Category Archives: Life Cycle

When a Childhood Home is Demolished

05 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by in Life Cycle, Stories

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Above photos – Michael, me, and our father – 1952 and view from the street today

Eighty-three years ago, in 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, my childhood home in west Los Angeles was built.

It is a charming California ranch-style home of no more than 2100 square feet. According to neighborhood code, every home was set back 100 feet from the street.

When I was growing up, 15 mature trees populated the grounds. In the back yard, there were willow, palm, avocado, guava, kumquat, peach, plum, laurel, and lemon. In the front yard grew magnolia, jacaranda, paper birch, oak, pine, and maple. Alas, all are gone now except the maple.

As a kid, I loved climbing the tall oak or magnolia whenever I needed to be alone. I also loved to climb onto our tile roof being careful not to break the tiles, which I did from time to time.

My parents bought the home in 1949 just before I was born. My brother Michael left for college in 1966, and after I left in 1968, my mother sold the property. The family that bought it lived there for the next 49 years until this past year.

Last week the developers who bought it put up a green fabric fence signaling that demolition is imminent.

I loved that house. My very first memories are from the age of two. I played baseball with my dad and brother in the back yard. Michael and I dug holes lined with tin cans in the front yard so we could putt golf balls. In the back was a built-in red brick distressed barbecue. In the service yard behind the garage we inherited an incinerator from the 1940s and used it until the LA City Council banned them in 1957.

My dad played the violin and painted still life casein in the sunny lanai, a room he named for his pleasant experiences serving in the Hawaiian islands during World War II as a physician and lieutenant colonel in the US Navy. Our parents entertained with scotch and martinis before sit-down dinners. They drank their coffee black and hot!

My dad bought Michael and me our first bicycles. Mine was a red 24-inch Schwinn I called “Betsy.” His was black. We rode the neighborhood with gusto. I walked to the bus stop or the mile through back streets to school from the age of 6 without my parents expressing, to my knowledge, any worry.

Our house doors were never locked. Milk was delivered in bottles and placed in a small niche near the back door. The Good Humor ice cream truck drove our streets in the afternoon. I played outside until dark and came home filthy. I knew my neighborhood like the back of my hand and knew most of the neighbors. Dogs roamed the streets unleashed.

As a little boy, I remember following my dad (who I called “Daddy” and still do) like a puppy in the back yard picking up the clippings he pruned. I can still remember the smell of wet cut grass and eucalyptus from the adjacent property. We fed California jays (now called scrub jays) and had names for all of them according to their markings. We collected butterflies.

In 1953, my parents bought our first television set, a 24-inch black-and-white console. They put it in my dad’s study with his book shelves, medical journals, desk and two red leather chairs and ottoman on which my brother and I watched cartoons on weekend mornings, westerns in the afternoons, I Love Lucy when we were sick, the Friday night fights with my dad, The Wonderful World of Disney and The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights.

In 1956, I remember the interview with Adlai Stevenson when the camera caught the hole in the bottom of his shoe. I recall also seeing Fidel Castro on Face the Nation in 1959 just after the Cuban revolution, JFK delivering his inaugural address in 1961, his Cuban Missile Crisis speech in 1962, Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech on the Washington Mall in 1963, the entire weekend after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 including live the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, LBJ signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the White House, and footage of the fighting during the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the combined armies of eight Arab nations who promised to “push the Jews into the sea.”

I emerged into political and historical consciousness in that house.

On August 10, 1959, my world changed irrevocably. Michael (a year older than me) and I saw our father for the last time that evening as he stood in the doorway of our small bedroom to say goodnight. He hadn’t been feeling well and while we slept an ambulance came to the house and took him at 2 a.m. to the hospital where he died 23 hours later from his second heart attack. He was only 53 years old.

My brother and I call that house “321.” It has been our link to our childhoods and father throughout our lives. I visited it from time to time and even knocked on the door 25 years ago and asked to walk through. The owners remembered my family and were gracious. Though it has been owned by others, Michael and I still feel that it belongs to us. I fantasized that maybe either of us would be able and want to buy it this past year when it was put up for sale.

One doesn’t say Kaddish over a house, but its demolition is a death for both of us. We’re left now only with, as Jim Croce poignantly said, “photographs and memories.”

Thanks to Michael for sharing his memories with me as I wrote this.

 

When Mortality Stares Back at Us

09 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle

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A good friend, a few years older than me, told me this week that he just received a heart stent to open one of his 90% occluded arteries. His doctors explained that without the stent he risked suffering a massive and likely fatal heart attack at any time.

He appeared vulnerable and in shock and confessed that he felt both terrified and grateful: “My mortality stared me in the face.”

Relieved, I responded: “Thankfully, you have yet to write more chapters of your life!”

Eight years ago following cancer surgery and radiation therapy (I’m fine now), I learned two important truths. The first is that healing physically from surgery and treatment is the easier part of a post-traumatic and life threatening event, but it is very different than the emotional and spiritual healing that’s also required. The latter takes much longer and necessitates far more introspection and inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual struggle to adjust to the new reality of our lives.

Most young people don’t think much about the end of life, but as we age we realize that there are fewer years ahead of us than there are behind us. When we suffer an event as my friend did this past week, we necessarily become excruciatingly aware of our life circumstances.

Thankfully, advances in medicine have extended life expectancy substantially, and there is little doubt that my friend has been given a reprieve by the angel of death.

Twenty years ago after his father died, he told me that he had read all 150 Psalms and had found great comfort and perspective in its verse.

Tradition attributes the authorship of the Psalms to King David as an old man who had lived a full, dramatic, challenging, and often heart-breaking life.

When my friend told me about his experience reading the Psalms, I said that perhaps I ought to teach them in my community. He liked the idea but thought I was too young and though I’d experienced much in my own life already and witnessed much in the lives of the people in my community, the Psalms, he reflected, required a person of age to teach them as they ought to be taught. He believed that no young person could adequately understand them.

I put aside the idea and wonder now if I’m ready.

 

 

 

Love, Sweet Love!

14 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Art, Divrei Torah, Holidays, Life Cycle, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry

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“The world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”

So said Rabbi Akiva (2nd century Palestine), who believed that The Song of Songs, a love poem in the Hebrew Bible, traditionally attributed to King Solomon as a young man, is an allegory between two lovers, God and Israel.

The allegorical interpretation of The Song of Songs is why The Song of Songs is read each year on the Shabbat during Pesach, this Shabbat, for it’s then that we celebrate our people’s redemption and liberation from bondage on the one hand and the Kabbalistic idea of the hoped-for-redemption of God within God’s Divine Self on the other.

All that being said, this extraordinarily enriched poetry seems to be a purely secular poem (God’s Name is never mentioned) celebrating young, sensuous and erotic love and the passionate draw of two lovers yearning for relief from their existential loneliness:

“For love is strong as death, / Harsh as the grave. / Its tongues are flames, a fierce / And holy blaze”  (Song of Songs 8:6 – Translation by Marcia Falk)

Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook wrote of a higher metaphysical love represented by the Song of Songs in this way (Translation by Ben Zion Bokser):

“Expanses divine my soul craves. / Confine me not in cages, / of substance or of spirit. / I am love-sick / I thirst, / I thirst for God, / as a deer for water brooks.

Alas, who can describe my pain? / Who will be a violin / to express the songs of my grief?

I am bound to the world, / all creatures, / all people are my friends.

Many parts of my soul / are intertwined with them, / But how can I share with them my light.”

Tonight – Friday, April 14 at 6:30 PM,  at Temple Israel of Hollywood, we will be celebrating as part of our Kabbalat Shabbat service the Song of Songs with beautiful music set to its verse. We have invited members of our community who are celebrating milestone wedding anniversaries to join us, and we will offer them a blessing. If you are free and would like to join us, please do come.

Shabbat shalom and Moadim L’simchah!

Getting to 100 – What Makes for a Long and Healthy life?

30 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in American Politics and Life, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Israel and Palestine, Life Cycle, Social Justice

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Today, December 30, would have been my father’s 111th birthday. He made it only to #53, and every year I ponder what he and I would have become together and individually had he lived longer.

My mother, who died a year ago, almost made it to 100. She was eighteen months shy of that millennial milestone.

Their birthdays, yahrzeits, Yizkor, and other significant family events always raise for me the questions “What if…?” and “How do those who live to 100 do it?”

Here are eight responses by people who’ve reached 100 to the question “Why have you lived so long?”

“Eat boiled corn with codfish and cream, and laugh…”

“Smoke a good cigar, avoid alcohol, drink water, stay positive, and sing.”

“Thumb your nose at sadness, turn the tables on tragedy, laugh instead of getting angry, and don’t feel envious of anyone.”

“Find a good wife and drink two scotches every night.”

“Fight injustice, help people in trouble, and keep your mind active.”

“Do something new each day, avoid drama and stay far away from difficult people.”

“Mind your own business, don’t eat junk food, treat others well, and work hard at what you love.”

“Live for God, pray, and surround yourself with nice people.”

So… there you have it – but, not so fast, because even if we do everything right – i.e.  eat well, exercise, manage stress, maintain social connections, and live with faith – there’s no guarantee of anything.

After all, some of us are more prone to disease, accident, and rotten luck than others.

Longevity researchers say that both genetic factors and behavioral factors contribute to longevity. These include health and health behaviors, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, stress, social and environmental support, mental health, and life satisfaction.

Perhaps the most important study on longevity is “The Longevity Project” written by psychology professors Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin of UC Riverside. They culminated an eight-decade-long study, begun in 1921 by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman, of 1500 precocious children. Terman died in 1956 so future researchers picked up where he left off, including Drs. Friedman and Martin. (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19longevity.html)

The 1500 children were followed in meticulous detail throughout their lives. In studying them Drs. Friedman and Martin conclude:

“The best childhood predictor of longevity [is] conscientiousness—the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person—somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree….It’s not the happy-go-lucky who thrive—it’s the prudent and persistent who flourish through the years.…conscientious people do more … to protect their health and engage in fewer [risky] activities …. are less likely to smoke or drive too fast. They buckle their seat belts and follow the doctor’s advice…They are not necessarily risk averse but they tend to be sensible in evaluating how far to push the envelope. [some are]…biologically predisposed to be …more conscientious and healthier ….less prone to develop certain diseases, … these people have different levels of the chemical…serotonin in their brains [serotonin helps to determine happiness and well-being]…Individuals with low levels of serotonin tend to be much more impulsive… and they eat more and sleep less… Having a conscientious personality leads a person into healthier situations and relationships… happier marriages, better friendships and healthier work situations.”

This study showed that kids described as cheerful and optimistic didn’t live as long as those boring and serious kids (i.e. nerds!?) who worried constantly about school, studied and worked hard.

The one factor that best predicted long life, even more than happiness itself, is purposeful goal-oriented work, whether for a paycheck or for its own sake. People drawn to live their lives with other like-minded, healthy, active, and involved people significantly increase the odds of their living longer and more happily.

Judaism emphasizes that it’s not the number of days or years that we live, it’s the quality of those days that matters and that is the surest way to wisdom (Psalm 90:12).

In this New Year 2017, there’s much about which to be thankful and much cause for  worry – e.g. Israel’s security, its isolation and the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;  epic changes the Trump administration promises; the well-being of our children, grandchildren, extended family, friends, community, nation, people, the world, and the environment.

We cannot know what’s going to occur in the year to come. However, we can control how we ourselves cope – that is our challenge going forward.

I hope that each of us will be blessed with good health, length of years and the knowledge that did all we could to live our lives ethically, compassionately, patiently, and with love.

Note: This is a blog I posted initially on December 27, 2013 with updates.

Follow me on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/RabbiJohnLRosove

The suicide of a former ultra-Orthodox mother of seven stuns Israel

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Health and Well-Being, Israel/Zionism, Life Cycle, Stories, Women's Rights

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“In this city I gave birth to my daughters – in this city I die because of my daughters….I understand that I am sick and needy, and I don’t want to continue to be a burden on you….Don’t make much effort for the ceremony, something modest with a lot of flowers, and remember that this is what I chose as best for me, and also if you say that I am selfish, I accept and understand your lack of understanding.”

So wrote Esti Weinstein, 50, in a suicide note found alongside her body in her car that was discovered four days after her death at a beach in the city of Ashdod, Israel.

I learned of Esti’s story not from the media, though her suicide was headline news in Israel at the end of June, but from one of my synagogue’s regular cantorial soloists a day after her body had been discovered.

Meni Philip was Esti’s friend. Like Esti, Meni had left the ultra-Orthodox Haredi world in Israel in which he was raised. Both Esti and Meni were disowned by their parents and community and were cut as if by a surgeon’s knife by their Haredi community away from everything and everyone they knew and loved.

Meni (47) is the second child of eleven siblings and the father of five children. His marriage had been arranged, but he never loved his wife. At 32 Meni asked his rabbi for a get (a religious divorce). He continued to live in the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community doing all that was expected of him religiously, though he had come to no longer believe in the God that had been taught to him by his rabbis. Four years after his divorce, though continuing regularly to see his parents and children, he could no longer keep up religious appearances, took off his kippah and began wearing western clothing. He didn’t anticipate, however, that he would become persona non grata. His family, rabbis and friends suddenly would have nothing to do with him. He was denied visiting his children. Yet, he persevered, built a new life, learned survivor skills, acquired work, and became a filmmaker.

Four of Meni’s siblings followed him out of the Haredi community. Today, he has reconciled with his parents and children.

Such was not the positive outcome for Esti Weinstein, the mother of seven daughters all of whom save one, Tami,  completely cut ties with her.

Esti comes from a prominent Gur Hasidic family, a stringent Haredi sect considered extreme even by others in ultra-Orthodox world. Husbands never address their wives by name. Sexual contact between them is considered a sacrilege and is engaged only for the purpose of procreation. Sex occurs rarely, quickly, while fully clothed, and devoid of emotion, intimacy, and joy. (http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/gur-hasidim-and-sexual-separation-1.410811)

After leaving her community, Esti suffered. She wrote an autobiography (that Meni sent to me) in which she told her inside story in a 183-page book she called “Doing His Will.” Esti dedicated the volume to her daughter Tami who followed her out of the Gur sect and who remained close to her. She wrote as well of her marriage, the loss of her other six daughters and about a previous suicide attempt.

In a story reported by The Times of Israel one can view photos of Esti (see below). She was a natural beauty, but beneath the lovely smiling images was a profound sadness. She ended her book with these words:

“…my life of motherhood, the painful, that is smashed to pieces, sick and wounded….I thought it was a temporary matter, but the years are passing and time isn’t healing, and the pain doesn’t stop.” http://www.timesofisrael.com/before-suicide-woman-penned-book-about-her-ordeals-in-ultra-orthodox-world/ – see also http://forward.com/news/343780/ex-hasidic-womans-suicide-book-rattles-ultra-orthodox-world/

Meni told me that there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of former mostly young Haredim in their 20s living in Israel who have left their communities over the years. It is unclear what is causing the increasing number of suicides in this unique population, though it is clear that many had been disowned by their families. Some may have suffered depression before they left, and many experienced as children sexual abuse and later as adults spousal abuse.

Meni made a film called “Sinner” which won the “Best European Short Film” in the Venice Film Festival, Italy 2009. (the 27-minute film can be viewed here in its entirety – http://www.meniphilip.com/english/Sinner.html)

There is one underfunded organization in Israel called Hillel (not the same as the college organization) that offers help and support for ex-Haredim. Meni received such support as did Esti who had volunteered there and where Esti and Meni met and became friends. Additionally, there are two more small but important organizations that were established by Meni’s good friends after the deaths of two young “Yozim” (those who leave) a few years ago. One is called “Uvacharta-And Choose” (see https://www.facebook.com/uvacharta/?fref=ts) and the other called “Out for Change – Yozim l’shinuy” (https://www.facebook.com/yozimleshinuy/. The first focuses on social support, and the second focuses on educational assistance. Neither receives financial support from the government.

The Reform movement’s Israeli Religious Action Center (IRAC) assists individuals who leave Haredi communities through its social justice program Keren B’chavod. Israeli Reform Rabbis tell me that the Reform movement’s 45 synagogue communities around the country are open to any ex-Haredi Jew who seeks support and comfort.

May Esti’s memory be a blessing.

Journeys into Judaism – Shavuot Truths in the wake of Terrorist Desecration

13 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Divrei Torah, Ethics, Holidays, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Life Cycle, Social Justice, Women's Rights

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The Shavuot experience I am about to describe was taking place at precisely the time of the terrorist attack in Orlando. The contrast of our experience against that hate crime is stark and devastating. I am posting this reflection only 24 hours after the carnage as a way to counter spiritually, emotionally, morally, and Jewishly the desecration and destruction of life and community that terrorism and violence represents.

The three speakers, Jews by-Choice, at our Tikun Leil Shavuot celebration told our community that they do not feel that they had left anything behind when they converted to Judaism. Rather, Judaism had become already an essential part of their identity by the time they underwent formal conversion.

Some had been married to a Jewish spouse already for years once they converted, but they were already living a Jewish life at home and in the synagogue and identifying with the Jewish community and people.

Others had met the love of their lives and decided before marriage that they wished to create a Jewish family and convert.

One grew up in Salt Lake City with a Mormon background and roots in America reaching back to the days of the pilgrims.

Another was born and raised in Texas as a Roman Catholic.

A third came from a non-religious home in the Midwest.

Each was attracted to Judaism because of our tradition’s emphasis on critical thinking and openness to questioning our faith tradition’s ideas concerning  ultimate issues of life and death, faith and God. They loved our people’s commitment to family, our tradition’s emphasis on high ethical living and the value we place as a people in performing acts of loving-kindness, on caring for the most vulnerable, on social justice and tikun olam. They are inspired by our people’s great thinkers and activists – Rabbi Akiva, Rambam, Isaac Luria, Martin Buber, Rabbis Heschel, Kaplan, and Cook. They identify with our historic struggle with God, and our aversion to accepting by rote any religious dogma.

They spoke about their feeling fully accepted for who they uniquely are in our liberal Jewish community. They understood, appreciated and identified with our concerns about preserving Jewish particularism and advancing our universal aspirations, that we care for and take responsibility for the character of own Jewish people and the rights and dignity of the “other.”

As we reflected on the meaning of covenant as it manifested at Mt Sinai and throughout the writings of our sages, and expressed in the Book of Ruth, these Jews by-choice understood that at the core of our people’s covenant with God is love, and love, and love, and love, and love some more – and that true religion must bring people together and not tear them apart.

As I sat and listened to these moving personal stories, I was deeply moved and inspired. We broke into chevruta discussion groups of 3 and 4 people to reflect about the transformative and transcendent moments in our lives and about how those experiences changed us and moved us forward on our respective Jewish paths, I heard that these people loved having found a liberal Jewish community that embraces without judgment and with full acceptance who they are as men and women, LGBTQ and straight, the faithful and the atheist and agnostic, the young, middle years and old.

When we reconvened, I observed how very different Jewish identity is today as compared to a century ago, and how much more embracing it has become of the uniqueness of the individual, but also that today Jewish identity is not a given.

Whereas the immigrant generation of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents felt in their kishkes that they were Jews, many liberal Jews today come to Jewish life not from the shtetls and the pale of European Jewish settlement, nor from tightly bonded Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewish families and communities, but from outside the tradition altogether. Consequently, every Jew must make the choice to be and do Jewish, and that takes learning and active engagement with Jewish communal life.

The words of Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi after the death of her husband and two sons, one of whom was married to Ruth, go to the heart of Jewish tradition: “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’” (Ruth 1:16)

Ruth’s love and commitment to the devastated Naomi healed them both and clarified the nature of the covenant forged between God and Israel at Sinai and between each of us – that we are a people meant to love and embrace each other, to care for each other and about each other, and to create and nurture communities that are worthy to stand in God’s presence.

Note: I am grateful to my colleagues Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh and Rabbi Jocee Hudson who conceived of and promoted this Shavuot experience.

Hearing aids for baby-boomers – it’s time for a lot of us!

17 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in American Politics and Life, Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle

≈ 10 Comments

“What? Can you say that again?” I ask.

“Did you hear what I said?” Others ask me.

A confession: I’ve found it increasingly difficult in the last several years to hear people sitting next to or across from me in noisy restaurants. My family has been telling me that I’m missing a lot of what they say. And so, I decided at last that it was time to find out definitively if I had a hearing problem.

First, I went on-line to learn what common symptoms are associated with hearing loss. I was alarmed to discover that I was experiencing many of those symptoms, including frequently asking people to repeat what they’d just said, turning up the TV and car radio volume, not understanding what’s being said in movies, theaters and public gatherings, straining to understand conversations in a group, not hearing easily what’s being said from a different room, not understanding others when I couldn’t see their faces, straining to hear some conversations altogether, not hearing ‘low-talkers’ (i.e. people who speak softly), thinking that many people mumble, and avoiding noisy environments whenever I can.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) estimates that one in eight people in the United States (13% – 30 million people) aged 12 years and older has hearing loss in both ears, based on standard hearing examinations. 15% of American adults (37.5 million) aged 18 and over report some trouble hearing. Men are more likely than women to report hearing loss. 2% of adults aged 45 to 54 have disabling hearing loss. The rate increases to 8.5% for adults aged 55 to 64. Nearly 25% of those aged 65 to 74 and 50% of those 75 and older have disabling hearing loss.

15% of Americans (26 million) between the ages of 20 and 69 have high frequency hearing loss due to exposure to noise at work or during leisure activities. Among adults aged 70 and older with hearing loss that could benefit from hearing aids, fewer than one in three (30%) has ever used them. Even fewer adults aged 20 to 69 (16%) who could benefit from wearing hearing aids have ever used them.

Reading all this, recognizing that there was clear evidence of my own evolving hearing disability, I decided to see an audiologist. She led me through a series of tests and, indeed, I have high frequency hearing loss. She told me that her own father, a man six years younger than me, has the same problem.

“Does he wear hearing aids?” I asked.

“Of course he does,” she said. “John – if you were my Dad you’d be wearing them too.”

She added that her father has never been happier now that he wears them because now he can easily hear everything clearly.

That did it. I ordered a pair and a week later they arrived.

My mother (z’l), and others too, used to complain to me that hearing aids didn’t work well for them, but that generation of hearing aids is already ancient history. Hearing aids have advanced dramatically over the last decade. They are now digital and connect with an app on IPhones, and are very effective.

For the past two weeks since wearing these little ear pieces (most people don’t notice that I’m wearing them because they are small and their color matches my hair color – increasingly more gray), my life has changed dramatically for the better. I can hear everything now, even sounds I didn’t know I wasn’t hearing.

My devices have three adjustable settings and I can control them either on the ear phones themselves with the push of a tiny button, or on an app on my IPhone; one setting is for normal every-day conversation; another is for restaurants with lots of ambient noise; and the third is for music. I can also listen through the hearing aid to music, news and podcasts wirelessly transmitted from my IPhone.

Above my audiologist’s desk is a powerful quote of Helen Keller: “Blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.”

It’s true! I found that as my hearing worsened, I was gradually stepping away from some conversations I couldn’t hear and just sitting quietly while others conversed. I felt more disengaged, separate, apart, and frustrated. No longer!

If hearing is your problem or the problem of someone you love or someone with whom you work, get yourself tested or encourage them to get tested. If you or they have a hearing deficit, then do yourself, your family, friends and co-workers a favor – get hearing aids.

One problem – hearing aids are not (yet) covered by insurance or Medicare, so be ready to make an investment. Nevertheless, don’t be deterred. It’s worth it and you won’t be sorry.

Returning the hearts of parents and children to each other

17 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Divrei Torah, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Holidays, Jewish Identity, Life Cycle, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Social Justice, Women's Rights

≈ 3 Comments

“Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet
before the coming of the great and awe-inspiring day of God;
And he [Elijah] will return the hearts of parents to children
and the hearts of children to their parents.”  (Malachi 3:23-24)

These two verses were read yesterday on Shabbat Hagadol (“The Great Sabbath”) that comes immediately before Pesach. They have touched and moved me since I was young in a number of ways.

As a congregational rabbi, so often I encounter parents and grown children who are alienated from each other, and though every situation is different and the sources of rupture in families are as varied as there are people, I wonder what it would take for most of these estrangements to be healed and for families to draw closer to one another. It’s my conviction that in most families, if there’s a strong enough will the breach can be healed.

In this season of Pesach, inspired by the Prophet Malachi, if this is your situation why not seize the opportunity today, now, this week, and reach out to the person or people from whom you feel  distance and seek a way back to each other?

Reconciliation with the most important people in our lives (our parents and children) may tragically be too late for some families after years of alienation. It’s been my experience that unless a child or a parent suffers from mental illness or addiction disorders, it is usually a parent who provoked and/or allowed the alienation to occur with his or her child(ren) to fester over the years. Most children want positive relationships with their parents, but old injuries, accumulated anger, resentment, hatred, and calcification of negative feelings and attitudes towards the other have been allowed to make reconciliation difficult, but not impossible.

Judaism affirms the power of s’lichah (forgiveness) and t’shuvah (repentance – return) to transform our lives. These are themes not only of the High Holiday season but of Pesach too, as both are required for g’ulah (“redemption”). Judaism affirms as well that it’s possible to free ourselves from injuries born in the past and to transform them in the present so as to chart a new, different and positive future. That is the essence of the Exodus and Passover story.

What’s required may be the most difficult challenge we ever face; that parents and children look within themselves, acknowledge their own culpability for the breach, avoid blaming the other, approach the other with humility and an open heart, and then forgive both themselves and the other for whatever occurred in the past. After so long a period, it no longer really matters who caused the rupture in the beginning. Either side, and hopefully both, can and ought to reach out.

Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. It means “letting go” of the slights inflicted and experienced so long ago, and setting aside the aggravating and annoying quirks of personality that justify, in our minds and hearts, the distance we’ve each perpetuated and sustained.

When we forgive we heal the hurts of the past and the injuries we believe we never deserved. By forgiving, we reverse the flow of our own history. This is the meaning of redemption – that we redress grievances and restore ourselves first to ourselves and then to those nearest to us.

In another way, these Malachi verses have moved me since I was young because they stimulate my memories of my father who died so long ago, but whose voice, smell, touch, and love for me, my brother, my mother, and our family remain alive in me and all of us who he loved and who loved him. This year, these verses evoke memories of my mother too, whose soul passed from this life a few months ago. I imagine my parents’ souls communing together again, as they did with so much love and joy once upon a time, and I imagine my mother restored to her parents and siblings also, people whom she so adored in the 98+ years of her long life.

This coming Shabbat eve, families and friends will gather around the Seder table and Elijah’s empty chair will, hopefully, remind us of our parents and their parents, our sages and teachers, prophets, mystics, and tzadikim, as our people celebrates liberation and the promise of redemption. We’ll recommit ourselves to right the wrongs and injustices in our communities, among our people, in our nation and world, to reaffirm that justice must exist everywhere for us to be truly free ourselves, and that the virtues of compassion, empathy and loving-kindness are the means to affirm and concretize Judaism’s ideals of a world healed of its many breaches.

May this season be one of meaning and joyful reunion for each of us, for everyone we love, for the Jewish people, for the oppressed among the nations, and for all the inhabitants of the earth.

Chag Pesach Sameach!

Hillary’s and Bill’s marriage is none of America’s business

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in American Politics and Life, Ethics, Life Cycle

≈ 2 Comments

It is no one’s business how Hillary and Bill Clinton have worked through their marriage challenges.

As a congregational rabbi of 36 years, I have counseled many couples as infidelity tears marriages apart. In those rare instances when the partners’ love for one another is strong enough and they are forgiving enough and repentant enough, some couples can stay married successfully and happily.

Marriage and long-term relationship commitments are often difficult. Most married individuals, at one time or another, are seduced or almost seduced to violate their marriage bond and commitment. That there were violations in the Clinton marriage is, frankly, none of America’s business. Whatever indiscretions Bill committed, Hillary staying with him does not make Hillary an enabler, as Donald Trump self-righteously and cruelly barked last week, but rather, it suggests that Hillary is a strong, forgiving and loving wife.

In reading Carl Bernstein’s excellent un-authorized biography of Hillary Clinton A Woman in Charge (publ. 2007), I came away with the sense that the Clintons are honest with each other, that they know each other exceptionally well, have made peace with each other’s frailties, and that they have enough together that they want to stay married. If that reflects a deficiency of character, then perhaps I have learned nothing in my life as a Jew and a rabbi. To the contrary, I believe that their suffering, reconciliation and ability to move forward together is a sign of strong character and abiding love.

When Hillary Clinton was a Senator, my wife Barbara and I spent 10 minutes speaking with her privately at an LA fundraiser. She had just delivered a sermon on Yom Kippur at a congregation in Los Angeles on the theme of forgiveness. I asked her what she said as I had just spoken on the same theme in my synagogue, and she looked me in the eye and explained that she loves her husband and despite the humiliation she suffered following the Monica Lewinsky affair, as a Christian she found it in her heart to forgive him, that Bill never wanted to lose her as his wife, that he loved her and she loved him, and that they had built a life together far beyond politics that they cherished and did not want to lose.

Bernstein discussed this dynamic at some length in his book, and it became clear to me, as I have learned counseling couples over the years, that everyone, including Hillary and Bill, is different. Every couple is different and every marriage is different. Those that survive threats to their marriage  become stronger and more committed to each other as a consequence and are to be respected, not vilified.

So – let’s stick to the issues of this important presidential campaign and judge the capacity of the respective candidates on the basis of their philosophy of governing, their judgement, temperament, perspective, experience, and understanding of the nation and the world, and decide based on those metrics what this nation needs going forward and not allow ourselves to speculate on what happens inside anyone’s marriage. Frankly, we don’t have a clue and it’s none of our business.

My Mother’s Death and Why Writing an Ethical Will is Important

31 Thursday Dec 2015

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

≈ 5 Comments

Having just lost my mother less than two weeks ago, I have been pondering, among the flood of memories that have swept over me, how very short is a human life, even one like hers who lived for 98+ years.

When we are young we assume that we will live indefinitely. We don’t think about the end of life. But when we lose the people we love we realize, as if for the first time that a life, however long, is in truth very brief.

Writing a eulogy for my mother was not easy for me. I have officiated at close to 500 funerals over the past 40 years. I have written eulogies for more than 35 members of my family and my wife’s family. I know what is required in writing such an address – to evoke the essence of a person and reflect on those enduring qualities that left an impression on others. It is always difficult to do this. Nothing, however, came even close to the challenge I felt in writing my own mother’s eulogy.

I avoided sitting down to write. I waited and waited and waited some more until I could wait no longer. Then I struggled to find exactly the right words to express who my mother was, what was in her heart, what animated her spirit and personality, how she developed her core values, who she loved, and what was most important to her.

I thought I would be prepared for her death. After all, these last years were not easy for her as her sight, hearing and mental acuity were seriously compromised. As it turned out, I was not prepared. After she died when I realized that I would never see her again, never see the smile on her face when I came to visit, never again hear her voice, nor feel the warmth of her skin against my lips as I kissed her goodbye and said “Mom, I love you and I’ll see you next time,” and hear her say back to me “I love you too,” I found no words for a eulogy as I contemplated the fact that she was now gone forever.

As we lowered her casket into the double grave with my father who we buried 56 years ago, and covered her with soil, I was struck in a completely new way by the permanence of her death, and I felt what I felt when my father died so long ago – empty, alone and deeply sad.

Now both my parents are gone, and I wish that I had something written from each of them telling me what they loved most, valued and wanted for my brother, me, our wives, and the next generation in our family.

Sharing this with you is by way of an introduction to an invitation I offer those who live in Los Angeles. This coming Tuesday evening, January 5th, at 7 PM at Temple Israel of Hollywood, I will lead a discussion about why I believe it is so important that each one of us, regardless of our age, whether we be old or young, write our “Ethical Will.”

Ethical Wills are documents that Jews have written over many centuries that express a person’s core beliefs, values, desires, and hopes for their children, grandchildren and heirs. Ethical Wills constitute a genre of Jewish literature begun when Jews suffered impoverishment and had little material possessions to leave behind. They contain no lists of assets and property, but they reveal the inner life, heart, mind, and soul of individual Jews who describe with simple eloquence their ultimate values, what they cherish and feel about their families, what lessons they learned distilled over a life time, and the acquired wisdom and truths they want to impart.

In American culture we leave trusts and wills to allocate our worldly possessions. However, is material wealth what is really most valuable in our lives to leave to others?

On one occasion only years ago I read a woman’s Ethical Will at her funeral. It was a powerful experience for all because it was as if she was speaking to us from the other side about what was most important to her and what she wished for her family and dear ones. Ever since I have encouraged people to write these themselves.

I wish I had had such a document from my own mother to have read last week at her grave as we bid her farewell.

I welcome you to join us on Tuesday evening. I will distribute examples of Ethical Wills written over the centuries and ask participants to consider writing their own.

If you wish to join us, please email our worship coordinator, Rachel Lurie, by Monday, January 4 at Temple Israel so we can know who you are and so we can appropriately plan – RA@TIOH.org.

L’shanah chilonit tovah u-briyah. A good and healthy New Year to you all.