Becoming More Assertive

Starting this Monday night, I’m going to be teaching a class at Temple Israel about Musar.  Musar loosely translated means ethical behavior.  We will be looking at texts that answer the basic question, how should we behave?

A depiction of Abraham conversing with God

Broadly speaking, texts about “how to behave” go way back in our tradition.  The Torah explores human behavior in numerous stories about our forbears and concretizes expectations of behavior through laws. 

The book of Proverbs and the book of Ecclesiastes provide advice.

Medieval Jewish philosophers wrote about how to define proper behavior. 

During the 19th century, the so-called Musar Movement developed and musar instructors wrote and taught about how one might change one’s behavior for the better.

They established frameworks for self-reflection and behavior modification.  A recent framework, established by the Mussar Institute, offers the following guidelines:

In the morning, you identify a type of behavior that you want to embrace. 

You say it, think about it, meditate on it.

In the afternoon, you do activities that strengthen the behavior.

In the evening, you write about your efforts. What went well?What didn’t go well?

When it comes to improving our own behavior, lots of things get in the way.

Often we aren’t aware of how we’re behaving.  We say and do things that are angry or timid or selfish and we aren’t even aware.

When we look at other people who behave in positive ways, we might be intimidated by them.  If we get as far as saying, “Gee, I’d like to do that,” we don’t necessarily know how to go about it.

In this morning’s Torah reading alone, we see examples of behaviors we might want to follow (and perhaps some that we don’t want to follow).

I’d like to focus on one behavior of Abraham that I would say is a positive behavior, one that we might want to emulate.

Engaging With a Scary, Unjust World

We tell a lot of stories to children that are terrifying.  The Brothers Grimm - two German scholars - are best known for their fairy tales and they are quite scary.  But we don’t even need them as examples.  The Bible has plenty of scary stories.  

To be sure, when we tell the story of Noah, we focus on the cute little animals and there are even cute songs about them walking onto the ark which I’ll spare you.  But the overall story is terrifying.  Destruction by flood is terrifying and if children use their imaginations to consider what that would be like, it might keep them up at night.

There’s another scary aspect of the story, and that is, that God decides to give up on humanity.  And at least as scary as that is the fact that the human that God picks to be saved along with his immediate relatives says nothing and starts to build a big boat just like God commands in order to save himself, his family, and certain animals.

Giving up is one answer to the fact that human beings are various shades of imperfect/dismissive/downright cruel.  There are lots of ways to give up that don’t involve wholesale destruction, though we’ve certainly done that to one another as a species.  We give up by allowing injustice and violence to continue without saying or doing much.  Ignoring and denying are very common ways that human beings give up on one another.

The first thing Noah does when he leaves the ark after the flood is plant a vineyard and get drunk.  Usually we don’t teach children that part.  I imagine he gets drunk in part because it is too painful to face sober the reality of the destruction that occurred and the reality of his own complicity, his tacit agreement to “give up.”

There is an alternative to giving up. It occupies the rest of the Torah, such that the Noah story becomes the exception rather than the rule.  The alternative to giving up is engagement.

One Year After the Tree of Life Synagogue Shootings

I grew up in a town that had, and still has, a large Jewish community.  My public high school had a sizable Jewish population but was mostly Christian.  I imagine there were students of other faiths as well, though I wasn’t aware of it.  

Great Neck community prayer gathering following the shootings

I experienced so little antisemitism as a student that I distinctly remember the very few times it occurred. 

Now these were the 1970's and early 80's in Fair Lawn, NJ, a suburb half an hour west of the George Washington Bridge. Towns with fewer Jews, towns in different parts of the country, generally experienced more antisemitism. 

The 70’s and 80’s, when a significant number of us came of age in this country or were raising our own children, were what I’ll call a little gan eden, a little Garden of Eden.  Great Neck in the 70’s and 80’s must have felt like my childhood town, even more-so.  A more sizable Jewish majority, more Jewish influence, more of a feeling of stability.

As this morning’s Torah reading makes clear, the Garden of Eden didn’t last so long.  Was it meant to last longer?  From a literary perspective, I would point out that the story, in keeping with other origin stories, was likely was meant to be etiological, to explain to its readers why life was the way it was - why life was hard, why people had to struggle with constant disappointments, with human beings not only loving and creating, but also hating and destroying.  

And so a story was told about how the creator put us in a beautiful secure garden לעבדה ולשומרה l’ovdah ul’shomrah - to tend and to care for - and we messed up, resulting in our living in a world that is beautiful but also dangerous.  

No one who came to this country from Poland or Germany or Iraq or Iran or many other places believed this was a Garden of Eden for Jews because they understood, based on their experience, that there is no such thing.

But even for these individuals, and certainly for those who came of age here in the 70’s and 80’s, and for our children, it felt in general, and for Jews as well, that life was safe and secure.

One year ago, as we heard the news of the shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, whatever feeling of safety and security we might have had was shattered.  A sense of American Jewish life as being somehow protected was in a profound way threatened.

Fear is Real - A Message for Yom Kippur

This past Sukkot, shortly after last Yom Kippur, a member of our family had a health-related issue that, thankfully, reached a positive resolution.  The experience, as you might imagine, caused a considerable amount of anxiety at the time.

There’s a well-known Jewish song which begins כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאד kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od.  The world is a very narrow bridge.  והעקר לא לפחד כלל Ve’ha'ikar lo l’fahed klal.  And the essential thing is not to be afraid at all.

The song is sung at Jewish summer camps and youth group gatherings and we often sing it here at Temple Israel

I’ve always liked the song, but at the same time, it always bothered me.  The essential thing is not to be afraid at all. 

Does that mean that if we or a loved one are facing a danger and we are afraid, we are somehow missing the mark?  Somehow not strong enough or brave enough?

The words of the song are attributed to a certain rabbi, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav.  I was intrigued by him years ago and decided to read a biography about him called Tormented Master, by Professor Art Green.  The title alone might tell you something, and I dove right in.

Rabbi Nachman, or Rav Nachman, was descended from the Baal Shem Tov, considered the founder of Hasidism, and Rav Nachman is credited with having revived Hasidism in a variety of important ways.  

He was known for being incredibly intense emotionally and apparently he was an extremely anxious person.  He thought things through to the point that he worried about them incessantly.  He had profound personal conflicts that lasted his entire life.

I imagine that when he wrote these words - the essential thing is not to be afraid - he was writing them as much for himself as for anyone else, kind of like when Dori, the fish in Finding Nemo, kept reminding herself to “just keep swimming.”

When you are worried about something, you know that the fear is real and cannot be denied or ignored.

If you have ever worried about the well-being of someone you love, or about your own well-being, you know that the fear is real.

We Need Each Other - a Message for 5780

We need each other.  That’s my message for the New Year.

A few years ago I was sitting with a group of parents in our religious school and I asked, what qualities do you want to instill in your children?  I made a list.  The qualities included hard work, honesty, compassion.  One quality that rose to the top of the list is independence.  Parents unanimously said they want their children to become independent.

Independence is an important quality, obviously. 

However.  We also understand, when we reflect honestly, that none of us is fully independent.  We rely on others all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

Looking back at our tradition, I had trouble finding references to independence.  In fact, I’m not sure I could identify a Biblical or rabbinic word that quite conveys the concept.  עצמאות atzma’ut, the modern Hebrew word for independence, does not seem to go too far back.

What you do have going way back in our tradition is ערבות areivut, which is interdependence.  Areivut is the notion that we are responsible for each other, we need each other.  We give and we get.

As a New Year begins, following a year in which we often have felt polarized and pulled apart from one another, I want us to consider several of the ways in which we are interdependent.  

Let’s start with the exciting world of romantic dating.  I want you to imagine that you’re coming up with a profile for yourself for a dating app.   

Present in the Present

I’ve told this story before but I was thinking about it again recently.  Our oldest son was born when we were living in Riverdale, along with many other rabbinical students.  The day after they came home from the hospital, Deanna asked if I could go down to the nearby pharmacy and get some diapers.  

I said sure, and then I started to get emotional and I said, you may think this is crazy, but I started to imagine standing with our son under the chupah and wondering what I would say.

And she said, that’s beautiful. And then she said, please go down to the story and get diapers.  The smallest size they have.

It’s fun to dream about the future and it can be illuminating to reflect on the past.

However, I believe that many of us, from time to time, find that we prevent ourselves from appreciating the blessings and the opportunities of whatever moment we are in.  

If you have ever catapulted yourself out of the present by rushing toward the future, or getting stuck in the past, these next few words are for you.

I’ll use myself as an example in the hope that you can relate.

Effective Thoughts and Prayers

Hurricane Dorian battered the Bahamas, skirted Florida, and continued northward near the Atlantic coast.

Marianne Williamson, presidential candidate and self-help author, wrote the following tweet once the storm turned course away from the Florida coast.

"The Bahamas, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas...may all be in our prayers now. Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea; it is a creative use of the power of the mind. Two minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation for those in the way of the storm.”

Hours later she deleted that tweet and replaced it with the following:

"Prayers for the people of the Bahamas, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. May the peace of God be upon him and their hearts be comforted as they endure the storm.”

I don’t know if she realized herself the deeply problematic nature of her original tweet.  She was implying, it seems, that it was powerful, collective thinking that resulted in the hurricane turning away from making landfall in Florida. It might have hit Florida, but powerful prayer, visualization, meditation, shifted it away.

Someone responded to her first tweet with the following, I’m paraphrasing:  I guess the prayers, visualization and meditation of the people in the Bahamas just weren’t good enough.

The original tweet presents a spiritual approach, a theology, that, to me ear, frankly, is self-congratulatory and deeply offensive.

If you escape natural disaster, it’s because you said or thought the right thing.  By implication, if you escape medical catastrophe, it’s because you said or thought the right thing.

And if you don’t escape those things, it means you didn’t think or pray right by God?

So much guilt and spiritual suffering has been inflicted on people by adding theological insult to physical, medical and emotional injury.