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.