Divre Harav/Words from the Rabbi – May, 2015

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Every 7 – 10 years, every cell in our body will have died off and been replaced. This means that on a cellular level, you are a completely different person – the old you has died off and been replaced. Yet, somehow, the patterns of memory that give us our identity are preserved.

On an institutional level, Congregation Ahavas Israel is the same organization it has been since 1937, when Ahavas Achim rejoined Beth Israel after having broken away 36 years earlier. As a congregation, we trace our sense of identity and our place within Grand Rapids history back to the founding of our first predecessor congregation in 1892. Some families and a few individuals have been continuous members for 80, 90, 100 years or more, but most of us came much later. The congregational body, unlike the human body, does not have a genetically influenced end of lifetime. If we care about it and put time, energy, and money into its upkeep, it can survive and thrive indefinitely. The congregation needs you who care enough about it to be members, to sustain it.

As a religious organization, the most consistent heartbeat of activity can be found in our services: shabbat, festival, and weekdays. Every Wednesday and Thursday morning, groups gather for prayer in the chapel. Perhaps this is a place where you can help sustain the congregation – can you help ensure weekly minyanim by committing yourself to morning prayer once or twice a week or twice a month?

The festival of Shavuot is approaching. We’re gathering on the first night for a program that is part social and part educational – a Tikkun Leil Shavuot study session. If you’ve never participated, perhaps this year you’ll try it out. It’s an informal gather at my home (2021 Michigan St. NE) at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 23. The Shavuot morning service the next morning reenacts the giving of Torah at Mount Sinai; the second day of the festival is both Memorial Day on the secular calendar and a day on which we recite Yizkor on the Jewish calendar. The ritual of remembering connects us personally and institutionally, as Jews and as Americans, to those who gave us our identity and to whose lives made it possible for us to live in freedom. Our two identities also intersect at the Ahavas Israel and Greenwood cemetery, where we gather twice a year to place flags on the graves of veterans. We’ll meet at Ahavas Israel Cemetery at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 17 to place flags for Memorial Day.

Shavuot makes the beginning of summer on the Jewish calendar. During the summer months, make it a point to spend a Shabbat once or twice a month (or more!) with us. Your presence will help the heart of Ahavas Israel beat more strongly.

Psalm 89

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How long, Adonai, will you hide your face forever; will your fury blaze like fire? (89:47)

The final Psalm in Book 3 of the Psalms, at 53 verses, is the third longest Psalm. It concludes with a doxology typical of the final verse of each book of Psalms, “Blessed is Adonai forever, Amen and Amen.” When I embarked on this project to write a reflection on each of the 150 Psalms, one per week, a nearly three year project, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to maintain the discipline. That’s the funny thing about long-term projects. You begin with the best of intentions, but at a certain point it seems like they’re going to take forever to complete. Forever is a long time. Something which takes forever is never completed.

The JPS translation of our verse, paying careful attention to the punctuation of the verse, reads three distinct questions:

How long, Adonai; will you hide your face forever, will your fury blaze like fire?

The first question, “How long,” is a general cry for God’s presence. It is followed by two specific question. To paraphrase, “Will I never see you again?” and “Are you very angry?”

Rabbi Benjamin Segal, in his masterful book “A New Psalm: The Psalms as Literature” translates the verse differently by putting moving the word “forever” from the middle of the verse, where it is found in the Hebrew, to the end of the verse:

How long, Adonai, will you hid your face; will your fury blaze like fire forever?

Rabbi Segal’s translation, reads the verse as two questions — “How long will you remain distant?” and “Will you be angry forever?”

I’ve chosen a different way to understand the verse. The Psalmist asks, “How long will you hide your face?” but embedded in the verse is the word ‘forever,’ a word which indicates what he’s afraid of. I’ve translated this verse to emphasize the writer’s sense of uncertainty and contradiction. The Psalmist asks “how long?” but answers that God’s face will be hidden forever, that God will never appear to him again.

Time is relative. One minute standing in silence, as Israelis do as part of their Memorial Day observance, seems like an eternity. On the other hand, one minute on a rollercoaster is over in a flash. When we’re feeling abandoned, time crawls. When we’re having a good time, time flies. Three-fifths of the way into my journey though the Psalms, I, like the Psalmist, sometimes wonder if I’ll make it to the end. It seems far away. As we finish Book 3 of Psalms, I pause to acknowledge God, the source of blessing, and to thank God for giving me the mental strength and discipline to push on and finish what I began.

Psalm 88

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As for me, I cry out to You, O LORD; each morning my prayer greets You.  (88:14)

Some people wake up in the morning ready to go; others wake up with feeling like their brains are full of damp cotton. Even the most enthusiastic morning folks don’t always look forward to morning prayers. There is so much to do, we want to get started tackling the items on the agenda! So we rush through the prayers without much thought in order to get started with more important business.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev noted that it is easy to find people who are distracted by business during prayer times; it is far more difficult to find people who are distracted by God or Torah during business hours.

Why cry out to God? Doesn’t God already know what’s on my mind? Is it possible that God won’t provide for my needs unless I ask for them? And what about all those things that I ask for that I never receive – is God not listening?

We pray not because we need something from God, but because we need to remind ourselves to distinguish between what we truly need and what we merely want.

We pray because we remind ourselves that our life is a gift from God and we need to remind ourselves to show gratitude.

We pray because showing gratitude to God for God’s attributes of love, power, and generosity reminds us to be loving, use power wisely, and generous.

We pray to remind ourselves that the world can be better than it is right now, to remind ourselves that optimism is a Jewish value.

We pray because sometimes we are in pain and shared pain hurts less than pain born alone.

We pray because sometimes we are joyful and joy increases exponentially when shared.

Finally, we pray in a communal minyan to remind ourselves that we are not simply fulfilling a selfish personal obligation – we are also supporting others to fulfill their obligations.

Psalm 87

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Indeed, it shall be said of Zion, “Every person was born there.” (87:5)

For every person to be born in Zion either means that the world population shrinks dramatically or the boundaries of Zion, literally or metaphorically, expand to encompass the whole world. Let’s think of a messianic world in which we are citizens of planet earth whose capital is Zion.

If we lived in a truly messianic world in which there were no national conflicts and no meaningful borders between nations, in which people of all religions treated each other with absolute love and respect — wouldn’t that feel as if the messianic City of Jerusalem had expanded  to encompass the entire world?  The whole world would be Israel, a city/land of God.

In this messianic world any Jew living anywhere in the world could claim our birthright – Israeli citizenship and an Israeli passport, fulfilling the Psalmist’s vision, “Every person was born there.” For a host of reasons, this will have to wait until we are significantly closer to peace and stability in the Middle East, but I have a dream! I dream of an expanded Birthright Israel in which Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return is offered to any Jew on the condition that he or she visit Israel once every 5 years and participate in some kind of Israel service program. How many diaspora Jews would make a commitment to participating in the life and development of the Jewish state in exchange for Israeli citizenship? In my dreams, at least, the number is significant.

Psalm 86

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I call to You all day long (86:3)

Years ago I met a man named Ken Wells, who used to sit at a table in the front window of a vegetarian restaurant named Gaia’s. Because I saw him every time I went there, morning or afternoon, I thought he owned the place. One day I struck up a conversation with him and found out that he was a local artist and a Buddhist, but he did not in fact own the restaurant. I admired his work, which I found flowing and whimsical, at a couple of bagel places where he was commissioned to do murals on the walls. Ken was my primary source of information on meditation, years before I did any serious learning from Jewish sources.

I invited him to be the primary speaker at an interfaith Thanksgiving service that was held at the synagogue. His message included a reference to his personal meditative practice in which he strove to spend the entire day, every waking moment, in a state of meditation.

At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. My mental image of meditation was of a person sitting in a quiet space emptying his mind of thoughts. How can you drive, have conversations, engage in business, or create art, with an empty mind? Over time I learned more about meditation and began to understand what he meant. Meditation is a “I call to you all day long” experience of being connected and aware of the Divine Presence at every moment. When speaking to another person while in a meditative state, you have total focus on that person and what she is saying as a manifestation of the Divine Image. Safe driving requires a meditative-like awareness of your surroundings and complete focus on the task at hand. Creating art, creative writing, and even engaging in business require a mind which is at once completely focused and at the same time open to unexpected ideas, a state of mind which can existed in meditation.

Thank you Ken Wells, of blessed memory, for sharing this insight with me years before I had the capacity to understand it.