looking for someone who is organized, thoughtful, visionary, knowledgeable, a mensch. They’ll be looking for someone who is most likely clergy, a rabbi, who can engage the tradition and be a presence on the bimah even as he or she is a presence in the classroom and engage the individual, the family, the community. They’ll be looking for someone who can lead us to be a congregation of learners, looking to engage with each other and create loving community with one another.

I can say without hyperbole that this search will be one of the most important things we do as a congregation. It points us in a new direction, and has the potential to be transformative. This is more than just a new school director, or keeping our kids engaged; this is about nourishing each and every one of our neshamot, our souls. This is about each of us being Myrna, the teacher that embraces all. This is how we will continue to serve the Delaware Jewish community for generations to come.

Rabbi Eliezer said: In the light that God created on the first day, a person could see from one end of the world to the other. When God foresaw the misdeeds of future generations, God hid this light from them, reserving it for the righteous of the future.

Asked the disciples: "where was it hidden?"
He replied, "In the Torah."
They asked, "If so, will the righteous find something of this hidden light when they study Torah?"
He replied, "They will find and continue to find."
They asked, "If so, what should the righteous do when they find some of this hidden light in the Torah?"
He replied, "They should reveal it in the way they live." (From Martin Buber's Or HaGanuz)

The light is there, waiting for us to reveal it—through our learning, and through our actions, through our sharing. We will reveal that light as we pursue lifelong learning, a director of lifelong learning, and may we find and continue to find in that light not only Torah, but each other. Amen. 

Erev Rosh Hashanah: We Still Have Hope

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion and on the opposite mountain I am searching for my little boy. An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father both in their temporary failure. Our voices meet above the Sultan's Pool in the valley between us. Neither of us wants the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels of the terrible Had Gadya* machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son has always been the beginning of a new religion in these mountains.

--Yehuda Amichai

I don’t like flying. I am, honestly, afraid of flight. The idea of getting into an aluminum tube held aloft by physics alone sends my heart racing. It’s been like this for a long time. The only thing that calms me down is reciting t’fillat haderech, the travelers’ prayer, and reciting psalms that begin ‘shir Hama’alot’—a song of ascents. And when I am absolutely convinced I am going to become a statistic, I plead that I have too much more work to do.

This is an irrational fear, one rooted in nothing more than my own anxiousness. Today, I have other fears that, once upon a time, I would have thought irrational, even inconceivable.

Today I fear for Jews around the world and at home being attacked exclusively because they are Jews. I fear individuals and groups attacking Jews or those believed to be Jews, with the express purpose of doing them harm because they are Jews. I am afraid that our People is under assault in a way we haven’t been in 70 years.

Today I fear for the survival of the Jewish state, a fear my generation has never known. I fear for its survival against an insidious evil that is sweeping across the Middle East. I fear inaction or worse, wrong action from a West that has lost the ability to differentiate right from wrong, up from down.

Today I fear that well-meaning people of faith and without faith, who see suffering and want to accept easy morality tales, who subconsciously continue to use Jews and the Jewish State as the blank canvas to cast all they find repugnant in their own countries, are giving succor to anti-Semitism. In doing so, organizations like the Presbyterian Church USA that have so often been our natural partners in social justice are needlessly unspooling decades of good will and good work that may never be repaired, certainly not in this generation.

I fear that Israel, in its grief and anxiety for the future, may be losing its moral core. I fear that in mourning children, Israel and Israelis are lashing out with rage. That in defending itself righteously, voices of intolerance and hate in Israel are gaining strength, and in supporting settlement building by fringe elements, Israel is losing the ability to speak truth to power.

Today I fear that children in this country are not safe. Jewish children, black children, white children, are not safe. We have allowed our fears to isolate us and violence to tear communities apart. A person is shot blocks from the synagogue and no one says anything; even the residents of the apartment complex are too concerned to get to work to worry about the blood stains on the street. We look at each other with suspicion, and assume the worst; of our teachers, police officers, of people different from us, of people we’ve known for years.

I fear the voices that say it’s too late to save our world: we are too violent, our political system too broken, our climate too polluted, our world too competitive.

I am even afraid for me and my colleagues, rabbis who want to speak out about Israel from a nuanced and thoughtful perspective, but are convinced they will be shouted down, or ignored, or even have their job threatened because they are perceived as having the wrong stance on the Jewish State.

And it’s not only my fears. I speak with teens who are afraid about what has been happening in Israel, who don’t understand why their friends don’t see what Hamas is doing. Teens who are combating anti-Semitism in places like Ridgefield, New Jersey and Pine Bush, New York, places with large Jewish populations where nevertheless, kids are assaulted and verbally abused and swastikas are painted on walls and school administrators respond too often with a shrug.

Friends, there is a generation growing up with fear, who are increasingly convinced of the bleakness of the future in a way we haven’t seen in some time. They are afraid, and that fear is partly our doing. We have become paralyzed ourselves. We don’t know how to act, we aren’t sure of the right steps to take. We don’t want to do the wrong thing for fear we will fail. And we are told again and again that there is no hope—there are no partners for peace, that Europe, to quote Sylvan Schwartzman, is “a bloody trap.” That people are the way they are, that injustice is a natural part of the world, that the only thing people respond to is strength, and by strength we mean force. We sacrifice our hope and moral compass to defeat that which is hopeless and morally bankrupt. We fight fire with fire.

Tomorrow morning, you and I will read a story about a goat and a child; we will read a story about sacrifice in the hills of Jerusalem. We will read a story we call the Akedah—the binding, but perhaps should be called the Nisa—the Test, when Abraham takes his son Isaac (though some say Ishmael), his only, his beloved, his first born, to offer on the mountains of Moriah, the mountain later called Zion. It is a test I fear we are still taking in Jerusalem, one still involving children, sacrifice, and our temporary failures.

It would be so easy for us to give up. To give up on the well-meaning critics of Israel: the Presbyterians and the college students and the Europeans. It would be easy to give up on the Palestinians themselves, their hearts clearly filled with hate and rage and fear. It would be easy to give up on Israel, even; to divorce our love for the Jewish people from the Jewish homeland. Perhaps it’s even better to tune out the entire Middle East, to change the channel whenever news about Syria or Iraq comes on.

It would be easy for us to give up hope that things may ever change, to harden our hearts, to assume the worst, to let our anger and fear and angst rule us when we talk about Israel. That may be the hardest part of the test we face.

Friends, just as Isaac was bound, so are we bound. Just as Abraham was tested, so are we now tested, and while the answers elude us, we must keep at it with our hearts open, or we will surely fail.

Now is not the time to give up hope in a Jewish state. Now is not the time to give up hope in the Israeli citizen craving peace—perhaps not Shalom, wholeness, but at least sheket—quiet. Now is not the time to give up hope on the Palestinian who nurses his hurts and wounds but is still has a place in those hills. Now is not the time to give up hope on our neighbors and the non-Jews in our lives and assume each would wear a red armband were this the 1940s.

When I speak of hope, I don’t speak of blind faith, or naiveté. I don’t pretend that Gaza will suddenly turn into Norway, that Hamas will magically become Canadians. Israel is in a tough neighborhood. Nor will I pretend and wish away the issues internal in Israel; while the majority of Israelis want the Jewish state to be also a democratic state, we have members of the government who are uninterested in nuance. While most Israelis were horrified by the murder of Muhammad Abu Kheder, too many members of the government or political parties within government acted sanguine. And this is not to say anything of the hostility from the settlers in Hebron toward native Arabs. While most Israelis want a two-state solution, many of them are wrestling with the thought that it may be a one-state solution, with another failed state or no-state on their border. All of this in a larger picture of ISIS, the Syrian civil war, Iran, and an intensity of anti-Semitism not seen in the postwar period. When I say hope, I recognize that it’s awfully hard to be hopeful.

Nevertheless, we must have hope. The same hope that Abraham carried in his heart as he brought Isaac, his son, to be sacrificed on a mountain in the desert. We read tomorrow as Abraham says to Isaac, “God will see to the sheep for the sacrifice.”

We must have hope, and we must act on that hope. Hope, not force is the remedy to fear. Hope, not rage, will give us the strength to respond. Not grief, not anger, not even certainty, but hope.

Hope gives us the strength to respond to our non-Jewish friends to show them that Israel is neither an apartheid state nor should be the source of their angst. Hope gives us the will to stand up to the anti-Semite with calm and grace. Hope gives us the power to reach out to the stranger and build community, to plant roots together and secure a future together. Hope makes the sacrifice worthwhile.

We must have hope and act on that hope—in the streets, in our lives, all the time—if we are to see justice done in this world, to see bigotry finally banished not only from public discourse but private thought, to see the world we imagined for our children. We must have hope to see a new religion born on the hill, of freedom and righteousness and equality for all. For if we don’t, if we give in to fear, then the sacrifice will be our children after all, and we will set their future ablaze.

We must remember that Israel’s anthem is “Hatikvah”, the Hope, a hope that has sustained us for millennia. And in singing about that hope, we focus on the wrong words. We emphasize lihiyot am chofshi b’artzeinu, eretz tzion yeriushalayim: to be a free people in our land, the land of Tzion, Jerusalem. That is what we sing the loudest, what we sing twice.  But the most important line is before that, the one responding to the Prophet Ezekiel: Od lo avda tikvateinu: we haven’t given up our hope. We mustn’t give up our hope. We may not give up our hope, for to give it up means to give up on Israel, on our Jewishness, on the world, on each other.

I have read that Israeli soldiers, on their way into Gaza, sang the Hasidic song Kol Ha’Olam Kulo: all the world is a narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid. We must not be afraid. More than that, we must have hope, hope to see us through the fear, hope to see us through our temporary failure, hope so that our voices return to us, laughing and crying. Od lo avda tikvateinu, we haven’t lost our hope. May it always give us strength, strength to overcome fear. Amen. 

#BlogElul Day 29: Return

Shana Tovah All!

#BlogElul Day 28: Give

A basic principle of the laws of property is that “matters [that are only] within the heart are of no significance” (literally: “are not matters”) (See T.B. Kiddushin 49b). If your intention is serious, if you really plan something, say it (italics mine). As long as man has not confessed, his ‘repentance’ is not considered complete. He may think in his heart: “From now on I shall observe the Sabbath, I’ll close my store at the start of the Sabbath, I shall be straight and honest in all my dealings and cheat no one, I’ll study Torah at regular and set times.” All these are commendable thoughts, but as long as they are not expressed verbally, they do not comprise an act of repentance. Confession is the climax of the process of repentance; only after confession has been made can repentance be effective… 

Thus, according to Maimonides, confession is the concretization of repentance. Speech, the verbalizing of confession, endows the thought of repentance with reality. It is the climax and final chord of the long and tortuous internal process of repentance. 

-From On Repentance: The Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik By Pinchas Peli

We think of the act of repentance as work, and in many ways, it is; if we're doing it right, if we're really turning within ourselves, turning to those around us, and turning to God, we are exhausting ourselves Spiritually, emotionally and physically. We come away from the experience transformed and, like birth, the effort leaves us drained.

But also like birth, repentance is an act of tremendous generosity. When we verbalize our intent, we are giving ourselves the chance to take our life back rather than let it stew in the sin we have committed. We are taking ourselves seriously, as capable of transformation and renewal, and not forever defined by the hurtful action or word. When we ask for forgiveness, we are giving ourselves over in humility to the person we have offended. And when we forgive, truly forgive, letting go of the offense, we release the person from the sin they have committed.

In these last moments of preparation, think and reflect of who you need to be generous with, and how you can ask for generosity for yourself. What do you need to do to make that happen?

#BlogElul Day 27: Intent

At night, alone, I just sat and waited. Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.
--Patti Smith, Just Kids

 Saturday morning in Torah study , as we were discussing Nitzavim and the idea of having one time a year to stand and account for ourselves, one of the participants said, “but shouldn't we do that all the time?”

Of course the answer is yes; we shouldn't wait until Rosh Hashanah for cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul. Of course we shouldn't wait until Yom Kippur for tshuvah, the turning that returns us to God, ourselves and each other. At the time, I said that, despite that fact, most of us wait until the last minute. We’re spiritual procrastinators, afraid to look ourselves in the mirror, afraid to make a full accounting. As with much else in life, we need a deadline, and the first ten days of a New Year are as good a time as any.

The Days Of Awe raise the question of our intentions. It’s one thing to go through life with our only inner monologue justifying our actions, our choices. It’s one thing to avoid or escape self-reflection. It’s another thing entirely to carve time out to really listen carefully to the still, small voice within.

Rosh Hashanah comes and our intentions are questioned as much as our actions. Did we mean to do the right thing, or to do the convenient thing? Do we mean to do something of worth, or something of self-satisfaction? Surely our actions require reflection as well, but without proper intention—focused intention—our actions, no matter how praiseworthy, will fail to nourish our spirit. 

#BlogElul Day 26: Hope

How can we educate and empower a generation of Jews to take hold of their tradition? Can we shift from a mentality of survival to one of meaning? How will we recognize and meet the overwhelming demand for an engaged Jewish life? Can we imagine a new Jewish world?
 Ellie Kaufner, Empowered Judaism

Where do you find meaning? Where is it located? Within or without? And how does it relate to your Jewishness?

#BlogElul Day 25: Begin

At the edge
Of a world
Beyond my eyes
Beautiful
I know Exile
Is always
Green with hope-
The river
We cannot cross
Flows forever
-"Promised Land" by Samuel Menashe

Where do we begin? How? The New World always seems so distant, so far from where we are, so hard to reach given what we think we're capable of. But it's beautiful, isn't it? The idea we have of who we might yet be. Perhaps we never get there. Perhaps we can never truly be that person, but we look out across the river at him, at her, and we yearn.

And we begin to become that person, ever so slowly.

#BlogElul Day 24: End

 THERE ARE TWO WORDS I should like to strike from our vocabulary: “surveys” and “survival.” Our community is in spiritual distress, and some of our organizations are often too concerned with digits. Our disease is loss of character and commitment, and the cure of our plight cannot be derived from charts and diagrams. When surveys become an obsession, a sacred cow that eats up vast energies, they may yield confirmation of little more than what we know in advance. It is in such a spirit that undertaking surveys is an evasion of creative action, a splendid illusion.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur And Spiritual Audacity

We spend an awful lot of time worrying about the End: the end of ourselves, of the World. Of this or that institution or program. Of Judaism. An end to the Jews. This concern isn't new; we see it manifest itself even in parashat Nitzavim, which we read this morning. Even now, the text says, there are those with wormwood in their heart, who are turning away from God this very moment. This isn't about the number of Israelites, however, any more than it's about the number of Jews today. It's about our commitment to our values, to our Torah as a living, breathing document, to God with whom we share a sacred partnership. That partnership and those values are expressed differently in each generation, in each community, but it's never about the program, never about the specific form of worship. 

If we want Judaism to survive we need to move beyond the idea that Judaism is expressed superficially or episodically. Judaism means relationship--with other Jews, with God, with Torah. The specifics may change, but the core is eternal. We are God's people. We have sacred obligations to act as God's partner in Creation. These obligations make a demand of our resources--our time, our treasure, our mental and spiritual energy--to reshape the world and ourselves into a place of Justice. These obligations are Holy. We become holy when we do them, and especially when we do them TOGETHER. 

Our community is still in spiritual distress. We still need to share a new vocabulary of the Neshamah with one another, to find our voices in the Voice of Torah. It feels hard, complicated. Nitzavim reminds us that it's not; it's in us, in our mouths and hearts. We don't trust it, but it's there. Will this year be the year we open ourselves to that voice? Or, as Jake Marmer quotes Samuel Menashe: 

---

Taut with longing

You must become

The god you sought—

the only one

#BlogElul Day 23: Love

This is how the Jewish messiah redeems his followers: not by whisking them off to a better world, but by teaching them how to see this one differently. Some assembly is required—those who want to be saved have to go ahead and, like the novel’s narrator, learn how to save themselves—but once the art is mastered, change is imminent. 

From A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen by Liel Leibovitz

 A few weeks ago my son noticed the Shwings I had on my Chucks. I had gotten them as part of a Lootcrate (a gift subscription of nerdy things from my lovely wife) and he showed an interest. We like encouraging our son to be himself--not that he usually needs the encouragement--so we looked around online, found some black lightning bolts, and ordered them, telling him that we'd put them on the next pair of shoes once he grew out of these.

So they arrived. And he grew out of the shoes, and we got him a pair of black and neon-green sneakers (as much a quiet, subversive protest against his school's uniform policy) and put the shwings on.

He took one look at them and said he didn't want to wear them, "because J- will pick on me."

This has been a rough transition to the start of school. He has fewer of his friends in his class. His teacher is patient and nice but has more expectations in terms of sitting still than last year. He's had some run-ins with rougher kids on the school bus. None of this is surprising; our son marches to the beat of his own drum, which has its consequences, and he certainly wouldn't be the first seven-year old to wrestle with these issues. And it doesn't help that, at the fall, just when he's transitioning from camp and summer to school and religious school and piano lessons, Dad is extra busy.

But to hear him struggle, especially with classmates' judgment (and perhaps, bullying), makes me sad. Part of me wants to help him achieve escape velocity, to find him a better place where he won't have to worry about this stuff. But the reality is, kids are kids, and this is life. There will always be people who, for whatever reason (anxiety, issues at home, lack of self-awareness, medical issues, etc.) will lash out and minimize those around them. He has to learn that, and how to navigate those mixed sets of expectations and challenges (good and bad) that he'll face for a long time to come, and hopefully still express his own Self meaningfully.

They're just sneakers. It's just one kid. My son is healthy and supported and getting a great education. It is a first-world problem of identity if there ever was one,  and as much as my heart aches for my son as a parent, I know that this too shall pass. Nevertheless, I pray that he learns from these experiences, small though they may be, to find strength, to see the love that surrounds him, and learn not to ape such behaviors himself, but rather to see the world from a different vantage as a result, and work on saving his own Self, and others.

#BlogElul Day 22: Dare

I just read the point-counterpoint articles on whether you should take your kids to High Holiday Services. You should go and read them. Very interesting perspectives.

I get both perspectives, and both have their ups and downs. Frankly, it's interesting to see it portrayed this way, as opposed to previous generations of articles arguing for letting parents bring their kids to services (yes Virginia, once that argument had to be made).

(Side-note: my first year at Beth Emeth I flipped a High Holiday ticket over for no good reason and was horrified to find a note to parents on the other side reminding them that services were decorous occasions and if their kids made noise they should take them out. I was pretty horrified. Needless to say, that's not what's on the back of the ticket anymore).

I was having a totally different conversation earlier today (about Buber's "I and Thou", and comedy improv, actually. Seriously. I love my study group) and I think the question fundamentally comes down to one's own relationship with the high holidays (and maybe Judaism by extension).

If our relationship with the holidays is one of generosity--if our desire to celebrate grows out of a sense of loving engagement, be it with Torah, God, community, or all of the above--then it's an I-thou relationship, one of deep spirituality and connection.

If, however, it's a sense of obligation without love, or ego, or a manifestation of fear or anxiety (variations of 'I have to') then it's I-It, and while it may still be good, it's not going to have the depth of connection we want.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: what's holding us back from entering the room? What's keeping us from being generous with the holiday (or ourselves)? Or, what sends us into the room? Are we feeling pushed, or drawn in?

Maybe we're intimidated by the holidays. Maybe we had a bad experience at some point, a moment of judgement. Maybe they shine a light on other aspects of our lives that we don't want to look at or examine too closely (frankly, that's what the holidays are supposed to do, no?). Or maybe no one ever showed us the door in and, even when we're in the room, we feel like interlopers. Whatever it is, it's about US, not about our kids. And we as parents need to work that out within ourselves before we impose either choice or lack thereof on our kids' relationship with the holidays (or Judaism in general).

So, before daring to enter the sanctuary for Rosh Hashanah, will you dare to look at your relationship with Rosh Hashanah first?

#BlogElul Day 21: Change

Rather than lament—as is the perennial disposition of the young—the gone glories of an earlier age, and rather than compare—as was the habit of so many Canadian writers before him—his own landscape unfavorably with some other, foreign, and more luminescent one, [Leonard] Cohen wrote poems that argued that his own place and time were brimming with detritus but also with holiness. He realized that a simple encounter between a man and a woman was worthy of the language and the passion of the biblical prophets. Rather than try to inflate the world to epic proportions, as Layton did,  Cohen made his universe seem ever grander by admitting just how awash it was with bigotry and violence and dumb lust.

-Liel Liebowitz, A Broken Hallelujah: Rock & Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen

We think the point of the holidays is to reflect on how we need to change ourselves and the world around us, but what if the purpose is to see the world more clearly, to change our perspective and point of view? To recognize not only the brokenness within and without, but the inherent holiness as well? 

To be sure our world is filled with abundant examples of evil and rot and selfishness, and we want to see it transformed, if not to some Platonic idyll, at least to something more fair, more loving, more secure, more whole and more holy. But we cannot redeem the world--or seek redemption ourselves--unless we are prepared to say the world is worthy of redemption, that in addition to the shards of broken vessels scattered throughout, there is also The Light. So too it is with us. We can change only when we think we're worthy of transformation; when we can accept fully our own value as ourselves and not as others--or we think others--wish us to be.