Sabbatical

Divre Harav – June, 2025

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Transitions … Stuart and Barbara Rapaport will be leaving Grand Rapids in June. We honored them at a Kiddush last month and will be sad to see them go. Stuart will be returning this fall to lead our service on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

We can’t replace Stuart’s deep impact on the religious life of Ahavas Israel, but we have been able to replace much of the roles that he has played as cantor: leading services, reading Torah, and regularly reading Haftarah.

Eliott Buyce, Barukh Hales, Calev Ben Avraham, Daveed ben Avraham, Akiva Roni Reese are new Torah readers following my Torah reading class last fall. David Reifler will be teaching Haftarah trope this summer. My next goal is to increase the number of people who can lead different parts of the Shabbat service.

My six week absence, from June 8 through July 20, the second half of a planned Sabbatical that began last summer, will be challenging, but I am grateful that Rhonda Reider, David Reifler, Sandy Freed, and others have stepped up to meet the challenge.

I’ll be visiting a couple of other small to medium size congregations over Shabbat, catching up on a lot of reading, and looking after my physical, mental, and spiritual health during my time away. When in town, I’ll be available for urgent matters. Call or message Ann Berman, the president of Ahavas Israel, at (616) 633-7922 in case of emergency.

Turning towards the fall … what would you like to hear from me on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Feel free to send me topics, article to react to, and questions to address. I can’t promise to address everything, but I’m curious to hear about what’s on your mind.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • Azakah – an emergency siren
  • Tzeva Adom – “color red” The special alert, with a rising and falling sound, for rocket or missile attacks in Israel.
  • Tzefirah – The continuous level siren that sounds for two minutes at 10:00 am on Yom Hashoah and twice on Yom Hazikaron, as the day begins in the evening and again in the morning.

Divre Harav – Summer, 2024

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Beginning mid-June, I will be taking six weeks of Sabbatical time. It has been about four years since my last Sabbatical. My pattern has been to take three months of Sabbatical every five years, but I am hoping to split this next Sabbatical into two – six week segments, over the course of two years. With Stuart’s retirement, it is more difficult to be away for three months at a time. It will not be easy covering the six weeks between June 16 and July 28, but between Stuart Rapaport, Rhonda Reider, Dovid Ben-Avrohom, a small additional crew of Torah readers and service leaders, and with your help making the minyan, it is possible. If you would like to help out by sharing a d’var Torah during the service, you can do so at http://tinyurl.com/CAITorahSignup. A d’var Torah should be about 12 minutes.

We are always looking for additional help reading Torah, more Haftarah readers, and people willing to lead a portion of the service. If you are interested in learning, I can connect you to resources, including audio recordings, that will help.

I am hoping to spend Shabbat in congregations in New Jersey, Minneapolis, metro-Detroit, and Indiana to learn new melodies and gather some ideas for enhancing Shabbat practice and community. In addition, I will continue working on a collection of brief introductions to pieces of prayer for Shabbat and holiday mornings. On my Shabbat travels, in exchange for hosting me, I have offered the congregations several book talks on Psalms or prayer, based on my book Reflections on the Psalms. I will be sharing some of that material at our Tikkun Leyl Shavuot evening program on June 11. Don’t forget to make a reservation! 

Beginning this month, I will be on Sabbatical for three months. It is a common practice of rabbis and other clergy to be given a periodic Sabbatical from their regular duties for reflection, for rekindling the spirit and the sense of calling by God, for reconnecting more deeply with the tradition (Scripture, theology, liturgy), and for deepening one’s own spiritual life. While on Sabbatical, I will not be available for my normal Rabbinic duties. I will not be coming into the office, attending meetings, or scheduling appointments. I will not be taking phone calls or responding to email for routine questions. I will not be teaching, leading study groups, leading services, or giving Divre Torah. The office will refer calls or email either to the president or to the appropriate committee.

Clergy organizations suggest that a Sabbatical should not be heavily structured. The idea is to have free time for unexpected projects and learning. The one exception I will make in a normal Sabbatical practice will involve officiating at funerals, if I am in town. However, during normal office hours the initial phone call regarding a funeral should go the office. At other times (weekdays 7:00 am – 10:00 am and 3:30 pm – 10:00 pm or weekends), please call Ann Berman. After the basic funeral arrangements (include date and time) have been set, I will be contacted. If I am available, I will contact the family to speak about the funeral service. Otherwise, Stuart Rapaport or another appropriate person will handle the funeral service.

Hebrew word of the Month:

  • Shabbaton – Sabbatical

Divre Harav – November/2019

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Divre Harav/Words from the Rabbi

Beginning this month, I will be on Sabbatical for three months. It is a common practice of rabbis and other clergy to be given a periodic Sabbatical from their regular duties for reflection, for rekindling the spirit and the sense of calling by God, for reconnecting more deeply with the tradition (Scripture, theology, liturgy), and for deepening one’s own spiritual life. My last Sabbatical was five years ago. While on Sabbatical, I will not be available for my normal Rabbinic duties. I will not be coming into the office, attending meetings, or scheduling appointments. I will not be taking phone calls or responding to email for routine questions. I will not be teaching, leading study groups, leading services, or giving Divre Torah. The office will refer calls or email either to the president or to the appropriate committee.

Clergy organizations suggest that a Sabbatical should not be heavily structured. The idea is to have free time for unexpected projects and learning. I will be spending a great deal of time time reading and studying. I will be out of town for part of the time, but most of the time will be spent in Grand Rapids. 

Previous Sabbaticals have focused on:

2004-5 – Visiting small synagogues Tefillah Tidbits, Dale Carnegie graduate assistant

2009-10 – Visiting churches to learn the art of preaching, Dale Carnegie graduate assistant

2014-15 – Writing group, Guide to funeral practice, Psalm Blog, Dale Carnegie graduate assistant

This Sabbatical, I will be working with the Local First organization on a national project to create materials supporting a “Sacred Economy” initiative. They describe the project this way:

We believe a Sacred Economy:
is that ordering of relationships
that enables and encourages people
to activate their talents and energies

to create, exchange, and use goods and services
to provide for humanity’s everyday needs,
in a truly loving manner,
befitting that Love that is the signature identity
and desire of both God and the human person.

I’ll begin by working to identify teachings and language that resonates across spiritual traditions, political spectrums, and people groups, gathering multi-faith resources related to the sacred economy and connected topics. I’m looking forward to meeting with people from many different faith traditions to learn how their personal faith and sense of the Sacred affects the way they structure their business, and what texts or traditions shape their decision-making process.

During my Sabbatical, a number of people and committees will be picking up some of my responsibilities. Services will be led by Stuart Rapaport. As of the beginning of October, seven slots were open for divre Torah and 2 slots were open for leading Torah discussions. A d’var Torah should be about 12 minutes. The Torah study should be a 50 minute interactive session. To sign up, go to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1akhLglgeGsuICPyT0aWjPhnOmhGUcmk65wMrPOXn7AY/edit#gid=0 or http://tinyurl.com/CAITorahSignup.

The one exception I will make in a normal Sabbatical practice will involve officiating at funerals, if I am in town. However, during normal office hours the initial phone call regarding a funeral should go the office. At other times (weekdays 7:00 am – 10:00 am and 3:30 pm – 10:00 pm or weekends), please call Stuart Rapaport. After the basic funeral arrangements (include date and time) have been set, I will be contacted. If I am available, I will contact the family to speak about the funeral service.  Otherwise, Stuart will handle the funeral service.

This will be my fourth three-month Sabbatical. I understand that the many people in the congregation really stretch themselves to cover for me while I’m away, and I am immensely grateful for this opportunity. Todah Rabbah!

Hebrew Words of the Month:

  • Sh’mittah – Sabbatical year, once every seven years, a Sabbath of the land.
  • Yovel – Jubilee year, once every 50 years, every seven Sabbatical cycles, an economic realignment.

The Story of Soup

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I shared two Sabbatical articles with my writing group last week. Aside from the small suggestions of grammar and sentence structure, I heard comments that I need to pay more attention to story. These articles could be more than just a journal of my activities. They should be the ongoing story of a series of transformative activities. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be in a profession that allows them an unstructured leave from daily responsibilities to spend an extended period of time learning and thinking. However, the Sabbatical can be experienced in microcosm if the story can be translated into the reader’s life.

Here’s a story from the first week of Sabbatical: One of my more mundane activities has been making soup. When I was first learning to cook seriously, in my early 20’s, I thought cooking soup required magic. My mother is a wonderful cook. I could never figure out how she could turn water into this rich, fragrant, golden liquid called chicken soup until I tried it for myself. I discovered that cooking soup simply requires throwing the ingredients into a pot of water and cooking it for hours, letting the magic of chemistry blend the flavors together, pull the starches and bind the liquid together into … soup!

If all you have at your disposal is standard kitchen equipment (i.e., no pressure cooker), you can’t rush the process of making soup. You can’t turn the stove up to high and make the magic happen faster. Similarly, the learning that happens during a sabbatical takes time. What do you do when you don’t have extended unstructured time? One answer, the Jewish answer, is that you can build a mini-sabbatical, called Shabbat, into your week. Magic happens on Shabbat when you decline to schedule shopping, entertainment opportunities, or children’s obligations, but rather spend the time in prayer (preferably community-based prayer), study, reading, contemplation, socializing, and eating meals with family and/or friends.

Winter is approaching. What a good time to make soup and make Shabbat!