Monthly Archives: August 2011

When Civil Discourse on Israel Fails

22 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Israel/Zionism

≈ 1 Comment

In the early 1980s when I served as the Associate Rabbi at Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, I had come to the conclusion that a two-states for two-peoples end-of-conflict resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the only way that Israel could remain Jewish and democratic. The year was 1983 and Menachem Begin was Prime Minister of Israel. Only 9 years earlier the pro-Israel Breira organization made up mostly of American liberal Rabbis advocated for the same resolution and was drummed out of existence by the American Jewish establishment.

In 1983 I wanted to explain to my congregation why I supported the creation of a Palestinian State alongside a secure State of Israel, but because I was a young junior rabbi I called my childhood rabbi for advice. Rabbi Leonard Beerman had never been averse to controversy. He had fought in Israel’s War of Independence, marched with MLK, was among the very first American rabbis to protest the Vietnam War, and earlier than almost anyone else supported the Palestinians in their quest for statehood. For all this he was denied the Presidency of the Central Conference of American Rabbis when he was nominated.

Leonard told me; “John, I am already at the end of my congregational rabbinate and you are starting out. You will feel badly no matter what you do. I think you ought to be circumspect. Your day will come. Be patient.”

I heeded his counsel and said in my Rosh Hashanah sermon only that the most significant moral problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was that there are two peoples who have legitimate claims to the same land.

After services concluded a number of synagogue leaders gathered to greet one another outside my Senior Rabbi’s study. A group of three Israelis approached and one of them, who happened to be the chairman of the Likud party of Tel Aviv, lost all semblance of civility and lunged at me. Thankfully, the synagogue president jumped between us and averted what would probably have been a powerful right to my jaw.

I recall the incident because ever since I wrote an op-ed column in March for The Los Angeles Jewish Journal expressing why I support J Street, a controversial left-leaning pro-Israel pro-peace political organization in Washington, D.C., there has been a constant flow of very nasty emails to me at Temple Israel by one man in particular, not a synagogue member.

Granted, one person sending vicious emails is not such a terrible thing to endure. I deleted his emails after the first couple, and eventually I had them all blocked. Out of sight, out of mind. However, for some reason in the last 2 weeks our Temple email system underwent some change and his emails began streaming into my in-box again. I was, frankly, dumbfounded that this guy was still at it. Though I am not worried for my safety, I have noticed that his tone has worsened. One accused me of contributing to the genocide of the Jewish people, and a second put me in league with Hamas.

Obviously, the sender is disturbed; but he is not alone in his intolerance and hatred for views with which he disagrees relative to Israel.

When Jeremy Ben-Ami (the founder and President of J Street) and David Suissa (a columnist for The LA Jewish Journal and The Huffington Post) spoke at Temple Israel in April before 600 people from throughout the LA Jewish community what was most striking was the civility of the event and the respectful way Jeremy and David dialogued. Both acknowledged that the other is pro-Israel even as they disagreed on fundamental issues.

As the September 21 vote in the UN General Assembly and possibly the Security Council on the Palestinian Statehood resolution approaches, we are likely to see the vitriol from the extreme right-wing intensify. We need to remember what the rabbis of the Talmud taught; that the reason for the destruction of the Second Temple was sinat chinam, groundless hatred of one Jew for another. The way our people behaves here and in Israel will help to determine the very character of the State of Israel. We all need to keep our heads.

VJ Day Footage – Honolulu, Hawaii, August 14, 1945

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Politics and Life

≈ 2 Comments

Gratitude to Andy Romanoff who sent this to me.

My own father was in the Pacific on VJ Day and I found myself watching and searching for him in the footage from that day 66 years ago. Alas, he wasn’t there, as far as I could tell.

The video was taken by Richard Sullivan and his son put this up two years ago. The text with the video was shot on Kodachrome and had actual sound. The men and women look like our young people today, but most are probably consigned to the ages.

Ahh…the quick passage of time. That day must have felt like an anvil was lifted from everyone’s neck. If only we felt it today!
http://vimeo.com/5645171

D’var Torah – Parashat Ekev – Joining Heaven and Earth

19 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

≈ 1 Comment

This week’s portion contains one of the most famous verses in Torah:

“God afflicted you and made-you-hungry, and had you eat the mahn (i.e. manna) which you had not known and which your fathers had not known, in order to make you know that not by bread alone do humans stay-alive, but rather by all that issues at YHWH’s order do humans stay-alive.” (Deuteronomy 8:3 – translation by Everett Fox)

The Hebrew Bible drives home the truth that God is present here and at all times, at once abiding within us and outside of us, and greater than the mind can ever expect to fathom. Our most challenging religious/spiritual question is how to maintain our conscious awareness of God’s ineffable Presence as we move through each day?

Recognizing this challenge, the rabbis of the Talmud developed the B’rachah (blessing) as a way for us to focus on what is taking place in our lives moment by moment. There are blessings for every conceivable activity: when we taste, hear, see, smell, and sense something unusual, glimpse the ocean and desert, hear thunder and see lightning, meet a friend and encounter royalty, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars – many opportunities to collapse the abyss between oblivion and consciousness, God and us, heaven and earth.

The b’rachah’s power and significance is that we experience the worlds below and above simultaneously, that we recognize constantly that God is immanent and that the material world is infused with divinity.

Rabbi Meir (139-163 C.E.) taught that every Jew should say at least one hundred blessings daily.

Here is a list of twenty blessings I could say upon rising just this morning:

  • Awakening from sleep
  • Being restored to consciousness
  • Discovering that all my physical functions work
  • Becoming conscious that I can see clearly enough
  • Hearing a mockingbird singing outside my bedroom window
  • Standing up
  • Walking on my own two feet
  • Greeting my dog and receiving her morning sweetness
  • Taking her outside and smelling the grass and flowers
  • Feeling the coolness of the morning air
  • Knowing that God is in this place
  • Being grateful for my life
  • Feeling grateful for my family, friends and colleagues
  • Knowing that I have meaningful work to do today
  • Welcoming Shabbat this evening
  • Being a part of an ever-evolving and dynamic Jewish community in Hollywood
  • Teaching Parashat Ekev this morning to my weekly Friday morning Men’s Torah Study group
  • Reading the ancient and holy tongue of the Jewish people
  • Feeling grateful for the people and State of Israel despite its problems and challenges
  • Feeling gratitude to God for the miracle of existence itself

Later in Deuteronomy (30:11-20) we read that Divinity is not far away that we should have to go and seek it. Rather, it is very close to us, upon our lips, in our breath, eyes, taste, touch, thoughts, hearts, and souls.

When we recognize all this we also recognize the truth of these words (Psalm 150); Kol ha-n’shamah t’haleil Yah – Halleluyah.  Every soul sings praises to God – Halleluyah!

Shabbat Shalom.

 

 

Why Glenn Beck is dangerous to Middle East peace and a bloody idiot!

18 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Politics and Life, Israel/Zionism

≈ 2 Comments

Put aside for a moment the truth that Glenn Beck is an ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous extremist. What most recently is alarming is that he has inserted himself into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and by doing so poses a threat to the Jewish democratic state of Israel and to Middle East peace.

Beck is against a 2 states for 2 peoples end-of-conflict resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He is for one state; ostensibly a Jewish state, but if there is only one state, by 2015 Jews will be in the minority in the land that Israel currently occupies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. If heavily populated Arab land is not given to the Palestinians in a negotiated deal that results in 2 states for 2 peoples, and they remain second class citizens in Israel, the Jewish State of Israel will become an Apartheid-like state in just three and a half years. If, however, Israel remains a democracy with equal voting rights granted to all its citizens (Arabs living in the West Bank do not vote in Israeli national elections), then Israel will cease to be a Jewish State and the Zionist dream will be thrown into the trash-bin of history.

Beck is in Israel this week preparing to hold a mass rally in Jerusalem under the banner “Restoring Courage” next Wednesday, August 24. While there, he has spoken to reporters to characterize the hundreds of thousands of housing protesters in Tel Aviv and all around the country as politically “hard left.” To the contrary, the protesters cut across all political party lines. They are middle-class Israelis having a very hard time making ends meet as inflation continues to rise and salaries remain stagnant. They have protested non-violently and are within their democratic rights.

Beck also said, “I’m wondering if there’s any financing behind any of that. Why even look, why even look to see if there is any global leftist financing involved in Tel Aviv. And you know what, do not even look to see if there is any Islamist movement that is joining them.”

What is he talking about?! Is Beck, the fundamentalist Christian, trying to provoke Armageddon and a Middle East war resulting in the second coming of Christ? This could be the only rationalization to his outrageous charges.

A disclaimer: I am one of 400 rabbis (Reform, Conservative and Orthodox) who signed a letter to Rupert Murdoch this past year to protest that Beck’s trivialization of the victims of the Holocaust on the Fox network should not be tolerated. In response, on the air, Beck charged that we Reform Rabbis (though, again, many of the signatures were rabbis from other Jewish religious streams) are all political leftists and cannot be considered religious leaders.

The only good thing I can say is that being on Beck’s enemy’s list is a badge of honor!

 

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg – Still a towering figure with a special capacity to enlighten and inspire

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

≈ Leave a comment

The last time I heard Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg speak was more than 30 years ago when he addressed a Jewish Federation gathering of young leaders that my wife Barbara and I were a part of in San Francisco where I served as the Associate Rabbi at Congregation Sherith Israel. “Yitz,” as he is widely and affectionately known, was compelling then, a favorite speaker of the organized Jewish community, a Jewish scholar of note, a significant theologian and thinker, a teacher par excellence, and a writer always worth reading.

In the intervening years I have read his books and marveled at his courage as a modern Orthodox Rabbi who insisted that all the religious streams had to keep talking together, critiquing each other honestly, listening to one another, and striving for mutual understanding, at the very least. He is courageous because, despite his intellectual heft and taking a back seat to no one, his pluralistic outreach to Jews of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements set him up for calumny heaved at him by the small-minded right-wing orthodox rabbis and Jews, who have now taken over far too much of the traditional world in America and Israel.

Today, here in Los Angeles, I joined with more than 170 rabbis and rabbinic students at the annual Board of Rabbis of Southern California High Holyday practicum to hear Rabbi Greenberg, hosted by Stephen S. Wise Temple over the 405. In the intervening years he has lost none of his luster. Aging gracefully, tall and still lean, Yitz is a towering intellectual and spiritual figure. Having earned his s’michah (rabbinic ordination) in 1953 at Yeshiva Beis Yosef, he was a student of the great Rav Joseph Soloveitchik.

Rabbi Greenberg shared with us the essence of his forthcoming book; the grand Jewish narrative that embraces the themes of Creation, Covenant and Redemption. He argued persuasively that this narrative of Jewish tradition is the most influential narrative of any religion in human history. Upon it Judaism has based its sacred literature, liturgy, holydays, rituals and observance. This narrative theme also is found at the basis of Christianity, Islam and modern western civilization thereby including 2.5 billion people living today.

The High Holiday Practicum, a highlight of the Board of Rabbis calendar year, is NOT where we all get our sermon ideas for the holidays, as so many congregants suspect. Nevertheless, this day of learning does feed the heart, mind and soul, and as a result ideas begin to percolate as we rabbis struggle to find something meaningful, spiritual, Jewish, and personal to say when the Yamim Noraim arrive in just 6 weeks!

Yes – if you are wondering. I have been thinking now for several months and I have begun writing. Yet, what I write in these initial days of preparation is never what my congregants end up hearing, for “writing” is really all about “re-writing,” and that continues literally until the moment I stand on the bimah and start talking.

Rabbi Greenberg’s talks today were wonderful, and it was great to see and hear him again.

Michele Bachmann Profile – In The New Yorker

15 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Politics and Life

≈ Leave a comment

This is, hopefully, the first of many articles that will appear in the mainstream media profiling who Michele Bachmann really is – an extremist Christian fundamentalist ideologue who believes that Christianity is incompatible with democracy. The added problem is that there are 70 million American fundamentalist evangelical Christians who agree with her.Though it is unlikely she could ever become President, this article shows how dangerous she is to civil discourse, honesty in the public sphere and integrity of the American democratic system.

(The New Yorker – The Political Scene – “Leap of Faith: The making of a Republican front-runner” by Ryan Lizza – August 15, 2011)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all

 

D’var Torah – Va-et’chanan – Transforming Personal and National Yearning

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah

≈ 1 Comment

This week’s Parashah, Va-et’chanan (Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11) begins: Va-et’chanan el Adonai  ba-eit ha-hi leimor…“I pleaded with God at that time, saying…” (3:23+)

Rashi asked why should the first word of the verse and parashah be Va-et’chanan (“I pleaded”) and not Va-et’palel (“I prayed”)? He explained that Va-et’chanan comes from the root chanan and suggests that Moses was asking for a gift from God that he knew he didn’t deserve or merit, but he wanted it badly; indeed, he yearned to enter the Promised Land which he had forfeited as a consequence of his earlier defiance of God.

Moses’ pleading is particularly shocking when we consider the spiritual pre-eminence of the man. He was after all the greatest of the prophets, the only one who spoke panim el panim, face to face with God, the great liberator who led the people out of Egypt, the law-giver who received the Torah at Sinai, and the guide who led the people to the edge of the Promised Land.

Such yearning is understandable, and anyone who has ever suffered any kind of loss or extreme disappointment knows the feeling.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev offers, relative to the opening words of the parashah, an important insight into Moses’ state of mind. This great Chassidic Master didn’t believe that God actually punished Moses by not granting the prophet’s fervent request to enter the Promised Land. Rather, Levi Yitzhak placed the onus of Moses’ exile on Moses himself because his spiritual orientation wasn’t quite right, and he, Moses, was responsible for his own condition, not God.

Rebbe Yitzhak came to this conclusion because at the end of the first verse appears the word leimor which he believed was a superfluous addition included to emphasize that what would follow are words from God, but what preceded were from Moses – “I pleaded with God at that time, leimor – (i.e. saying)…” This was the only time in Moses’ long career that he felt the need for Divine assistance in his prayer, and so he turned to God in the language of pleading – va-et’chanan – begging the Eternal One to put words in his throat as God had done so many times before and be near him.

Va-et’chanan (I plead) is the language of exile, and that it introduces the Torah portion this week, only days following Tisha B’Av, is not an accident. For Tisha B’Av is the holyday that recalls the pain of our people’s destruction, loss and exile, our separation from God, from the land, and even God’s exile from God’s Divine self. The Destruction of the two Temples were national catastrophes to the Jewish people without parallel until their time.

Our yearning this week as a people with time and with the assistance of t’shuvah (and we begin to look forward to Elul and the Days of Awe even now), is the challenge before Moses and before our people in these days following Tisha B’Av. This is also an opportunity for transformation, healing and renewed hope.

Chazak v’eimatz. May we be strong and courageous!  Shabbat Shalom!

 

 

 

 

A thought has blown the market place away

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in Quote of the Day

≈ Leave a comment

Given the two weeks that have traumatized America and the world with the extreme fluctuations in the stock market, the devaluing of American credit and the loss of pensions and so much more, the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are worth contemplating this Shabbat:

“A thought has blown the market place away: there is a song in the wind and joy in the trees. The Sabbath arrives in the world, scattering a song in the silence of the night. Eternity utters a day. Where are the words that could compete with such might? Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness in time. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of Eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but the soul belongs to Someone else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world; on the seventh day we try to dominate the self – to set apart a day a week, a day on which we could not use the instruments so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with one another and with the forces of nature.”

Shabbat Shalom!