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

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michele Bachmann Profile – In The New Yorker

15 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Politics and Life

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

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

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

 

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

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

A thought has blown the market place away

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in Quote of the Day

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

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

Shabbat Shalom!

Who Rules Israel?

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in Israel/Zionism

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Israel, like America, is convulsing. 300,000 Israelis of all political stripes have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest economic conditions and call for greater “social justice” and equality within Israeli society. Working middle-class Israelis cannot pay their rent and salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, despite Israel’s national economic health and global leadership in start-up companies in bio and communications technologies.

How has it come to this? Here are some of the reasons.

More than a dozen years ago economic reforms put in place by then Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reduced government regulation and thereby encouraged start-up companies and the emergence of an entrepreneurial class. The government also eliminated subsidies of basic goods such as cottage cheese and bread. At the same time billions of dollars were spent (and continue to be spent) by successive governments building up West Bank settlements which Amos Oz, in Haaretz recently, characterized as “the greatest mistake in the state’s history as well as its greatest injustice.” For years Israel has also poured mammoth sums of money into the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas where “generations of ignorant bums grow, filled with contempt toward the state, its people and the 21st century reality.” (These words are not mine, but I wish they were. They belong to Leonard Fine.)

What is going to happen? That is anyone’s guess. Politically, my cousin, Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin of the Likud Party, was quoted this week saying that Israel might never reach the November 2013 scheduled elections. This government could fall at any time and new elections would be held.

Yes, by the way, my Israeli family are right-wingers and always have been going back to my Great-Great Uncle Avram Shapira, known as the Shomer (i.e. policeman) of Petach Tikva. Uncle Avram helped settle the town with his family and four other families beginning in 1880. They had come from Russia in 1878, lived in the Old City of Jerusalem for 2 years before moving to this town, now a suburb of Tel Aviv. I met Uncle Avram at the age of 7 when he visited us in LA in the winter of 1956, but that’s another story.]

And then there is looming on the horizon September 20 when the Palestinian Authority has called for massive non-violent demonstrations. The following day, September 21, the PA intends to bring to the United Nations General Assembly (not the Security Council because it knows that the US will veto it) a resolution for Palestinian statehood.

Indeed, Israel has a few challenges on its plate.

Months ago, one of the best articles I have seen on what is happening in Israel, who is running the government and why this government is the most right-wing government in the history of the State, appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times written by Yossi Alpher, the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. I recommend your reading, saving and distributing it. It is prescient!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23iht-edalpher.html

Book Recommendation – “Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir,” by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie with Rita Lurie

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Book Recommendations

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This wonderful memoir is so beautifully written, heart-breaking and honest that I cursed my exhaustion when sleep interrupted my reading. The author’s mother, Rita (Ruchel) Lurie at the age of 5 years with 14 members of her family were forced to flee their homes in Poland and were taken in by righteous rescuers who risked their own lives to hide this family in a dark attic for two years between the summers of 1942 and 1944 while Nazis frequented the farm and wandered menacingly around outside.

Rita witnessed the death of her baby brother Nahum and then her mother Leah two weeks later (from a broken heart?) in that attic. Rita and the remnants of her family (her father Isaac and sister Sara, soon to be renamed Sandra) wandered around Europe for 5 years until the United States took them in. The damage, of course, was done, and this was only the beginning of Rita’s life-long challenges to cope with the wounds she suffered with the loss of her mother and brother, her father’s marriage to a woman possessed with her own demons as a survivor of Auschwitz, and a father who loved her dearly but was limited emotionally and unable to give Rita what she really needed and wanted.

Yet, this beautiful little girl grew into a beautiful woman, married a prince of a man whom she loved and who loved her, and mothered three exceptional children of her own, all of whom have spent their lives in one way or another trying to make right for their mom what was beyond their capacity to do.

Rita’s oldest daughter Leslie, in elegant prose and with keen insight into her mother and herself, tells their story following nearly a decade of writing, researching, returning to Poland, and seeking out both the rescuers, neighbors and relatives who lived in the attic.

Rita’s and Leslie’s candor is ever-present and exceptionally self-revealing. They share some of their deepest secrets, fears, passions, and drives, and their courage in doing so speaks to their strength as individuals and to the power of their family “enmeshment” and loving bond. Leslie’s daughter Mikaela, now a teenager two generations removed from the Shoah, carries the DNA of her grandmother’s and mother’s experience into the next generation. The cover photo of the book shows the three of them walking away down a country road towards the sun.

There are many Holocaust memoirs, and they all break-the heart. This one does that but it also uplifts, and I recommend it highly.

For more information, see Leslie’s blog and an overview of the book at http://www.bendingtowardthesun.com/bending_toward_sun.php