Tag Archives: Stories

When Our Parents Reach Extreme Old Age

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Stories, Uncategorized

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My mother was once a beautiful, vital, vivacious, smart, intellectually engaged, and generous woman. She was strong-willed, independent, high-powered, and passionate. Her family meant everything to her and she had many devoted friends.

Today, at 96 she is nearly blind, nearly deaf, and has dementia. She can no longer read, hear music, listen to books on tape/CD, or watch television. She falls frequently and has many aches and pains. Most of her friends have died and all her nine brothers and sisters are gone.

Two years ago it was clear to my brother, me and everyone who knew her that she needed to move from part-time to full-time care, but she could not afford to have someone live in her home 24-7. We decided to move her from independent to assisted living, but she resisted mightily. At last we refused to take “no” for an answer.

Over these two years her situation has worsened. At times my mother knows who I am, but she forgets seconds later and wonders what strange man is sitting with her, and why. I remind her that I am her son, but she is now more often than not bewildered, frustrated and angry because she is aware enough to know how much mental capacity she has lost and of the dramatically shrunken world in which she exists.

Only two things sustain her these days. She has some of her long-term memory remaining, and so she recalls vividly her parents and siblings thus bringing them alive; and her knowledge that my brother and I we are well and happy offers her a measure of comfort.

I share my mother’s situation with you because I know that my brother and I are not alone. Many others also experience the disabilities that afflict their parents, grandparents and loved ones as they reach extreme old age.

In a lucid moment yesterday, my mother asked me, “What could I have possibly done that God hates me so much to make me so miserable!”

I took her hand and said, “Mom – How could God possibly hate you? You have always been loving and generous. You were always the first to respond to those in trouble and who needed help – to family, friends and strangers. You contributed to every good cause. You served the Jewish community devotedly. I cannot believe that God is angry at you. Rather, I am sure that God loves you. I love you. Michael [my brother] loves you. You are just very very old, and this is what happens when people get old like you!”

She listened but didn’t respond. I don’t know if she understood me.

What else could I say? She is miserable, and for good reason.

She spoke about another woman, Anna, who is a resident on her floor and a devout Catholic, and said that Anna has more reason than most to end her life because she is “even more miserable than me!” She added, “There are ways to end your life, you know. But she won’t do it, because she’s religious.”

“What about you, Mom? Do you ever want to end your life?”

“Yes, I want to die,” she said, “but I would never take my life for the same reason that she doesn’t take hers!”

I marveled at how strong, still, is my mother’s faith. From the time she was a child in Winnipeg, Manitoba she was a deeply spiritual and religiously inclined person. On Friday nights she secretly went to synagogue alone without her parents and siblings knowing because they thought religion was nonsense. She told them she was attending school events.

Every Shabbat for months I have been offering a mi shebeirach healing blessing for my mother over an open Torah; but of late, I have begun to wonder whether I should stop based on a famous story from the Talmud.

When the great Rabbi Judah HaNasi was near death his disciples came to pray on his behalf in the courtyard below his window. His maidservant, hearing the desires of those “above” for Rabbi Judah’s soul and the desires of the students “below” decided to drop an earthen vessel to the courtyard stones hoping that the crash would at least momentarily distract Rabbi Judah’s students from their prayers. The noise indeed diverted their attention and they stopped praying. It was then that Rabbi Judah gave up his breath to God. (Talmud Bavli, Ketubot 104a). Rabbi Judah’s maidservant is regarded positively and with respect by tradition.

The Biblical Kohelet wrote that there is

“A season set for everything, / A time for every experience under heaven; / A time for being born and a time for dying…” (3:1-2)

When is my mother’s time for dying? Are my prayers on her behalf in any way sustaining her when she so deeply wishes and is ready to pass on?

Excruciating questions, and I have no answers.

On Life’s Beauty, Meaning and Joy – In Memorial to Michael Weiner

24 Sunday Nov 2013

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

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I did not know Michael Weiner personally, but I wish I had. Since his death on Thursday of brain cancer at the age of 51, the eulogies have poured in from around the country, and by all accounts Weiner was the embodiment of what it means to be mensch.

A happily married man and a loving father of three daughters, Michael Weiner served as the Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA) since 2009, and had been involved in the business of baseball for many years. He was most widely known, respected, admired, and loved as a professional of uncommon ability, skill, integrity, decency, compassion, empathy, and humility.

Michael Weiner loved baseball. He loved the players and recognized that without them there would be no game. The business of the game, though important, in his mind and heart was secondary to the integrity of the game and the well-being of its players. He was so effective at building consensus in labor issues and so deft at simplifying and making understandable to lay people (he was a Harvard Law grad) complex legal and contractual language, that of the four major sports in the United States only Major League Baseball has been successful in negotiating a collective bargaining agreement ensuring 21 consecutive years of labor peace, largely because of Michael Weiner.

As if all this weren’t enough, Weiner also taught Sunday School at the Jewish Center of Northwest Jersey, and, as one might assume, the children adored him.

As Weiner’s cancer progressed (he was first diagnosed in August, 2012) he reflected about his life. It is this statement that led me to write this blog of memorial to a man I did not know personally. Its message is what all of us ought to emulate:

“As corny as this sounds I get up in the morning and I feel I’m going to live each day as it comes. I don’t take any day for granted. I don’t take the next morning for granted. What I look for each day is beauty, meaning and joy, and if I can find beauty, meaning and joy, that’s a good day.”

Zichrono livracha – May Michael Weiner’s memory be a blessing, and may his family and loved ones find comfort among all mourners in Zion and Jerusalem. Amen!

Jacob’s Dream and Spiritual Leadership – Parashat Vayetze

08 Friday Nov 2013

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

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Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:10-22) was his first encounter with the God of his fathers Abraham and Isaac, and is part of a narrative that culminates next week in a second meeting at the River Jabbok (Genesis 32). There, in the darkness of night, Jacob wrestled with a Divine/human being and became Yisrael, the one who struggles with God.

In these Genesis chapters, we watch Jacob grow into the Jewish leader he was destined to become. As a boy he was graced with great spiritual potential, but he was ethically challenged and needed a full range of life experience, including hardship and suffering, before he could assume leadership of the tribe.

At the core of his life was his relationship with his twin brother Esau, a relationship that was troubled from the start. Even before birth in Rebekah’s womb they struggled. Jacob emerged second holding Esau’s heel signaling both his resolve and his destiny to become the leader.

Rashi reasoned that Jacob’s apparent manipulation and deceit in attaining the birthright in last week’s portion Toldot gained for him what should have been his from the beginning. After all, Rashi explained, if you drop a pebble into a flask followed by a second pebble, and then invert the flask, what happens? The second pebble falls out first. Thus, though Esau was born first, he was conceived second.

As the boys grew, Rebekah understood as only a parent can that Esau lacked the necessary spiritual gifts to effectively lead the tribe, whereas Jacob possessed deep understanding of the spiritual world. She therefore compounded Jacob’s unethical behavior with her own, and orchestrated with him a plan whereby Isaac would bless Jacob as the first-born in Esau’s place.

Our commentators struggled with the deception. Some explained that Isaac’s old age, blindness and feeble-mindedness kept him from knowing which son was which, and so he was easily tricked in blessing the wrong son. However, all evidence suggests otherwise, that Isaac was not at all feeble-minded, nor was he confused. He had maintained and built upon his father’s wealth, and his blessings of his two sons in last week’s portion (Genesis 27:28-29, 39-40) were each eloquent poetry describing Jacob’s and Esau’s respective natures and destinies.

It seems to me that Isaac was a silent and willing partner with Rebecca in the ruse, that though loving Esau dearly, Isaac agreed that Jacob was the more fitting heir and leader. This was not the first instance in which the younger exceeded the older (e.g. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac).

Jacob’s dream of angels ascending and descending the ladder to heaven at Bethel signals the spiritual destiny of the Jewish people. Commentators note that the stairway (sulam – samech, lamed, mem) totals 130 according to the science of gematria that assigns number equivalents to Hebrew letters, just as Sinai (samech, nun, yod) also totals 130, thus linking Jacob’s dream-revelation and Moses communion with God at Mt. Sinai.

When Jacob awoke from his dream, he was astonished and said, “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it!”

For the first time in his life Jacob experienced awe, wonder and humility, the quality of which he sorely lacked and needed to lead effectively his tribe.

Jacob’s faith was not yet fully evolved despite his powerful encounter with God at Bethel. Though moved, he vows his obeisance to God conditionally:

“If God remains with me, if God protects me …, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father’s house – then the Eternal shall be my God.”

Nachmanides (also Ramban – 13th century) explained that Jacob was not as deficient in faith as the narrative suggests. He doubted not God but himself, because he knew that he was a man prone to committing sin. Ramban says that Jacob’s conditional vow was a sign of his righteousness.

Among the great themes in the patriarchal and matriarchal narratives is that our Biblical heroes all suffer fear and a sense of inadequacy, as do each of us. Only the hardship that comes with life experience facilitates their spiritual and moral growth.

This week Jacob dreams, falls in love and is tricked by Rather’s father, Laban, to serve him for many years that he may marry Rachel. Laban made Jacob’s life miserable, and so at last he fled with his family.

In next week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, Jacob’s spiritual and familial journey reaches a peek moment as he encounters for the second time a Divine/human being on the night before he is scheduled to meet the brother that he so wronged twenty years earlier. That night encounter and the next day’s meeting are among the most dramatic moments in all of Biblical narrative.

The story is not only about the meeting between estranged brothers. It is about each one of us. Stay tuned!

Shabbat Shalom!

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” – By Nathan Englander – Book Review

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Book Recommendations, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Stories, Uncategorized

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What I appreciate most about Nathan Englander’s new collection of short stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” (publ. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), is not only his gifts as a writer, story teller and psychologically sophisticated observer of people, but that he actually knows something about Judaism, Jewish history, modern Orthodoxy, Ultra-Orthodoxy, the secular Jewish world, the state of Israel, and the place of the Holocaust in the psyche of the Jewish people.

Mr. Englander was born in 1960 in New York, raised on Long Island and educated in Orthodox schools through high school. In his mid-thirties, he moved to Israel where he lived for five years, but returned to the states and moves between Brooklyn, New York and Madison, Wisconsin where he teaches fiction and creative writing.

His Jewish/Israeli/secular background plays itself out in all his stories. He is at once an insider and outsider, sympathetic to the Jew as victim and vanquisher, and he knows Jewish tradition, though I suspect he  is no longer Orthodox himself. I sense, as well, that despite the darkness that undergird his stories, he sees the world through a comic and ironic eye as some of his stories are at once absurd and hysterical.

Englander’s eight stories, mostly involving Jewish characters and 20th century Jewish experience, touch upon many themes; the limits of love using the Holocaust as a backdrop in the title story (“What we Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”); the very different fates and destinies that befall two Israeli sisters who move into the West Bank after the 1967 Six Day War with their husbands and children to establish a settlement that eventually grows into a city (“Two Sisters”) – one sister loses her husband and all her children in war and a freak accident and the other survives with 9 children; the revenge-filled encounter with an anti-Semitic bully in America that is reminiscent of Bernard Malamud (“How We Avenged the Blums”); a dream sexual fantasy of a married protagonist who has lost his faith but is still plagued by Orthodox Judaism’s moral strictures (“Peep Show”); the influence of a person’s family history, familial bonds and memory on his heart, mind and soul long after everyone has died (“Everything I know About My Family On My Mother’s Side”); the ease towards paranoia among Holocaust survivors who, in an unlikely setting of an American seniors summer camp, accuse another survivor of being a former Nazi (“Camp Sundown”); the pain and loneliness of a once famous writer whose fan base is now old, dying but ever-demanding (“The Reader”); and the legacy of the death camps on a boy survivor who returned after the liberation as the only one left in his family to his boyhood home to discover his “governess” plotting to murder him in order that her family will keep his family’s farm (“Free Fruit for Young Widows”).

Every story is provocative, imaginative, engaging, entertaining, moving, and memorable. As a whole, they challenge the modern Jew to think about the nature of one’s Jewish identity in modernity, the role of religion, God, faith, culture, and history in forming who we are, and our capacity for evil and revenge. These stories are complex and operate on multiple levels from the real to imaginary to allegorical. They will leave you impressed by Englander’s skills,  moved and wondering – who am I?

Two Narratives – Two Truths

22 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Book Recommendations, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Stories, Uncategorized

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Much will be said in the coming days and weeks about what negotiations mean, what Israel and the Palestinians are willing to do and give up, whether the gap is just too wide, and whether a two-state solution is possible given current thinking on both sides.

I have just begun reading an important new book published last year called Side By Side – Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine edited by Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-on (zal), and Eyal Naveh of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). Developed over the last 15 years by Palestinian and Israeli scholars and educators, this work represents a wholly new way of teaching the Middle East to Israeli and Palestinian High School students. Regardless of one’s identity, both sides likely will be surprised that, more often than not, each holds a one-dimensional view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will obstruct peace-making.

The two narratives and interpretations of the meaning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are set side by side in 400 pages. Clearly, we live in two worlds and our understanding of the same historical events are very different.

Each side’s better understanding of the “narrative” of the other will hopefully result in a softening and opening of the heart to the other’s identity and experience.

No one in the Middle East wants to be a fry-ar (Israeli slang; “sucker”). Negotiations will be very difficult.

We here should be giving Secretary Kerry every benefit of the doubt in his efforts to facilitate negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians towards a two-state solution and a peaceful resolution of this conflict. Criticism of Kerry should be silenced. Mocking him, especially by Jewish media pundits should be quelled. What is important now is to support this renewal of negotiations. The alternative to a two states for two peoples resolution is more war, more suffering and a darkening of the landscape to death and the destruction of dreams.

The Challenge of Defining Who is a Jew and What is an Israeli Today – A Book Review

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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The 188th Crybaby Brigade – A Skinny Jewish Kid from Chicago Fights Hezbollah, by Joel Chasnoff (publ. 2010) is a well-written, insightful, at times hysterically funny memoir of a young American Yeshiva bucher who sought to live the complete modern Jewish experience while shedding the diaspora coat of victimhood. He made aliyah, enlisted in the Israeli army, did basic training, was chosen “Outstanding Soldier of the Platoon,” fought the Hezbollah as a tank commander in Lebanon, and got engaged to a beautiful Israeli woman.

One would think that he had arrived. But not so fast!

Joel’s army experience was not what he expected. He was, in fact, disheartened by the capricious, nasty, sadistic, and dehumanizing treatment of recruits by some of the commanders. Yet, after three weeks of training he reflected that

“…mandatory army service is the reason why Israelis are the way they are: aggressive, hotheaded, and stubborn on the one hand, and, on the other, unbelievably generous and community minded. It’s because these are army values. And since just about every Israeli comes of age in the army, these values become national values.”

When he finished his service, Joel and his fiancé Dorit sought out an Israeli Orthodox rabbi to officiate at their wedding, but upon inquiring into Joel’s family past, the rabbi said, “You are not a Jew!”

As Joel and Dorit sat there bewildered, the rabbi explained that though Joel’s mother had converted before he was born with an American Orthodox rabbi, she was instructed by a Conservative rabbi who “practiced an invalid brand of Judaism.”

Dorit was furious, and, pounding her fist on the desk, shouted, “A young man risks his life for the Jewish state, and you have the chutzpah to say [he’s not a Jew]… Rabbi, did your sons serve in the army?… You don’t mind if he dies for your country, so long as he doesn’t get married here.”

Joel was devastated: “It’s as if my entire identity just got kicked in the nuts, and then it hits me: As far as this country is concerned, I’m a Gentile….I was enraged at how Israel had stabbed me in the back.”

He then reflected about his identity and Israel’s dilemma:

“I was a Jew, through and through. I couldn’t reinvent myself if I tried…. I’m not the one [however] with the identity crisis. Israel is. I know exactly who I am, but after two generations in which Israel defined itself as a post-Holocaust haven from antiSemitism – in other words, the past – Israel now faces a much greater challenge: defining its future. In the meantime, the country has no idea who it is. It’s a democracy with no separation between church and state. It’s a sovereign nation with only one rigidly defined border: the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a Jewish state where observant Jewish soldiers have to choose between breakfast and prayers, where the most religious Jews don’t even have to serve in the army, and where the criteria for getting drafted aren’t enough to get you buried in the military graveyard. The country is confused. Meanwhile, at the top of the pyramid is this tiny group of rabbis who think they’re Kings of the Jews and therefore get to decide who’s in and whose out. But the Kings of the Jews are out of touch, because they fail to realize that Israel’s future, if it has one, depends on all the reject-Jews they’ve been pushing away from the table: the half-Jews and intermarried Jews, the queer and bi Jews, the women rabbis and young, freethinking Israelis who crave spirituality, not just restrictions, and the children of supposedly illegitimate converts, like me.” (p. 255-256)

The author articulates the central challenge of the Jewish people and State of Israel today. Who are we and what are we becoming? Are we stuck in the past governed by narrow religious definitions and extremist politics, or are we inclusive of all religious streams, expansive in our thinking and moving forward?

Despite his feelings, Joel decided to convert, but admitted:

“The stage in my life where I could innocently take for granted that I belonged to the Jewish people simply by virtue of being me-when I dunked in the water, that part of my life ended and a piece of me died. Even though I chose to convert, I’m furious at Israel for forcing me to choose, for humiliating me, for making me stand naked before three rabbis. I’m also furious at myself for going through with it, because by dunking in that pool, I accepted their claim that it is they, not I, who get to determine who I am.”

Joel and Dorit married and now live in Chicago. Their decision to leave Israel is a great loss for the State.

“Born on a Blue Day” – by Daniel Tammet – Book Recommendation

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Beauty in Nature, Book Recommendations, Health and Well-Being, Stories

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“Born on a Blue Day” (publ. 2007) is an extraordinary memoir written by a young British autistic savant, Daniel Tammet. His mental capacities are so remarkable that he was able to recite Pi to the 22,514th digit and holds the British and European record.

The author writes about his unique way of thinking called “synesthesia,” in which he sees numbers, letters and musical notes as colors and shapes. One of about 100 people in the world with his abilities, scientists believe that they are a consequence of hyperactivity in his brain’s left pre-frontal cortex.

Tammet is able to multiply vast numbers without having to write anything down. He is a gifted linguist and is fluent in 10 languages – English, Finnish, French, German, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Spanish, Romanian, Welsh, and Icelandic (which he learned to speak in one week!).

As a child his father introduced him to chess by taking him to the local chess club. Daniel was instructed by one of the older members and after familiarizing himself with the moves of the different pieces and then visualizing them moving in mathematical configurations, he beat his teacher in his first game. He went on to win many matches.

This engaging memoir tells the often painful story of Daniel growing up, isolated because of autism, Asperger’s and an early epileptic episode that almost killed him. As a child he was so unusual that he had no friends, which he did not miss because he was happy spending time alone in his room thinking.

Daniel only learned to become empathic (a problem for those with autism and Asperger’s) by associating his feelings about numbers and colors to feelings others experience in their lives. He wrote:

“Emotions can be hard for me to understand or know how to react to, so I often use numbers to help me. If a friend says they feel sad or depressed, I picture myself sitting in the dark hollowness of number 6 to help me experience the same sort of feeling and understand it. If I read in an article that a person felt intimidated by something, I imagine myself standing next to the number 9. Whenever someone describes visiting a beautiful place, I recall my numerical landscapes and how happy they make me feel inside. By doing this, numbers actually help me get closer to understanding other people.”

Daniel describes his obsessive and compulsive need for order and routine in life, explaining:

“I eat exactly 45 grams of porridge for breakfast each morning; I weigh the bowl with an electronic scale to make sure. Then I count the number of items of clothing I’m wearing before I leave my house. I get anxious if I can’t drink my cups of tea at the same time each day. Whenever I become too stressed and I can’t breathe properly, I close my eyes and count. Thinking of numbers helps me to become calm again. Numbers are my friends, and they are always around me. Each one is unique and has its own personality… No matter what I’m doing, numbers are never very far from my thoughts.”

Tammet is often poetic, especially when describing his love of numbers and words through color and texture:

“There are moments, as I’m falling into sleep at night that my mind fills suddenly with bright light and all I can see are numbers — hundreds, thousands of them — swimming rapidly over my eyes. The experience is beautiful and soothing to me. Some nights, when I’m having difficulty falling asleep, I imagine myself walking around my numerical landscapes. Then I feel safe and happy. I never feel lost, because the prime number shapes act as signposts.”

Despite his Asperger’s and autism, Daniel lives independently. When he was in his early 20s he told his parents that he was gay, soon fell in love, and moved in with his lover/partner.

Daniel Tammet is a wonderful story teller, and to read his words is to enter a unique world. He is a descriptive, honest and often touchingly vulnerable writer.

People have often asked him how he feels about being a human “guinea pig” to scientific researchers of the human brain. He does not mind because he knows that what is learned will expand knowledge of how the brain works. He is also interested in understanding himself better and says he wrote this book so that his family will understand him better.

This memoir is not only a fascinating read, but is important in understanding a true savant and the condition of autism and Asperger’s.

You can read an excerpt from “Born on a Blue Day” here:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=2794451&page=1#.UcJHOdjm9I0

 
 

“A German Life – Against All Odds, Change is Possible” by Bernd Wollschlaeger – Book Recommendation

14 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Book Recommendations, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Stories

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Bernd Wollschlaeger, born in 1958 in the small German town of Bamberg, is the son of a former Nazi tank commander and member of one of the elite units of the Wehrmacht, the Germany army, for which he was awarded the Knight’s Cross personally by Hitler.

Bernd loved his parents and admired his father, but growing up he needed to know all about what his father refused to discuss with him, what the Nazis did to Europe, Germany and the Jews, and what was his role.

When Palestinian terrorists murdered Israel’s Olympic athletes in 1972, the German press noted that again Jews had been killed in Germany. The fourteen year-old Bernd wanted to know what that meant. However, he could not get a straight answer from his parents. What he learned about the Third Reich at school horrified him. When he asked his father about German crimes his father told him that Bernd’s “teachers were all communists and liars and that a Holocaust never actually existed.”

Curious too about Judaism and Jewish faith, Bernd sought out a small orthodox Jewish community in his home town where he met and befriended a Holocaust survivor who began to teach him Judaism. Increasingly rejected by his own family, these mostly elderly Jews became Bernd’s new family.

One day he read about a peace conference being held in a nearby German town for Israeli Jewish and Arab youth organized by Neve Shalom. He decided to attend and from that point on his life would never be the same again. He now wanted to visit Israel.

In 1978 Bernd sailed to the Holy Land. He was reunited with his Israeli and Palestinian friends, fell in love with Vered, one of the young Israeli women, visited his Palestinian friend Chalil, and prayed at the Kotel. There, before the ancient stone wall he felt a spiritual stirring he had never known before. A kindly Orthodox man, watching him in his reverie, approached and encouraged him to seek out and reclaim his n’shamah, his Godly soul.

Bernd returned to Germany, completed his medical degree, converted to Judaism, and made aliyah. These acts severed whatever bond was left with his father and family.

In Israel, Bernd joined the Israeli Defense Forces as a medical officer, served for two years in the West Bank during the first Intifada, married and had a son.

The First Gulf War frightened his American-born wife, and so with a heavy heart he agreed for her sake to move to Florida. They divorced three years later. Bernd remarried and had two more Jewish children. Today he is a practicing family physician and an addiction specialist.

Bernd wrote of his remarkable journey, love of Judaism and Israel, and self-search:

“Initially, I came to seek answers about the Shoah, the crimes committed by Germans against [the Jewish] people, and of course the role my father played during that part of German history. Now I feel that there are other issues I need to explore. Why am I so attracted to this country? Why do I feel at home here? Why does Jewish faith and prayer seem to touch something deep inside me? Now I am searching for who I am. Since we’ve been here in Jerusalem, I’ve felt so close to finding it, but I still don’t know….

Many stories have been told by survivors, but this memoir (publ. by Emor Publishing, 2007) is the first I have read written by a child of a perpetrator.

When his own children asked about his family past, Bernd vowed not to do as his parents had done:

“I decided to break the wall of silence and tell them the truth about me. I needed to express what compelled me to dramatically change my life. I finally had to explore the relationship with my father and how it was overshadowed by the Holocaust. Our unresolved conflict and his denial motivated me to search for answers, and I found them within me and my acquired faith: Against all odds, change is possible…”

Dr. Wollschlaeger spoke to my synagogue community during this year’s Yom Hashoah Commemoration. We came to know of him from our member, Claudia Ehrlich Sobral, a child of survivors and a documentary film maker who produced “Ghosts of the Third Reich” which highlights Bernd and several other descendents of high ranking Nazis confronting the legacy that each carries.

Bernd’s courage to confront the truth and the transformation he underwent in order  to create a new life despite his family’s past amazes and inspires. His memoir will move you and I recommend it.

Hag Shavuot Sameach!

Wandering, Romantic Love, Transcendence, and Shavuot

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Stories, Uncategorized

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This week’s portion B’midbar (lit. “In the desert”) always precedes the festival of Shavuot that begins on Tuesday evening. Parashat B’midbar is not just a marker that reminds us when Shavuot occurs each year, its juxtaposition joins the season’s themes of wandering, covenant, transcendence, and love.

These themes are amplified in the Haftarah portion from the prophet Hosea. Betrayed by his wife’s promiscuity as another man’s concubine, the prophet perceives in his own tragic personal biography a parallel to the Israelite’s betrayal of God during the period of wandering.

Hosea was a star-filled romantic. He so wanted to forgive his wife her infidelities and welcome her back into his bosom. He prayed not only for personal reconciliation with her but also that God would forgive His own wayward lover, the people of Israel, and reaffirm with them the Covenant they once forged together at Sinai.

The prophet proclaims: V’e-ras-tich li l’o-lam b’tze-dek, u-v’mish’pat, u-v’che-sed, u-v’ra-cha-mim (Hosea 2:21-22) – “I betroth you to me forever; I betroth you to me with steadfast love and compassion; I betroth you to me in faithfulness…”

Love for God, one man’s yearning for his bride, one woman’s passion for her lover, the longing of the soul for the Ein Sof (God), all are joined in B’midbar, Hosea, and Shavuot. 

In a wonderful volume called “We – Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love,” the Jungian analyst Dr. Robert A. Johnson explores these themes as they played themselves out in the medieval myth of the hero Tristan and his beloved Iseult the Fair. This is a complicated, moving, beautiful, and tragic tale from 12th century Europe from which “Romeo and Juliet” and other great romantic love tales have sprung.

The story focuses upon the emotional and spiritual journeys of two protagonist lovers, and Dr. Johnson explores what came to be called “Courtly Love:”

“The model of courtly love is the brave knight who worshiped a fair lady as his inspiration, the symbol of all beauty and perfection, the ideal that moved him to be noble, spiritual, refined, and high-minded. In our time we have mixed courtly love into our sexual relationships and marriages, but we still hold the medieval belief that true love has to be the ecstatic adoration of a man or woman who carries, for us, the image of perfection.“

Dr. Johnson explains that when lovers fall “in love” they feel a sense of completion as though a missing part of themselves had been returned to them. They are uplifted as though suddenly raised above the ordinary. They feel spiritualized and transformed into new, better and whole human beings.

The connection of theme in the mythic romantic love tale “Tristan and Isault” and the Revelation at Sinai should now be clear. Dr. Johnson writes:

“Here we are confronted with a paradox that baffles us, yet we should not be surprised to discover that romantic love is connected with spiritual aspiration – even with our religious instinct – for we already know that courtly love, at its very beginning so many centuries ago, was conceived of as a spiritual love, a way of loving that spiritualized the knight and his lady, and raised them above the ordinary and the gross to an experience of another world, an experience of soul and spirit.”

“Tristan and Iseult” is a story describing the yearning of the soul. So too is that great and singular event that Shavuot commemorates. Indeed, the wilderness of Sinai stripped the people of pretense. They were more vulnerable than they had ever known, and in that the expansive uninhabited landscape of quietude they opened their hearts and souls in awe and wonder to God.

It was there that Torah was given and received. It was there that God and the people of Israel, even if but for a moment, were One.

Shabbat shalom and Hag sameach!

“Sacred Housekeeping – a spiritual memoir” by Harriet Rossetto – Book Recommendation

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Book Recommendations, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Stories, Uncategorized

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Harriet Rossetto was a bright Jewish kid with success written all over her. Like other young women growing up in the early 1960s, she went to college, got married, had a child, and hoped to live happily ever after. It didn’t turn out quite that way, but today she is more fulfilled than she ever expected to be.

Harriet is the CEO and Founder of Los Angeles’ renowned non-profit drug and alcohol treatment organization called Beit T’shuvah (House of Return), the only institution of its kind for Jews in the US. She earned an MSW and then, as she describes her life at 45, she became unemployed and homeless, hitting rock bottom. From that place one day she picked up an LA Times classified ad for a job as a Social Worker at the county jail. The ad specified the need for “a person of Jewish background and culture to help incarcerated Jewish offenders. MSW required.”

That turned out to be a fateful day. The job, working with Jewish addicts and cons, led Harriet to found Beit T’shuvah and meet her husband and partner, himself an addict and con, who would eventually be ordained Rabbi Mark Borovitz.

Harriet is brutally honest and self-revealing about herself, her struggles, her life and addictions. She also speaks movingly of the central role her return to Judaism played in her journey, offering the essence of what she discovered this way:

“Judaism began to rest on a few core beliefs that helped me redefine my perception of myself, of others and of the purpose of life.

I matter. You matter. I have a holy soul. I am imperfect by design. My value is a birthright. Change is possible and mandatory. Right action is the bridge to wholeness of self.”

Harriet recognizes that her formerly negative view of life, that “nothing matters and who cared anyway, had been shifting: Everything [now] mattered, I realized. Everything. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: something sacred is at stake in every event.”

Hers and Mark’s quest turned out to be the classical Jewish mystical quest, to confront both the darkness and light in the individual soul, and to struggle towards the light.

It is an irony that this child of middle class Jewish parents found her most natural home among addicts. She identified with them, struggled along with them, hit bottom like them, and became their teacher and guide:

“My qualification to be your life teacher is I have been where you are. I’ve seen it all. I know your torment, your war against yourself. I have battle-hardened experience and I still struggle every day. And I have learned how to live an integrated life. You will too. You are sure that whatever you’re addicted to is the only thing that will relieve the misery of your emptiness, the hole that aches. Without (fill in your own blanks) drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, food, money, power and prestige… there is no reason to get up in the morning….you will want to use again, and you might. But if you don’t, one day you will start to feel better. Alive again, in fact.”

Harriet teaches that, similar to other 12 step programs, “faith in a Power greater than oneself was necessary in order to stay sober. The addict has to learn how to live from within and stop seeking external solutions to internal discomfort.”

Unlike other 12 step programs, hers is based in Torah and Judaism:

“Torah is the Big book of Jewish recovery from human broken-ness. We believe if you can see yourself in every Parsha it is the Path to Shalem (wholeness) and Shalom (Peace of Mind.)”

Those accepted into Beit T’shuvah for treatment are required to live according to strict rules of the house. Prayer, meditation and learning Torah are essential components of daily life, alongside productive work, therapy and mutual support.

Beit T’shuvah is funded solely by voluntary contributions. No one is turned away because of inability to pay. Grateful parents and grandparents, foundations and friends support it because it works.

Harriet’s spiritual memoir is a moving tale of ongoing recovery; hers, Rabbi Mark’s, and all those who pass through. Her story, though unique and extraordinary, in truth is everyone’s story because each of us can locate ourselves somewhere along that continuum of addiction to non-addiction. We’re all broken somehow. All of us yearn for healing and liberation from our personal Mitzrayim (“Egypt” – lit. “the narrow constricted places” that enslave us and bow our heads).

Harriet’s book is one more thing – It is a moving testimony to the capacity of each one of us to lift ourselves up, turn our lives around, one step at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time.

Yasher kochachechem, Harriet and Mark!