A Place for Private Light and Public Light

What do people think about wearing a kippa in public?

About lighting a Hanukkah menorah in the public square?

What do we feel about sharing our feelings for our loved ones publicly?

About doing acts of kindness, or advocating for justice, in public ways?

I suspect some of us think it’s a great idea to be public about all manner of observance and behavior, Jewish or general, and others think, not so much.  Or perhaps for most of us it depends on the issue at hand.

I want to reflect on the private/public dilemma of how we live our lives generally and how we navigate being Jewish.  What do we keep private?  What do we share publicly?

Joseph, Judah and Jerusalem: Confronting Intergenerational Baggage

When it comes to confronting deep-seated, challenging, multi-generational baggage, it helps to take small, thoughtful steps. How might this look in families and what it might mean for the recent announcement about Jerusalem?

Parents and children from "Hand in Hand" Center of Jewish-Arab Education in Israel

First, families.  I highly recommend a TV show about genealogy called Finding Your Roots.  The host, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., interviews several well-known people and presents them with research about their ancestors, often going back more than 10 generations.  The research includes ship records, census records and DNA.

The show is often fascinating.  It raises issues of race, ethnicity and socio-economics.  It raises questions about inherited traits, including personality.  Often the research reveals family secrets that were hidden for generations.  

The most recent episode featured the actor Gaby Hoffman, who starred in the Amazon TV series Transparent.

Gaby Hoffman was raised by her mother in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.  Her father left when she was a young child.

Hoffman saw her father occasionally as a preteen and teenager. She generally found him distant, formal and a bit angry.

The episode focused on her father’s side of the family going way back generations.

Hoffman wondered - why the anger?  Why the distance?  

His father, it turns out - her grandfather - was angry and even abusive.  Hoffman said that she and her sister always wondered if there was some reason why these two generations of men were so angry and what situations might have occurred in previous generations.

As the research was revealed to her by the host, she discovered that one of her great-grandfathers was raised by a different man than his biological father.  

Hoffman’s comment when she discovered this was telling.  She said, I'm paraphrasing, all this stuff somehow lasts a lot of generations.  The animosity, the anger, the secrecy - it has a conscious and subconscious effect that lasts. 

Painful emotional realities often last from one generation to the next. Mistrustful, hostile relationships get replayed over and over with different actors from one generation to another.  They don’t magically disappear.  

Unless - says the rabbi channeling his inner Lorax - unless courageous, pragmatic, thoughtful steps are taken.

Gratitude is a Choice

A few years ago I watched every episode of an excellent Israeli TV series about modern-Orthodox "30 - somethings" called S’rugim.  S’rugim refers to the kippa s’ruga, the crocheted kippa that, for many, has grown to serve as a symbol for this community.  

I thought it was a compelling show.  The characters were appealing but also at times frustratingly self-absorbed.

Deanna stopped watching after season 2 and I continued.  One night when I couldn’t sleep, I went downstairs and binge watched through to the end of the third and final season.

One of the main characters is named Hodaya.  

She grew up in an observant home, daughter of a rabbi.  Of all of the characters, she departs the most from her observant upbringing.  

She is also probably the least satisfied of all of her friends. She is brilliant, creative - perhaps in some ways the most gifted of all of her friends - and yet she never seems to be satisfied.

It first occurred to me this past week - as I was preparing to speak - the irony of her character given her name.

Her name - Hodaya - means gratitude in Hebrew. Thanksgiving, actually.  

And she appears almost constitutionally incapable of being thankful.

Many people will say that gratitude is a feeling.

To some degree it is.  But I want to suggest - on this Shabbat immediately following the American holiday of Thanksgiving - that gratitude is primarily a choice.  We choose to be grateful or not.  We choose to what extent we focus on saying “thank you” for the good things in our lives and to what extent we focus on everything that is wrong or tense or problematic in our lives.

Supporting Israel with High Resolution

Last Tuesday night the Central Student Government at the University of Michigan voted in favor of a divestment resolution targeting Israel.  The vote was 23 in favor, 17 opposed, 5 abstaining.   

The vote has no bearing on the University’s policies.  The University of Michigan in the past has roundly opposed divestment resolutions and in all likelihood will oppose this one. But it's quite disturbing nonetheless.  

I want to affirm today what I’ve said all along.  When it comes to how students relate to Israel, understand Israel, and advocate for fair treatment of Israel, the best thing we can do is educate them as deeply as possible about Israel, the Palestinians, the peace process and the larger Middle Eastern context.

That does not mean presenting Israel as completely virtuous and without flaw.  To the contrary, efforts to educate high school students this way often backfire.  The students get to college, realize it’s not so simple, and then feel that they have been misled by their teachers and rabbis.

What's called for is an approach that the educational institution Makor calls "high resolution." High resolution means knowing as much as possible in as deep a way as possible.

I want to take us to three places.  The family drama of Esau and Jacob.  The approach of an Israeli thought-leader who understands high resolution.  And back to the college campus.

Confronting the Hole in the Soul: Addiction, Trauma and Us

Rabbi Schweber and I attended an unusual performance last week at the Sid Jacobson JCC.

The performers are not professional actors but they all have two things in common.  They are all recovering addicts.  And they all participated in an unusual residential recovery program called Beit T'Shuvah.  I say it’s unusual because Beit T'Shuvah, in addition to using psychotherapy, creative arts and 12-steps, also mines Jewish tradition as a source of therapeutic healing.  Most recovery programs that have a religious bent are Christian, so this sets Beit T'Shuva apart.

Scene from Freedom Song

The performance we saw is called Freedom Song.  It features a split stage.  On one side of the stage, a family is having a passover seder.  One of the children, a young adult whose addiction caused pain to her family and was estranged from them for several years, walks in during the middle of the Seder.  

On the other side of the stage, a 12-step meeting is taking place and tension emerges between a woman and her husband, whose addiction has caused severe strain on their marriage.

The performance explores the causes and effects of addiction, not just on the addicts themselves, but on their family and friends.

At the end of the performance, Rabbi Mark Borovitz, co-founder of Beit Teshuva, spoke to the audience and answered questions.  A recovering addict himself, he said that one thing which addicts have in common with one another is that they have what he calls a “hole in the soul.” Something missing, or wounded, deep in the soul.  

Addictive behaviors and substance abuse are complicated, involving emotional, chemical and social components.  One key element, Rabbi Borovitz emphasized repeatedly, is the “hole in the soul,” a hole that addicts will try, unsuccessfully, to fill with behaviors and substances that are harmful.  

I want to talk this morning about the hole in the soul.  It’s a difficult topic.  It’s easier to avoid than to face head on, but avoiding it comes at a great cost.  Many people sense holes in their souls  - not just addicts.  In fact, I venture to say that just about everyone feels it at some point.  A pain so raw that you don’t quite know what to do with it.  

Reinventing Ourselves

My father’s retirement required him to reinvent himself.  He no longer had a job that he needed to get to every weekday at 8 am.  He had newfound time on his hands.  I’ll say more about how he managed this later.

To reinvent is to re-create, to forge a new approach to something.  Charles Darwin explored this in the natural world as something that is random, unintentional.  As an example, a mutation causes certain animals, over millennia, to develop long necks and those long-necked animals who live in places with tall trees have an advantage which lets them survive.  The mutation “reinvents” the animal and, given a felicitous set of circumstances, the animal is then poised for an increased chance at survival.

But we can also recognize intentional reinvention, especially among humans, reinvention of a religion tradition, reinvention of an institution, reinvention of a person.  Without reinvention, things stop in their tracks.  With reinvention, continuity is possible.

What Are We Missing? An Invitation for Yom Kippur 5778

A few weeks ago I confessed that I missed the solar eclipse completely.  Now there’s a bigger crowd so I’ll expand my confession.  Unlike so many people, I didn’t arrange to be in the path of totality.  I didn’t pay $1000 to rent a small room in Wyoming.  Worse than that – even just staying here in Great Neck, I didn’t get my act together.  I didn’t buy the right sunglasses.  Many people ordered them in advance and I didn’t. I thought about it but in the end I didn’t order them.  

"Best seat in the house"

So when the big day came, I realized I would miss the eclipse. During the brief moments when you could look up and see the eclipse if you had proper eyewear, I walked from my house to the synagogue.  I was so afraid of damaging my eyesight that I looked down the whole time.  So there was a major cosmic event going on and I was looking at my feet and hearing the voice of my mother saying, "Don't look up!"  Feel free to interpret that however you wish. 

Maybe it was important to see the eclipse, maybe not.  I don’t need to spend any more time on that right now.

But I do want to share with you, to invite you into, an exploration of what significant things we might be missing in our own lives.  And why.