We Are Family

Two colleagues and I arrived in Israel last Thursday morning for a week with the Hartman Institute.  We were headed to Jerusalem to meet the rest of our colleagues.  There was a line of cabs waiting at the airport.  My colleague headed toward a particular cab.  As he was starting to put his suitcases in the trunk (and on the roof of the cab), I noticed what was inside the cab.  Piles of books, plates, the remains of a few peppers.  I’m not a neat freak, but the pepper rinds on the passenger seat up front were a bit much for me.  I motioned to my friend, maybe we want to take another cab.  Meanwhile, his stuff was already in the trunk and the driver, a woman named Rachel, was saying, rega, rega – wait a minute, as she picked the pepper carcasses off the passenger seat.  And we got in and away we went.

                                My colleagues and I (back right) at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem

Along the way, she’s asking us questions, where are we from, what are we doing in Israel, she’s schmoozing and schmoozing.  About her family, about her trip to New York, how she hopes to get to the pool by 10 o’clock – she doesn’t swim for pleasure but for therapeutic reasons, she’s facing some economic challenges, etc.

By the time we were on the main highway to Jerusalem I knew a whole lot about her.

The endless conversation, the sharing of good and bad, the few remaining pepper seeds that I discovered underneath me, her pointing out of the shkeydiya – you see, she said, the almond tree blossoms really do bloom on Tu Bishvat - reinforced one thing for me.  That I was with family. 

The week I spent in Israel with over 20 rabbis at the Hartman institute was devoted to Jewish identity in Israel and in the US.  We discussed lots of challenges that face both communities which are in many ways very different from each other; Israeli Judaism by and large is becoming more nationalistic, more tribal, less open; American Judaism is becoming more assimilated, more universal, more open.

But one theme which emerged for me in Israel, which has repercussions in the US, is family. 

What does it mean to be with mishpacha?  The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly – what does it mean?

One Day with the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem

I’m writing from Jerusalem where I’m participating in the second winter portion of the Rabbinic Leadership Initiative, a program for over twenty rabbis from varying ideological perspectives sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute.   In the past I’ve shared teachings and insights that I gleaned from my experience and recently Temple Israel hosted two other rabbis from the program, Rabba Sara Hurwitz and Rabbi David Ingber.

In order to give a sense of the depth and breadth of the program, I’d like to present a chronology, with minor descriptions, of most of the events that transpired on a single day.  Below is an account of my experience with the Hartman Institute on Monday, February 2, 2015.

8 am.  Breakfast with several of my colleagues and Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.  Yehuda spoke with us about the inaugural year of a new program, a Gap Year for American and Israeli students that allows them to explore Jewish topics together and to engage in dialogue about the realities of American and Israeli life.  He told us that he is thrilled by the enthusiastic engagement of North American Israeli teens that he has witnessed.

9 am.  Study and discussion of Jewish sources from Bible to Zohar that deal with the theme of universalism and particularism in Jewish thought.  Unfortunately the scheduled instructor, Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed, Professor of Jewish mysticism and Zohar at Hebrew University, was unable to teach due to the death of her husband the night before.  Dr. Biti Roi, a Lecturer in Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University, filled in for her colleague after offering a brief reflection about Melila’s husband and leading us in the chanting, in his memory, of a medieval poem about the soul.  We made plans to pay a shiva call to Melila. The subsequent study and discussion raised questions that we applied to contemporary Jewish life.  How is the Jewish experience of God and history unique?  What are the parameters of our loyalty to our people specifically and to humanity overall?

With my colleagues at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem

Looking in Two Places at Once: An Authentic Jewish Response to Current Events

A boy named Henry was a real wise-guy and eventually was kicked out of the Jewish day school he was attending. 

So his parents enrolled him in another school.  Henry showed up that day and was doing pretty well until it came time for snack.  The children were all lined up in the cafeteria.  There was a basket of apples on one side of the serving table and one of the rabbis had written a note that was placed next to the apples:  The note said: Take only one.  God is watching.

Henry read the note.  He then noticed a big plate of chocolate chip cookies on the other side of the table.  Quickly, he wrote his own note and put it next to the cookies.  It said:

Take as many as you want.  God is watching the apples.

We like to believe that God is capable of keeping track of more than one thing at once.  We can debate that, I’m sure.

But I’m reasonably convinced that we mortals are not very good at doing that.  Given how over-loaded we are, given our particular perspectives, we tend to see one thing clearly at the expense of another. 

Jewish rabbinic tradition famously requires us to consider more than one thing at a time.

I’m going to begin with layers of understanding that go back generations and then I’d like to reflect on how we might face the very real challenges that confront us today.

From Opposition to Governance, Becoming to Being: Thoughts About the UN and Paris after a Tragic Week

Menachem Begin was a tough opposition leader when the Israeli government was presided over by Labor prime ministers.  He criticized Ben Gurion for multiple reasons, criticized Golda Meir for not having adequate intelligence during YK war, criticized Rabin for making too many concessions for the sake of peace.  He was a clever polemicist, sharp-tongued, and as the leader of the opposition party for decades, he got to take his shots and he took advantage of every opportunity and then some.

And then, he became prime minister, the first non-Labor prime minister elected.

He was no less sharp-tongued, no less polemical, but he quickly learned that it’s different to govern than to criticize government, different to be in charge than to be the opposition.

The opposition merely has to demonstrate why the leader is wrong.  The leader has to actually figure out to do that is the most right given circumstances that are often very difficult.

I think people were surprised that Menachem Begin was so successful at negotiating peace with Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt. 

Begin transitioned well, in my opinion, from leader of the opposition to leader of the country.  He navigated and compromised more effectively than many might have expected. 

I doubt everyone in this sanctuary shares Begin’s political or ideological perspective.  But his transition from oppressed leader of the opposition to empowered statesman was a really important one.  It required him to accept incremental and even partial success.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal wrote the following about Palestinian leader Abbas’s recent efforts at the UN:  “Why does he persevere?  Because the pleasures of dreaming are better than the labors of building, just as the rhetoric of justice, patrimony and right is so much more stirring than the fine print and petty indignities of compromise.  Mr. Abbas consistently refuses a Palestinian state because such a state is infinitely more trivial than a Palestinian struggle.  Becoming is better than being.”  (Bret Stephens, “The Dream Palace of the Arab,” WSJ, January 5, 2015)

Remembering is Not About the Past - A Message for Hanukkah 5775

A large part of holiday observance is remembering events that happened in the past – leaving Egypt, defeating Haman, defeating the Greeks.  And then we eat, of course, but even the eating is connected to the remembering.

This morning I want to talk a little bit about how we remember.  Because the way we remember has an impact on us.  We can remember the past in ways that make us stuck in the past.  Or we can remember the past in ways that help us face the present. 

Forgive me if I spend a few minutes talking about Passover before I turn our attention to Hanukkah.  If nothing else, they belong in the same sermon because the two most widely observed rituals among American Jews are the Passover Seder and the lighting of Hanukkah candles.

Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt and how do we remember our time in Egypt and our leaving Egypt?

I recently heard a lecture about this by Micha Goodman, a Senior Fellow at the Hartman Institute.  He identified two models for how we remember Egypt – one which gets us stuck in the past and one which helps us face the present.

The Meeting of Desire and Decency: Our Role in a Crucial Conversation

I had a conversation recently with a colleague and friend who ran a Hillel for many years.

He brought up the recent high-profile stories about the harassment and assault of women on college campuses.  And he said that the problem, as he and other university professionals see it, is one of culture – a culture on campus that overtly and tacitly encourages some young men to feel it’s ok to overstep certain boundaries.

We read the Torah year after year because we believe it adds value to our lives.  The more I study, the more I feel that the impact of Torah on us is unhelpful if it’s simplistic.  The Torah says this, so do it.  Jacob did this, so let’s do it.  

Rather, the more carefully we analyze a particular story or dynamic in the Torah, the more profoundly we are likely to impact our approach to modern circumstances and dilemmas.

And so I want to spend some time looking closely at a story that I believe can deepen our thinking and action regarding a current reality that is quite disturbing. 

When Life Makes Us Dizzy

My son texted me recently:  “Did you the guys dangling near the top of the world trade center?”

I hadn’t seen the news yet so I googled it and saw a whole video of what transpired.

For those who may not have seen it, two window-washers at 1 WTC were left dangling in their window-washer contraption over 60 stories above the ground at a very awkward angle because one of the cables holding it up suddenly got slack and so the contraption went practically vertical.

As I’ve said on occasion, I have a particular fear of heights, so I had a sickening feeling just from my son’s text, which worsened the more information I got.  But I suspect that most people sitting here find the thought of dangling 60 + stories above the ground less than comforting.

I would go so far as to say that if I worked in the WTC, I would totally understand if nobody ever cleaned the windows.  My contribution to the psychological well-being of humanity would be to work in an office with filthy windows so no one would ever have to go through what these two men went through.

I want to talk this morning about psychological vertigo.  Now medical vertigo, to be accurate, is not generally connected with heights.  Although we have the association between vertigo and fear of heights through Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film by that name, medical vertigo is associated with loss of balance, sometimes accompanied by a spinning sensation.  It is occasionally associated with heights, though often not.

But I want to talk about "psychological vertigo", the sense that the literary scholar and biblical interpreter, Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, refers to in her commentary on the passage of the Torah that recounts the death of the matriarch Sarah.  In her book, Genesis:  The Beginning of Desire, Gottlieb Zornberg refers to the feeling we may get when we have a profound sense of how vulnerable we are.  

I want to explore different ways that we respond when we sense how fragile we are, when we experience the “near miss” of how differently something could have turned out in our own lives, when we allow ourselves to acknowledge the dangers and mishaps that we see around us.  When the world in some way feels like it’s spinning around us.