Category Archives: Tributes

Remembering Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman (1921-2014)

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Poetry, Tributes

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Rabbi Leonard Beerman has been in my life since I was 12 years old, and his death this past week at 93 years represents a huge moment in the life of this community, the Jewish world, and the personal lives of many, including me.

One of our g’dolei dor (great ones of this generation), Leonard inspired me and so many in my generation to engage as young teens in the civil rights movement, to protest American military involvement in Vietnam, to apply for Conscientious Objector status during that war, to protest nuclear weapons proliferation, to engage in interfaith dialogue, to join coalitions of decency on behalf of just causes, and to support the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people for a state of their own alongside a secure Israel despite (as Leonard put it many years ago) Palestinian “cruelty and stupidity.”

He was, in my young eyes, larger than life. He was brave and smart, eloquent and passionate. We were not close when I was growing up – that would come much later – but he was a force that shaped my moral conscience and sensibility.

Leonard enlisted in the Marines during World War II and was a rabbinic student in 1948 studying in Jerusalem when the War of Independence began. He enlisted while there with the Haganah to fight in that war. Those two war experiences persuaded him to become a pacifist, an unpopular position in the Jewish community following the Shoah.

For the last 65 years since his ordination at the Hebrew Union College, Leonard has been a uniquely courageous voice in the American Rabbinate advocating for peace, justice, compassion, and human rights.

Leonard’s message of moral responsibility was as provocative a message as there was in American Judaism during all these years. I grew up hearing the gentle resonance of his voice and the prophetic power of his words. He believed that speaking his truth as a pacifist was more important than feeding his community what they wanted to hear. People loved him or they walked away. He once remarked that unless at least one person resigned from his congregation after the High Holidays he had failed. When I think of him, I am reminded of the 19th century Rabbi Israel Salanter’s words: “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is no rabbi. A rabbi who fears his community is no mensch.” He was a great rabbi because he was honest and fearless, and he spoke his truth without hesitation.

Over the past few years, Leonard and I began meeting for lunch every few months to talk, share stories and thoughts about issues great and small, personal, Jewish, and worldly. These were precious times for me. Leonard generously told me how much he treasured our time together as well, that I made him feel young again and gave him hope, that he was proud of me because I took the battle for justice, compassion and peace so seriously. I told him that he was my standard bearer of rabbinic leadership and that I was merely emulating him, that anything I may ever have said or done pales by comparison with his words and deeds over a lifetime.

Leonard’s humility, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, honesty, courage, and principled activism are, indeed, a beacon of light of rabbinic leadership for me and for so many of my colleagues.

In advance of the High Holidays this past August, Leonard and I met for lunch, and we commiserated about the terrorism, missiles, bombings, destruction, and loss of innocent life that occurred during this past summer’s Hamas-Israeli War, as well as the harm the war likely did to the future of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which we both so deeply believed is the only way to assure Israel’s security, democracy and future.

In emphasizing the brutality of war, Leonard referred me to a passage in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brother’s Karamazov” in which two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, discussed the death of a child:

“Tell me straight out…answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, … a child … and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? ….

No, I would not agree, ….

And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the … blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?”

No I cannot admit it brother…”

As we parted, knowing that I would be speaking about the Gaza war on Rosh Hashanah to my congregation, as he would to his, Leonard said to me, “John, remember to be moral!” I assured him that I would, but I knew that my “morality” and his would look different concerning that war.

Leonard sent me a copy of that sermon, the last he would ever deliver to the Leo Baeck community on Yom Kippur morning. I was moved and provoked as I always was when I heard him, but I did not agree with his emphasis. I thought he did not take into consideration nearly enough the context in which Israel acted, and that he was overly harsh in his criticism of the IDF.

I sent him my sermon as well. He complemented me on the writing, though he wrote, “We do not agree about Gaza,” which, of course, I knew.

Leonard was a lover of great literature and poetry, and he gave me a gift one day of a poem called “My Promised Land” by Carl Dennis, which reflects our shared dream about the land and state of Israel:

“The land of Israel my mother loves
Gets by without the luxury of existence
And still wins followers,
Though it can’t be found on the map
West of Jordan or south of Lebanon,
Though what can be found
bears the same name,
Making for confusion.
Not the land I fought her about for years
But the one untarnished by the smoke of history,
Where no one informs the people of Hebron or Jericho
They’re squatting on property that isn’t theirs,
Where every settler can remember wandering.

The dinners I spoiled with shouting
Could have been saved,
Both of us lingering quietly in our chairs,
If I’d guessed the truth that now is obvious,
That she wasn’t lavishing all her love
On the country that doesn’t deserve so rich a gift
But on the one that does, the one not there,
That she hoped good news would reach its borders.

And cross into the land of the righteous and merciful
That the Prophets spoke of in their hopeful moods,
That was loved by the red-eyed rabbis of Galicia
Who studied every word of the book and prayed
To get one thread of the meaning right;
The promised Land where the great and small
Hurry to school and the wise are waiting.”

Were he here now, Leonard would remind us to keep fighting for justice and for the realization of the ideal. I promise that I will do so, in his memory, and I will hold his compassionate, just and prophetic voice close to my heart and soul now and always.

The words of Samuel have resonated in my mind and heart this past week: “Eich naflu hagiborim – How the mighty has fallen!”

Zicharon tzadik livracha – May the memory of this righteous and great man be a perpetual benediction.

[Note: An interview of Leonard was recorded a few years ago and can be found at this link – http://vimeo.com/17542880]

 

Kindnesses That Last Forever

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Jewish History, Quote of the Day, Tributes

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When I was in Central Europe last month with thirty of my congregants touring formerly great Jewish centers of life in Budapest, Prague and Berlin, the Holocaust was everywhere we went. Memories of the cruelty and brutality so oppressed members of our group that many of us reflected that, despite how worthwhile our tour was, we had never returned from travel feeling as demoralized, depressed and sad as we did from this trip.

Since our return I recalled an act of kindness once shown to me by one of my rabbinical school professors. It took place forty years ago, but his loving concern for me has never faded from my heart and memory. Juxtaposed to what we experienced in Central Europe, what he did for me is a stark contrast to what we witnessed in the cities of our recent travel.

One of my Talmud teachers at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles was Dr. Abraham Zygelboim (z’l). As a rabbinic student in my mid-20s, I had suffered a painful break-up with my then-girlfriend, and I was emotionally devastated. Between classes one day I needed to take a few minutes for myself, so I walked outside, sat against a wall and wept.

Out of nowhere Dr. Zygelboim approached me quietly and kissed my forehead without ever saying a word. His sweetness stays with me and will all the days of my life.

Dr. Zygelboim was a gentle man, a Polish Holocaust survivor whose brother, Szmul Zygelboim, was a political leader in the Jewish community of Warsaw before the Nazi occupation. Szmul managed to escape Poland and advocated on behalf of the persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe as powerfully as he could in the United States and Great Britain. Deeply frustrated that the allies were neglecting to stop the slaughter of the Jewish people, and as a public act of protest, Szmul set himself on fire in front of the Parliament in London on May 12, 1943.

Szmul’s brother, my teacher, never spoke to us, his students, of his experience in the Shoah or of his brother’s ultimate and courageous act of protest. But we knew of it.

Dr. Zygelboim knew Talmud, and I was lucky to learn with him. But frankly, I do not remember the specifics of any particular lesson he taught me forty years ago, though I remember the sections of Talmud we learned with him – but I do remember his kiss on my forehead.

We are, each of us, powerful beings, and we often underestimate our capacity to touch others. Indeed, how we treat others and the way we speak to them defines not only our relationships with them, but our nature and the measure of our character.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said towards the end of his life: “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

It is, of course, not always easy to be kind – especially when confronted by obstinate, difficult and offensive individuals. The moralist and essayist Joseph Joubert offered this in such circumstances, “Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.”

Leo Buscaglia offers this certain truth: “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

My Tribute to Leibel Fein

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Tributes

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Leonard Leibel Fein’s death is a particularly painful loss to the liberal social activist progressive Zionist world. He spoke and wrote always the truth as he understood it, inspired by a deeply Jewish vision, with an eloquence and a precision of language that inspired, opened the heart and renewed a sense of purpose and hope in anyone who was open and receptive enough to resonate with his message.

I first met Leibel 44 years ago when I was a college student at the summer Aliyah of then Brandeis Camp Institute (now Brandeis-Bardin) in Simi Valley, California, where he had come to spend a month with us 70+ young people from all over the country and world. He spoke to us and with us, lecturing about American Jewish life and religion, God, Israel, Zionism, Soviet Jewry, and social justice.

Those were the heady euphoric years after Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 Six-Days War, yet Leibel (an early scholar of the Israeli enterprise at Brandeis University) understood intuitively that the great victory of three years earlier on the battlefield that resulted in the reunification of Jerusalem and the acquisition of the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai desert, did not address the deeper far more complex moral challenges that confronted the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

He emphasized that there were at least four significant challenges confronting Israel and world Jewry at that time; (1) the 1967 war would not be the last war Israel would be forced to fight; (2) Israel’s Jewish culture, moral and democratic character would be defined in part by how it settled the Arab-Israeli conflict, how it conducted itself as an occupier of more than a two and a half million hostile Palestinian Arabs then living in the West Bank and Gaza, and whether it treated Israeli-Palestinian citizens of the state as equal citizens with Israeli Jews; (3) what would be the fate of the three million Soviet Jews then trapped behind the iron curtain, and (4) looking us in the eye, what we young American and Canadian Jews (and a couple of Israelis), then in our late teens and early twenties, would become as American Jewish leaders.

For some reason, Leibel singled me out all those years ago (he was only 36 at the time), gently but assuredly, and privately challenged me to become engaged seriously with the American Jewish community as a Zionist and a leader. In that way, Leibl became one of my earliest Zionist mentors.

I read nearly everything he would subsequently write, and so often over the decades he focused my thinking and redirected how I considered the great issues facing America and the Jewish people. He never lost his intellectual, moral and compassionate verve. As this last column (link below) that Leibel wrote for The Forward so eloquently and movingly expresses, with its introductory note by the Forward’s editors, what made Leibel Fein’s thought so deeply Jewish was that the prophetic tradition was always his proof text and he led as much from the heart as from the mind.

As Leibel battled his own demons over the years, suffered the tragic loss of his daughter, and finally illness that seemed to plague him for far too long, he never lost what made him that unique and compelling thought leader.

I will miss him, though we only saw each other at J Street conferences in recent years, but he is embedded in my heart as he is in the hearts of so many of us.

Zichrono livracha. May his memory abide as a blessing.

http://forward.com/articles/204190/from-gaza-to-sderot-trauma-marks-the-past-and-t/#ixzz3AcSJiiW2

Why I Don’t Want to Die

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle, Poetry, Tributes

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My ailing mother and I had a conversation yesterday that broke through the fog of her dementia enough for her to express her greatest fear as she confronts the end of her life.

My mother is 97 and suffers from serious macular degeneration, deafness and dementia. She still knows my brother and me, though at times I have to persuade her that I am, indeed, her son. She is mostly able to communicate what she feels and thinks, though her vocabulary has become more and more limited and her confusion has increased. She has little short-term or long-term memory left.

When I arrived at her assisted living home yesterday, the aids told me that she had had a very bad morning, had broken a piece of equipment and wanted no one to touch her. They had medicated her to calm her. She sat alone appearing still agitated.

She can’t do much of anything by herself anymore. She needs assistance getting out of bed, using the bathroom, getting dressed, and moving anywhere. For the first 95 years of her life she had been independent and self-sufficient, so her frustration at her incapacities is now severe.

For some time now she has told me that she wants to die, that since all her brothers and sisters are dead, and most of her friends, this is no way to live.

Seeing me yesterday after several bad hours changed her mood. I let her vent and kept touching her and asking her direct questions – “Are you in pain?” “Does anything hurt?” “Do you need to use the bathroom?” “Do you know who I am?” “Do you need anything from me?”

Then she said, despite her past readiness for death, “I don’t want to die!”

“Really, Mom? That’s a change,” I said. “Why do you not want to die now?”

“I don’t want to leave you and everyone,” she answered.

I knew that was true, but I had the sense she was really saying something else, something deeper, trying to tell of a fear about dying that she had not expressed to me before.

I asked on a hunch; “Mom – are you afraid that I will forget you?”

She looked at me (I always sit very close to her with about a foot between my face and hers so she can see and hear me), and then with a clarity she had not had since I had arrived – “Yes!”

I took the opportunity to tell her a fundamental truth about my life, despite her having been a very difficult personality for both my brother and me throughout our lives, the following:

“Mom, let me tell you something. Even now, where ever I go, you are with me, in my heart. After you die and are gone, you will still be here with me in my heart. You have taught me so much about loyalty to family and generosity to everyone, about love and kindness, about giving back to others and trying to make a difference in the world, about making a contribution. That is what you have always tried to do and I believe you did it all really well. Just as Daddy has been with me every day since he died [56 years ago], as I know he has been with you and has been with Michael [my brother], you will be with me always too. Don’t worry about that. I cannot nor do I wish to ever forget you. I love you and am grateful that you are and have been my mother!”

She smiled at me for the first time that day – “I love you so much, John.”

I stayed a while longer. She was convinced that she was holding something in her gnarled hands and she wanted to put it onto a tray sitting on her dresser. I assisted her for a while and then just took her hands in mine and rubbed them and asked her to flex her fingers for exercise. The “sandy” sensation that she had tried to release went away.

It was lunch time, and I left her with her aids. As I walked to my car I was reminded of the concluding verse of one of my favorite e e cummings poems:

…here is the deepest secret nobody knows
here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life
which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide
and this is the wonder that keeps the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

My Cousin – Israel’s New President

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Tributes

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I do not know my 3rd cousin, Ruby Rivlin, very well. We corresponded 14 years ago when the “Who is a Jew” issue came before the Knesset. He was an advocate for a change in the law that, had it passed, would have defined for purposes of aliyah under the Law of Return that a Jew is someone born of a Jewish mother or who converts “k’fi ha-halacha” (according to traditional Jewish law as interpreted by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate) which would exclude many conversions conducted by many American Orthodox rabbis, and all Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal Rabbis.

Ruby’s response to me was warm and familial, but direct. As an elected member of the Knesset he was obligated to preserve the integrity of the Jewish people. He believed that this law would accomplish that goal.

The bill did not pass due to the international outrage expressed by Diaspora Jewish leadership.

I knew Ruby’s beloved mother, Rae Rivlin, better than I knew Ruby. I spent a number of Shabbatot in her Rehavia Jerusalem home when I was a first-year rabbinic student at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem in 1973 to 1974. She was an extraordinary woman, deemed the grand hostess of Jerusalem in “O Jerusalem.” Family and guests were there every Shabbat for dinner, and I was included. Ruby was a regular. I learned that between 5 PM and 6 PM daily never to visit or call because Rae was watching Peyton Place, a huge American TV soap opera.

I never met Ruby’s father, the late and beloved Professor of Islamic Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Yosef Rivlin, who died in 1968 just after the Six- Days War. Yosef translated the Koran and the Arabic classic A Thousand and One Nights into Hebrew. The latter is a series of volumes of which I am a proud owner of a signed first edition printing.

Ruby’s family came to Israel in the early 19th century. His father’s namesake – also Yosef Rivlin (a street in downtown Jerusalem near Hillel Street is named for him) was the first Jew to move out of the Old City of Jerusalem and establish the neighborhood of Mea Shearim, now a hareidi stronghold, only steps from the Old City walls. The elder Yosef was a brave man, as Mark Twain described the land in those years being plagued by bandits and marauders. He moved out of the Old City because there was a dearth of habitable apartment space available for increasing numbers of Jews making aliyah before the modern Zionist movement really took hold.

At the time that I knew Ruby, he was a young politician close to the leader of Herut, Menachem Begin, before Likud came to power in 1977. Ruby was (and still is) broad shouldered, bullish, but kind. Indeed, people love him personally. He is part of Likud’s old guard, a hard-liner when it comes to the unity of Jerusalem and the two-state solution. He was among those who supported Gush Emunim after the 1967 War that came to be known as Yisrael Shleima (i.e. the Greater Israel movement).

Ruby does not believe in a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He also believes that Reform Judaism is tantamount to idolatry. I expect that he will modify his public denunciation of the American and Israeli Reform movements now that he is President of the State, but I doubt that he will modify his beliefs that there can be a Palestinian state alongside Israel and west of the Jordan River and in Gaza.

When Ari Shavit spoke in Los Angeles last week, in a small conversation with a few of my colleagues and me, he worried (and he repeated this in a subsequent Haaretz column) that a President Rivlin will go far beyond the traditional non-political role that Presidents of the State traditionally have taken, and that specifically he will be an adversary to an eventual two-state solution to the conflict.

That being said, within the context of Israel, Ruby believes in equal civil rights for Israeli Arabs. For that reason, so many in the Arab-Israeli community also love him personally.

Ruby has a big heart and he has served the state of Israel with love, integrity and honesty his entire life.

Yet, his views on both the 2-state solution and religious pluralism run counter to the vast majority of Israelis and Diaspora Jewry. As President, he must expand his thinking and represent all the Jewish people in the state, not the segmented extremist fringe, and by extension be inclusive of the Jewish people around the world who regard with love and loyalty the state of Israel as the homeland of all the Jewish people.

Though politically, I hold very different views from Ruby, I wish him mazal tov and prayers for long-life and distinguished service to the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

Paul Wurtzel, Son of Hollywood Legendary Producer Sol Wurtzel, Dies at 92

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Art, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Stories, Tributes

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When I received a phone call last week from the great-grand-daughter of the first President of Temple Israel of Hollywood, Sol Wurtzel, who asked me to officiate at the funeral of Sol’s only son, Paul Wurtzel, her great-uncle, I could not say no.

I never met Paul nor his father, who died in 1958. But the “Wurtzel” family name is not only significant in the history of my synagogue, but in the history of Hollywood’s golden era of film-making.

Paul Wurtzel’s death marks the end of an era. Though he himself did not reach the pinnacle of power and influence that his father enjoyed, nevertheless, Paul was well-respected as a long-time assistant director of television series. His credits include hundreds of episodes in series such as The F.B.I., The Fugitive, Barnaby Jones, and The Thin Man, and he was the production manager on the 1980 television movie The Twilight Zone.

More than any of his television credits, Paul was beloved as a humble, unassuming, generous, funny, and gracious man. He married briefly, but had no children. Paul adored his sister’s four grandchildren and doted on them who considered him like a grandfather. His funeral this past Sunday was a veritable love-fest that attracted close to one hundred people – not a small thing for a 92-year old who had no children of his own.

At one point I stopped the service to share with those assembled that I have conducted many funerals in my 35 years as a congregational rabbi, and that the spirit at each is unique because the deceased and the mourners are unique. This one for Paul was memorable because of the palatable love, camaraderie and joyful banter amongst the mourners. I told them that their spirit was testimony to the positive and enduring impact of Paul’s life on each of them.

Paul’s youth and career could not have been easy for him. His father was a powerful man and his family shared with me that he was especially hard on his only son. Paul grew up in the lap of wealth in his parents’ Bel Aire home, but he had to rely upon his own resources. His family said Paul essentially raised himself. When he had knee surgery that kept him in bed for a month as a child, they took a six-week European summer vacation and left him with a care-taker.

Perhaps sensing that the young 8-year old Paul was unseen by his father, George Gershwin, a guest at the family home one night, told Paul to sit down at the piano after Sol had left the room for a few moments. Gershwin then played Rhapsody in Blue and quickly darted out of sight when his father returned only to see Paul sitting with his hands over the piano keys.

All that aside, Sol Wurtzel was one of the principle creators of the golden age of Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s and had a significant impact upon the careers of some of its most illustrious stars.

Sol was hired in 1917 by William Fox, the founder of Fox Film Corporation, to be his personal secretary in New York. Fox, however, hated coming west to California, so he sent Sol to run production in Los Angeles.

Sol headed up Fox’s “B” rated movie division that included the popular Charlie Chan series and “Bright Eyes” (1934) starring Shirley Temple who sang “The Good Ship Lollypop.” He helped discover and make popular Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Ray Milland, Glenn Ford, Ginger Rogers, Robert Taylor, and the young Norma Jean Baker before she became Marilyn Monroe. Sol also promoted the young director John Ford who became a multiple academy award winning director and delivered the eulogy at his funeral in 1958.

Sol was among a handful of founding members of Temple Israel of Hollywood in 1927. When the congregation moved in the early thirties to a building vacated by the Hollywood United Methodist Church (now at Highland and Franklin Avenues), Sol commissioned Fox Studios to create and build an Ark. When we moved from that building in 1948 to our current Hollywood Blvd facility, those Ark doors were stored and eventually installed in our synagogue’s small chapel in 1955.

Those Chapel Ark doors constitute the only Aron Hakodesh ever created by a Hollywood film studio props department. It graced our Ark continually from 1955 until October, 2013 when our Chapel was demolished as part of a rebuilding project to be completed before this coming High Holidays.

Though we will not be using these Ark doors in our new Chapel, we will display them as they are iconic to our congregation and they bear historic significance in the history of Los Angeles Jewry and early Hollywood.

In Paul Wurtzel’s memory, Zichrono livracha – His memory is a blessing.

On Humility and Kindness

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Ethics, Poetry, Tributes

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In the next several weeks I will have the privilege of praising publicly two dear friends and colleagues on the occasion of significant milestones in their lives and the lives of their synagogue communities.

The first is Rabbi Ammi Hirsch, the Senior Rabbi of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan, on his tenth anniversary as that community’s spiritual leader.

Ammi is brilliant, eloquent, thoughtful, visionary, and dynamic, and is among our nation’s finest congregational rabbis. His greatest virtues, despite all these undeniable strengths, are his modesty, humility and kindness.

Ammi did not wish to be honored on this occasion, though he is without question well-deserving, but allowed his community to do so on the condition that the synagogue raise substantial funds to expand their synagogue’s youth programming. His intent is to engage and inspire the youngest generation of Jews to become our future Jewish leaders imbued with serious Jewish learning, strong ethical impulses, and a proud identification with the people and state of Israel.

The other is Emeritus Rabbi Martin Weiner, who is being honored by his congregation, Sherith Israel of San Francisco, on the 50th anniversary of his ordination.

I spent the first seven years of my rabbinate as Marty’s assistant. He is a rabbi’s rabbi, a wonderful teacher who models integrity, wisdom, humility, kindness, and a commitment to people. Marty has inspired many young women and men, including his own son Daniel, to become rabbis themselves. Always gentle and wise, Marty is beloved by so many because he gives of himself so selflessly.

As I reflect upon the virtues that distinguish both Ammi and Marty, humility, modesty and simple human kindness immediately come to mind.

As servant-leaders, they are worthy recipients of the gratitude and praise of their communities.

The following are reflections first on humility and then on kindness because the latter naturally springs from the former:

Know before Whom you stand. -Talmud, Berachot 28b

Humility is a river fed by two streams – a sense of limitation and a sense of awe. -Rabbi Norman Hirsch

Teach your tongue to say ‘I don’t know.’ – Talmud, B’rachot 4a

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -Stephen J Gould, paleontologist

For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner…on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies…That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that. -Carl Sagan, astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author

Why was the human being created on the last day? So that if such a person is overcome by pride it might be said: ‘In the creation of the world, the mosquito came before you.’ -B’reishit Rabba

When a person comes into the world his hands are closed as if to say, ‘The whole world is mine, I want to possess it.’ When he leaves the world his hands are spread wide as if to say, ‘I possessed nothing of what is in the present world.’ -Kohelet Rabba

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. -Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

A thoughtful act or a kind word may pass in a moment, but the warmth and care behind it stay in the heart forever. – Marjolein Bastin, artist

The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. -William Wordsworth, poet

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.-Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, writer

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve. -Joseph Jourbert, moralist and essayist

Show me the man [woman] you honor, and I will know what kind of man [woman] you are. -Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher

 

Until Death Do Us Part – How Couples Successfully Sustain Their Marriages Over Time

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle, Tributes

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For the past twenty-five years on the Shabbat evening in Pesach my congregation has celebrated the Biblical Song of Songs as well as “milestone” wedding anniversaries of members of our community.

I have offered hundreds of blessings – once to a couple married for 70 years, twice to couples married for 65 years each and three times for 60 years. Many have celebrated 55 and 50 years continuing in descending integrals of 5 years each that we arbitrarily designate as “milestone anniversaries.” It is a joyous Shabbat including children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Given the 50% divorce rate among American Jews (now equal to the general American population) I ask each couple as they come forward for a blessing:

“How have you done it? What has sustained you for so long?”

Responses vary; some are hysterically funny and others wise from experience:

“She talks; I listen.”

“I agree with everything he says… especially when I don’t!”

“I let him think that every major decision went her way!”

“We laugh a lot!”

“We’ve learned to be patient and we forgive.”

“We don’t sweat the small stuff!”

“We communicate constantly.”

“We adore our kids, but they know that our marriage has always come first.”

“We love family time!”

“We fight fair – we are never nasty.”

“We value each other’s privacy and know when to leave the other alone!”

“We have our separate interests but we spend a lot of time together.”

“We’ve never let anyone come between us.”

“We share many good friends.”

“We’ve resisted temptation and stayed faithful to each other.”

“We trust each other as we trust no one else.”

One bold forty-something wife announced this past Shabbat before 200 people, “We have great sex!”

Over the years I’ve also learned that long-term happily married couples don’t take each other for granted. They tell each other frequently that they love one another. They hold hands. They bring each other unexpected gifts at unexpected times. They accept each other’s differences and have long since stopped trying to change the other. They don’t harbor resentments and they avoid blame. They respect each other’s talents, viewpoint, opinions, and feelings. They cherish each other in ways large and small. They compromise. They share their economic resources as equal partners (money being just one dimension of their partnership) regardless of who earns the most or who brought the most into the marriage. They give generously to each other and there’s never a quid pro quo.

No marriage, of course, is perfect. No marriage has all the above going for it. Every marriage has challenges, difficulties and moments of tension. However, successful and happy marriages are those in which both partners work hard to understand and accept the other as well as accommodate the other’s needs.

Marriages fail for all kinds of reasons. Some die natural deaths when one or both partners grow apart; when one or the other stops caring; when there is disloyalty and unfaithfulness; when injury is left unaddressed and unresolved; when one or both cannot own and apologize for bad behavior; when spouses are rigid, uncompromising, and insistent that things be their way; when one person must always have the last word.

Marriages fail as well when one or both partners have an untreated personality disorder, suffer from mental illness, are abusive, or are plagued with addiction problems.

When I meet and talk with couples before officiating at their weddings, I try and identify areas where I sense that there may be conflict that could develop into serious trouble if left unaddressed, such as how the couple communicates, what are their shared values, and how each partner approaches sex, power, money, in-laws, and leisure. I remind them that marriage is dynamic and ever-changing, and that honest and open communication is critically important to their marital well-being.

I remind them as well that no matter how much they love each other now and how good their relationship is, they will certainly experience peaks and valleys going forward. However, if they place the well-being of their marriage and each other above all other concerns (e.g. work, in-laws, children, extended family, and finances), then it is likely that they will deepen their bond as the years pass.

Doing so is always worth it. In this spirit Mark Twain captures the wonder and ineffability of the marital bond:

“A marriage…makes of two fractional lives a whole; / it gives to two…lives a work, / and doubles the strength of each to perform it; / it gives to two questioning natures / a reason for living, / and something to live for; / it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, / a new fragrance to the flowers, / a new beauty to the earth, / and a new mystery to life.”

 

 

To Be or Not To Be Spock – Leonard Nimoy Discusses his “Live Long and Prosper” Hand Gesture

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Jewish Identity, Tributes

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My friends know that Leonard Nimoy is married to my first cousin Susan (her father and my mother were brother and sister). I have been close with Susan, who is a “smidge” older than me, throughout my adult life from our 20s when we rediscovered each other as young adults outside of childhood.

When Susan married Leonard twenty-five years ago I had only known him the way the public does, as a fine actor and director, the creator of Mr. Spock on the Star Trek series, as Morris Meyerson, the husband of Golda Meir, in Leonard’s Emmy-nominated role opposite Ingrid Bergman in “A Woman Called Golda,” as a liberal political activist, and as a committed Jew.

What I didn’t know was Leonard’s heart, and over these past two plus decades as a close family member, I have grown to love Leonard for so many reasons, not the least of which is that he makes my cousin Susan so happy (as she does him), but also because of his seriousness as an thinker and artist, his sense of humor and loving heart, his kindness and menschlechkite. My wife Barbara and I love him.

This five-minute interview with Leonard is a classic, and if you have not heard the story of his signature hand gesture of greeting/farewell as a Vulcan in Star Trek, do click onto the link below.

Leonard wrote two autobiographies; the first he called “I Am Not Spock”; the second he called “I Am Spock” – both are true, depending on circumstances.

As you will see, the hand gesture that accompanies “Live Long and Prosper” emerged out of Leonard’s earliest memories as a Jew accompanying his grandfather, father and older brother to shul on Shabbos morning in South Boston.

What I love most about this interview is that Leonard’s joy and love come pouring through, clearly reflecting that side of him which is NOT Spock!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyiWkWcR86I

 

A Rabbi at 93 and a Poem Called “The Promised Land” by Carl Dennis

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Holidays, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Jewish-Christian Relations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry, Social Justice, Tributes

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Rabbi Leonard Beerman has been in my life since I was 12 years old. He inspired so many in my generation and me to engage as young teens in the civil rights movement, to protest American military involvement in Vietnam, to apply for Conscientious Objector status during that war, to fight nuclear weapons proliferation, to engage in interfaith dialogue and create coalitions of decency on behalf of just causes, and to support the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people for a state of their own alongside a secure Israel despite (as Leonard put it many years ago) Palestinian “cruelty and stupidity.”

Leonard was a rabbinic student in 1948 learning Hebrew in Jerusalem when the War of Independence broke out, and he aided in the effort to help establish the Jewish state.

For the last 65 years Leonard has been a uniquely courageous and consistent voice in the American Rabbinate advocating for human rights here, in Israel and around the world despite personal ostracism and political blow-back at the hands of many fellow Jews. Leonard spoke as he did because he believes that the principles of justice, compassion and peace as articulated by the Biblical Prophets are primary Jewish ethical concerns.

Leonard is as eloquent and provocative a speaker as there is in American Judaism today. I grew up hearing the gentle resonance of his voice and the prophetic power of his words. His message at once inspires me, comforts me and forces me to think critically even if I do not agree with him. Even so, Leonard is always worth hearing because like the Biblical Prophet he understands that speaking truth is more important than feeding his community what he knows they want to hear.

Today, April 9, is Leonard’s 93rd birthday, and I send him birthday wishes with hopes that he will enjoy many more years of productive activism and good health with his dear wife Joan, his adoring children and grandchildren, and his many cherished colleagues, friends and admirers.

Leonard and I meet for lunch every few months to talk, share stories and thoughts about issues great and small, personal, Jewish and worldly. Last week when we met he brought me a poem that evokes the Jerusalem I love of Jewish messianic dreams and the real Jerusalem that I also love that inspires so much passion by so many and is one of the core issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The poem, called “My Promised Land” by Carl Dennis, is at once wistful, melancholic and hopeful. It is worth reading at our Passover Seders because it reminds us of our messianic dreams and of the work that is yet to be done for the sake of peace:

“The land of Israel my mother loves / Gets by without the luxury of existence / And still wins followers, / Though it can’t be found on the map / West of Jordan or south of Lebanon, / Though what can be found / bears the same name, / Making for confusion.

Not the land I fought her about for years / But the one untarnished by the smoke of history, / Where no one informs the people of Hebron or Jericho / They’re squatting on property that isn’t theirs, / Where every settler can remember wandering.

The dinners I spoiled with shouting / Could have been saved, / Both of us lingering quietly in our chairs, / If I’d guessed the truth that now is obvious, / That she wasn’t lavishing all her love / On the country that doesn’t deserve so rich a gift / But on the one that does, the one not there, / That she hoped good news would reach its borders.

And cross into the land of the righteous and merciful / That the Prophets spoke of in their hopeful moods, / That was loved by the red-eyed rabbis of Galicia / Who studied every word of the book and prayed / To get one thread of the meaning right; / The promised Land where the great and small / Hurry to school and the wise are waiting.”