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.