Divre Harav

Psalm 20

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How much has the world changed in the last 2013 years? How much has it changed in the last 5744 years? Is there anything that has existed for the entire timeline of recorded history?

My friend and colleague Rabbi David Seidenberg wrote recently that what is possibly the oldest living culture, the Australian aborigines, is about 60,000 years old (see his writings at neohasid.com). That’s pretty old, possibly as old as the earliest development of symbolic culture and language. For the rest of us, our religion, culture, traditions, laws, and rituals are a whole lot younger. Still, our cultural and religious systems provide a measure of stability and continuity over time. The Psalmist, in Psalm 20, reflects on what is temporary and what is permanent.

They [call] on chariots, they [call] on horses, but we call on the name of Adonai our God. They collapse and lie fallen, but we rally and gather strength. (20:8-9)

When you get down to brass tacks (what does that really mean, anyway), what do you find at the core? The Psalmist presents two contrasting world views, that of gashmiyut vs. ruhaniyut — materialism vs. spiritualism.

All material objects are temporary. Living creatures eventually die, and their (our) bodies disintegrate, slowly turning back into more basic elements.

I remember flying in and out of New York, looking at all of the buildings and thinking that even such enormous structures cannot last forever. I used to try to imagine Manhattan tens of thousands of years in the future, the buildings covered with vines, slowly eating away at the material, slowly crumbling. I never imagined that the end of the two most imposing towers at the South end of the island would be so dramatic as the one we witnessed in horror on September 11, 2001.

Gashmiyut, materialism – Horses and chariots, mortal beings and material objects, will all eventually collapse and disappear. Everything that we create will ultimately be destroyed.

Ruhaniyut, spiritualism – The existence of a Divine realm over and above us assures us that there is the possibility of a transcendent set of values and meaning for our existence. We can gather together in community and call upon the name of God, we can find strength in rallying together under a banner of a religious community whose purpose is to do good in the world.

Psalm 16

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Many articles spilled much ink noting that Hanukkah 2014 was the earliest Hanukkah in the solar year in 125 years. Some noted that Hanukkah will coincide with Thanksgiving again in 70,000-some years, an assertion which assumes that the growing error between the Jewish year and the solar year will never be corrected. Were this the case, in 35,000 years we would be celebrating Rosh Hashanah in April and Passover in September. The problem is that the Jewish year is corrected to match the Julian year. We follow the Gregorian calendar, which corrected a very slight error in the length of the year. At some point, when Passover is projected to fall too late in the Spring, the calendar will be corrected so the celebration of Thanksgivakkah or Hodunakkah may very well happen again, although not necessarily in our lifetime.

I bless the LORD who has guided me … (16:7)

The Hanukkah story is an example of how we use a religious myth – the myth that God’s guiding hand can be seen in history. Please do not misunderstand the word ‘myth.’ It does not mean ‘a made up story, one that is not true.’ A myth may or may not be a historically true story, but it does teach something significant and true. The most accurate definition of ‘myth’ is a narrative that provides a meaningful framework for our lives. The Exodus story is the backbone of the Torah. The principles derived from the experience of the transition from slavery to Mount Sinai, such as the obligation to take care of the weak and vulnerable in our society, are the most important principles of the Torah. Tzedakah and Shabbat, for example, are explicitly linked to the Exodus.

The way we tell the Hanukkah story reinforces the idea that our successes, our victories, are directly linked to acting on our faith in God.

An objective telling of the Hanukkah story might focus on military acumen, the wisdom of fighting a guerrilla war against the Syrian army rather than confronting them in the conventional face to face battle. The Syrians, fighting on behalf of Greek values, were a powerful army, but not particularly committed to the ideology for which they were fighting. They could be worn down over time, and that’s what the Mattathias and his five sons did.

The theological story of Hanukkah emphasizes the victory of the few against the many, the weak against the powerful, an event that could only have happened with God’s intervention. This story is the one told by the al ha-nissim prayer, inserted into the Amidah and Birkat Hamazon on Hanukkah.

An even more extreme story is told by the Talmud to explain the 9 branched Hanukkah menorah. The 8 day celebration of Hanukkah, we are told, is only indirectly connected to the Maccabee’s victory. Rather, we are celebrating the miracle that the last vial of consecrated oil, uncontaminated by Syrian idolatrous hands, burned for 8 days, until new oil could be pressed.

The dreydel, with its four letters representing “A Great Miracle Happened There,” is ambiguous. Which miracle are we talking about – the military victory, the oil, or both? It doesn’t really matter – both stories illustrate “I bless the LORD who has guided me …”, seeing the hand of Divine providence in the critical events of our history.

Divre Harav/Words from the Rabbi – Summer, 2010

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One of my projects for the past couple of months has been working with a web designer on our new Ahavas Israel web site.  By the time you read this it should have replaced the web site that Paula Bojsen created for us about five years ago.  Paula created a state of the art web site which over the years has been a valuable virtual front door to the congregation.  It is fascinating to me how quickly time goes by in the internet world.  Five years is a generation.  A five year old web site looks dated, but more importantly, the technology that was used to create and maintain had become obsolete.  We undertook the redesign project in order to ensure that our web site functions not only as an attractive and informational brochure for potential members, but also as a communications tool for our congregational family.

While researching web sites of other synagogues, I found many, belonging to both large and small congregations, that contained broken links and out-of-date information.  As a virtual front door to the congregations, they reflected badly on the organization.  We are grateful to Rachel Lutwick-Deaner for keeping our website updated for the last few years.

One of the interesting things about building a web site is that it is a great equalizer among congregations.  A 2000 family synagogue might have a large building and staff along with an eight figure budget and a multi-million dollar endowment, and might offer a greater variety of programming than a small congregation, but you can put their web site and ours side by side, and the differences shrink.  A large congregation is just as likely to have a difficult to navigate, out of date, web site as a small congregation.

I also found organizations with web sites that gave no sense of the personality of the congregation.  Many Federation and Chabad web sites, which take most of their content from a national organization suffer from this.  Such generic sites may have useful information, but the personality and uniqueness of the local organization is buried underneath the identity of the national parent organization.  In the world of news, we know that national and international news can be found any number of places; local news sources, however, are much more limited in number.  A web site of a congregation should stress the local, not the national.  Our web site reflects the fact that Ahavas Israel exists to provide local community and connections.

Our new web site can be found at the same address, AhavasIsraelGR.org.  Please visit it and let me know what you think.  Let me know what else you’d like to see, and let me know if the organization and layout is intuitive and usable.

Stuck in a Rut? Pesah Tells You to Get Unstuck!

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Divre Harav, Words from the Rabbi – Bulletin article, March, 2010

I am grateful to the leadership of Congregation Ahavas Israel for giving me a three month Sabbatical.  The time away from active rabbinic work was renewing and refreshing, but it is very good to be back at the synagogue.

While away, I visited with a number of pastors to learn about the creation of a sermon from a fresh angle.  Within Protestant churches, the sermon is the focus of the service much the same way that the Torah reading is the focal point of a traditional Jewish Shabbat morning service.  We devote about 1/3 of the service time to the Torah reading, and about 1/2 of our time on Shabbat morning is devoted to the Torah service, adding in the Haftarah and the sermon.  In the churches I visited, the pastors devoted an equivalent amount of time within their service to the sermon.  Because their sermon functions as the main vehicle for hearing sacred Scripture, they tend to be longer and more carefully structured than most synagogue sermons.  They also tend to use Biblical verses to appeal to the emotional and moral sense of the congregation, often teaching a specific belief or theological approach to God, while most synagogue sermons tend to appeal to the intellect and teach a specific Jewish practice or behavior.

I don’t believe that one style is inherently better than the other.  What I learned from the project is that it is easy to get into a rut, preaching and teaching in the same style and appealing to the same part of the brain week after week, just because it is familiar and comfortable.  The work I did as a graduate coach in a Dale Carnegie program reinforced the same message — that most of us are stuck in a rut, doing the same things over and over again, repeating the same habits and the same mistakes, because we are afraid of trying something new.

This is a good lesson to be reminded of in conjunction with the celebration of Pesah.  The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, a word that connotes narrow places  (probably taking its name from the fact that the fertile part of Egypt is a narrow strip of land on either side of the Nile).  In a metaphorical sense, when we are stuck in Mitzrayim, we are living our lives in a constricted place. We are stuck inside a narrow box.  Pesah is the time to look at the narrow box in which we are living, look at those behaviors which keep us stuck in a rut, and free ourselves.