19 Monday Sep 2011
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (1918-2008)
18 Sunday Sep 2011
This will give you a lift – the Israeli version of “Glee” for Rosh Hashanah.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlcxEDy-lr0
15 Thursday Sep 2011
A disciple confessed to the sage: “I try so hard to atone. I try to wrestle with temptation. I try but I do not succeed. I remain mired in the mud of transgression. Help me to extricate myself from sin and to truly repent.” The Sage answered, “Perhaps, my dear friend, you are thinking only of yourself. How about forgetting yourself and thinking of the world?” (Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, p. 162)
06 Tuesday Sep 2011
Eternal God, / Source and Creator of Life; / From the depths we have called to you / and we call to you again for courage, strength and wisdom on this anniversary of our nation’s tragedy.
Grant us courage to confront our enemies. / Comfort those who stand alone without spouse, parent, brother, sister, or friend. / Open our hearts to them and to the children orphaned. / Enable us to love more deeply all children who suffer. / Accept with mercy our prayers of healing on behalf of the families of the victims / and on behalf of the first responders who became ill at Ground Zero and who eventually died as a consequence.
Despite the horror and tragedy of 9/11, / our country remains a shelter of peace, / a symbol of freedom / a beacon light of compassion and justice / to the downtrodden and oppressed of the world.
Strengthen the hands of our people to defend this country / and our common values of freedom and justice. / Inspire our leaders and diplomats / to act wisely and to pursue peace everywhere in the world.
May we teach our children to learn and to think, / To consider and to reason, / To be courageous in thought and in deed, / And to nurture hearts of wisdom / That they may do battle against fear, hatred and bigotry / Using weapons of the spirit and loving hearts.
We offer our prayers / on behalf of our country and government, our President and judiciary, / our officials and institutions, our soldiers and citizens, / upon all who faithfully toil for the good of our country, to preserve democracy in our land, / to advocate for civility between adversaries, and to treat every human being / as infinitely worthy and dignified / by virtue of being created / b’Tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image.
Bestow upon us all the blessings of peace, / and may we live to see the day / when swords will be converted into ploughshares / and nations will not learn war anymore. / Amen!
By Rabbi John L. Rosove, Temple Israel of Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA
31 Wednesday Aug 2011
Next month Rosh Hashanah will be upon us. One theme of the High Holidays that drives many Jews away from Judaism is the doctrine of Reward and Punishment. Though it is part of Jewish religious tradition, it is utterly foreign to my Jewish faith.
The Kabbalists teach that despite our living most of the time in Olam ha-Praida (“The World of Separation”) there is also Olam ha-Yichud (“The World of Unity”). Olam ha-Yichud can be understood as the implicate order in which everything, including Olam ha-Praida, exists. In the world of the mystics God is the Unity principle embracing and connecting the physical and metaphysical realms. Mystics do not regard God as ‘out there’ or ‘up there,’ but rather as an immanent continuously emanating Presence, the All of the All. In this sense, transcendence is to be discovered within immanence.
From this perspective, the doctrine of Reward and Punishment has no part. Put another way, a facile connection cannot be made between our behavior on the one hand and good or ill fortune that may come to us on the other. Such thinking, in fact, is silly. This is not to say that there is no cause and effect. What we do, say, think, and feel affect other human beings, the environment and ourselves.
What do we do with the doctrine of Reward and Punishment? Do we read, for example, the second paragraph after the Sh’ma that says God will grant rain in its season depending upon whether we fulfill the mitzvot, or do we drop it? Do we not participate when the congregation reads the Un’taneh Tokef (“Who will live and Who will die” refrain), or do we read it as metaphor affirming the transitory nature of life?
Over the years, Jews have told me that the doctrine of Reward and Punishment was the impetus for them leaving Jewish religious life and community because they do not believe in a judgmental commanding and angry God. Nor do they believe in the apologetics of yisurin shel ahavah (“sufferings of love”), a rabbinic principle that says sufferers here will be rewarded in the world to come because God loves them.
I am sympathetic with their rejection of this doctrinal nonsense. I believe that the healthiest approach is not to consign these texts to the geniza as sacred trash, but to use them as motivators of ideas and as a stimulus to transcend higher and nothing else. For example, note that the second paragraph in the Sh’ma (see above) follows the V’ahavta (“You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, mind and soul…”). This juxtaposition suggests that the best reason for doing the right thing is not for the sake of a reward but rather for the love of God, as if to say that ‘virtue is its own reward.’ Given, however, that none of us is always virtuous, sometimes we need a carrot dangling in front of our noses to remind us, ‘Do right and good will come,’ and at other times we need the stick threatening us, ‘Do right, or else!’
This way of thinking can spur us to do good, but this is not theology. It is merely recognition of our human faults and weaknesses. What we need are vehicles of transcendence (i.e. words, Torah, midrash, poetry, music, and ritual) that can open us to the deepest realm of Olam ha-Yichud.
As we approach the Yamim Noraim, it would be well for us to remember that the so-called offending texts were written in a very different time and place. Much, thankfully, has occurred that has evolved our thinking, understanding and faith.
Rabbi Heschel taught that the sin of taking the text literally is that we miss the poetry of life. Our charge during this season is to take the old, re-excavate its stopped-up wells, immerse ourselves in its ebullient springs, and find renewal.
May the month of Elul be a time of probing, struggle and return.
Chazak v’eimatz. Be strong and of good courage.
30 Tuesday Aug 2011
“The primary role of t’shuvah (repentance), which at once sheds light on the darkened zone, is for the person to return to herself, to the root of her soul. Then she will at once return to God, to the Soul of all souls….It is only through the great truth of returning to oneself that the person and the people, the world and all the worlds, the whole of existence, will return to their Creator, to be illumined by the light of life.” (Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook)
29 Monday Aug 2011
“Open the door of t’shuvah (i.e. repentance) only the width of the eye of a needle and God will open it wide enough for carriages and wagons to pass through.” (Song of Songs Rabbah 5)
19 Friday Aug 2011
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:
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.
17 Wednesday Aug 2011
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.
07 Sunday Aug 2011
One of the least commemorated holydays in the Jewish calendar cycle comes this Monday evening and Tuesday, Tisha B’Av, the day marking the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem (586 BCE and 70 CE). Each was a horrendous and traumatic event in the ancient Jewish world. Historical documents record that blood flowed like a river through the streets of Jerusalem, that all was destroyed, that the survivors, such as there were, became slaves to the Babylonian and Roman conquerors respectively, and that God was driven into exile with the people.
Beyond the geo-politics of those events, sages of later generations linked the two destructions to the people’s behavior. Following the first destruction they explained mip’nei chataeinu gilinu m’artzeinu (“because of our sins we were exiled from our land”). The sins included the perversion of justice, disregard for the needs of the widow, orphan and stranger, and worship of the false gods of profit and materialism. Following the second destruction, our sages said mipnei sinat chinam gilinu m’artzeinu (“Because of gratuitous hatred [of one Jew for another] we were exiled from our land”).
Over the centuries Tisha B’Av became a day of national mourning. For modern Jews focusing on the sins of the people as the first cause of the destruction raises difficult theological and moral problems especially after the Holocaust. Yet, even if we believe we are individually and collectively innocent of the oppressive and hard-hearted conditions that characterize our era, Rabbi Heschel reminds us that “some are [indeed] guilty, but all are responsible.”
Towards the end of the day, during Minchah, the mood of Tisha B’Av abruptly changes. At that hour, tradition teaches, the Messiah will be born. Thus, our mourning is transformed suddenly into celebration and our dejection is converted into anticipation of reunification with God.
Though national in character, Tisha B’Av has personal parallels. This past Friday evening during Shabbat services I witnessed the devastation that death brings in its wake and that Tisha B’Av commemorates for us as a people.
A dear long-time member of our community who had raised both her daughter and son at Temple Israel had just returned from New York where she buried her 60 year-old daughter. Her younger son had died at the age of 51 five years ago. She had come to say Kaddish.
A parent’s absolute worst nightmare had been visited upon her twice. As I prepared to say Kaddish with her I recalled Rose Kennedy’s loss of four children in her life-time and the words she taught her children when they were young as recalled by Ted Kennedy in his memoir True Compass:
“The birds will sing when the storm is over; The rose must know the thorn; The valley makes the mountain tall.”
May Tisha B’Av be a day when as we recall our national and personal traumas we also remember that as long as we have life there will come a new day if we are patient enough.
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