My Family's Ushpizin

Inviting Ushpizin (guests in Aramaic) into your sukkah is a wonderful tradition. There is a Kabbalistic ritual of inviting Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David like we invite Elijah to our Seders. If you are ever in an ultra-Orthodox sukkah, you might see other "guests" in the form of pictures of great rebbes. So, in this vain, in my family sukkah, we invite every year great Liberal rebbes, men and women who have shaped non-Orthodox Judaism. Here are our Ushpizin:

Abraham Geiger

 

Isaac Mayer Wise

Leo Baeck

Stephen S. Wise

Mordecai Kaplan

Regina Jonas

Abraham Joshua Heschel

And one Rabbi that is still very much alive:

Sally Priesand

Who would you invite to your Sukkah for next year?

My Rosh Hashanah Sermon

Here is my Rosh Hashanah sermon on my personal experiences of God. Sorry it is late.

Rosh Hashanah 5774

Back in the summer of 2001, the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I was a unit head at the Reform Movement Camp Newman in Santa Rosa. One Shabbat, the camp was visited by Rabbi Richard Levy, at that time the director of the rabbinical program at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. I had recently decided that I was going to apply for rabbinical school, and HUC required a pre-interview with someone from the college before they would send you an application. So, I got to sit down for a chat with Rabbi Levy while he was at camp. I figured he would just ask me a few questions: Where are you from, what do you major in, how’s your Hebrew, etc. The first question was “Where are you from?” But, then, next question, it seemed to me to be out of nowhere, “What is your concept of God?”

            I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I think it was kind of academic. I was a Judaic studies major at Tulane. I had just spent my junior year studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem pouring over classical Jewish texts and learning from some of the world authorities on the academic study of Judaism. I could tell you the difference between Yehudah HaLevi’s conception of God and Maimonides’ conception. I could talk about transcendence and immanence, mystical and philosophical. I think I did, in a rambling way. Rabbi Levy just nodded his head and said, “OK,” and moved on.

            When camp was over that summer I set out to absorb the great modern works on Jewish theology, books by Jewish thinkers on God. I wanted to be able to answer Richard Levy’s question more eloquently. This quest continued when I got into rabbinical school and continues until now. But, as I reminisce about this encounter twelve years ago, I was going about Levy’s question in the wrong way. Reading works of theology has been, and is, rewarding and meaningful for me, but Rabbi Levy was asking about me, my belief, not what others say. I needed to formulate my own theology based not only on books and tradition, but based on my own experiences, based on how I encounter the divine in the real world. And so, tonight I offer you all something that I have never done formally. I am going to formulate through some autobiographical sketches, my experiences of God—times in my life that, as I reminisce on them, I have come to realize that I greatly felt the Divine presence. I hope this very personal sermon can relate to others and is not only about me, but uses my life as an example of ways others might experience God.

            I am now going to stop using the “G” word. You know, G-O-D.  For me, and for many of us, I suspect, it congers up images of an old man in the sky with a James Earl Jones voice, but this is not what I experience in life, so I will try to use metaphors to explain what I have felt. Because when we try to describe an experience of the ineffable, we need to resort to figurative language.

            And so it is with great humility that I will be the first of your clergy this year to address how I view faith during these High Holy Days. The other two rabbis will also be speaking on the subject in these coming days. As the writer and minister Frederick Buechner writes, “All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography.” So, here is part of my story.   

            I began my first days of college, and it was very hot, hot outside because it was New Orleans in August, but I also always felt hot inside air-conditiioned buildings. I was always sweating, constantly. Moving away from home and meeting new people is hard in and of itself, but I was finding that it was something that made me very nervous. I couldn’t concentrate in class, I couldn’t sleep well, I was losing a lot of weight, I was irritable, and my hands were beginning to shake periodically. I thought that I was having a nervous breakdown. When I returned home for Thanksgiving break my parents sent me to the doctor. He took one look at me and diagnosed me with Graves’ disease. It is a thyroid disorder. There was too much thyroid hormone in my body, and it caused the somewhat harmonious system of my body to be out of balance.

            Once I started the treatment for my body’s disorder, I set about reestablishing order and balance in my life. Hillel, the Jewish student organization, had a huge role in that. I began attending Shabbat services. The consistency of the prayers, the ritual, the order, became comforting. It wasn’t necessarily the words of the prayers, it was the action of doing them that helped bring healing to my unbalanced life. Prayer and praying is something that became very important to me, and it is something I continued as I entered rabbinical school, trying to attend not just Shabbat but daily services. The task of following our ancient order of prayers, with its rituals and ritual garb, marking the holiness of the moment, centered me every day, helped give my life direction.

            My disease, my thyroid disorder, was just that--something that disordered my universe. It’s amazing how one bio-chemical (I know that I am simplifying the biology of this) can disrupt our whole being. We humans seek and crave order. The opening chapter of our Torah is about creation being the ordering of the chaos. Religion, Judaism, helps us realize and create the systems of order in our chaotic world. We try to bring cosmos to chaos. My encounter with my hormonal disease resulted in, to paraphrase a title of one of my favorite movies: “How I learned to stop worrying and to love to pray.”

            When I strive for order and experience it, through acts of prayer and ritual, I give thanks. B’rucha Achdut haOlam. Blessed is the Unity of the Universe that unites all of us. Blessed is our search for order.

            As I mentioned before, I spent my junior year of college in Jerusalem at Hebrew University. It was the school year of 2000-2001, the first year of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian revolt against Israeli rule. It was a very tense time in Israel. Israelis took to calling the time “hamatzav—the situation.” There were constant terrorist attacks, security guards at restaurant and on buses, and here I was living in a dorm in eastern Jerusalem in eyeshot and earshot of the hostilities. Many of the students in the dorms were also American students in Jerusalem to experience Israeli culture, learn Hebrew, many there to explore their Jewish identity. Like any good college dorm, students would hang out late into the night discussing deep topics (among other things). Maybe it was because of the “matzav,” the tense and often dangerous situation around us, but I felt that my conversations with others that year created a special kind of bond. Whether we were talking about Israel, or Judaism, or great music, I let myself get fully immersed in the relationship. Have you ever had a conversation or an encounter with another and it felt as if time stood still—felt as if you were part of the infinity of the universe? It could have been falling in love or looking at your beloved under the chuppah, or learning with someone, or cradling your newborn, or holding someone’s hand in a hospital bed. As the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber writes, “With every Thou (every true encounter with another) we are stirred with a breath of the Thou (the Eternal One), that is, eternal life.”

            It is through our relationships that we experience the great connector of the universe—the source of our web of connection to each other and the world. Baruch M’chaber haOlam. Blessed is the Eternal Connector of our relationships.

            My spiritual biography goes from order to connection to a little shul in New Iberia, Louisiana. During rabbinical school in Cincinnati the students get the pleasure of serving small synagogues throughout the Midwest and South that cannot support a full-time rabbi. My first student pulpit was Congregation Gates of Prayer in New Iberia, in Southwest Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country. My first time in New Iberia was Rosh Hashanah and I stayed through Yom Kippur. I was leading services, giving sermons, visiting congregants, teaching children, and all along I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I was worrying about the logistics of the service, and my presence on the bima, and the congregants’ impression of me—it was stressful. I probably came across on the bima as very nervous. But, at the end of Yom Kippur, towards the metaphoric closing of the gates, something hit me. I was standing in front of the open ark, the president of the congregation on one side of me and the vice-president on the other side. An overwhelming sense of awe struck me. The disorientating nature of my visit became ordered and clear, and I felt a connection with the congregation and the whole Jewish people, past and present, standing in front of the arks all over the world. I think what   I felt was a transcendent sense of purpose. This is where I was supposed to be, and this is what I was supposed to be doing. I was a part of something greater than myself. I felt humbled and upright at the same time. Order, connectedness, and transcendent purpose all together for that brief holy moment. It may have been something like what Abraham Joshua Heschel said about the feeling he had when he participated on the March from Selma with MLK, he said, “my feet were praying.” For me, my whole being was praying. I have heard of people having similar experiences on the top of a mountain or in doing acts of justice—a sense of transcendent purpose.

            B’rucha haElyonut—Blessed is the Transcendence that gives our lives purpose and meaning.

            It is hard for many of us contemporary Jews to talk openly about our belief in the Divine. I’m not sure I even know what “belief” means when it comes to this. But, I think, many of us have had encounters and experiences similar to the one I describe. I am not trying to prove that God (there is the G word again) exists in the form that our ancestors believed, but I do know that I have felt times in my life that I have been suffused with something that is within myself and that is also beyond myself—something that gives order, connection, and meaning to my life. As we pray, contemplate, and meditate during these High Holy Days, let us explore and ask ourselves about our experiences and encounters that ground our lives and create a sense of Ultimate worth.                

           

                       

            

Va-et'chanan and Tayvon Martin

This is my Dvar Torah from this past Shabbat.

Va-et’chanan 7/19/13

This morning while driving to work here at Beth Israel I was listening to Morning Edition on KPBS as I usually do. The host was talking to a photographer about a photo that he took in 1973 that recently went viral on the internet starting with him posting it to his Facebook page. They described the picture pretty well, but because it was radio, I had to use my imagination, so when I got to my desk, after a quick Google search, I found the photo. In it you see five children all under the age of ten taking a quick break from playing in an alley to pose for a quick picture. They have their arms around each other with huge smiles on their faces. The photo is very kinetic. Two of the children are white and three are black. They are just playing as friends as if that doesn’t matter . . . because it shouldn’t matter.

            Now, I’m not here to give a “can’t we all get along kumbaya” sermon after the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman trial (nor am I here to give my opinion on the specifics of the trial for I am not a lawyer). I’m not here to say that this picture proves that everything is okay. I know that when my sons are older they will be treated much differently if they are walking down the street after dark than boys that happen to be black. As President Obama said today: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and history that—that doesn’t go away . . . There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being flowed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.” And I’m not here to say that we can solve this right now, but if we look at this literally black and white photo, we can see that racial prejudice is learned by society—not something inherent in kids.

            This week’s Torah portion has Moses’ retelling of the Ten Commandments. I would like to offer an interpretation given by our bat mitzvah girl from last week’s Shabbat afternoon. She focused on the second commandment of not creating a sculptured image. Here is the commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below . . . You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the Eternal your God am an impassioned God . . .” She wanted to make these verses relevant to her life, but she did not know anyone who creates physical idols to worship. But, she taught us, all of us create images in our heads of other people. She felt that the idolatry of today is prejudice. We create an image of people that are different than us that we cannot get rid of, we obsess over. Even us, open minded people, do it. Our prejudices might not be overtly racist or violent, but are they right? When we create an image of someone, we are not seeing the other as an individual.  The only way to smash these idols that we worship is to know the people that are different than us. The five kids in the photo did that. The Torah knows that this is hard, that is why we are commanded over and over again (in different versions) to not “oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be a stranger in the land of Egypt.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comments: “Why should you not hate the stranger? – asks the Torah. Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt. If you are human, so is he. If he is less than human, so are you.”

            It is hard to treat everyone as an individual, especially those we don’t know. It is hard to have empathy.

            While our Torah portion can help us think about the tension in our nation from this week’s legal decision, so can our season of the Jewish year. Tuesday was the ninth of the month of Av, Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, the day Jews commemorate the destruction of the two ancient Temples in Jerusalem and other calamities of the Jewish people. Our rabbis tell us the first Temple fell because of the people’s idolatry, and the second Temple fell because of the people’s baseless hatred of one another. While we might not mourn and hope for a rebuilt Temple today, I saw on facebook a beautiful statement from Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson about what Tisha b’Av can mean for us today. “On Tisha b'Av we cry because we mourn the chasm between what is and what could be.”

            What is: An America very divided by race, ideology, name your fault line.

            What could be: An America where we try to understand the other. Not one where everyone is the same or believes the same. An America where we live with empathy.

            We as Jews have historically seen our mission in the world is to try to move it, slowly, little by little, to where it could be. Is it every going to get there? Only God knows. Can we quit trying? That would be giving up on our beautiful heritage. Our reading from the prophets this Shabbat comes from Isaiah and begins, “Comfort, oh comfort My people, says your God.” It is not comfortable to really live between what is and what could be. It is not comfortable to live in a world that is troubling, and it is not comfortable to try to make the world a better place. But, as the prophet says two chapters later, “I the Eternal, in My grace, have summoned you, and I have grasped you by the hand. I created you, and appointed you a covenant people, a light of nations—opening eyes deprived of light, rescuing prisoners from confinement, from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” It may not be comfortable to bring the world closer to what it could be, but it is our duty to try. We can start with empathy.  

Patience

Here is this year's Yom Kippur sermon:

Let us take a poll: What is more annoying?

1. Being stuck in a line at Ralph’s and the person at the checkout is paying by check.

2. Calling the credit card company, trying to figure out which number to press to get a person, and then when you get a person, being put on hold. Or

3. Waiting a minute or two while your email downloads on your phone at Starbuck’s because the free Wi-Fi is slow.

Of course all three of these things are pretty annoying (to most of us, I guess), but why do we find them so irritating? I think it is because they all try our patience. During these situations we think we can always be doing something better. We have people to see, things to do. I didn’t go to the grocery to wait in line; I didn’t go to the café to sit and…wait a second; I did go to the café to sit. Just sitting is hard for us today. We are texting, tweeting, checking our email, thinking about whom we should be emailing, looking at sports scores, stock quotes, or political polls. We never have the patience to just wait a second. Many of us don’t have patience for much. I know all about it. I have a two and a half year old. Every day I’m trying to get him dressed, get him to eat, get him to take a bath. Not to mention, he always is asking me “Why?” Why do I have to do this? Why is it sleeping time? Why are bananas yellow? Why can’t I drive the car? I admit, sometimes, regrettably, I have lost my patience. I know that my son, Eitan, is just trying to learn about the world or assert his little independence, but I feel that I always have something better to be doing. But do I?

In Hebrew the word patience is savlanut. You will not find this word in the Bible, but you will find other words with the same root like sevel (suffering) or lisbol (to suffer). Other related words are sevolet (tolerance) and sovel (burden or load) and sabol (a porter or carrier). As Alan Morinis, the contemporary teacher of Mussar, the Jewish self-improvement method, teaches: “Seeking out the common element in all these words (suffering, tolerance, burden, load, porter) teaches us a fundamental lesson about patience, as Jewish tradition would have us understand it. Being patient does not mean that you are in a completely calm and unruffled state of mind, but rather that you are able to bear the burden of your hostile and explosive feelings without reacting. Think of your emotional load as a heavy suitcase, and you as the porter who can take it on his shoulder to bear the burden.

In other words, we don’t have to learn to love traffic or being put on hold, but if we learn to tolerate them, we can live lives of less grief. The classic Mussar teacher Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Satanov states: “When something bad happens to you and you did not have the power to avoid it, do not aggravate the situation even more through wasted grief.” As Morinis writes, “We truthfully have so little control over so many features of our lives that it doesn’t make any sense at all to put ourselves through useless suffering as if we did have control. And that’s just what we do when we slip into impatience.”…We don’t have much control over the person in the checkout line in front of us; so, why does that person have to cause us grief? Wouldn’t our lives be easier without that grief. Maybe it is human to always want to be in control, but I think that one huge theme of these High Holy Days is that we are not totally in control. Maybe letting go of that need to be in control all the time can lessen our tzuris--our grief and stress. 

One more quote from the above quoted Rabbi Menachem Mendel: “Woe to the pampered person who has never been trained to be patient. Either today or in the future s/he is destined to sip from the cup of affliction.” But it does not have to be that way. We, the Jewish people, are a patient people. Some traditional Jews, every morning, pray this line, “I firmly believe in the coming of Messiah; and although he may tarry, I daily wait for his coming.” We have over two thousand years of patience. Individually we need to work

A story: A respected woman once came to ask the advice of the rabbi of Apt. The moment he saw her, he realized that he knew a secret about this woman. He shouted, “Adulteress! You sinned only a short while ago, and yet now you have the chutzpah to step into this pure house!” Then from the depths of her heart the woman cried, “The Creator of the world has patience with the wicked. God is in no hurry to make them pay their debts and God does not disclose their secret to any creature, lest they be ashamed to God. Nor does the Eternal One’s face hide from them. But the great rabbi of Apt sits there in his chair and cannot resist revealing at once what the Creator has covered.” The rabbi let his impatience with sin, his grief over the idea of adultery, affect the way he interacted with a real person. He didn’t have the patience to meet her need. She might have been coming to him to ask advice on how to right her wrongs, but the rabbi let his tzuris affect their relationship—the relationship of rabbi and searching Jew. He didn’t see her as created in the image of the Divine, only as a sinner.

Impatience can lead to grief and grumpiness, anger and even affliction. This grief and grumpiness from impatience affects our relationships.

As I mentioned a few minutes ago, I sometimes get impatient with my son. I’m sure many of us often get impatient with our loved ones--our spouses and partners, our kids, our friends, our parents. Sometimes it is because we are tired, or stressed out from work. Our impatience at other events affects our attention to our loved ones. We don’t have time to hear about their day or how they are feeling. When we allow our impatience to overtake us, we close our ears to what another is trying to tell us. We don’t hear the excitement, or the pain, or the exhaustion in their own words or actions. When we are overly impatient in our lives, it spill over to our loved ones, we can put wedges in our relationships.

Losing our patience at things beyond our control can make us testy with others, dampening our interactions. It can even block us from seeing the image of God in another.

While impatience can hurt our human relationships, it can also turn us off from a relationship with God and Jewish community and practice. Notice how I said Jewish practice—something you must work at. Let me illustrate with an encounter I once had:

I was at my friends’ wedding in my hometown on St. Louis. At a brunch the day after the wedding, some relative of the groom, knowing that I am a rabbi, came up to me to chat. She said: “Rabbi, I need some advice. I just can’t find a synagogue that I like here in St. Louis. After my rabbi retired, I thought I should look around. Two years ago for Rosh HaShanah I went to such-and-such Synagogue. I didn’t like the music. Last year I went to Temple so-and-so. I didn’t connect with the rabbi’s sermons. I don’t know what to do for this year’s High Holy Days.”

I told her, “Don’t go. If you really want a community, go on Shabbat. See what the community is about. Then go on another. Maybe go to an adult-ed class. We can’t always expect to be wowed on the first time, especially when it is the High Holy Days. They are meant to be a little scary.”

My conversation partner, it seemed to me, did not have the patience to enter into a community. She only gave the community and its rabbi a ten day chance. And, I know that I was being impatient with her. Instead of telling her, kind of curtly, “don’t go”, I should have suggested that she stick with the synagogue a while after the High Holy days and then make her decision. I shouldn’t have discounted her eagerness to find a community. With my impatience, she might not have heard my answer. Her spiritual impatience, though, reminds me of a great Hasidic story about the founder of Hassidism, the Baal Shem Tov.

The great rabbi was once in the synagogue and he prayed for a very long time. All of his students were done with their prayers, but he continued without paying any attention to them. They waited around for a while and then went home. After a couple hours of running errands and what not, the students went back to the synagogue and found their rabbi still deep in prayer. Later he said to them: “By going away and leaving me alone, it was a painful experience. I needed my community.” The Baal Shem Tov then said, “Let me tell you a parable.

“You all know about migrating birds that fly to warm countries in the autumn. Well, people in one of those lands once saw the most glorious multi-colored bird in the midst of a flock that was journeying through the sky. Nobody had ever seen such a bird. It was so beautiful. The bird landed on the top of the tallest tree and nested in the leaves. When the king of the country heard of it, he made the people fetch the bird with its nest. The king ordered a number of people to make a ladder up to the tree by standing on each other’s shoulders. It took a long time to build this living ladder. Those who stood nearest the ground lost patience and shook themselves free, and everything collapsed.”

The people needed each other to reach spiritual heights, but it takes patience. To be in a community and pray takes patience.

There is a reason we say religious practices. We cannot always expect to have a “spiritual moment,” be wowed every time we enter into a synagogue (although we do try our best to create a spirit-filled atmosphere). We have to work at it. It’s like Ikea. Yes, the Swedish put-it-together-yourself furniture place. They give you the little book (just like we do at a synagogue), you look at it and it doesn’t make any sense. (Ikea’s books are all in cartoons; ours have Hebrew.) You start to put the furniture together, it doesn’t look quite right, and then you throw down your allen wrench in frustration. Or, at least, I do. But, if you clear your mind, take a deep breath, and work at it, often you can put together a nice bookshelf. After you do it once, you start to learn to patterns of Ikea furniture, and it is often easier the next time. So, if I haven’t lost you with my metaphor, Jewish life takes practice. Prayer takes practice. We need to attend synagogue over and over to learn - the prayers, the melodies, the movements. Rituals take practice. And, by having the patience to do them, sometimes over and over, we can bring meaning and joy into our lives.

We need patience in relationships and to make Judaism more meaningful, and now I would like to offer a way to bring these two together: Shabbat. What is more Jewish and family/community than that? Shabbat is the perfect time to instill a sense of calmness and centeredness in our hectic lives; a time for prayer, community and relationship. Think about it…when we are impatient it is often because we think we could be doing something better with our time. When we are stuck in a long line we say, “I don’t have time for this.” Shabbat, though, is a time of timelessness; a time to refresh. A time when we realize that that email is not so urgent. A time when we realize that reading a book is more rewarding that a thirty second YouTube video. The opening chapter of the Torah says that God created the world in six days, and on the seventh day God rested. Things can wait. We don’t always need to be in a hurry. We have time to eat, to sing, to read, to pray, to be with our community and our loved ones. On Shabbat we can practice patience because we realize that we are not ultimately in control of time. We are not ultimately in control of much, so on Shabbat we can just be. It takes some practice, though.

Now, I know that an “Orthodox” idea of being Shabbat observant does not fit into many of our lifestyles, but there are many things that we can do to slow down once a week, that we can do to cultivate our patience. The writer Judith Shulevitz, in her recent profound book “The SabbathWorld”, offers this example of a modern Shabbat, “My husband and I work hard at the celebratory aspects of the Sabbath. We spend the week scouring farmers’ markets for fresh fruits and vegetables, and on Friday mornings and afternoons we make an elaborate dinner, and sometimes, if we get home in time, take baths and dress up, and we invite friends over or we go to their homes, and we light the candles, and we bless the children, the wine, the challah, and the washing of our hands. As for the negative proscriptions—the ‘do nots’—we observe those largely by keeping our electronic devices off, including cell phones. These we use only if we really, really need to.”

Turning off our electronics—it sounds so easy, but it’s not. I know I’m addicted to my iPhone, and I know that having a computer in my pocket that can send a message, look something up on the Internet, and show a video all in milliseconds adds to my impatience. Why, because I now expect things to happen right now. Just think, it was not that long ago when we didn’t have phones in our pockets let alone computers way more advanced than the computers that put men on the moon. What did we do with ourselves? We talked to each other, for one thing … We had conversations that were longer than 140 characters. Now, I’m obviously not anti-technology, but sometimes with our technology we think that we can control everything, and then our technology controls our mood or our time. It makes us impatient. On Shabbat, we don’t need to control; we can be patient.

There is now a group of young Jews who have created the “Sabbath Manifesto” to encourage people to experiment with Shabbat practices as I have described. On their Facebook page (of course) they give their “10 principles that can serve as an antidote to our increasingly fast-paced way of living.

1. Avoid technology

2. Connect with loved ones

3. Nurture your health

4. Get outside

5. Avoid commerce

6. Light candles

7. Drink wine

8. Eat bread

9. Find silence

10. Give back

“They can be interpreted in any way you want, and practiced with friends, family, or even your local bartender.”

On their website you can even buy a little sack called a “cell phone sleeping bag” to put your phone in on Shabbat to remind yourself to relax and refresh yourself. A congregant reminded me recently that in personal fitness, if you want to build muscle, it happens when you rest. Lifting weights tears your muscles, and resting lets them grow. Just like with Shabbat, our stress, our aggravation, everything that makes us impatient during the week can tear us down, but Shabbat can help our individual lives and our relationships grow.

I said a few moments ago that in our tradition, God rests on Shabbat so therefore we should try to emulate
God. During these Days of Awe, we remind God through our prayers over and over that God is erech apayim, literally “slow to anger,” another way of saying endlessly patient. We say that God is so patient, that God waits for us to return to our true paths towards God. Because God is patient, we should strive to emulate God. Can we teach ourselves this year to not get angry at things we cannot control and save our righteous indignation at true injustice? Can we make 5773 a year where we don’t always focus on what we can be doing instead of focusing on what we are doing right now? What would our relationships be like if we strive to practice patience this year, maybe through the observance of Shabbat?        

Bonia Shur z'l (1923-2012)

I was saddened by the news of Bonia Shur's death.  His music for the Shabbat morning service is Shabbat to me.  I loved to pray at HUC in Cincinnati as he lead the choir and musicians.  When i pray the Hallel psalms, I hear his music in my head.  (I had the pleasure of singing in the annual Hallel choir three times at HUC.  Bonia convinced me that I can sing.)  His is the music I imagine the Levites singing as the pilgrims made their way into the Temple.  I will always remember spending a wonderfully crazy evening at his and Fanchon's house talking about Jewish music and his extraordinary life.

Above is an El Maleh Rachamim that he arranged.  El Maleh is the traditional memorial prayer.

Here is one of my favorite pieces of his.

Please visit his website to explore more of his music.

May Bonia's memory be for a blessing.  

Post Birthright Reflections

It's a beautiful afternoon in Jerusalem, and I'm sitting with my wife in a very peaceful courtyard cafe in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem.  A few days ago we finished staffing the San Diego community Birthright trip.  We spent ten days touring around the country with thirty-nine young Jewish adults ages 22-26 from San Diego.  We saw all the major sites--the Kotel, Yad VaShem, Har Herzl, Masada, Independence Hall, etc,.--and we got to experience some more day-to-day Israeli realities like the visit to the new high school in Sha'ar HaNegev that is completely rocket proof.  (Because of its proximity to the Gaza Strip, this region has been plagued by rocket fire the last several years.  Sha'ar HaNegev is the San Diego Jewish community's sister region in Israel.)  

Before the trip, I was a bit of a Birthright agnositic.  As I understand it, Birthright's main goal is to connect young Jews to their Jewish identities, using a free trip to Israel as the vehicle.  I was always skeptical because, as one who has spent a lot of time in Israel, I felt that ten days was not long enough, and that the participants are already too old.  It's better to send teens and grab them early.

I think I have been convinced that I am am wrong about Birthright.  While I wish that every American Jew would spend long trips in Israel, I did see a real community form in these short ten days.  People who have not thought seriously about their Jewish identity since they were a kid, or ever, were engaging in true questions of meaning like: What does it mean to be a Jew?  What is my connection to Israelis?  Do I have a responsibility to live as a Jew?  

I was also wrong about the age thing.  Teenagers are not great with "meaning" questions, but young adults are trying to figure these things out, and we as a Jewish community have not helped them find Jewish answers.  This past Shabbat afternoon, six of our participants chose to make questions like the aforementioned into their lives in serious ways by choosing to become "b'nei mitzvah."  I put this in quotes because according to Jewish tradtion, one is automatically a Jewish adult at the age of thirteen, but our six never had the opportunity to affirm this.  They were raised with little or no Judaism in the home, but they decided to stand up in the small synagogue in a small hotel in Tiberius and commit themselves to a Jewish life.  They were looking for community, for meaning, for connection.  Israel brought this out of them.

I have been moved many times by many things in Israel, but this was the most exceptional.

Hatikvah n' Roses

While I wish it was Slash rockin' out to "Hatikvah", this is pretty cool for someone who was obsessed with Guns n'  Roses as a kid and for someone who is a lover of Israel.

This should be a good addition to the last post.
Enjoy!