Embodied Torah

Divre Harav – January, 2024

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It’s cold and snowy outside, and nothing is growing. Trees are bare and plants and grasses around the yard are dry and dead. Yet our tradition tells us that we should celebrate Tu Bishvat, the new year for trees. A pessimist would look around and conclude that the world is dying and there is no point any more. An optimist looks around and believes that the cold will end and the world will become green and grow again. There is a midrash about Adam and Eve, who are exiled from the garden just before Shabbat of that first week of creation. Shabbat is a beautiful day of light, but as Saturday night approaches and the world gets dark, they become afraid. It’s never happened before (in their very short lives), and they think the end of the world is nigh. So God gives them the gift of fire (which we commemorate as part of the Havdalah ceremony), and the light and warmth of the fire relieves their fear and gives them assurance that the world is not ending.

I believe that Judaism gives us a mandate to be an optimistic people, but Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, went one step further. He writes:

People often confuse optimism and hope. They sound similar. But in fact, they’re very different. Optimism is the belief that things are going to get better. Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together, we can make things better. It needs no courage, just a certain naivety to be an optimist. It needs a great deal of courage to have hope.

In the Midrash, Adam and Eve lacked the tools and the knowledge to take action to bring light and fire into the world. But we are different. We celebrate the rebirth of the world not only because we have optimism (based on past experience and science) that the world in fact will warm and become green again, but we also have hope that we can affect the environment around us through good stewardship of natural resources. The celebration of Tu Bishvat has evolved from a way to mark the age of trees for purposes of tithing produce, to a mystical Seder celebrating our connection with God through eating different kinds of fruit, to a day celebrating planting trees and care for the planet.

Rabbi Schadick, Cantor Fair, and I will be leading a joint Tu Bishvat Seder on Wednesday evening, January 24th, at 6:00 p.m. It will include a light dinner (a vegan barley soup and fresh baked rolls), along with different kinds of fruits and nuts.

The cost is $10/person for adults and children 12 and over, no charge for children under 12. You can make a reservation online here or by calling/emailing the synagogue at 616-949-2840. Please either send a check to the synagogue or pay by venmo,  @AhavasIsraelGR, account.venmo.com/u/AhavasIsraelGR . The reservation deadline is Sunday, January 12. We cannot accept reservations after that date.

We hope you’ll join us.

Hebrew Phrase of the Month:

  • Tu Bishvat – The fifteenth (the total of the letters Tet=9 and vav=6) of the month of Shevat
  • Hag Ha-Ilanot – The festival of trees. Ilan is a late Biblical word for tree found in the book of Daniel. Etz is the more common word for tree.
  • Tikvah – Hope

Divre Harav – December, 2023

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We, who love Judaism, probably do so because we love the holidays, the life cycle events, maybe the structure and content of prayer. We may also love the system of ethics as it applies to personal spiritual growth or medicine or even business. And of course we love Torah and we ought to love Israel as well, the land that it clearly given to us as a place to exercise sovereignty and self-determination. And that it why so many of us have been in emotional and spiritual agony since October 7, the day on which the terrorists of Hamas butchered our young and our old and kidnapped about 240 of our brothers and sisters to use as human shields.

I’m writing this article on November 1, to be published on December 1, hoping, but not at all confident, that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza will have ended. There are some aspects of Jewish law and ethics that are unpleasant and messy and among them are the laws of war. We think of Jewish ethics as a system designed to elevate the human being to reflect the face of God and to connect people to each other in loving ways. But sometimes ethics teaches us how we might defend ourselves by shooting guns and missiles, dropping bombs, laying siege to a city, cutting off electricity, food, and water, in order to achieve an ethically defensible goal – that of preserving our lives at the expense of those who are trying to kill us and those who are supporting them.

I don’t have the military expertise to wage war. I rely on colleagues with both rabbinic ordination and military training to teach me, just like I rely on attorneys to guide me on legal issues and mechanics to fix my car and my heat and air conditioning. I try not to take strong positions on issues outside my field of expertise. And despite writing a column entitled, “Ethics and Religion Talk,” when it comes to the ethics of war, I am not an expert.

I know that some portion of the population of Gaza are people who fundamentally disagree with Hamas and are afraid to say that publicly, lest they put their lives as risk. I know that some portion of these people are children, complete innocents.  I do not know of a way to wage war without putting innocent, non-combatant, lives at risk. I am confident, however, that the Israel military goes above and beyond the letter of the Law of Armed Conflict as it warns civilian populations before bombing a target in their area, trying to minimize collateral casualties. And I will remind you, unnecessarily, I hope, that the enemy that Israel is fighting goes out of its way to maximize non-combatant casualties, and has said, repeatedly, that its fight is not over until Israel no longer exists.

So you may not love the parts of Judaism that try to offer guidance to the messy, ugly, business of waging war. But for a thousand years, Jews were sovereign in the land of Israel under King Saul, King David, and his dynasty. And they protected the land and the people with their blood. And Jews were generals and leaders under the Moslem government of early medieval Spain. Jewish communities protected themselves from Pogroms in Russia. Jews fought for this country against the scourge of Hitler and his Nazi thugs. And I wish that all people of the world would melt down their weapons and turn them into farming implements, but until that happens, I thank God and pray for the Israel Defense Forces.

Hebrew Phrase of the Month:

  • • Am Yisrael ḥai! – The nation of Israel lives!

Reflections on the Psalms

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An interview with Samuel Zinner about my book. The book is available on Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFCYR1NP. If you are in Grand Rapids, I have a few copies that I can sell for about 20% off. It makes a great Hanukkah (or Christmas) present!

Samuel Zinner, Ph.D. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Zinner concentrated in modern and ancient languages and literatures, history, and Museum Studies. He contributed to German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing 1920- 1945 (Berghahn Books 2004), which was awarded the American Library Association’s prestigious “Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Award” for 2005. He has contributed articles to Religions/Adyan (Doha International Centre for Interfaith Dialogue), and other academic journals. He has served as a peer-review referee for the journals Old Testament Essays, Paedagogia Christiana, etc. His work has been published internationally in a variety of languages by Oxford University Press, De Gruyter, etc. Zinner’s work has been praised by Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Philip R. Davies, Hebraist John F. A. Sawyer (Durham University), Targums scholar Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge), and others. Zinner is currently an editor of the forthcoming volume Origins and Applications of Language and Number (Rowman and Littlefield), which includes contributions by Noam Chomsky, Gregory Chaitin, and other eminent scholars. Zinner’s recent conference participations include presentations for the Oregon Jewish Cultural Project “Bob Dylan: Jewish Perspectives on his Repertoire” and “The Bible and the Qur’an: Comparative Studies” at the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran.

Divre Harav – November, 2023

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Ahavas Israel has been involved in an interfaith Thanksgiving service for at least 40-50 years, originally with a group of churches in our neighborhood, and for the past 20-some years, a city-wide coalition convened by the Kaufman Interfaith Institute of GVSU. The service takes place on the Monday night before Thanksgiving. It is designed to be a glimpse through the window at an authentic expression of gratitude from a variety of traditions, including Sikh, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, Catholic, several Protestant Christian denominations, Unitarian, non-theist, and Jewish. During the years that I have been involved in planning the service, I have tried to stress that we’re not creating a service which erases the differences and the unique character of each our traditions, but rather one which weaves the texture, and color of our differences together in a color rainbow tapestry. I am always moved and lifted up by the offerings of prayers, music, dance, and song.

I had a different reaction to a service which I attended earlier this year in my role with the Grand Rapids Police Department’s Clergy on Patrol, I attended a memorial service for officers with Michigan connections who have fallen in the line of duty. Each officer, the first of which was George Powers, a detective shot by a suspect in a train robbery, was represented by a current officer who presented a rose in their memory. The service itself was moving, but the hymns and music and prayers were distinctly Christian. I found myself feeling like an outsider, excluded from the service.

Recently, I went to a meeting of clergy working with the police at which the police chaplain was invited to present about his position and duties with the department. He talked about the importance of a chaplain not pushing his personal faith, but being available and accessible to all. I brought up my feelings of exclusion at the memorial service, and offered my thoughts that an organization connected to the government and laws of the State, comprised of people from a variety of faiths, has the responsibility not to promote Christianity over other faiths. To my mind, this kind of memorial service is not an experience in which people witness the faith of other traditions, but rather one in which all people attending remember and pray for the fallen officers and their families together. Therefore all prayers and hymn should stay away from language expressing a preference for a particular tradition, referring instead to a common God which might appeal to all people of faith attending. Rather than a tapestry illustrating unique differences, it is a blanket weaving universal threads of love and comfort, joining people together in prayer.

These are two different models of interfaith prayer. There is a proper place for each one. Each one has integrity and beauty. I will be out of the country and miss the Interfaith Thanksgiving service this year, but I hope you will go and represent Ahavas Israel in my place. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Hebrew Words of the Month:

  • Hag Ha-hodaya – Thanksgiving
  • Hodu – India
  • Turkiya – Turkey (the country)
  • Turkee – Turkish
  • Tarnegol Hodu – turkey (the bird)
  • Hodu LaAdonai! – Give thanks to Adonai!
  • Toda – thank you

Divre Harav – October, 2023

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A Hasidic teaching I studied recently suggested that God is represented by words. God is found in the words of the revelation at Sinai, the words of Torah. But it also suggested that when we live our faith fully, that we not only hear God’s words, we also actually hear God’s voice, a more powerful connection.

The difference between words and a voice is this: Words might be seen as an artifact of an ancient world, the dusty remnants of a previous generation. A voice, on the other hand, is an active presence, something alive and vibrant. Faith, commitment, spiritual energy, belief, is what transforms the words on the page into a living, contemporary, compelling, tradition.

I have been on a quest to learn how to transform words into a voice and to teach others how to take the words of Psalms or words of the Siddur and derive transcendent meaning from a single sentence, verse, or phrase. It began with a four year journey reading Psalms and writing reflections which appeared in columns in the Voice and in posts on our ahavasisraelgr.org website. In the past year, I have collected those reflections and published them as “Reflections on the Psalms,” a demonstration of the process of contemplative reading in order to see what word, phrase, or sentence draws the reader’s attention, and discerning a larger message by connecting that passage with Jewish wisdom.

Our prayer books contain many words. Our services are rivers of words, in which you dip your consciousness like a fishing line to see what comes out. I like to think that the words that stick with me after a service are a message from God. God’s voice is in those words. My job is to figure out what God’s voice is trying to say to me.

I want to help you find God’s Voice in the words of our tradition, in Torah, in the Bible, in the Siddur, in Rabbinic literature. I’d like you to join me for our many Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret and Simhat Torah services, for my Zoom Torah study, or for my Sunday morning survey of Mishnah classes. 

And if you’d like to purchase the book, you can find more information and a link to Amazon here, https://embodiedtorah.com/reflections-on-the-psalms/, or search for the title on Amazon.com. Discover how the Psalms can inspire you to engage significant contemporary issues. This is not a commentary on the meaning and message of the Psalms; rather, this book considers the Psalms as a collection of phrases and images that invite us into brief meditations using Jewish wisdom for spiritual development.

Hebrew Words of the Month:

  • Tehillim – Psalms
  • Hit’bon’nut – Contemplation (from the word bina, understanding)