Friday, September 28, 2012

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?        

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

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.