TIWRA - Truth Is, We Are Accountable

Over 25 years ago I got invited to tea in England.  The invitation came from a professor that I got to know through my involvement in the Jewish community during my junior year abroad.

I was 20 years old and what did I know?  I’m not proud of this, but I’m telling the story to make a point.  I was ambivalent about attending.  By way of rationalizing, I suppose, I assumed he’d invited tons of people, that it would be crowded and no one would miss me.  I didn’t go. 

Turned out, he didn’t invite tons of people and if you understand English teatime you know where this is going.  I found out subsequently that he’d set four places at the table in addition to those for his own family, and one of the four was for me, the American who, according to most of the people I met, was spending the year learning English as a foreign language.  That place was quite noticeably empty. 

When I found that out I felt terrible and called to apologize and he "kept a stiff upper lip" and was most gracious and life went on.  But I never forgot the incident and I’ve tried to be more respectful and careful.

You may have read a recent article in the Style Section of the Times about how people are cancelling appointments last minute by text messaging.  SCUSS.  Something came up, so sorry. . .

High Resolution - Good to Look Closely

This past Wednesday evening, I attended the annual dinner for the Iranian American Jewish Federation, an organization that provides support for numerous worthy causes in Israel and locally.  The dinner took place, as it did last year, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.
 

Last year, I was there simply to enjoy the event, which showcased the outstanding work of an organization that so many Temple Israel members are deeply involved with, an organization which supports medical research, outreach to the elderly, Israeli athletes training for the para-olympics and so much more.

This year, I had a role to play.  Not the standard rabbinic role, either.  Following the speech by Alan Dershowitz, a mentalist performed, someone who, I was told, could make successful predictions about the future.

I agreed to have him send me a prediction to my house, not to open it, and to bring it to Alice Tully Hall.

The Fed-Ex envelope arrived at my house while it was raining and so it got wet.  I put it on the counter and, the next day, took it with me into the city.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, toward the end of the mentalist’s show I was called onto the bimah of Alice Tully.  I participated in a card trick and read the letter inside, which accurately predicted things that would happen that day.

Finally, it predicted the color of my tie and, moreover, it predicted details about my tie that I myself hadn’t noticed before.

Is Progress Possible?

Perhaps in the brief moments between the recent storms in New York and the intensification of rocket fire in Israel, you had the opportunity to pay attention to the complex scandal in the US military.

It features emails, state secrets, the furtive crossing of boundaries – if nothing else, it’s an interesting diversion.

One of the comedians on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show wryly pointed out that you’re bound to have security problems when you allow straights into the military.

I looked at this whole situation as another reason to ask a question which I want to pose today and consider.

Do things ever change for the better?  Is progress possible?

People in power, men mostly, have been crossing inappropriate boundaries forever. 

Eros has clouded judgment forever.

People have not paid sufficient attention to the environment forever.

People have bullied one another and engaged in aggressive acts forever.

The question – is progress possible – is not just a question for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Post Sandy - of Land and Love

I remember a conversation I had with my family when I was growing up about another family in the neighborhood.  They were facing a particular challenge and I said, “I feel bad – look what they are dealing with.”

And my mother said some version of a Yiddish phrase the gist of which is, “Unfortunately, on a beautiful Tuesday morning after Passover these people had their challenges.”  Meaning, even before the crisis, things weren’t easy for them.  And the crisis of course just made things worse.

Life was challenging enough before the recent storms – everyone I know has challenges – but the storms brought things to a new level – it exposed cracks that were already present and it added new cracks.

There have been many conversations about infrastructure and resources and more will certainly be forthcoming.

I want to talk about what I believe really animates us, what really keeps us going. 

Three Ingredients for a Fuller Life

The holidays are over and, if you’re like me, you’ve done a fair amount of eating.  I want to offer a recipe that I shared with our congregation on Shemini Atzeret, right before the Yizkor service.  In deference to all the eating we’ve done, the recipe is not for food.  It’s a recipe for how we can live life more fully, a recipe that has been time-tested and tasted by the Jewish people.

Challenging Our Assumptions

Delivered on Kol Nidre Night 5773 at Temple Israel of Great Neck


I’ll start with a joke that many have heard, which I hope to use for a new purpose.  Robby tells the rabbi that he has a problem.  The World Series game is the same night as Kol Nidre.  The rabbi tells Robby he can TIVO it.  Robby says “Rabbi, you’re the best!  I didn’t know you can TIVO Kol Nidre.”

Tonight I want to talk about assumptions and how we need to challenge them.

First, a fact about an unfortunate recent event.  Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.  This was within the past Jewish year, 5772, a fact which may or may not have been of interest to him, given that he spent much of his recent career arguing against the existence of God and denouncing religion for all of its negative contributions to the world.

Hitchens was an intelligent man with strong convictions.  He gave people of all religious backgrounds and perspectives a lot to think about.

Two years after he published God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, Karen Armstrong wrote The Case for God. 

In The Case for God, Armstrong argued that the religion that Hitchens was attacking is fundamentalist religion.  Hitchens’ critique that religion claims a monopoly on truth is a critique of fundamentalist religion, as is his critique that religion is a source of bloodshed.

According to Karen Armstrong, Hitchens' attacks on religion assumed a fundamentalist approach to religion, and I tend to agree.  He set religion up as a straw man. 

Tonight, I’m going to ask us to do something that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Yom Kippur as I understand it.  Yom Kippur is the day of reflection and purification. 

If ever there is a time for us to try to be honest with ourselves, to try to clean out the attic, intellectually and emotionally speaking, Yom Kippur is it. 

Tonight, I’m going to ask us to question our assumptions.  About God.  About one another.  And about ourselves. 

Speak Out, Act Out - Exerting Influence

A message for the New Year, delivered during the High Holy Days at Temple Israel of Great Neck

There’s a story told about a famous rabbi who became head of a yeshiva and author of several books.  His full name was Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin and he lived in Poland during the 19^th century.  He was known as the Netziv. 

But, of course, he wasn’t always famous.

In fact, when he was younger, he wasn’t a particularly good student.  The story told is that one evening, a year after his bar mitzvah, he overheard his parents talking in the kitchen and saying that because he wasn’t such a good student, maybe he should stop studying Torah so intensively and become a tailor.  The young man was confused. 

He went to sleep that night and had a dream.  In the dream, he saw himself at the end of his life, and then he passed on into the next world and he got to the front desk and he was asked a simple question.

Where are your books?

Excuse me?  He said.

You had the ability to write books about Jewish tradition and philosophy that would influence generations.

Where are they?

God's Love is for Everyone

Sometimes, I set out to say one thing and end up realizing I’d rather say something else.  That happened to me when I was preparing to speak for this morning.

I was set to talk about the evolution of our relationship with God and our religious tradition – the trajectory from the innocence of childhood to the rejection of teen hood to the accommodations and willed innocence of adulthood.
 

I was going to do my best not to oversimplify, to indicate that each phase has its nuances, and ultimately to come to what it means to be ach sameach – utterly joyful, during the festival of Sukkot – given the arc of our psychological and emotional development over time.

And then I opened up the New York Times and saw the cover article about a young man who is severely cognitively impaired, who is leaving the hospital where he spent his entire life and about to enter a group home.

Jews and the Sacred Balancing Act

(I shared these words with the Temple Israel community the morning after I returned from a synagogue trip to Israel.  Click here to see photos and reflections from the families who participated in the trip.)

I returned yesterday morning on the red-eye from Israel, having spent 10 days with a group of Temple Israel families. 

It was an amazing trip. I’m suffering a little bit from jetlag and my brain is currently somewhere over Greenland, but I’m going to do my best to share a few interesting stories about our adventures and, hopefully, to make a worthwhile point.

Monday morning, 2:30 am.  Three adults, including me, and three teens, all of whom celebrated becoming bar mitzvah on our bimah, left the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem to drive to Masada so we could climb it and then watch the sun rise.

While we were planning it the night before, it seemed like a great idea (and in the end it was, as you can see!)

Ten Days in Israel with Family

On the concrete level, Temple Israel’s trip to Israel concluded for each participant with the thwack of the US Customs stamp on our passports at JFK.  But the impact of the trip is hardly over for any of us, certainly not for me.

I’ve been to Israel many times and each trip resonated in its own way, a function of itinerary, company and life circumstance.  But this trip was unique for me in at least one respect.  Never before have I led a group of families – young children, teens and adults – as a rabbi.

For starters, I enjoyed watching people of all ages as they took in the kaleidoscopic reality of Eretz Yisra’el, some for the first time.  What’s it like to watch the mostly Jewish throngs (some in thongs) on the Tel Aviv promenade?  What’s it like to shmooze with Israeli teens (some who idolize America) at a natural watering hole in Beit Shean?  What’s it like on Shabbat to walk to and from shul on the streets of Jerusalem? 

What’s it like to dance with wide-eyed kindergartners in Ashkelon and then see the shelter that they have 20 seconds to run to when rockets strike? What’s it like to celebrate with a Bat Mitzvah a few hundred feet from where the ancient Levites used to ascend the steps to the Holy Temple?

From Russia, With Love

Last week, I joined with over a dozen rabbis from the New York area on a UJA-Federation sponsored mission to St. Petersburg, Russia.  The previous week, our president, Alan Klinger, and his wife, Susan, joined a group of lay leaders on a similar trip that also included Moscow.

I’d like to share several highlights of the trip and then try to put it into a larger context.

Naturally, Russia is very different now than it was just 25 years ago in many respects.  A colleague of mine on the trip pointed out that when he was there in the late 80’s, food was scarce for virtually everyone.

Today, food is more widely available.  We ate well at two kosher restaurants, which points to a second major change.

Today, religion can be practiced far more openly than in pre-perestroika times.  We prayed daily in our hotel wearing tallit and tefilin.  We wore kippot in the streets of St. Petersburg.

And we observed a Jewish summer camp, sponsored by the local Jewish community with enormous support from Jewish communities abroad, chief among them the New York community, through the efforts of UJA-Federation of New York.

Time to Grow Up

If you’re looking for interesting summer reading, why not pick up an old classic?  Though it's not quite a page-turner, I recommend Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. 

It reads in part as a sophisticated critique of religion, but it’s also an attempt to understand how the human mind works. 

Freud draws an analogy between the human mind and a city.  A city is established when its first buildings are built; while these buildings are sometimes destroyed as the city grows, often they are preserved as new layers emerge.  In Paris, the ile de la cite remains central; in New York, it’s Lindy’s near Time Square. . .

But far more than these foundational buildings shape a city, Freud argues, foundational experiences shape our cognitive and emotional development.

The yearnings and fears we experience in infancy carry on profoundly as part of the human psyche.  Our hungers, for example, or our fear of abandonment, remain core elements of who we are.

What do we do with these intense and foundational parts of our identity?

Some people don’t ever quite get beyond their own selves. 

Hopefully, most of us build on our core hungers and fears.  We come to recognize that, just as we have needs and fears, others do, as well.  We come to appreciate that for us to have opportunity and liberty, others must, as well – or else the whole house begins to collapse.

I highly recommend a series on HBO about John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough.

On and around July 4, it’s especially pertinent.

Where Does Self-Esteem Come From?

My mother wanted us all to have positive self-esteem.  So she separately told me and my sisters that we were each her smartest child. 

That worked reasonably well, I suppose, until one evening when we were all together and we compared notes. 

We confronted her with it, and she said, “alright, you got me.  But it’s good to know that at least you’re talking to each other.”

Generally speaking, positive self-esteem is something we want our children to possess, something we want to possess ourselves; but self-esteem is elusive.

I believe that appropriate positive self-esteem – not arrogance, but self-esteem – is a cornerstone of family, community and society.

And I want to speak about three pillars of self-esteem which, I believe, emerge from the Biblical tradition.

Complex Religion for a Complex World

De and I saw the Book of Mormon this week.  For those who may not know, it’s a highly irreverent musical comedy that takes a wickedly funny look at the role religion plays, and might play, in society.

We ran into De’s cousin before the show and afterward, her husband asked, “So how are you going to use this in a sermon?”

He was kidding, but the truth is that while I laughed and even shed a few tears at what I thought was a great show and a raucous meditation on what religion might be, I spent Act II working out the sermon in my mind.   I know it’s a professional hazard to think about work during a show, but here goes. . .

Marching Toward Freedom

At the recent Celebrate Israel Parade, Dr. Ruth Westheimer was interviewed for Channel 9.  She graciously thanked the anchors for their time and reminisced about her role as a sniper in the Hagana around the time of Israel’s independence.  She observed how the parade demonstrates support for Israel within and beyond the Jewish community.  She also spoke about how parades like this one reveal the pervasive blessing of freedom in America.  How fortunate we are, she remarked, that Jews, Latinos, Indians and others can march proudly up “fancy Fifth Avenue,” fully integrated into American society while able to embrace the unique aspects of their respective cultures.

Bravo, Dr. Ruth.  You always seem to find the right words for the occasion.  Indeed the Celebrate Israel Parade is not only about Jewish support for Israel, it’s about world recognition. Moreover, it is one of many ethnic parades that convey an important message about our country, namely the freedom and equality that every group deserves.

Unfortunately, in the State of Israel, religious freedom still eludes many Jews as the Conservative and Reform denominations of Judaism do not receive equal treatment under Israeli law.  Recently, an important development took place that will hopefully begin to change that reality. 

Writing Each Other Off

Twenty-five years ago, I had my first introduction to my wife’s extended family.  The occasion was her cousin’s Bar Mitzvah.  I was asked to read Torah and although I had a fair amount of experience, I was a little nervous.

Before the Bar Mitzvah, I had a chance to meet De’s cousin.  He came across bright and personable.  His family was concerned because he had some learning issues which made reading a challenge for him.  English was hard enough, and now he had to work backwards and navigate the Hebrew.  He worked extra hard to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah.

I did my reading and the bar mitzvah boy did just fine. And then the rabbi got up to speak and he spoke about how the boy had gotten kicked out of Hebrew school classes again and again due to poor behavior and how disappointing his Hebrew school performance was.  And I was waiting for him to say, “but look how well you did today and we are going to make sure you continue your Jewish education” but he never said that or anything like it.  He spoke about the grandfather of the bar mitzvah and his involvement in the synagogue and then the speech just ended.  I was kind of surprised, to say the least.  I didn’t know the family well enough at the time to ask them about their reactions.

The Limits of Outsourcing

We’re familiar with the scene in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer where Tom is given the task of painting the picket fence.  A boy comes by, says he’s off to go swimming.  Too bad Tom has to work.  Tom says, if you call this work.  And starts talking about how much fun it is and yet how not everyone has what it takes to paint it in a way that would satisfy Aunt Polly.

Before long, the boy starts painting, Tom starts to watch. 

Here’s the way Mark Twain describes the action:

And while the [boy who had pretended he was] late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Sawyer didn’t invent outsourcing, but he took it to new level.

I want to talk about outsourcing – its benefits, but mostly its limitations.

Curious Minds

Last week, I asked the third and fourth graders in our Religious School to imagine that they could ask God a single question and that God would answer it.  What might they ask?  Here are a few of the questions they shared:

Who created you? Are you a boy or a girl?  What happens after we die?  Are there aliens somewhere on another planet?   Will anything really sad happen to me?  Can I have 50 more questions?

It didn’t take long at all for our children to come up with these questions, which suggests that they had already been thinking about them.

We’re a contemplative species, as our tradition has long recognized.  Every morning we recite the words, “A person has many thoughts.”  In the words of Ecclesiastes (3:11), God puts eternity in our minds, “but without man ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that God brings to pass.” 

Don't Judge Me

A few weeks after Rosh Hashanah, a few years ago, someone in the congregation came to talk to me in my office.  He said that he felt like his life wasn’t going in the direction he wanted, and he wondered if maybe it was because he’d made what he considered a few mistakes.  He wondered if he was being judged in some way.   I asked what he meant and he said, ‘well maybe this is God’s way of telling me I messed up.’

He then told me that he also felt like other people were judging him negatively for what he’d done.  I’ll come back to what I told him at the end.

The more I thought about the conversation, the more I considered the issue of judgment.   This person is not alone in feeling like he’s being judged, either by God or by other people.

My sense from my professional and personal interactions with people is that judgment is something we often think about and worry about.   And while the feeling of being judged by God is important, I somehow feel that for most of us, it’s the sense that others are judging us that is more persistent. 

How do I look to my friends?  How did I come across in that conversation?  What did my friends in social studies class think of my speech?  Will my child think I’m too strict?  Will my spouse think I’m being annoying?  Will the people at work think I’m a team player?  

And if we consider our own feelings of wondering if and how we’re being judged, we may want to think about the extent to which we judge others and thereby contribute to the reservoir of discomfort that so many of us feel.

I want to say that while some situations call for our judgment, more often than not, what we need from each other is not judgment.  We need something else.   But I’m not there yet.

Free To Choose

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Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on the Eighth Day of Passover, April 14, 2012

For all of us who have tried, unsuccessfully, to mop up our remaining soup or gravy with a piece of matzah – have no fear.  Challah, or perhaps a nice crusty piece of sourdough bread, is on the way. 

Looking back on the week, we can recall all the times that we spoke, sang, dipped and ate.  Maybe we had to do a little political negotiation with family and friends at the seder – wouldn’t be the first time.

But what do we really carry with us when the holiday is over?

I want us to focus on the idea of responsibility.

If there’s one concept I want us to digest fully, it’s the notion that our choices and our actions have more profound consequences than we tend to imagine.

I actually believe this is the most important message of Passover.  We might say, “No, the most important message is that God saves us!”  But I disagree.  I believe that God’s saving power may be the loudest message of Passover.  But it’s not the most important.

The second movement of Beethoven’s 7^th symphony has two melodies, one loud and insistent; the other, soft and enchanting.

Talk Ain't Cheap - of Tarof and Seichel

I’ve told this story before but I’m going to tell it again.  If our people can tell the story of leaving Egypt again and again, I can tell this story twice.

Shabbat morning, circa 1980.  My parents were getting ready for shul.  My mother came downstairs all ready and said to my father, who was eating breakfast, “what do you think about my new outfit?” 

He had been eating a piece of pastry, a babka, I think, and he took a minute to swallow before he answered.  Or at least that’s how I remember it, but my mother didn’t quite look at it that way. 

“I guess you don’t like it,” she said. 

“Of course I like it.  Whatever you wear, you look beautiful.”

“What do you mean, whatever I wear, I look beautiful?  So I guess you don’t like the outfit.  Just say it.”

And my father sat there, trying to digest the pastry and the conversation that didn’t go quite the way he wanted.

(Post script - I’m pretty sure they were both fine by the time they got to shul.)

I want to devote my comments to the importance and utter complexity of how we talk to each other. 

Finding a Home

The other day, I saw a member of our congregation whose mother passed away recently.  I asked him how he was doing, and he told me he’d been cleaning out his mother’s apartment.  This was not the home where he grew up, but nevertheless the process of cleaning it out brought back many memories from his earlier years.

That conversation, as well as a book I reread recently, got me thinking about the concept of home. 

What exactly is a home?  How do we define it?  What is the essence of a home?  How many homes does a person have, over the course of a lifetime or perhaps even at the same time?

We may think of the home where we grew up as a place of stability and strength or as a place of conflict and uncertainty.  Or, as my Israel uncle Elimelech would say, gam ze v’gam ze.  All of the above.

Keeping It Lit

In Jerusalem there’s a special zoo which contains animals mentioned in the Bible.  There’s a story told about a particular cage in the zoo which illustrates the verse, “and the wolf shall lie down with the lamb.”  (Isaiah 11:6) The purpose of the verse is to illustrates the end of days, when peace will reign even in the animal kingdom.  So the cage featured a wolf and a lamb, getting along splendidly.

A visitor was standing in front of the cage with his small children.  Noticed that the lamb is hanging out, looking content.  And the wolf is hanging out, looking content.  He saw one of the zookeepers and said, “I understand the verse, but we’re not living in the end of days.  How do you get the wolf and the lamb to hang out so peacefully in real life?”  The zookeeper said, “It’s very simple.  Every morning we put in a new lamb.”  

The joke is kind of edgy.  But it connects, in my mind, to a point the Torah makes, much more positively, about vigilance.

Innate GPS

Years ago, I knew how to navigate the South Shore.  I knew to use Peninsula Boulevard to get from West Hempstead to Cedarhurst and to take Hempstead Avenue to Broadway when I needed to get to Hewlett or Lawrence.  If any route was blocked, I intuited alternatives since I knew the overall direction in which I was headed. 

Not anymore.  Is it because I haven’t lived there for awhile?  I don’t think so.  Frankly, I blame it on Madam GPS.  Since she entered my life, my navigational capacity has atrophied.  She is the reason why I no longer remember how to get to Atlantic Beach without paying a toll.  Because of her, I can no longer say with certainty at what point Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue. 

What's God Got to Do With It?

Drivers Ed, circa 1980.  My teacher delivers the following hypothetical: Suppose it’s night-time and you’re on a deserted highway.  No cops, no one.  You miss an exit.  The next one is 50 miles away.  You can back up a bit and take the exit.  Chances are good that no one will see you.  But you know it’s illegal.

What do you do?

I don’t remember what the answers were.  But I remember that it got me thinking at the time, and I’ve considered the question as part of a larger conversation.

Are we wired to do what’s right or not?  Do we differentiate between different kinds of rules – some affect other people, some seem rational, some seem arbitrary?  How much do we need the cop patrolling to keep us in line?

No Questions Asked

I went to college in New York City and often, on the way to class, was asked for money by people on the street.  Initially I gave without reservation.  Over time, friends and others suggested that I should probably be more circumspect.

After all, I wasn’t sure how the money would be used and I might be giving financial support for self-destructive behavior.

So, following the example of others I witnessed, I began asking those seeking money if I could buy them a sandwich or a piece of fruit.  Some refused, but many accepted.

As a rabbi, I’m often asked to provide money for people in need.  In keeping with the dynamic I discovered as a young man, I respond by giving food cards, no questions asked.

Centuries ago, Rav Yehuda articulated the principle, ein bodkin lim’zonot (Talmud, Bava Batra 9a), meaning that when it comes to providing food, we don’t ask questions.  We don’t examine background, we don’t try to assess motivation.  If someone says he needs food and we are able to provide it, we do so, no questions asked.

I believe this is something that Hatzilu, an organization devoted to providing relief for needy Jews, has always understood.  From the time I moved to Long Island as a rabbinical student, over 20 years ago, I have always been impressed by the intuitive sensitivity that animates Hatzilu’s many volunteers.  The sensitivity emerges from the bedrock understanding that food is a basic human need and hunger is simply unacceptable.

From ancient Palestine to modern New York City and its environs, the words of Rav Yehuda continue to reverberate.  Ein bodkin lim’zonot.  When it comes to giving food, no questions asked, except for one:  How can we continue to help?

Written for the Hatzilu Newsletter, March, 2012

Born Again and Again

Many of us remember the first academic paper we got back from a college professor.  Accustomed to a more glowing reaction from our high school teachers, we may well have sadly surveyed a sea of corrections and a grade that we didn’t rush to share with our parents.   

There are times in our lives when we need to “kick it up a notch.”  Personally and professionally, we are challenged today in ways that defy yesterday’s solutions.  It sometimes feels like we’re in a giant video game.  The moment we think we’ve mastered one level, we find ourselves adrift in the next.

The Torah’s description of the Exodus from Egypt is replete with birth and birthing.  The midwives defy Pharaoh’s orders and save the male children whom they deliver.   The Hebrew word for Egypt, mitzrayim, implies a narrow place.  The Israelites’ departure from Egypt through the Sea of Reeds depicts the birth of a nation.

I don’t think that birthing is a one-time event.  Various life changes require us to reinvent ourselves.  When young children reach physical maturity, when high school students get a rude awakening in college, when a person experiences a change in personal status, when one’s work environment changes drastically, it can call for a kind of reinvention.

Brothers and Sisters

I’m nervous.  Last week, we spoke about an incident where some Haredi/ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel were harassing young girls walking to school because they felt that they weren’t dressed modestly enough. 

Shortly after that episode took place, in response to demonstrations against their behavior, a small group had their children dressed in concentration camp outfits, including Jewish stars, implying that the Israeli government was persecuting them the way the Nazis persecuted Jews.

Both actions created a negative uproar, as well they should have.  Elie Weisel, quoted in Ha’aretz, said "I never thought they'd stoop to such a low. How dare they? To both desecrate the honor of the State of Israel and the memory of the Holocaust?"

Israeli government officials condemned the behavior, along with many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox leaders. 

Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, Executive Director of the Rabbinical Assembly, wrote a reaction, as did Rachel Delia Benaim, news editor of the Yeshiva University Observer.  I want to give you the essence of their reactions and my sense of how they can each guide us moving forward.

Bring Back the Mystery

A classic scenario involves a small child watching a sunset.  His eyes widen to embrace the visual symphony of color and shapes.  He sits transfixed for several minutes as the scene intensifies.  As soon as the sun slips beneath the horizon, he starts to clap and calls out, “Again!”

The child is too young to understand that he will have to wait a full day before the performance repeats itself and it will be years before he grasps the scientific underpinnings of what he witnessed.

But a small child intuits that which scientific awareness sometimes dilutes, namely the inherent mystery of the natural world and of life itself.  

I recommend a recent book by Karen Armstrong called The Case for God.  Written in part as a response to the writings of self-described atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, it is less a defense of God than an historical overview of trends that characterize how God has been perceived.