Gratitude Takes Practice

Gratitude doesn’t always come naturally.   If we tally up the ratio of gratitude to complaint that we feel and articulate in the course of a day, we may not be proud of the results. 

And yet every religious tradition I’m aware of encourages gratitude – for reasons that are psychological as well as theological.

On this Shabbat following the American holiday of Thanksgiving I want to offer three insights about gratitude from three different portions in the Torah, insights that can help us cultivate gratitude against the natural grain.

Vulnerable Enough To Know the Difference, Strong Enough To Make a Difference

What does it mean to be Jewish in America?  What is our essential story and what are our responsibilities based on our story?

Are we strong?  Are we fragile?  Are we safe?  Are we vulnerable?

Is America essentially different for Jews than any other place where we have lived – are we significantly freer, significantly safer?

Or at the end of the day is it not so different?  Not so different from Spain, Germany, Iran – countries where we had really good runs for centuries before things changed.

I don’t have the tools to analyze how safe we are and even for those who do have the tools, it’s only speculation.

But I do have some tools, and much responsibility, for speaking about how our view of ourselves ought to impose a vision and a responsibility for how we respond to our nation and our world. 

So fasten your seatbelts and join me on a journey that will include, not in chronological order, father Abraham, two rabbis who lived around the time of Jesus, and, well – us.

 Abraham Arguing with God

Who are we American Jews and – in this complex, multi-cultural, seismically shifting country we live in - what exactly should we be doing based on who we are? 

A Post-Election Message to My Congregation

Here is what I sent to the Temple Israel of Great Neck community two days after Election Day.

To the Entire Temple Israel of Great Neck Family:

We have completed a tense, divisive election season and a new president, Donald Trump, has been chosen.  The reactions in our congregational family run the gamut, our own ideological and political diversity in many ways reflecting that of our nation.

As American Jews, we strive to bring the noblest values of two traditions to bear on how we influence and shape society – the American commitment to democracy and freedom and the bedrock Jewish principal that all human beings are equally precious by virtue of having been created in the image of God. 

We must continue to affirm our commitment to honor the equal, inalienable rights of all of our nation’s inhabitants of all political perspectives, religions, races, ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, gender identities and sexual orientations.  We have made much progress in these areas and must continue to move forward.

We must work harder to talk and especially to listen well to one another, particularly when we disagree. 

And we must continue to affirm our commitment as a synagogue to be a place where everyone feels welcome to discover the power of Judaism to bring blessing to our lives and to our world.

Abraham and Sarah, whose geographic and spiritual journey we will be reading about this Shabbat, were charged by God to be a source of blessing to all the families of the earth.

Let all of us in our beloved, passionate, diverse Temple Israel community continue to channel the legacy of Abraham and Sarah, bringing blessing to our community, our nation and our world.

Please join us at 8 pm this evening, Thursday, November 10, for our daily evening service, which will include a prayer for our great nation and its potential.  Of course we will also offer this prayer on Shabbat. 

May God forever inspire us to honor God’s image in all human beings and may God bless the United States of America.

November 10, 2016

Is Our Self-Esteem Blowin' in the Wind?

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, some people were excited, applauding what they believed was a well-deserved, “outside the box” choice, and some were upset.

Here it is, weeks later, and he hasn’t returned the Academy’s phone call informing him that he won the prize. 

(Shortly after I wrote this Bob Dylan did respond affirmatively to the committee, but I don’t think it changes the substance of my message.  So if you’d like, please read on…)

Some think that’s a real chutzpa – I mean, who doesn’t pick up the phone when the Nobel Prize committee is calling?

Others think that this is a tribute to his artistry.  He doesn’t want to be categorized by anyone – he wants the freedom to be himself, to define himself.  He doesn't require the validation of others.

Today is Shabbat Bereishit – the Shabbat associated with the creation of the world on which we read the story of creation.

In the first account of creation, human beings are the climax – created on the last day before Shabbat.  Given the scriptural context, I’d like to explore the question, where does our value come from?  To what extent does it come from the e-valuations of others, to what extent does it come from our own sense of who we are?  How does all this impact our self-esteem?

Are We Trying Hard Enough? The Essential Yom Kippur Question

The morning back in high school that I took the SAT’s, I packed my number 2 pencils and was about to leave the house when my mother said to me, “Remember.  All you can do is the best you can do.”

She said that to me numerous times as I was growing up.  Before tests.  Before I went onstage to act in a show.  On my wedding day…

All you can do is the best you can do.

Sometimes the comment made me more nervous.  Though overall it was a helpful thing to hear and I think my mother said it because she wanted me to understand that the most important measure of my success was the knowledge that I’d done my best.

However, with enormous respect for my mother, may she rest in peace, I’m going to begin my comments by modifying hers a bit and encouraging us to evaluate ourselves using what I believe is a more effective measure.

Truth is, not every situation calls for “the best we can do.” 

When our kids were growing up and we would get dinner ready, we realized it didn’t have to be our best.  It just had to be reasonably nutritious and something they would eat. We knew we could do “better,” but with all of the other competing priorities we chose not to.  We didn’t aspire to be Wolfgang Puck while we were making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their school lunches. 

When we cleaned up at the end of the day we realized we didn’t have to do our best.  We just had to make sure it was neat enough and we determined what neat enough was.

On arguably the holiest day of the year, when we’re supposed to take a look at ourselves, and a look at the world, and ask appropriate self-reflective questions about how we relate to the world, I propose the following question that we can ask today, and all year long, about different situations.

Are we trying hard enough? 

In each realm of our lives, the mundane and the unusual, the individual and the societal, are we trying hard enough?

Open Our Hearts - A Plea for the New Year

At the end of the Amidah, which is part of our daily prayer, we each say the words:

פתח לבי P’tah libi.

Dear God – Open my heart.

Why do we have to pray for this?

Why don’t we just do it?  

A 6 year old boy named Alex who lives in Westchester sent a letter to the president of the United States.  He had seen the picture of a 5-year old boy sitting in an ambulance in Aleppo, wiping blood off of his face, a picture many of us have seen.  Alex wrote to the president that he wants the boy to come live with his family.  Alex wrote that he is prepared to share his toys with the boy.  He ended the letter by saying, “We will give him a family and he will be our brother.”

It’s very inspiring to hear about the pure open-heartedness of a 6-year old boy.  A boy who is ready to open his home, his toy box, and his heart to someone roughly his age.

But our view of things gets more complicated as we grow into adolescence and adulthood.   We experience fear again and again.  We experience disappointment again and again. 

We understand how complicated situations are socially and politically.

Our expectations lie unfulfilled.   Our hearts get broken.

And little by little, in different situations, over time, our hearts harden – they close up. 

So maybe that’s why we each pray to God ptah libi – open my heart – because we wish our hearts could remain open despite all of the internal and external forces that can keep our hearts rigid and closed.  And because it’s not so easy to keep our hearts open.

It is truly understandable for us to harden our hearts in so many situations.  We are often perfectly justified in being suspicious, or wary, or fed up. 

At the beginning of this New Year, I want to explore some of the political and personal reasons why we harden our hearts.  And I also want to explore why and how and in what situations we should strive to keep our hearts open.  Long past the relative innocence of childhood, can we face the world as it is, can we face life as it is, with hearts that remain appropriately open?  I hope so. 

Beware the Online Megaphone: in Defense of Research and Conversation Before Hitting Send

By mid-July of this year a colleague and friend of mine found himself in the midst of considerable controversy.  His name is Rabbi Neil Blumofe and you may have read about him in the Jewish Week and elsewhere on-line.

He is the rabbi of a thriving Conservative synagogue in Austin.  He was planning an Israel trip to include a local interfaith group he’s involved with as well as interested members of his congregantion. 

To plan the trip he turned to an organization called Mejdi, which was founded by an Israeli and a Palestinian with the objective of providing a dual narrative approach to travel.  Mejdi has planned trips for organizations that include the Hartman Institute and AIPAC.

The organization forwarded a tentative itinerary to Rabbi Blumofe for his consideration and Rabbi Blumofe held a meeting with congregants who expressed interest in the trip. 

The proposed itinerary included an overnight stay at a settlement and a meeting with the rosh yeshiva there, a discussion with a women's rights advocacy group in Haifa and numerous other items.  The proposed itinerary item that became quite controversial was a stop at the grave of Yasser Arafat.  The idea of it, as explained to Rabbi Blumofe, was to use that stop as a context for presenting various Palestinian narratives about Arafat and the PLO.

Rabbi Blumofe found that the guide that the Palestinian guide from MEJDI that he spoke with, and was hoping would help lead the trip, actually was very critical of Arafat and the PLO.   Rabbi Blumofe did not respond to any of the proposed items, wanting the entire itinerary to be discussed by those who were interested in the trip.

Rabbi Blumofe told a reporter for the Times of Israel that when he met with interested congregants on June 30 no one mentioned anything about the visit to Arafat’s grave.

A congregant of Rabbi Blumofe’s wrote a letter to him questioning his judgment and calling for his resignation.“To me, it’s no different than were you to travel to Germany to pay your respects at Adolf Hitler’s tomb, if one existed,” he wrote in his letter to Blumofe, adding that it was “time for you to resign. Depart and let us be done with you. In name of G-d, go!”

Rabbi Blumofe offered to meet with this congregant and the congregant refused.  The congregant wrote letters to major Austin philanthropists, including one who donated the property on which the synagogue and other Jewish institutions are located.  Statements were circulated on the internet including an open letter to Rabbi Blumofe calling for his termination, accusing him of helping to promote modern blood libels against Israel and world Jewry, and calling for termination of his rights to visit Israel.

Over the past 4 years I’ve gotten to know Rabbi Blumofe well.  He is a creative, compassionate, intelligent rabbi and an ardent supporter of Israel.  Within and beyond his congregation, he has succeeded masterfully in deepening and elevating the way people approach Judaism and Israel.

I personally think that a trip to Arafat’s grave is so loaded, so problematic, that whatever intentions you might have can easily be undercut by your symbolic presence there.  And Rabbi Blumofe himself has identified the problems involved with such a visit.

However.  What troubles me is that people assume intention before they ascertain intention.  What troubles me is that people mount campaigns before they do research.  What troubles me is that given the amplifying capacity of social media – people in the public eye but anyone, frankly – any one of us – can be tried and convicted without being given the opportunity to say a word.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to be, certainly not according to Jewish tradition going back to its Biblical roots.