Embodied Torah

Divre Harav/Words from the Rabbi – September, 2011

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My goal for bulletin articles this year is to reflect on the theme of holiday celebrations. I believe that many adult Jews carry around within them a distorted picture of Jewish holidays based on the education they received in religious school.  Religious school education is not necessary bad education, but it is unsophisticated.  It is designed for elementary age children (most religious school do not re-teach holidays to high school students).  Therefore, each month I want to address an aspect or theme of one holiday on a adult level.

Eating apples and honey and honeycake, gleefully throwing bread into a pond during Tashlikh, hearing the shofar and counting the seconds of the tekiah gedolah are the hooks that sweeten and enliven Rosh Hashanah.  The real meaning of the holiday, the part that we might try to teach to children but that they are not yet capable of understanding on the deepest level, is how we might embrace renewal and how we might experience real and fundamental change in the way we behave and respond to the world.  This is the stuff that people pay big money to therapists to do, and spend months and years doing.

Rosh Hashanah is a time to renewal relationships that have gone bad or simply become stale. Atonement is the goal, and the deadline is Yom Kippur.  The period leading up to Rosh Hashanah and the Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur is the time to examine how we have failed to nurture the relationships in our life, both with the people around us and with God.

The most difficult pill to swallow on Rosh Hashanah is the idea that we are responsible for everything that has happened or will happen to us.  “It’s not my fault,” should no longer be in our vocabulary. We should behave as if everything we do affects what happens to us.  If we are a victim, it is because we placed ourselves in a position to become victimized. This is a radical notion which may not be objectively true, but this is the message that Rosh Hashanah delivers, and this is the only way that full transformation is every possible – when we accept full and total responsibility for our lives. Rosh Hashanah rejects the “blame game,” in which people and organizations and political factions seek to blame the “other” for things which have gone wrong.  Rather, we are encouraged to look within ourselves to see what we have done to cause the problem. We may not be the sole cause or even the primary cause, but the theology of Rosh Hashanah believes that it is more useful for us to root out our contribution to the problem, since ultimately that’s all we can control.

In this month leading up to Rosh Hashanah, here are some things that you can do to achieve a sense of repentance and renewal:

Make a mental list of things you want to do better in the coming year. Consider what personality trait or traits led you do do the things you regret.  Consider the following questions:

In what way does Judaism serve as a guide in your life?  Do you draw upon Jewish wisdom to help you make business or personal decisions?  Does Judaism feel inadequate or too antiquated or irrelevant to address your day to day needs?  Do you feel overwhelmed by the impossibility of knowing how to ask the right questions of Judaism, in order to get the answers you seek?

During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, use the following questions to enhance and guide your prayer experience:

At what points in the service are you moved?  Emotionally by the cantor?  Intellectually by the Siddur?  Intellectually or emotionally by the rabbi’s words?  Physically by the incessant chatter of the people sitting behind you?

What emotions do you feel (here’s a sample list from a to z – out of order)? – boredom, apathy, joy, fear, worry, compassion, eagerness, friendship, pettiness, verisimilitude, happiness, insult, xenophobia, zealotry, uneasiness, sadness, rage, openness, questioning, jadedness, genuineness, decisiveness, nasty, tentativeness, magical?

In what way does Rosh Hashanah in the synagogue facilitate a prayer experience ?  At what points does the liturgy, the sometimes free translation of the prayers, or the commentary and additional readings, move you to a deeper examination of your life?  What does the experience of High Holiday services do for you, how does it affect you?  As a general question, do you consider it to be the responsibility of the synagogue and the prayer book to engage you, or do you consider it to be your responsibility to engage with the synagogue and the prayer book?  To address the (Divine) elephant in the room, what role does God play in this whole drama?  Is God a commanding presence, a relationship presence, a supportive presence, a demanding presence, an imperious presence, an irrelevant presence, an ineffectual presence, an emotional presence, a non-presence?

Summertime … Summer Reading List

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Bookshelf

Note:  I have not read most of the books on this list.  They have been recommended by colleagues (the annotation came from the recommendation or from book reviews).  Please comment on this post – suggest other worthwhile summer reads, or let us know what you think of any of the books on this list.

Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief by Stephen Dubner.

The free world: A Novel, by Bezmozgis, David.  A novel tracing refusenik family who gets an exit visa and finds themselves in Rome waiting to get a visa to America or Canada.  The story has a sense of reality, as told by someone who knows the experience from the inside.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem – James Carroll.  The History of Jerusalem.

The God Who Hates Lies:  Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition, David Hartman.  The struggle between commitment to Jewish religious tradition and personal morality.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot.  It’s about race, and gender, and poverty and science, education and love.  The story of the HeLa cells, taken from her cancerous tumor and used for medical research, becoming a multi-billion dollars industry – without the knowledge or consent of family, and without any renumeration.

Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?:  Gender and Covenant in Judaism, Shaye Cohen. The connection between Brith Milah and Jewish Identity considering Jewish and Christian sources on the question.

You Never Call! You Never Write!:  A History of the Jewish Mother, Joyce Antler. It has some fun sections as well as serious scholarship about the stereotype of the Jewish Mother.

Palaces of Time:  Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Elisheva Carlebach. Would you believe that a book about Jewish calendars and almanacs of the 15th to 18th centuries can be a gold mine of information about Jewish values and beliefs and their interaction with the external Christian society?

Sacred Treasure, The Cairo Genizah:  The Amazing Discovery of Forgotten Jewish History in and Egyptian Synagogue Attic, Mark Glickman, and Sacred Trash:  The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, Adina Hoffman, Peter Cole. The compelling story about the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, and the subsequent fate of its collection and the people who have studied them.

I’m God, You’re Not: Observations in Organized Religion and Other Disguises of the Ego, Lawrence Kushner. A wonderful collection of essays.

Hope Will Find You: My Search for the Wisdom to Stop Waiting and Start Living, Naomi Levy.  Quite moving and inspiring.

Hush, Eishes Chayil.  Eishes Chayil is of course a pen name.  Hish is a book about the sexual abuse that goes on in the Orthodox community. Fiction, based on the facts that no one talks about.

Subversive Sequels in the Bible, Judy Klitsner. 2009 National Jewish Book Award winner. Close reading of the Biblical stories – for example, it shows how the story of the Hebrew midwives builds upon, and is based upon, the Tower of Babel story in Genesis.

The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson. Interesting, probably thoughtful, definitely quite funny, and it evokes a lot of questions and conflicting feelings.

A Comment on How Difficult it is to FIGURE THINGS OUT

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In the field of Jewish ethics, Reb Simha Bunum suggests a way for the human being to balance humility and self worth:

“Rabbi Bunum said to his disciples: “Everyone must have two pockets, so he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to the words:’For my sake was the world created,’ and in his left:’ I am earth and ashes.”

Anochi Afar va-efer  (from Gen. 18:27)

and

Bishvili nivra ha-olam (from Sanhedrin 37a)

[from Volume 2 of Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, p. 249]

The comic strip “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal,” by Zach Weiner has a slightly more complicated take on the same basic idea:

What do you learn from a Holocaust Museum?

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I brought a group of college students to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills Michigan today. The experience of visiting Holocaust museums always leaves me uneasy. While walking through the exhibit and listening to the docent, I am constantly asking myself, ‘What is the intended outcome of such a visit? What impression is it meant to give the visitors?’

The tour began with a nod towards the Armenian holocaust, with a look at a special exhibit by an Armenian artist. The implied message is, ‘See, Jews are not unique. It happened before, and no one noticed.  There has always been tremendous evil in the world, and unless we recognize the signs and take action, it will happen again we will be guilty of complicity.’  At the same time, however, we wonder why, if Jews are not unique, there are no museums of the Armenian Christian Holocaust?  Why don’t they remember and shout out warnings to the world, as we do?

The tour guide made the point over and over again that Jews are not unique. ‘Who is the Jew,’ he asked. ‘Every and any one of you,’ he answered. The average citizen who knew what was happening and let it happen made the Holocaust possible. You have to believe that it can and will happen again.  You have to believe that you might be among the next set of victims, unless you understand how to watch for the signs and how to take action.

Then we approach the introduction to the permanent exhibit, pausing at a list of Jewish Nobel prize winners. A sign points out that Jew make up less the one percent of the population, but comprise 25 percent of the Nobel prize recipients. We are asked to imagine what the world destroyed when 40 percent of world Jewry was wiped out.  We are invited to imagine how much better the world would have been if the brilliant potential of European Jewry had been allowed to flower.

I wonder what my students took away from the experience.  I wonder what the two predominantly (or completely) non-Jewish grade school groups who were also visiting today took away from their experience.  Did they absorb the message that Jews are better and smarter than other people, and therefore our tragedy is monumentally worse than the Armenian Holocaust?  Or did they absorb the message that the same philosophy that gives birth to Jew hatred also spawns hatred of people of color, people with disabilities, and/or people of any minority religion?

The exhibit seems to want it both ways.  On one hand, Jews are just like anyone else, and the next victim could be you.  Other other hand, Jews are a unique treasure.

We realize that Jews have ritualized memory and the importance of remembering things, good and bad, to a depth possibly unmatched by other ethnic or religious groups.  Deep down, however, I think there is deep Jewish ambivalence about what to do with the Holocaust memory.  We have been trained by Passover and Purim and Yom Kippur to reenact our most important memories in order never to forget them.  On the other hand, we recognize that the Holocaust was an intensely painful and deeply dysfunctional period of our history, and we understand that unlike our other historical memories, this one does not have a positive lesson unless we can convince other people to join with us in taking responsibility for the evil and guarding the world so it will never happen again.

Students — Tell me:  How do you understand the experience you saw and heard today?

On the Death of An Enemy

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What do you do and say when your enemy falls?

Do you follow the advice of Proverbs 24:17, ” If your enemy falls, do not exult; If he trips, let your heart not rejoice?”
Or do you follow the advice of Proverbs 11:10, ” When the wicked perish there are shouts of joy.”

Do you follow the practice of the Pesah seder and spill drops of wine and tears over the loss of life?
Or do you sigh with relief that a man dedicated to evil and death has been eliminated from our world?

Do you bless God, the righteous judge?
Do you bless God who breaks the enemy and humbles the arrogant?

Did you rejoice, or would you have rejoiced on this day 66 years ago when Hitler’s death was announced?
Did you take a breath in wonder at the coincidence of Osama Bin Laden’s death on that anniversary, on the oh-so-grim day that we remember the Shoah?

Along with that sign of relief and that grateful breath, let me just say that I am grateful to our President and our armed forces for their persistence. May it be understood as a message to Islamic fascists that attacks against our country will not go unpunished.