A Person, A Poem, An Idea: Israel at 60
2nd Day Rosh Hashannah, 5768, September 14, 2007
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg Temple Beth Shalom
I thank my friend, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, for inspiring this sermon.
This appeared in the LA Times on Monday. “With eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union under arrest, Israeli authorities said Sunday that they had broken up a violent neo-Nazi gang that desecrated synagogues and staged at least fifteen attacks on religious Jews, Asian workers, drug addicts, and homosexuals. Video said to have been taken by the skinhead gang to document its beatings was shown at Sunday’s Israel Cabinet meeting, triggering urgent debate over what to do about immigrants who came as Jewish offspring, but grew up to commit hate crimes and shout, ‘Heil Hitler!’. “
This was a big story in Israel with one paper printing on the front page headline just one word in large caps: “UNBELIEVABLE!”
This year we will celebrate the 60th birthday of the State of Israel. 60 years into its existence Israel has discovered it has a Neo-Nazi problem. How do we make sense of this great irony? Is the younger generation forgetting the story of creation of Israel? Have young people not been given the history of Israel’s emergence as a nation in the wake of the Holocaust?
But despite the neo-Nazis, most of the rest of the Jewish people have a very strong attachment to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel. My friend, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, shared with me this interesting observation. Let’s say that someone got up at services and proclaimed. “I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t accept that God gave the Torah to Moses. I don’t believe that the Mitzvot are divine laws.” How would we react to such a public confession? Oh, we would say, “Goldberg, sit down already.” We might actually admire this person’s Hutzpah. Some of us would even agree with him.
But what about this alternative case? Let’s say the same person got up and proclaimed. “I am an anti-Zionist. I don’t believe in the State of Israel. I think the state of Israel is a cruel, monstrous state that oppresses the Palestinians. It has no right to exist. The Jews should return to Europe and let the Palestinians have their state.”
No one would yawn at that. The congregation would be outraged. And calls would be made to throw that person out the door. We would have to call a police escort.
The point I want to make is that 150 years ago the first public heretic, the God denier, the Kofer Ba’ikar, would outrage the congregation. But in our own times a Jew who does not believe in Israel, certainly a Jewish neo-Nazi, woe until him. While not all of us believe in God, the Jews overwhelmingly believe in Israel, in its right to exist, and its legitimacy as a Jewish state. We may be critical of Israel’s government or its policies, but the belief in the right for Israel to exist is as close a thing that Jews have to a dogma in our time.
Recent studies show that while there are few Jews who deny Israel, many younger American Jews are disconnected or indifferent to it. They may not get up and publicly deny Israel’s importance. They are certainly unlikely to become neo-Nazis. But the main concern is that many 20-30-somethings have little interest in Israel. Only 25% of American Jews have visited Israel. This alarming fact was so disturbing to leading Jewish philanthropists that they put their millions into a program called Birthright Israel which offers college age students free trips to Israel.
Many in this room were alive when Israel was founded. I know that moment changed your lives forever. But do your grandchildren feel the same way you do? How connected are they to Israel?
The creation of Israel is truly one of the great stories, not only of the Jews but of world history. But like any great story, it must be told over and over again and in new ways. Like Passover we have an obligation to pass it on to the next generation. Without knowing this story, those who follow us will not appreciate the remarkable courage and determination of the Jewish people to respond to catastrophe and to create a Jewish state.
In retelling this story I ask you, How has the existence of Israel changed you? What does Israel mean to you? How do we forge a stronger relationship with Israel as it enters one of the most critical periods of its existence?
Why is it that for 2000 years the Jewish people, scattered among the nations, never decided to return in Israel? Maimonides visited there and decided to live in Egypt. The expelled Jews of England in 1290 or the Jews of France in 1306 or the Jews in Spain in 1492 chose not to go settle there in mass. The Jews living amongst the Muslims chose the fleshpots of Baghdad or Fez or Cairo or Istanbul over the Holy land. But something changed in the late 19th and early 20th century. Jews moved from dreams to action and began to return in large numbers to the Promised Land.
The story of the creation Israel has infinite dimensions, but I want to look closely at only three. A person, a poem, and an idea. In telling the story of a person, a poem, and an idea we can understand the passion that led to the birth of Israel.
The story begins with a person. Why did an illiterate, assimilated Jew at the end of the 19th century begin a mass movement for Jews to return and create a Jewish state in the land of our ancestors? Theodore Herzl, despite being culturally assimilated and a leading public figure in Vienna in the latter half of the 19th century, experienced the indignities of being a Jew. Vienna like any major European had a long history of Jew hatred.
But the Jews of this era had hope and optimism. That hope lied in the West and that was France. Like many assimilated Jewish Europeans, Herzl admired France for its tolerance and legal acceptance of the Jews as full citizens. France was the paradigm of the future that he hoped would be imitated throughout Europe. The Jews of France had reached the highest levels of French society in literature, government, the military, the theatre, the arts, and in sport. Herzl believed that France pointed the way to the future of all of European Jewry. But he was in for a shock.
France got into an ill advised war with the emerging German nation state. France lost badly to Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian war. The mood in defeated France was ugly. People were looking for a scapegoat. No one thought that the identity of an officer accused of traitorous activity would matter, but when the officer, Albert Dreyfus, was accused of spying, the large mobs at the rallies calling for his punishment did not shout, “Down with the Traitor.” Rather, in rally after rally hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen shouted, “Death to the Jews”.
Herzl, covering the Dreyfus story for a Vienna newspaper, heard the cries of the mobs and never was the same man. In one shocking moment Herzl saw that the dream of emancipation for Europe’s Jews was a lie. The most progressive country in Europe seethed in the hatred of Jews. Herzl saw what no one else saw. He recognized that the Jew hatred stirred up by the Dreyfus case was not the old variety of the European-Christian kind. The Christians of Europe had for nearly 1500 years followed the teaching of the Christian sage, Augustine of Hippo (d430CE). He came up with the doctrine: Persecute the Jews, but do not destroy them. The Jews in their sorry state would be an enduring symbol to Christendom and to non-believers for their rejection of Christ.
But Herzl saw that the new Jew hatred was something different. It had been coined by others as anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews based on economic, cultural and most of all popular racial theories of his time. The new anti-Semites in Europe saw no reason to preserve the existence of the Jews. Herzl realized that the new anti-Semites would ultimately insist on the annihilation of the Jewish people. Herzl anticipated Hitler’s final solution. He saw it as clear as day. Like one who was struck by lightning and survives to tell the tale, he became meshugeneh about getting the Jews out of Europe. There was no future there. He became an advocate for the Jews reestablishing a state of their own in a place of their own.
His initial ideas were quite astonishing. He was in such a hurry to find a place for the Jews that he developed a short list. Palestine, Azerbaijan, Uganda, Argentina, and Arizona. Any one would do. Herzl, already feeling that time was running out in 1898 went around Europe talking to any rich or influential man who would let him in the door.
The people around him thought he was crazy. Rothschild threw him out. Rulers sat amused as he laid out his dream. His friends sent him to a shrink in the capital of shrinkdom, Vienna. His shrink, Max Nordau, the most prominent psychologist besides another young man by the name of Freud, listened to the fervent idealist for three sessions and became a disciple, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement.
Here is a passage from one of Herzl’s writings that summarizes his elevator pitch-what he tried to say to the influential people he met. They laughed. We cry.
“We are a people -- one people. We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-loyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands, where we have lived for centuries, we are still decried as aliens....The majority decide who the "alien" is; this and all else in the relations between peoples is a matter of power...In the world as it is now and will probably remain for an indefinite period, might takes precedence over right.
The whole plan is essentially quite simple...Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe adequate to meet our rightful national requirements; we will attend to the rest The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in obtaining sovereignty for us.”
The Jewish people got a state by the skin of their teeth, and held onto it tenaciously. We have attended to the rest as Herzl said.
The second part of our story is about a poem. As Herzl push started the new Zionist movement, other forces were at work that would transform the passive, long suffering Jews. In 1903 a particularly horrible pogrom took place in the city of Kishniev. There was a Jewish poet, beloved by Eastern European Jews, who witnessed the pogrom. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote a Hebrew poem, “The City of Slaughter”. Never has a poem left such a mark on a generation.
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) "The City of Slaughter" (1903)
“Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; into its courtyard wind your way;
There with your own hand touch, and with the eyes of your head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay, the spattered blood and dried brains of the dead... Descend then, to the cellars of the town, there where the virginal daughters of your folk were fouled, Where seven heathens flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother, the mother in the presence of her daughter, With bloody axes in their paws compelled thy daughters yield.
Note also do not fail to note, in that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath the bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood! Watching from the darkness and its mesh. The lecherous rabble portioning for booty their kindred and their flesh!
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; they did not stir nor move; they did not pluck their eyes out; They beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray: A miracle, 0 Lord,—and spare my skin this day! Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke, beheld their life polluted, the light of their world gone out— How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?
They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord, they offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word. The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi's house they flitted:
"Tell me, 0 Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted?"
The matter ends; and nothing more. And all is as it was before.
Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs the privies, outhouses and pigpens where the heirs of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions! Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame, So sanctified My name! It was the flight of mice they fled, the scurrying of roaches was their flight... They died like dogs, and they were dead!”
This is a poem about cowardly Jews, powerless Jews. The poet is disgusted with their cowardice, and shakes all his readers. This cannot go on.
What was Bialik saying to his generation? If we cannot defend our children, we are nothing. Powerlessness brings no dignity. Anyone who read and was struck by this poem came to one conclusion. Jews, need power to survive. Jews would have no dignity until they had power.
I read Bialik’s poem for the first time in 1975 during my junior year abroad in Israel for my advanced Hebrew class. This poem made me understand Israel’s special character which I could not fully appreciate growing up in America. The following year an Air France plane was high jacked. The terrorists landed the plane at the Entebbe airport in Uganda and immediately released the non-Jews and kept all the Jews as hostage. We know what happened next. Israel in a surprise raid freed the hostages, killed the terrorists, while losing one man, their commander, Yonatan Netanyahu. What was Israel saying to the world at Entebbe. Don’t mess with the Jews. We are no longer cowards. Bialik’s poem was answered.
The third part of our story is about an idea. There was this fellow name Asher Ginzberg. He was a dreamy fellow, not particularly social. But he had an idea and it possessed him. He was so inspired by the idea that he created a pen name which described his audience of readers: Achad Haam-literally ‘One of the People.’
Achad Haam was a very learned Jew. He was also a modern man. Achad Haam was troubled by the Jews in the Western Countries and by the Jews in the Eastern countries. The Jews of England, France, and Germany were assimilating, leaving traditional Judaism, abandoning its practice, its language, its culture. The Jews of the East, the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, the Ukraine, and Russia were deeply steeped in Jewish learning but because of circumstance and choice, were completely cut off from modern Western culture. This combination, radically assimilated Jews in the West and narrowly parochial, isolated Jews in the East prevented the Jews from healthfully entering the modern world.
Ahad Haam believed fervently that Judaism had to change in order to reclaim its Jews. He believed that the central problem of Judaism in modernity was that it could not create a compelling modern culture which would hold the allegiance of Jews but would open up new ways. He wrote in one of his most famous essays,
"Law of the Heart" (1894) “A people of the book, is a slave to the book. It has surrendered its whole soul to the written word. The book ceases to be what it should be, a source of ever-new inspiration and moral strength; on the contrary, its function in life is to weaken and finally to crush all spontaneity of action and emotion, till men become incapable of responding to life without its permission and approval. The people stagnate...the book stagnates.
It is not only Jews who have to come out of the ghetto, Judaism has to come out, too. ... [Judaism] can no longer tolerate the Galut-Exilic form which it had to take on, in obedience to its will-to-live, when it was exiled from its own country; but, without that form, its life is in danger. So it seeks to return to its historic center, where it will be able to live a life developing in a natural way, to bring its powers to play in every department of human culture.
We must keep alive the idea of the national renaissance. Only then can the Jewish soul be freed from its shackles and regain contact with the broad stream of human life without having to pay for its freedom by the sacrifice of its individuality.”
For Achad Haam, the Jews were the people of the dead book. It wasn’t just that the Jews had to strive to be modern people, but Judaism had to be made modern as well. This could happen if the Jews gathered anew in their land. There, they could become a modern nation required to deal with all the issues of being a modern state and culture. Could Judaism take its place among the great cultures and engage people in all areas of human endeavor. Achad Haam believed that any re-gathering of the Jewish people required a makeover of Judaism. The new homeland cannot be just another ghetto. It had to be the starting place of a new renaissance.
Israel is the product of a Meshuggeneh person, an angry poem of protest, and a dreamy idea of a Jewish renaissance. The efforts of a Meshuggeneh person lit a fire in the Jewish people, created a movement, and helped to eventually fulfill Herzl’s dream. Bialik’s poem became a prism through which many Jews saw the Holocaust. The Holocaust could happen because the Jews had no power. Ahad Haam’s idea of a modern Jewish renaissance inspired many Jews in Israel and outside to experiment with modernizing Judaism. The efforts to find a secure modern Judaism remains the most elusive dream of Jewry. We are in the midst of many modern experiments to both modernize Judaism and to redefine the Jews. In fact, as a Conservative synagogue we are only one example of that ongoing experiment. Jews remain locked in a great cultural and religious turmoil about how to apply Judaism in the modern world.
In Israel the question of cultural renaissance was deferred in favor or a practical approach. Do what has to be done to create and run a Jewish state. So there are Jewish policeman, there are Jewish telephone repairman, there are Jewish cable installers, there are Jewish traffic controllers, there are Jewish economists, Jewish government officials, Jewish tax collectors, Jewish customs officers and Jewish generals. Jews embraced the challenge of building a workable state, a functioning democracy, a modern economic society. They have done this and they have spent huge amounts of their resources fighting and giving up their lives to preserve their accomplishment.
We who live in America have our own story as Jews who have succeeded in the most hospitable country to Jews in history. The story of Israel and America are intertwined and the lessons of one are important for the other. We enter an uncertain period in Israel’s history. The future of Israel is now inextricably linked to the United States. Israel is on the front lines of the war against a virulent Islamic ideology that seeks its destruction and the end of the Western world as we know it. The war in Iraq and the instability in the Middle East will test the resourcefulness and patience of our Jewish brothers and sisters like never before. And the emergence of a fascist Islamic state in Iraq, racing to get nuclear weapons is the greatest threat of our times, not just for Israel, but the entire world.
The discovery of Jewish neo-Nazis must be understood in context. The neo-Nazi Jews are another pathetic type of Jew, an angry alienated counterpart to the timid Jewish men of Kishniev. These disturbed youth, none of whom served in the Israeli army, sadly represent an ugly side of the reality of statehood. One of the prices of having a state is that some young people become alienated from it and drop off its edges. Israel is also old enough to reveal its shortcomings which as a state. It suffers from an ineffective education system and a poor safety net.
In my visits to Israel, my friends there always complain to me about people’s perception of it as a country under siege, bristling with guns, on edge for the next terror attack. This is simply an untrue characterization of Israeli life. One of our tasks as fellow Jews in America is to maintain a close relationship with our Israeli brothers and sisters. This means frequent trips, cultural and religious exchanges, opportunities for study and fun. Israel is family and the most important act we can do is stay in contact and interact with family.
We can also connect more deeply by rededicating ourselves to learning the Hebrew language. This is one of the great miracles of modern Israel. To participate in it means to return to the Hebrew language which is the most authentic expression of Jewish culture throughout the ages. I would love if everyone committed themselves to learning Hebrew well enough to enjoy the Joseph story in Genesis or to read a modern Israeli novelist.
One thing my friends in Israel yearn for more than anything is that they be treated like normal people trying to live good and productive lives. I end this story with another poem, that captures the the yearnings of many Israelis. This is the side of Israel we don’t see in the newspapers and on TV. It is the side of Israel we should strive to appreciate, just like spending a sustained time with a beloved family member.
Yehuda Amichai "Tourists"
Visits of condolence are all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb and on the top of Ammunition Hill. They weep over our sweet boys
And lust over our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets
at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their
target marker.
"You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head."
"But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself. redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Matanah Tovah: The Role of the Gift in Sustaining Community
Matanah Tovah: The Role of the Gift in Sustaining Community
Rosh Hashannah 5768/2007
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Hayim, the beloved patriarch of the family, slipped into a coma. Everyone feared the worst. The family was called. The son flew in from New York. The daughter arrived from Boston. The aunts, the uncles, all sat despairing, waiting for the end.
Suddenly, a miracle occurred! Hayim opened his eyes. Weakly, he motioned for his son to approach so he could talk to him. Hayim was weak from the illness, so his voice was very faint as he asked,
"I've been ill?"
"Yes, Abba," replied the son with tears choking his voice, "Very ill."
Haim nodded and spoke again. "I had a dream. I was nearing death when I suddenly I smelled the aroma of your Imma’s potato kugel. I LOVE that kugel. As wonderful a cook as my Sarah is, that kugel is her masterpiece." He lied back against the pillows, weakened from the exertion of speaking.
"What a wonderful dream, Abba. But the smell is real. Mama just took the kugel out of the oven to cool."
"A miracle!" cried Hayim as he tried to rise, but weakly fell against the pillow. He turned to his son and said, "I'm still too weak to get up. Go to the kitchen and get for me a piece of your Imma's kugel."
The son obediently rose and left the room to fulfill his father's request. Those gathered around Hayim’s bed heard muffled words in the kitchen, but after a few minutes the son returned to his father’s bedside empty- handed.
Hayim looked at him and said, "Nu? Where is the kugel?"
The son replied, "I'm sorry, Abba. Imma says it’s for the Shivah.
Great joke, but it for the sake of a great line it ignores a really important part of the tradition of the Shivah-those seven days of mourning following the burial of a loved one. Friends and the community sustain the mourners with gifts of food during the Shivah, so that they need not be distracted or burdened during their mourning. Imma does not need to make the kugel. Her friends will make comfort food for her when the time comes. In Jewish tradition, gifts of food are intended to lift the yoke of despair off my shoulders when I am mired in grief.
The important point is that the friends and people in the community must bring the kugel, and the challah, the eggs, the bagels, the traditional foods of the shivah week. These are the gifts, according to Jewish tradition, that open the path of healing for one who is grief-stricken.
There are times in our lives when the presence of community can mean so much to us, when people’s presence saves us from despair and loneliness. We experience the holiness of community at these moments. That explains why the term for community in Hebrew is Kehilah Kedoshah-a holy community. A community becomes holy when it is engaged in the mitzvah of supporting each individual who is part of it during times of need and times of joy. This insight into community is one of the remarkable attributes of Judaism; it is one of the reasons, according to Gidi Grinstein, an Israeli scholar, for the mysterious survival and persistence of the Jewish people. Jews have a talent for creating, sustaining, and transplanting community wherever we find ourselves across this earth. There is a Jewish genius for creating community.
However, in America with all our affluence and comforts, our ability to create holy communities is greatly compromised. We live in a culture in which individualism, freedom, self fulfillment, and personal meaning trumps community. In the age of celebrity, our culture celebrates individual success and fame over communal effort and sacrifice.
The force of the market has taught us to look at things from the perspective of how we benefit. So people join churches and synagogues like they join an athletic club. I was reading the advertisements for the synagogues in the Orange County Jewish Magazine. I could not distinguish their ads from the pr for 24 hour fitness or Gold’s Gym. In fact most people relate to the synagogue as a commodity, the rabbi and cantor, service providers, the school, a way station for the kids. Ultimately such a utilitarian approach to communities vastly cheapens them. The members disappear when the benefits are no longer needed.
We live in the age of the Sovereign Self. The popular culture of America is about feeding, gorging, and stuffing the the individual in the hope that this will make him happy. Yet many of these very same people complain over and over about the lack of community, their loneliness, their deeply felt sense of isolation.
What is the alternative to our culture of self absorption? What makes for real a community? What is the ingredient of holiness in a holy community? What creates an authentically Jewish sense of community? What makes a community spiritually and morally excellent and transforming?
The answer to these questions begins with the simple act of a congregant bringing a kugel to the Shivah house. The preparing of food and bringing it to the shivah house is a gift. Gift giving is so common place that we never think about it. But gift giving is at the heart of what makes a community, indeed at the heart of all loving relationships. The gift is key to understanding Kehilah Kedosha-a holy community. What is the role of a gift in a community?
There are seven attributes to the gift within an authentic community.
Let me tell a story about the power of the gift to build community. A few years ago a congregant at my former congregation, named Mark, was in the middle of his struggle with cancer which ultimately would claim his life. At the time of this story he was shaky, but still strong enough to get about. He called me one day to ask me to visit with him to discuss arrangements for his final days. I mentioned to Mark that I would come over to his house that evening after going to a shivah minyan for another congregant who was mourning his father. Mark did not know the person well, but immediately asked for the address and told me he would be there to help make the minyan. I told him that he need not worry for the congregation’s Hesed Society had recruited enough people to make a minyan. But he said, ”See you there.” And a few minutes later Mark was there to my utter amazement and admiration. His presence was a gift.
Mark did not have an obligation to come to the minyan, but he knew that going to the minyan was a way of being generous, of giving of himself. It didn’t matter that he did not know the mourner that well. It did not matter if there was already a minyan. It did not matter that he was weak and uncomfortable because of his cancer. The situation presented itself and he saw this as the right thing to do.
Mark’s gift teaches us the first thing we should know about gift giving in a community: THERE IS A TIME AND CONTEXT TO GIVE A GIFT. Attending a Shivah is understood as a proper context in which to give a gift of food or of physical presence. Gift giving is made possible by certain situations that occur at intervals in our lives. Although the time of the gift may be unpredictable, once the circumstance arises we know the gift that is called for. Thus living consciously in a community is to know that you are on call to give gifts. So I know where to find my kugel recipe, when I hear news of a new mourner.
A second dimension about gifts is that WE KNOW WHAT IS CALLED FOR IN THE GIFT. Gifting in Judaism is quite straightforward. The gift may be my presence at a minyan, or a simple dish of food for a person in distress, or an invitation to my Shabbas table. The more you are at home in the culture, the clearer the idea of what gift is needed. (This is the challenge of teaching converts-how to know when to gift) Each community has a code, a language of what constitutes the gift. Those codes of giving once learned and understood, whether from childhood or as an adult allow us to fully enter the life of community.
There is third thing we should know about gift as illustrated in this story by Lewis Hyde.
“Imagine a scene. An Englishman in the colony of Massachusetts in the 17th century comes into an Indian lodge, and his hosts, wishing to make their guest feel welcome, ask him to share a pipe of tobacco. Carved from a soft red stone, the pipe itself is a peace offering that has traditionally circulated amongst the local tribes, staying in each lodge for a time but always given away again sooner or later. And so the Indians, as is only polite among their people, give the pipe to their guest when he leaves. The Englishman is tickled pink. What a nice thing to send back to the British Museum! He takes it home and sets it on the mantelpiece.
A time passes and the leaders of a neighboring tribe come to visit the colonist’s home. To his surprise he finds his guests have some expectation in regard to his pipe and his translator finally explains to him that if he wishes to show his goodwill he should offer them a smoke and give them the pipe. In consternation the Englishman invents a phrase to describe these people with such a limited sense of private property: The Indian-giver.
But our Indian giver understood a cardinal property of the gift: WHATEVER WE HAVE GIVEN IS SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN AWAY AGAIN, NOT KEPT. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going. THE GIFT MUST ALWAYS MOVE.
The kugel I bring to the shivah house is part of the movement of the gift. Although it is consumed, it continues to move when a few weeks later the mourner brings a challah to someone else who is sitting shivah. The spirit of the gift regenerates when we pass on another gift to the next person. This does not have to happen immediately. But the gift must not stay still with us. The movement must not be permanently interrupted. The gift or the value of the gift must always move.
But in order to keep the gift moving, doesn’t it make sense to reciprocate in response to the person who gave me the kugel? Shouldn’t it be both necessary and sufficient to send a thank you note, or maybe even to send a dish in return? But in communities the key is not the response to the donor; it is the direction you pass it on. GIFT GIVING IN AUTHENTIC COMMUNITIES IS CIRCULAR. This is the fourth attribute of the gift in a community.
When a gift moves in a circle in a community I do not give the gift to the person who gave it originally to me. I give a gift to the next person in need. The gift may very well return to me over time, but it will circulate through many people on its way around the circle. “It is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly and I will feel a sort of blind gratitude myself. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the person, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” (Hyde) So after my mourning is over I get a call from the Sisterhood asking me to deliver a meal to a young couple with a new baby. A few months later that couple brings a Shabbat candles to someone who is sick in the hospital.
Gifts in communities move in a circular motion. This is hard to grasp because we think of gift giving as acts of reciprocity between two people. Two people in love give gifts back and forth in a way that sustains and regenerates love. But over time if they limit their gift giving to each other, their generosity will decline or they may start keeping score. A Kashmiri folk tale tells of two Brahmin women who tried to dispense with their charitable obligations by simply giving alms back and forth to each other. When they died, they returned to earth as two wells so poisoned that no one could take water from them.
This sad tale illustrates the spiritual bottleneck of clique within a community. A clique within a community extends gifts to their circle of family and friends. A clique in a community is like a partially blocked artery, it reduces the circular flow of gift giving in the wider community To sustain a community we must give gifts not only to our family and friends, but also to those outside our own circles.
Gift giving is a relay, extending the hand to the next one whose hand is open. The secret of community is that we must know to move the gift to the next worthy person. We are ready to give, but we also must be ready to receive. A gift circle will not work if a potential recipient refuses to accept the gifts of others.
Often a Jews tells me,. “I don’t want to trouble people with my loss.” But the community exists to be troubled and bothered. That is part of the unwritten contract of being in a community. You join a shul to be bothered, to be nudged, and to be pushed beyond yourself. You also join a shul to let people show their care for you. Lots of Jews nowadays don’t join shuls because they don’t have time or don’t want to be bothered. Or they don’t have time to receive the care and concern of strangers outside my immediate circle. Those of us who have chosen to join a synagogue have to demonstrate to our non-connected friends the value of being bothered, of being needed and of receptivity to the compassion of others.
The recipient of a gift is also doing a mitzvah. She is causing another person to become worthy of doing a mitzvah. She is unblocking the artery, the lifeblood of a community to flow freely and generously. That explains the custom of not knocking when coming to a Shivah house. You just enter. The mourner makes it easy to receive the gift of your presence.
The fifth attribute of the gift is that EVERY ONE CAN GIVE regardless of whether you are rich or poor. One mark of the genius of the Halachah-Jewish law is its moral concern for preventing the community from fragmenting along economic lines. The rich cannot separate from the poor. We are bound to a greater destiny than class or life circumstances. The giving of the gift must be available to all. The gift of the kugel is the same whether I am rich or poor. My presence at the minyan is not a function of my economic standing.
Our tradition makes a sharp distinction between two types of gifts, gifts of money-tzedaka and gifts of lovingkindness-gemilut hasadim. It says in Talmud Sukkot 49b: “Acts of gemilut hasadim are superior to tzedaka (gifts of money) in three respects. Tzedaka can be accomplished only with money; gemilut hasadim can be accomplished through personal involvement as well as with money. Tzedaka can be given only to the poor; gemilut hasadim can be exchanged between rich and poor. Tzedaka applies only to the living; gemilut hasadim applies to both the living and the dead.
The last line of this teaching reveals the sixth dimension we should know about gifts and community. The circle of giving goes beyond the living to include the dead. GIVING UNITES THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. When we extend gifts to others in our community we carry on the gifts of those who have gone before us. We remember our loved ones by the way they gave. In fact they taught us how to give. The other day Rabbi David and Yetta Kane invited me to their home for Shabbat dinner. The food was delicious and I asked Yetta where she learned to cook. She told the story of how her mother taught her to cook in the displacement camps after the war. She told me how her mother bartered for a goat in exchange for candy and chocolate so they could have milk. The delicious kugel I ate at her house on Shabbat made me think of that goat providing milk in the displacement camp, of Yetta’s courageous and nurturing mother and her gift of the art of cooking to her daughter. We are Jews because of the gifts of our ancestors, both immediate and distant. Avraham and Sarah’s hospitality for the wayfarer; Joseph’s loving burial of his father, Jacob; Moshe’s act of kindness of taking Joseph’s bones out of Egypt; Rabbi Hillel’s gentleness before the man who wanted to learn about Judaism while standing on one foot. Rabbi Meir’s compassion for his wayward colleague, Elisha ben Abuye.
The seventh and last attribute of a gift in a community is that GOD MUST BE BROUGHT INTO THE GIFT CIRCLE.
The gift circle must include God for it to become holy. All giving in a community must flow from a faith in the giving nature of God. God starts the circle and our gifts circle back to God and they keep on moving, flowing, and breathing.
The gifts we give are no other than imitations of God’s gifts to us.
“‘Follow the Lord your God (Deut. 13:5).’ What does this mean? Is it possible for a mortal to follow God’s Presence? The verse means to teach us that we should follow the attributes of the Holy One, praised by He. As He clothes the naked, you should clothe the naked. The Torah teaches that the Holy One visits the sick, you should visit the sick. The Holy One comforts those who mourn; you should comfort those who Mourn. The Holy One buries the dead; you should bury the dead.” Babylonian Talmud Sotah 14a
Let us remember these principles of the Matanah-The Gift. The secret of achieving holy community is:
1. THERE IS A TIME TO GIVE A GIFT
2. WE KNOW WHAT IS CALLED FOR IN THE GIFT.
3. THE GIFT MUST ALWAYS MOVE
4. THE GIFT MUST MOVE IN A CIRCLE.
5. EVERY ONE CAN GIVE
6. GIVING UNITES THE LIVING AND THE DEAD.
7. GOD MUST BE IN THE GIFT CIRCLE.
The ultimate gift that God gave the Jewish people is described in this famous passage from the Talmud. .
“That you may know that I the Lord sanctify you: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, I have a precious gift-Matanah Tovah- in My treasure house, called the Sabbath, and desire to give it to Israel; go and inform them. (Talmud Bavli Berachot 10b)
The Torah claims that the eternal cycle of gift giving began with the Sabbath-the Matanah Tovah-the precious gift of God. How does a Jew testify to the giving God in the world? He does not set up missions to the gentiles, he does not preach to millions over the airwaves. He does not blow himself up inside a bus. He has you sit down with him at his Shabbas table. For when we bring guests to our Shabbat table we accept the precious gift God has given us and lovingly share it with those present at our table. And they, our kind guests also, God willing, will share their table with others. In this way God’s precious gift, the Sabbath, is passed on in a circle around the community, moving across the generations, and uniting us with past and future generations of Jews who guard it and give it in love.
It was tradition to for a sage to have his coffin made of his Sabbath table. I once shared this with my wife’s family who are in the furniture business and suggested they ought to sell tables by suggesting to people that it could also serve as a coffin. But kidding aside, this tradition is a recognition that the table which served as a welcoming place for probably thousands of people over a life time is deeply associated with us even after we die. The instrument of our gift giving is buried with us.
This year at Beth Shalom we hope to strengthen the culture of the gift in our congregation with a special emphasis on our theme for the year. Jewish hospitality. Please join us for the various efforts we will make to build a more caring and welcoming community. Attend a Shivah minyan, prepare some food for family with a new arrival, welcome a new member, have people to your table for a Shabbat meal.
Ponder this. The ability to build a community around gift giving is the secret to the longevity of the Jews. We move our gifts from generation by generation. May this new year renew your capacity to give, to receive the gifts of others, and to help fashion within all of us a Holy Community-a Kehilah Kedoshah that is worthy of the holy congregations of the Jewish people that have preceded us.
Rosh Hashannah 5768/2007
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Hayim, the beloved patriarch of the family, slipped into a coma. Everyone feared the worst. The family was called. The son flew in from New York. The daughter arrived from Boston. The aunts, the uncles, all sat despairing, waiting for the end.
Suddenly, a miracle occurred! Hayim opened his eyes. Weakly, he motioned for his son to approach so he could talk to him. Hayim was weak from the illness, so his voice was very faint as he asked,
"I've been ill?"
"Yes, Abba," replied the son with tears choking his voice, "Very ill."
Haim nodded and spoke again. "I had a dream. I was nearing death when I suddenly I smelled the aroma of your Imma’s potato kugel. I LOVE that kugel. As wonderful a cook as my Sarah is, that kugel is her masterpiece." He lied back against the pillows, weakened from the exertion of speaking.
"What a wonderful dream, Abba. But the smell is real. Mama just took the kugel out of the oven to cool."
"A miracle!" cried Hayim as he tried to rise, but weakly fell against the pillow. He turned to his son and said, "I'm still too weak to get up. Go to the kitchen and get for me a piece of your Imma's kugel."
The son obediently rose and left the room to fulfill his father's request. Those gathered around Hayim’s bed heard muffled words in the kitchen, but after a few minutes the son returned to his father’s bedside empty- handed.
Hayim looked at him and said, "Nu? Where is the kugel?"
The son replied, "I'm sorry, Abba. Imma says it’s for the Shivah.
Great joke, but it for the sake of a great line it ignores a really important part of the tradition of the Shivah-those seven days of mourning following the burial of a loved one. Friends and the community sustain the mourners with gifts of food during the Shivah, so that they need not be distracted or burdened during their mourning. Imma does not need to make the kugel. Her friends will make comfort food for her when the time comes. In Jewish tradition, gifts of food are intended to lift the yoke of despair off my shoulders when I am mired in grief.
The important point is that the friends and people in the community must bring the kugel, and the challah, the eggs, the bagels, the traditional foods of the shivah week. These are the gifts, according to Jewish tradition, that open the path of healing for one who is grief-stricken.
There are times in our lives when the presence of community can mean so much to us, when people’s presence saves us from despair and loneliness. We experience the holiness of community at these moments. That explains why the term for community in Hebrew is Kehilah Kedoshah-a holy community. A community becomes holy when it is engaged in the mitzvah of supporting each individual who is part of it during times of need and times of joy. This insight into community is one of the remarkable attributes of Judaism; it is one of the reasons, according to Gidi Grinstein, an Israeli scholar, for the mysterious survival and persistence of the Jewish people. Jews have a talent for creating, sustaining, and transplanting community wherever we find ourselves across this earth. There is a Jewish genius for creating community.
However, in America with all our affluence and comforts, our ability to create holy communities is greatly compromised. We live in a culture in which individualism, freedom, self fulfillment, and personal meaning trumps community. In the age of celebrity, our culture celebrates individual success and fame over communal effort and sacrifice.
The force of the market has taught us to look at things from the perspective of how we benefit. So people join churches and synagogues like they join an athletic club. I was reading the advertisements for the synagogues in the Orange County Jewish Magazine. I could not distinguish their ads from the pr for 24 hour fitness or Gold’s Gym. In fact most people relate to the synagogue as a commodity, the rabbi and cantor, service providers, the school, a way station for the kids. Ultimately such a utilitarian approach to communities vastly cheapens them. The members disappear when the benefits are no longer needed.
We live in the age of the Sovereign Self. The popular culture of America is about feeding, gorging, and stuffing the the individual in the hope that this will make him happy. Yet many of these very same people complain over and over about the lack of community, their loneliness, their deeply felt sense of isolation.
What is the alternative to our culture of self absorption? What makes for real a community? What is the ingredient of holiness in a holy community? What creates an authentically Jewish sense of community? What makes a community spiritually and morally excellent and transforming?
The answer to these questions begins with the simple act of a congregant bringing a kugel to the Shivah house. The preparing of food and bringing it to the shivah house is a gift. Gift giving is so common place that we never think about it. But gift giving is at the heart of what makes a community, indeed at the heart of all loving relationships. The gift is key to understanding Kehilah Kedosha-a holy community. What is the role of a gift in a community?
There are seven attributes to the gift within an authentic community.
Let me tell a story about the power of the gift to build community. A few years ago a congregant at my former congregation, named Mark, was in the middle of his struggle with cancer which ultimately would claim his life. At the time of this story he was shaky, but still strong enough to get about. He called me one day to ask me to visit with him to discuss arrangements for his final days. I mentioned to Mark that I would come over to his house that evening after going to a shivah minyan for another congregant who was mourning his father. Mark did not know the person well, but immediately asked for the address and told me he would be there to help make the minyan. I told him that he need not worry for the congregation’s Hesed Society had recruited enough people to make a minyan. But he said, ”See you there.” And a few minutes later Mark was there to my utter amazement and admiration. His presence was a gift.
Mark did not have an obligation to come to the minyan, but he knew that going to the minyan was a way of being generous, of giving of himself. It didn’t matter that he did not know the mourner that well. It did not matter if there was already a minyan. It did not matter that he was weak and uncomfortable because of his cancer. The situation presented itself and he saw this as the right thing to do.
Mark’s gift teaches us the first thing we should know about gift giving in a community: THERE IS A TIME AND CONTEXT TO GIVE A GIFT. Attending a Shivah is understood as a proper context in which to give a gift of food or of physical presence. Gift giving is made possible by certain situations that occur at intervals in our lives. Although the time of the gift may be unpredictable, once the circumstance arises we know the gift that is called for. Thus living consciously in a community is to know that you are on call to give gifts. So I know where to find my kugel recipe, when I hear news of a new mourner.
A second dimension about gifts is that WE KNOW WHAT IS CALLED FOR IN THE GIFT. Gifting in Judaism is quite straightforward. The gift may be my presence at a minyan, or a simple dish of food for a person in distress, or an invitation to my Shabbas table. The more you are at home in the culture, the clearer the idea of what gift is needed. (This is the challenge of teaching converts-how to know when to gift) Each community has a code, a language of what constitutes the gift. Those codes of giving once learned and understood, whether from childhood or as an adult allow us to fully enter the life of community.
There is third thing we should know about gift as illustrated in this story by Lewis Hyde.
“Imagine a scene. An Englishman in the colony of Massachusetts in the 17th century comes into an Indian lodge, and his hosts, wishing to make their guest feel welcome, ask him to share a pipe of tobacco. Carved from a soft red stone, the pipe itself is a peace offering that has traditionally circulated amongst the local tribes, staying in each lodge for a time but always given away again sooner or later. And so the Indians, as is only polite among their people, give the pipe to their guest when he leaves. The Englishman is tickled pink. What a nice thing to send back to the British Museum! He takes it home and sets it on the mantelpiece.
A time passes and the leaders of a neighboring tribe come to visit the colonist’s home. To his surprise he finds his guests have some expectation in regard to his pipe and his translator finally explains to him that if he wishes to show his goodwill he should offer them a smoke and give them the pipe. In consternation the Englishman invents a phrase to describe these people with such a limited sense of private property: The Indian-giver.
But our Indian giver understood a cardinal property of the gift: WHATEVER WE HAVE GIVEN IS SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN AWAY AGAIN, NOT KEPT. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going. THE GIFT MUST ALWAYS MOVE.
The kugel I bring to the shivah house is part of the movement of the gift. Although it is consumed, it continues to move when a few weeks later the mourner brings a challah to someone else who is sitting shivah. The spirit of the gift regenerates when we pass on another gift to the next person. This does not have to happen immediately. But the gift must not stay still with us. The movement must not be permanently interrupted. The gift or the value of the gift must always move.
But in order to keep the gift moving, doesn’t it make sense to reciprocate in response to the person who gave me the kugel? Shouldn’t it be both necessary and sufficient to send a thank you note, or maybe even to send a dish in return? But in communities the key is not the response to the donor; it is the direction you pass it on. GIFT GIVING IN AUTHENTIC COMMUNITIES IS CIRCULAR. This is the fourth attribute of the gift in a community.
When a gift moves in a circle in a community I do not give the gift to the person who gave it originally to me. I give a gift to the next person in need. The gift may very well return to me over time, but it will circulate through many people on its way around the circle. “It is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly and I will feel a sort of blind gratitude myself. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the person, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” (Hyde) So after my mourning is over I get a call from the Sisterhood asking me to deliver a meal to a young couple with a new baby. A few months later that couple brings a Shabbat candles to someone who is sick in the hospital.
Gifts in communities move in a circular motion. This is hard to grasp because we think of gift giving as acts of reciprocity between two people. Two people in love give gifts back and forth in a way that sustains and regenerates love. But over time if they limit their gift giving to each other, their generosity will decline or they may start keeping score. A Kashmiri folk tale tells of two Brahmin women who tried to dispense with their charitable obligations by simply giving alms back and forth to each other. When they died, they returned to earth as two wells so poisoned that no one could take water from them.
This sad tale illustrates the spiritual bottleneck of clique within a community. A clique within a community extends gifts to their circle of family and friends. A clique in a community is like a partially blocked artery, it reduces the circular flow of gift giving in the wider community To sustain a community we must give gifts not only to our family and friends, but also to those outside our own circles.
Gift giving is a relay, extending the hand to the next one whose hand is open. The secret of community is that we must know to move the gift to the next worthy person. We are ready to give, but we also must be ready to receive. A gift circle will not work if a potential recipient refuses to accept the gifts of others.
Often a Jews tells me,. “I don’t want to trouble people with my loss.” But the community exists to be troubled and bothered. That is part of the unwritten contract of being in a community. You join a shul to be bothered, to be nudged, and to be pushed beyond yourself. You also join a shul to let people show their care for you. Lots of Jews nowadays don’t join shuls because they don’t have time or don’t want to be bothered. Or they don’t have time to receive the care and concern of strangers outside my immediate circle. Those of us who have chosen to join a synagogue have to demonstrate to our non-connected friends the value of being bothered, of being needed and of receptivity to the compassion of others.
The recipient of a gift is also doing a mitzvah. She is causing another person to become worthy of doing a mitzvah. She is unblocking the artery, the lifeblood of a community to flow freely and generously. That explains the custom of not knocking when coming to a Shivah house. You just enter. The mourner makes it easy to receive the gift of your presence.
The fifth attribute of the gift is that EVERY ONE CAN GIVE regardless of whether you are rich or poor. One mark of the genius of the Halachah-Jewish law is its moral concern for preventing the community from fragmenting along economic lines. The rich cannot separate from the poor. We are bound to a greater destiny than class or life circumstances. The giving of the gift must be available to all. The gift of the kugel is the same whether I am rich or poor. My presence at the minyan is not a function of my economic standing.
Our tradition makes a sharp distinction between two types of gifts, gifts of money-tzedaka and gifts of lovingkindness-gemilut hasadim. It says in Talmud Sukkot 49b: “Acts of gemilut hasadim are superior to tzedaka (gifts of money) in three respects. Tzedaka can be accomplished only with money; gemilut hasadim can be accomplished through personal involvement as well as with money. Tzedaka can be given only to the poor; gemilut hasadim can be exchanged between rich and poor. Tzedaka applies only to the living; gemilut hasadim applies to both the living and the dead.
The last line of this teaching reveals the sixth dimension we should know about gifts and community. The circle of giving goes beyond the living to include the dead. GIVING UNITES THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. When we extend gifts to others in our community we carry on the gifts of those who have gone before us. We remember our loved ones by the way they gave. In fact they taught us how to give. The other day Rabbi David and Yetta Kane invited me to their home for Shabbat dinner. The food was delicious and I asked Yetta where she learned to cook. She told the story of how her mother taught her to cook in the displacement camps after the war. She told me how her mother bartered for a goat in exchange for candy and chocolate so they could have milk. The delicious kugel I ate at her house on Shabbat made me think of that goat providing milk in the displacement camp, of Yetta’s courageous and nurturing mother and her gift of the art of cooking to her daughter. We are Jews because of the gifts of our ancestors, both immediate and distant. Avraham and Sarah’s hospitality for the wayfarer; Joseph’s loving burial of his father, Jacob; Moshe’s act of kindness of taking Joseph’s bones out of Egypt; Rabbi Hillel’s gentleness before the man who wanted to learn about Judaism while standing on one foot. Rabbi Meir’s compassion for his wayward colleague, Elisha ben Abuye.
The seventh and last attribute of a gift in a community is that GOD MUST BE BROUGHT INTO THE GIFT CIRCLE.
The gift circle must include God for it to become holy. All giving in a community must flow from a faith in the giving nature of God. God starts the circle and our gifts circle back to God and they keep on moving, flowing, and breathing.
The gifts we give are no other than imitations of God’s gifts to us.
“‘Follow the Lord your God (Deut. 13:5).’ What does this mean? Is it possible for a mortal to follow God’s Presence? The verse means to teach us that we should follow the attributes of the Holy One, praised by He. As He clothes the naked, you should clothe the naked. The Torah teaches that the Holy One visits the sick, you should visit the sick. The Holy One comforts those who mourn; you should comfort those who Mourn. The Holy One buries the dead; you should bury the dead.” Babylonian Talmud Sotah 14a
Let us remember these principles of the Matanah-The Gift. The secret of achieving holy community is:
1. THERE IS A TIME TO GIVE A GIFT
2. WE KNOW WHAT IS CALLED FOR IN THE GIFT.
3. THE GIFT MUST ALWAYS MOVE
4. THE GIFT MUST MOVE IN A CIRCLE.
5. EVERY ONE CAN GIVE
6. GIVING UNITES THE LIVING AND THE DEAD.
7. GOD MUST BE IN THE GIFT CIRCLE.
The ultimate gift that God gave the Jewish people is described in this famous passage from the Talmud. .
“That you may know that I the Lord sanctify you: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, I have a precious gift-Matanah Tovah- in My treasure house, called the Sabbath, and desire to give it to Israel; go and inform them. (Talmud Bavli Berachot 10b)
The Torah claims that the eternal cycle of gift giving began with the Sabbath-the Matanah Tovah-the precious gift of God. How does a Jew testify to the giving God in the world? He does not set up missions to the gentiles, he does not preach to millions over the airwaves. He does not blow himself up inside a bus. He has you sit down with him at his Shabbas table. For when we bring guests to our Shabbat table we accept the precious gift God has given us and lovingly share it with those present at our table. And they, our kind guests also, God willing, will share their table with others. In this way God’s precious gift, the Sabbath, is passed on in a circle around the community, moving across the generations, and uniting us with past and future generations of Jews who guard it and give it in love.
It was tradition to for a sage to have his coffin made of his Sabbath table. I once shared this with my wife’s family who are in the furniture business and suggested they ought to sell tables by suggesting to people that it could also serve as a coffin. But kidding aside, this tradition is a recognition that the table which served as a welcoming place for probably thousands of people over a life time is deeply associated with us even after we die. The instrument of our gift giving is buried with us.
This year at Beth Shalom we hope to strengthen the culture of the gift in our congregation with a special emphasis on our theme for the year. Jewish hospitality. Please join us for the various efforts we will make to build a more caring and welcoming community. Attend a Shivah minyan, prepare some food for family with a new arrival, welcome a new member, have people to your table for a Shabbat meal.
Ponder this. The ability to build a community around gift giving is the secret to the longevity of the Jews. We move our gifts from generation by generation. May this new year renew your capacity to give, to receive the gifts of others, and to help fashion within all of us a Holy Community-a Kehilah Kedoshah that is worthy of the holy congregations of the Jewish people that have preceded us.
Five Phases of the Shofar
The Five Phases of the Shofar
Erev Rosh Hashannah 5768 Sept. 12, 2007
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Do you remember the first time you heard the Shofar? How old were you? Where were you? Who were you with? How was it explained to you? How did you feel when you heard the blast? Were you scared? Were you exhilarated?
The Blowing of the Shofar is one of the most dramatic rituals in Judaism. The Mitzvah, however, is not the blowing of the Shofar; rather the Mitzvah is to listen to its sound. “Lishmoa Kol Shofar- to listen to the Shofar sound.” Many Mitzvot involve the intentional use of a physical and sensory capacity. In the case of the Shofar we are commanded to listen with our ears.
In the age of the Ipod, this is especially hard to do. Never have human beings lived in a time when they can fill their ears with every pleasurable sound and shut out the rest of the world. It used to be we had a few stations we could hear, but now you can personalize what you want to hear, mix your own music, listen to your designer station, fill your time with the airwaves at every moment. I heard a story of a driver who drove off a cliff. At first, the authorities thought it was a suicide, but later they concluded that he was in a daze, listening to his Ipod and simply did not notice the turn and went flying to his death.
This is a new high in blissful unawareness.
But the mitzvah of listening to the Shofar is something entirely different. There is something mysterious about listening to this sound. What are we listening for?
Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav said that when the Shofar blows one hundred times on Rosh Hashannah, a bridge is formed between heaven and earth. According to another sage, the Tiferet Uziel the sounds of the Shofar are a secret language that is only understood in Heaven. We might then imagine from these comments, that when we hear the sound of the Shofar, we are hearing the echoes of Heaven. We are, as it were, overhearing supernal worlds, capturing through a hint of God’s message, apprehending just barely the conversation of angels.
The heavenly voice of the Shofar is much more subtle than listening to the blasts on Rosh Hashannah. The blowing of the Shofar during this season does not all take place on Rosh Hashannah. In fact there are five phases to the Shofar season, some which feature the blast, some of which feature silence. All are part of the symphony of the Shofar, the movements of the Ram’s Horn that make it possible to hear Heaven a bit more clearly. What are these phases?
The first time we have the opportunity to listen to the Shofar is the period of thirty days prior to Rosh Hashannah. The first blast of the Shofar begins on the first day of the preceding month of Ellul. We blow the Shofar on each weekday morning after the daily minyan. We hear the notes, Tekiah-Shevarim-Teruah-Tekiah, but unlike Rosh Hashannah we do not hear the notes announced. Nor do we pronounce a blessing in advance of hearing the Shofar as on Rosh Hashannah.
Ellul in Jewish tradition is understood as an acronym for a verse in the Song of Songs, “I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine-Ani (alef) Ldodi (lamed) vdodi (vav) li (lamed)”, spelling Elul in Hebrew. This hints that Elul is a time of love and connection. The rabbis understood this time as an opportunity for renewed relationship with God. Any attempt to take God seriously in our lives involves self reflection. The Shofar blast is meant to trigger self reflection in us. There was a medieval tradition of taking an hour to meditate each day of Ellul after the blowing of the Shofar. Thus the Shofar during the month of Ellul serves as the equivalent of a mediation gong.
Phase two happens on Erev Rosh Hashannah, the day before the festival. Tradition has us refrain from blowing the Shofar. This abstinence parallels the practice of not eating Matza on Erev Pesah and not sitting in the Sukkah on Erev Sukkot. Listen to two explanations for this intentional omission.
“The ram's-horn is not blown after the prayer (on Erev Rosh Hashannah) as it is on the other days of Elul, in order to mark a halt between the optional blasts of Ellul and obligatory blasts of the New Year, that is to say, between the blasts during Elul which are but a custom, and the blasts on Rosh Hashannah, which the Torah commanded.” [Levush]
Another Explanation: “(The silence of the Shofar on Erev Rosh Hashannah) is done in order to confuse Satan, to keep him ignorant of the coming of Rosh Hashannah when he brings charges against men, and to deceive him to think that the Day of Judgment has already passed. “ [Mateh Moshe]
These sources claim that transitions matter. How we handle transitions is critical. Spiritual traditions value and give meaning to transitions. These passages cause in us an escalation of concern, a marked increase in anxiety, but also a window of opportunity. To help us do the mitzvah of Shofar listening, we must have a silence to get ready. . If Heaven is to become audible, we must have the quiet to listen. The absence of something helps us to feel it more strongly when it reappears. We should not become habituated to the Shofar, to become complacent to its shrill blast.
The tradition of confusing Satan feels more primitive and grates at our modern view of Judaism. But our ancestors felt very vulnerable, that their lives hung in the balance during this time. Rosh Hashannah is Yom Hadin-the Day of Judgment. Satan in Jewish tradition is not a devil, but serves as God’s DA, the prosecutor who presents the faults of each of us before God as Satan does to Job in the Bible. By not blowing the Shofar we ask the court to take a recess, to allow ourselves to prepare our case which we will present in full over the next 10 days.
Phase 3: On Rosh Hashannah the Shofar is blown 100 times. Because the blasts are critical to enabling people to fulfill the Mitzvah of listening, the laws concerning their placement, clarity, and accuracy are quite intricate. The main concern of the Halachah is that the Shofar be blown in a way that is distinct and clear. The law, as it were, wants us to invest in good speakers, to get a good surround sound system so we can hear well.
What is the purpose of the Mitzvah of listening to the Shofar on Rosh Hashannah? According to Maimonides the purpose of the 100 blasts serves to wake us up. He wrote,
“Despite the fact that the blowing of the ram's-horn on Rosh Hashanah is an explicit decree in the Scripture, it is also a crying out, as if to say: ‘Awake, O you sleepers, awake from your sleep! O you slumberers, awake from your slumber! Search your deeds and turn in Teshuvah. Remember your Creator, O you who forget the truth in the vanities of time and go astray all the year after vanity and folly that neither profit nor save. Look to your souls, and better your ways and actions. Let every one of you abandon his evil way and his wicked thought….’” [Maimonides, Hilkhot Teshuvah III.]
Phase 4: The critical period of the Days of Awe is neither Rosh Hashannah nor Yom Kippur. It is the days in between when we are commanded to seek Teshuvah- repentance. The tradition assumes that we have listened during the New Year and that we have moved it up a notch, gone into action mode. Thus the Shofar falls silent during the –‘Aseret Yemai Teshuvah-the 10 days of repentance.‘
This silence is as equally striking as the silence on Erev Rosh Hashannah. The blasts of Elul and Rosh Hashannah function as goads-like the irritating alarm tone in my bedroom alarm clock that grows louder and louder until my discomfort forces me to get out of bed and turn it off. The moment after I turn the darn thing off, I realize that I am standing there; I am out of bed; I am awake although very, very grouchy. This is the role of the Shofar and its immediate aftermath of sustained silence. I realize that I am standing there awake. I am grouchy, but I have work to do!
What are we waking to? I believe the voice of Heaven, the voice of the Shofar is God’s way of forcing us to see our reality without illusion. We can only change when we see the truth. Hearing the truth about ourselves can be very unpleasant.
Rabbi Alan Lew tells a story of a Rabbi who was invited to a congregant’s home to view the first showing of the videotape of the wedding he had recently performed for this man’s daughter. As the tape begins, the rabbi and the cantor are seen standing alone under the wedding canopy, blissfully unaware that the videotape is running. They can be heard making fun of both families and how poorly the parents are adapting to their new status as in-laws. Then the cantor makes a disparaging remark about the bride’s mother’s dress. He calls it a ‘shmatte’. Then the rabbi himself can be heard uttering a profane assessment of the groom’s uncle.
Now imagine if God was playing back an embarrassing tape of yourself and you are looking at it for the first time. We are looking at ourselves unmasked before the Holy of Holies. On the 10 days of Teshuvah, God invites us home to see the real tape, the tape we fool ourselves into thinking does not exist. But if we are awake then the tape is not so surprising. In fact we have taken action to repair the errors and mistakes and wrongs that are so blatantly revealed on the tape of life.
While the mitzvah to listen to the shofar blasts ideally awakens a new awareness within ourselves, the action plan of the 10 days is outwardly directed and focused on our relationships. Jewish tradition requires us to repair the broken human relationships in our lives during this period. We are commanded to face directly those we have wronged, renounce our sin, and ask for forgiveness.
On Yom Kippur we then return to our interior lives and face our relationship with God. On this long day of fasting, it is as if, God is playing back the tape of our behavior in which we assumed that God was not watching. Or better, God plays the tape of our actions in which we assumed we were God, that there was no one or no thing that could question what we were doing or cast doubt on the wisdom or righteousness of our actions. The tape that God plays back to us on the long hours of Yom Kippur is a record of our vanities, our arrogance, our self satisfaction, our obliviousness, our pig headedness, or insensitivity, our inhumanity, our stubbornness, our self-satisfaction. It is only after we have seen this tape that we can hear the Shofar again.
Phase 5 At Neilah, the concluding service of Yom Kippur, we listen to a singular blast of the Shofar, one long, prolonged note. The blast is preceded by the recitation of three short verses: the Shema Yisrael, the Baruch Shem, and finally a verse from 1st Kings, Chapter 18 from the narratives about Elijah the Prophet. In the story, the verse “Adonai Hu Haelohim-Adonai He is the God” are the words spoken by the people when they acknowledge the public miracle of God’s presence on Mt. Carmel. In that story 400 prophets of Baal receive silence to their offering, while Elijah the prophet’s sacrifice is accepted by God. Clearly the blowing of the Shofar at the end of Yom Kippur is meant to remind us of the greatest public vindication of God in the Jewish Bible. We are acknowledging at the end of the Yom Kippur that there is a recorder who makes and safeguards our tape. We are accountable for this tape; we are required to review the tape, make changes, and reconcile with people and God. And our tradition adds that God desires our reconciliation. Only we have to want it also.
The end of Yom Kippur is the purest monotheistic moment of all of Jewish ritual. It is the acknowledgment that there is a moral force in the universe greater than us to whom we are held accountable. The whole process I have described hangs on that very moment at the end of Yom Kippur and that final Tekiah Gedolah that concludes the cycle of the Shofar.
The Shofar cycle is a carefully layered ritual that both builds in intensity and sustains drama by an alternation between a blast of the sounds and silence. The teaching of the Shofar is that awareness must be nursed along. It does not come and go, but must be drawn out, teased out of us. It must be sustained and it must be let go. The ritual leads us to self-awareness and a reconnection with other human beings and ultimately with God.
This is captured by the blessing, a powerful catalyst for the harnessing of our awareness. At the very center of this process we hear the blessing of the Baal Tokea-the Shofar blower, “Baruch Ata Adoshem Eloheinu Melech Haolam Asher Kidshanu Bmitzvotav V’tzivanu Lishmoa Kol Shofar –Blessed are You Hashem, our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and has commanded us to listen to the sound of the Shofar.”
We must listen, during the short blasts, the long blasts, the single blasts and the multiple blasts, the silent blasts and the loud blasts. The blessing is the expression of hope for that we can really hear these blasts and these silences above the noise of our daily lived, the background music, the talk radio that mires us in mindlessness. To achieve this depends on our openness, our will, and our discipline to tune out the static, perform the mitzvah that enables us to hear the sounds of heaven.
Erev Rosh Hashannah 5768 Sept. 12, 2007
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Do you remember the first time you heard the Shofar? How old were you? Where were you? Who were you with? How was it explained to you? How did you feel when you heard the blast? Were you scared? Were you exhilarated?
The Blowing of the Shofar is one of the most dramatic rituals in Judaism. The Mitzvah, however, is not the blowing of the Shofar; rather the Mitzvah is to listen to its sound. “Lishmoa Kol Shofar- to listen to the Shofar sound.” Many Mitzvot involve the intentional use of a physical and sensory capacity. In the case of the Shofar we are commanded to listen with our ears.
In the age of the Ipod, this is especially hard to do. Never have human beings lived in a time when they can fill their ears with every pleasurable sound and shut out the rest of the world. It used to be we had a few stations we could hear, but now you can personalize what you want to hear, mix your own music, listen to your designer station, fill your time with the airwaves at every moment. I heard a story of a driver who drove off a cliff. At first, the authorities thought it was a suicide, but later they concluded that he was in a daze, listening to his Ipod and simply did not notice the turn and went flying to his death.
This is a new high in blissful unawareness.
But the mitzvah of listening to the Shofar is something entirely different. There is something mysterious about listening to this sound. What are we listening for?
Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav said that when the Shofar blows one hundred times on Rosh Hashannah, a bridge is formed between heaven and earth. According to another sage, the Tiferet Uziel the sounds of the Shofar are a secret language that is only understood in Heaven. We might then imagine from these comments, that when we hear the sound of the Shofar, we are hearing the echoes of Heaven. We are, as it were, overhearing supernal worlds, capturing through a hint of God’s message, apprehending just barely the conversation of angels.
The heavenly voice of the Shofar is much more subtle than listening to the blasts on Rosh Hashannah. The blowing of the Shofar during this season does not all take place on Rosh Hashannah. In fact there are five phases to the Shofar season, some which feature the blast, some of which feature silence. All are part of the symphony of the Shofar, the movements of the Ram’s Horn that make it possible to hear Heaven a bit more clearly. What are these phases?
The first time we have the opportunity to listen to the Shofar is the period of thirty days prior to Rosh Hashannah. The first blast of the Shofar begins on the first day of the preceding month of Ellul. We blow the Shofar on each weekday morning after the daily minyan. We hear the notes, Tekiah-Shevarim-Teruah-Tekiah, but unlike Rosh Hashannah we do not hear the notes announced. Nor do we pronounce a blessing in advance of hearing the Shofar as on Rosh Hashannah.
Ellul in Jewish tradition is understood as an acronym for a verse in the Song of Songs, “I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine-Ani (alef) Ldodi (lamed) vdodi (vav) li (lamed)”, spelling Elul in Hebrew. This hints that Elul is a time of love and connection. The rabbis understood this time as an opportunity for renewed relationship with God. Any attempt to take God seriously in our lives involves self reflection. The Shofar blast is meant to trigger self reflection in us. There was a medieval tradition of taking an hour to meditate each day of Ellul after the blowing of the Shofar. Thus the Shofar during the month of Ellul serves as the equivalent of a mediation gong.
Phase two happens on Erev Rosh Hashannah, the day before the festival. Tradition has us refrain from blowing the Shofar. This abstinence parallels the practice of not eating Matza on Erev Pesah and not sitting in the Sukkah on Erev Sukkot. Listen to two explanations for this intentional omission.
“The ram's-horn is not blown after the prayer (on Erev Rosh Hashannah) as it is on the other days of Elul, in order to mark a halt between the optional blasts of Ellul and obligatory blasts of the New Year, that is to say, between the blasts during Elul which are but a custom, and the blasts on Rosh Hashannah, which the Torah commanded.” [Levush]
Another Explanation: “(The silence of the Shofar on Erev Rosh Hashannah) is done in order to confuse Satan, to keep him ignorant of the coming of Rosh Hashannah when he brings charges against men, and to deceive him to think that the Day of Judgment has already passed. “ [Mateh Moshe]
These sources claim that transitions matter. How we handle transitions is critical. Spiritual traditions value and give meaning to transitions. These passages cause in us an escalation of concern, a marked increase in anxiety, but also a window of opportunity. To help us do the mitzvah of Shofar listening, we must have a silence to get ready. . If Heaven is to become audible, we must have the quiet to listen. The absence of something helps us to feel it more strongly when it reappears. We should not become habituated to the Shofar, to become complacent to its shrill blast.
The tradition of confusing Satan feels more primitive and grates at our modern view of Judaism. But our ancestors felt very vulnerable, that their lives hung in the balance during this time. Rosh Hashannah is Yom Hadin-the Day of Judgment. Satan in Jewish tradition is not a devil, but serves as God’s DA, the prosecutor who presents the faults of each of us before God as Satan does to Job in the Bible. By not blowing the Shofar we ask the court to take a recess, to allow ourselves to prepare our case which we will present in full over the next 10 days.
Phase 3: On Rosh Hashannah the Shofar is blown 100 times. Because the blasts are critical to enabling people to fulfill the Mitzvah of listening, the laws concerning their placement, clarity, and accuracy are quite intricate. The main concern of the Halachah is that the Shofar be blown in a way that is distinct and clear. The law, as it were, wants us to invest in good speakers, to get a good surround sound system so we can hear well.
What is the purpose of the Mitzvah of listening to the Shofar on Rosh Hashannah? According to Maimonides the purpose of the 100 blasts serves to wake us up. He wrote,
“Despite the fact that the blowing of the ram's-horn on Rosh Hashanah is an explicit decree in the Scripture, it is also a crying out, as if to say: ‘Awake, O you sleepers, awake from your sleep! O you slumberers, awake from your slumber! Search your deeds and turn in Teshuvah. Remember your Creator, O you who forget the truth in the vanities of time and go astray all the year after vanity and folly that neither profit nor save. Look to your souls, and better your ways and actions. Let every one of you abandon his evil way and his wicked thought….’” [Maimonides, Hilkhot Teshuvah III.]
Phase 4: The critical period of the Days of Awe is neither Rosh Hashannah nor Yom Kippur. It is the days in between when we are commanded to seek Teshuvah- repentance. The tradition assumes that we have listened during the New Year and that we have moved it up a notch, gone into action mode. Thus the Shofar falls silent during the –‘Aseret Yemai Teshuvah-the 10 days of repentance.‘
This silence is as equally striking as the silence on Erev Rosh Hashannah. The blasts of Elul and Rosh Hashannah function as goads-like the irritating alarm tone in my bedroom alarm clock that grows louder and louder until my discomfort forces me to get out of bed and turn it off. The moment after I turn the darn thing off, I realize that I am standing there; I am out of bed; I am awake although very, very grouchy. This is the role of the Shofar and its immediate aftermath of sustained silence. I realize that I am standing there awake. I am grouchy, but I have work to do!
What are we waking to? I believe the voice of Heaven, the voice of the Shofar is God’s way of forcing us to see our reality without illusion. We can only change when we see the truth. Hearing the truth about ourselves can be very unpleasant.
Rabbi Alan Lew tells a story of a Rabbi who was invited to a congregant’s home to view the first showing of the videotape of the wedding he had recently performed for this man’s daughter. As the tape begins, the rabbi and the cantor are seen standing alone under the wedding canopy, blissfully unaware that the videotape is running. They can be heard making fun of both families and how poorly the parents are adapting to their new status as in-laws. Then the cantor makes a disparaging remark about the bride’s mother’s dress. He calls it a ‘shmatte’. Then the rabbi himself can be heard uttering a profane assessment of the groom’s uncle.
Now imagine if God was playing back an embarrassing tape of yourself and you are looking at it for the first time. We are looking at ourselves unmasked before the Holy of Holies. On the 10 days of Teshuvah, God invites us home to see the real tape, the tape we fool ourselves into thinking does not exist. But if we are awake then the tape is not so surprising. In fact we have taken action to repair the errors and mistakes and wrongs that are so blatantly revealed on the tape of life.
While the mitzvah to listen to the shofar blasts ideally awakens a new awareness within ourselves, the action plan of the 10 days is outwardly directed and focused on our relationships. Jewish tradition requires us to repair the broken human relationships in our lives during this period. We are commanded to face directly those we have wronged, renounce our sin, and ask for forgiveness.
On Yom Kippur we then return to our interior lives and face our relationship with God. On this long day of fasting, it is as if, God is playing back the tape of our behavior in which we assumed that God was not watching. Or better, God plays the tape of our actions in which we assumed we were God, that there was no one or no thing that could question what we were doing or cast doubt on the wisdom or righteousness of our actions. The tape that God plays back to us on the long hours of Yom Kippur is a record of our vanities, our arrogance, our self satisfaction, our obliviousness, our pig headedness, or insensitivity, our inhumanity, our stubbornness, our self-satisfaction. It is only after we have seen this tape that we can hear the Shofar again.
Phase 5 At Neilah, the concluding service of Yom Kippur, we listen to a singular blast of the Shofar, one long, prolonged note. The blast is preceded by the recitation of three short verses: the Shema Yisrael, the Baruch Shem, and finally a verse from 1st Kings, Chapter 18 from the narratives about Elijah the Prophet. In the story, the verse “Adonai Hu Haelohim-Adonai He is the God” are the words spoken by the people when they acknowledge the public miracle of God’s presence on Mt. Carmel. In that story 400 prophets of Baal receive silence to their offering, while Elijah the prophet’s sacrifice is accepted by God. Clearly the blowing of the Shofar at the end of Yom Kippur is meant to remind us of the greatest public vindication of God in the Jewish Bible. We are acknowledging at the end of the Yom Kippur that there is a recorder who makes and safeguards our tape. We are accountable for this tape; we are required to review the tape, make changes, and reconcile with people and God. And our tradition adds that God desires our reconciliation. Only we have to want it also.
The end of Yom Kippur is the purest monotheistic moment of all of Jewish ritual. It is the acknowledgment that there is a moral force in the universe greater than us to whom we are held accountable. The whole process I have described hangs on that very moment at the end of Yom Kippur and that final Tekiah Gedolah that concludes the cycle of the Shofar.
The Shofar cycle is a carefully layered ritual that both builds in intensity and sustains drama by an alternation between a blast of the sounds and silence. The teaching of the Shofar is that awareness must be nursed along. It does not come and go, but must be drawn out, teased out of us. It must be sustained and it must be let go. The ritual leads us to self-awareness and a reconnection with other human beings and ultimately with God.
This is captured by the blessing, a powerful catalyst for the harnessing of our awareness. At the very center of this process we hear the blessing of the Baal Tokea-the Shofar blower, “Baruch Ata Adoshem Eloheinu Melech Haolam Asher Kidshanu Bmitzvotav V’tzivanu Lishmoa Kol Shofar –Blessed are You Hashem, our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and has commanded us to listen to the sound of the Shofar.”
We must listen, during the short blasts, the long blasts, the single blasts and the multiple blasts, the silent blasts and the loud blasts. The blessing is the expression of hope for that we can really hear these blasts and these silences above the noise of our daily lived, the background music, the talk radio that mires us in mindlessness. To achieve this depends on our openness, our will, and our discipline to tune out the static, perform the mitzvah that enables us to hear the sounds of heaven.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Some Simple Ways to Build Community on the High Holidays
Giving People More of a Stake in High Holiday Services
15 Elul, 5768/29 September, 2007
As I prepare for my first High Holidays at Temple Beth Shalom, I wanted to give you a peek into some of the things I am planning for our services. There a few tweeks that I will make to give the services a special feeling. While I am spending a lot of time preparing sermons, I also give a considerable amount of time to plan the order of services, a sort of scripting. It is in this planning that you are able to add d imension and depth to a service. Ultimately the quality of the service will be determined by the ‘lev’-the heart that is felt by those who lead and how all of us participate in the service. Making openings for the heart to find expression is one of the keys to planning.
The High Holiday services are a unique opportunity to build a sense of community as well as to create a space for the individual to express his or her spiritual needs. There are a number of communal prayers that are recited just after the Haftarah-the prophetic reading which provide opportunities to acknowledge people who serve and people who have made significant transitions in their lives. During these prayers I will be asking people to come up on the Bimah to honor them. You might be among them, so now you are duly notified.
Rosh Hashannah First Day
Prayer for New Babies: This communal prayer custom is unique to TBS. We call on all parents and grandparents who celebrated the birth of a new child in their families during the past year.
Prayer for the Congregation: I will invite all new members and those who converted to Judaism during the past year to come up to be honored for their decision to join our community and our people.
Prayer for the Country: I will invite to the Bimah those who serve in our armed forces, veterans, civil servants, and public officials within our congregation who will receive our gratitude for serving our country.
Prayer for Jewish Communities: I will invite members of our congregations who come from Jewish communities outside the United States to acknowledge our diversity as a Jewish community.
Prayer for Israel: I will invite all of you who visited Israel during the past year to affirm our commitment as American Jews to the Jewish homeland.
Yom Kippur Day
Yekum Purkan (Prayer on behalf of Scholars) I will invite to the Bimah our members who have served the Jewish community as educators, professionals, and have taught Torah during the past year to wish them success and to extend honor to them for their efforts.
Prayer for the Congregation: I will invite to the Bimah our Board of Directors and all those who have served on synagogue committees during the past year to acknowledge their service to our community.
Prayer for Peace: I will call to the Bimah our worshippers who have volunteered with organizations to help improve the world. We want to acknowledge social activists in our midst who dedicate their lives to social justice and improving the human condition either as professionals or volunteers.
The Temple Beth Shalom Paginator: Hama’amad- (from the word amud-page)
As a kid I sat behind a wooden scoreboard at little league games and put numbers in the slots to tell the score. When I was a young man I went to a shul that had its own type of scoreboard. A child stood behind it and kept on flipping pages with large numbers on it. I wondered if there was some sort of competition on the Bimah between the cantor and the rabbi. Maybe they were keeping thetime of the service. Upon closer observation I saw that this scoreboard announced the pages so that the Rabbi or Cantor did not have to verbally announce the page and detract from the service. When I became a rabbi I commissioned a woodworker to make this contraption and called it a paginator or the Hebrew term Hama’amad.. I then recruited kids who could follow the service to sit on the Bimah and flip the pages so everyone in the congregation knew where we were in the Siddur.
One of my first official acts as rabbi at TBS was to commission a paginator to be made by Master Paginator Builder, Lyle Margulies, of the Northwest Jewish tribe of Seattle. (He is a member of another Beth Shalom up in Seattle, one of the Beth Shalom franchise shuls that dot our fine country.) He hopes to have it to us by the High Holidays where it will bless our Bimah and will help all of you not to lose your place at services ever again (unless the paginator operater falls asleep or misflips a page which will all cause us to be on the wrong page, God forbid.)
There is a method to my madness about something that seems inconsequential or quaint as a synagogue paginator. It is one of the methods I use to increase participation in our worship. It provides an opportunity for young persons to sit on the Bimah and to engage in the service. It removes anxiety from people who have trouble following Hebrew about where we are in the service. It allows the Rabbi and Cantor to focus on leading the prayers. It makes our service more accessible to newcomers. It may even allow us to keep score. I hope you enjoy our new paginator and that it enhances your worship experience at TBS.
Younger Persons: Become a Flipper or a Greeter Usher by joining the Future Mentches of Israel-FMI
The Future Mentches of Israel-FMI-is the name of our loose organization of young volunteers at Temple Beth Shalom. To join all you need to do is volunteer for the following. Parents and Teenagers: Please sign yourself or your children up by responding to this email or by calling and emailing the office before 9/7/07.
Paginator Flippers
I call upon our children to serve as ‘page flippers’ during High Holiday services. Children need to be available to sit at least one hour on the Bimah. Flippers will sit near the Rabbi who will help them to keep pace with the service and flip the correct pages. I recommend that the starting age for a flipper on the High Holidays be 10 and up or any child that has basic Hebrew reading ability. Even if you don’t, please volunteer. Younger children will be given an opportunity to be flippers on Shabbat. Paginating can be counted as community service for those who go to schools that require community service hours. We will be organizing a regular sign up process for services throughout the year after the holidays.
Young Adults as Greeter-Ushers
Speaking of community service, I call upon teenagers, post Bar Mitzvah and up, to serve as greeter ushers during the High Holiday services. All volunteer greeter ushers may apply this activity toward Junior High and High School community service hours. By ushering you get an automatic membership in FMI.
This invitation also goes out to adults at TBS, who want to enhance our services by making them more welcoming. I will be hosting a dessert and 1 hour orientation meeting on how to be a greeter-usher at the synagogue on Sunday, September 9th at 7:00pm in the Beit Midrash which is a prerequisite for getting community service credit. Please note that anyone who serves as a greeter usher is also fulfilling a mitzvah-hachnasat orchim-welcoming the guest. Jewish hospitality is the congregational theme this coming year.
My wife Robbie and I wish each of you a Shanah Tovah,
This will be posted to Rabbiblog. To see previous entries, please ciick http://rabbidovblog.blogspot.com/
Shalom,
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
15 Elul, 5768/29 September, 2007
As I prepare for my first High Holidays at Temple Beth Shalom, I wanted to give you a peek into some of the things I am planning for our services. There a few tweeks that I will make to give the services a special feeling. While I am spending a lot of time preparing sermons, I also give a considerable amount of time to plan the order of services, a sort of scripting. It is in this planning that you are able to add d imension and depth to a service. Ultimately the quality of the service will be determined by the ‘lev’-the heart that is felt by those who lead and how all of us participate in the service. Making openings for the heart to find expression is one of the keys to planning.
The High Holiday services are a unique opportunity to build a sense of community as well as to create a space for the individual to express his or her spiritual needs. There are a number of communal prayers that are recited just after the Haftarah-the prophetic reading which provide opportunities to acknowledge people who serve and people who have made significant transitions in their lives. During these prayers I will be asking people to come up on the Bimah to honor them. You might be among them, so now you are duly notified.
Rosh Hashannah First Day
Prayer for New Babies: This communal prayer custom is unique to TBS. We call on all parents and grandparents who celebrated the birth of a new child in their families during the past year.
Prayer for the Congregation: I will invite all new members and those who converted to Judaism during the past year to come up to be honored for their decision to join our community and our people.
Prayer for the Country: I will invite to the Bimah those who serve in our armed forces, veterans, civil servants, and public officials within our congregation who will receive our gratitude for serving our country.
Prayer for Jewish Communities: I will invite members of our congregations who come from Jewish communities outside the United States to acknowledge our diversity as a Jewish community.
Prayer for Israel: I will invite all of you who visited Israel during the past year to affirm our commitment as American Jews to the Jewish homeland.
Yom Kippur Day
Yekum Purkan (Prayer on behalf of Scholars) I will invite to the Bimah our members who have served the Jewish community as educators, professionals, and have taught Torah during the past year to wish them success and to extend honor to them for their efforts.
Prayer for the Congregation: I will invite to the Bimah our Board of Directors and all those who have served on synagogue committees during the past year to acknowledge their service to our community.
Prayer for Peace: I will call to the Bimah our worshippers who have volunteered with organizations to help improve the world. We want to acknowledge social activists in our midst who dedicate their lives to social justice and improving the human condition either as professionals or volunteers.
The Temple Beth Shalom Paginator: Hama’amad- (from the word amud-page)
As a kid I sat behind a wooden scoreboard at little league games and put numbers in the slots to tell the score. When I was a young man I went to a shul that had its own type of scoreboard. A child stood behind it and kept on flipping pages with large numbers on it. I wondered if there was some sort of competition on the Bimah between the cantor and the rabbi. Maybe they were keeping thetime of the service. Upon closer observation I saw that this scoreboard announced the pages so that the Rabbi or Cantor did not have to verbally announce the page and detract from the service. When I became a rabbi I commissioned a woodworker to make this contraption and called it a paginator or the Hebrew term Hama’amad.. I then recruited kids who could follow the service to sit on the Bimah and flip the pages so everyone in the congregation knew where we were in the Siddur.
One of my first official acts as rabbi at TBS was to commission a paginator to be made by Master Paginator Builder, Lyle Margulies, of the Northwest Jewish tribe of Seattle. (He is a member of another Beth Shalom up in Seattle, one of the Beth Shalom franchise shuls that dot our fine country.) He hopes to have it to us by the High Holidays where it will bless our Bimah and will help all of you not to lose your place at services ever again (unless the paginator operater falls asleep or misflips a page which will all cause us to be on the wrong page, God forbid.)
There is a method to my madness about something that seems inconsequential or quaint as a synagogue paginator. It is one of the methods I use to increase participation in our worship. It provides an opportunity for young persons to sit on the Bimah and to engage in the service. It removes anxiety from people who have trouble following Hebrew about where we are in the service. It allows the Rabbi and Cantor to focus on leading the prayers. It makes our service more accessible to newcomers. It may even allow us to keep score. I hope you enjoy our new paginator and that it enhances your worship experience at TBS.
Younger Persons: Become a Flipper or a Greeter Usher by joining the Future Mentches of Israel-FMI
The Future Mentches of Israel-FMI-is the name of our loose organization of young volunteers at Temple Beth Shalom. To join all you need to do is volunteer for the following. Parents and Teenagers: Please sign yourself or your children up by responding to this email or by calling and emailing the office before 9/7/07.
Paginator Flippers
I call upon our children to serve as ‘page flippers’ during High Holiday services. Children need to be available to sit at least one hour on the Bimah. Flippers will sit near the Rabbi who will help them to keep pace with the service and flip the correct pages. I recommend that the starting age for a flipper on the High Holidays be 10 and up or any child that has basic Hebrew reading ability. Even if you don’t, please volunteer. Younger children will be given an opportunity to be flippers on Shabbat. Paginating can be counted as community service for those who go to schools that require community service hours. We will be organizing a regular sign up process for services throughout the year after the holidays.
Young Adults as Greeter-Ushers
Speaking of community service, I call upon teenagers, post Bar Mitzvah and up, to serve as greeter ushers during the High Holiday services. All volunteer greeter ushers may apply this activity toward Junior High and High School community service hours. By ushering you get an automatic membership in FMI.
This invitation also goes out to adults at TBS, who want to enhance our services by making them more welcoming. I will be hosting a dessert and 1 hour orientation meeting on how to be a greeter-usher at the synagogue on Sunday, September 9th at 7:00pm in the Beit Midrash which is a prerequisite for getting community service credit. Please note that anyone who serves as a greeter usher is also fulfilling a mitzvah-hachnasat orchim-welcoming the guest. Jewish hospitality is the congregational theme this coming year.
My wife Robbie and I wish each of you a Shanah Tovah,
This will be posted to Rabbiblog. To see previous entries, please ciick http://rabbidovblog.blogspot.com/
Shalom,
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
The Story of Eugene Schlesinger
The most enjoyable aspect of coming to a new community is eliciting people’s stories and Jewish journeys. I have been doing a lot of listening, giving opportunities for people to tell their stories in private or in groups. Some of you are ready to tell your story. Others want more time. I hope to hear from all of you over time. Judaism is a story telling religion and people. Our most beloved book-The Haggadah of Pesah-means telling. We are commanded to tell the ‘story’ of the Exodus to our children. By extension, we are commanded to tell our own exodus and birth stories to our loved ones and to our community.
In this Igeret (epistle) I would like to share with you a few stories I heard this week from a long time, beloved, and respected member of our congregation, Eugene Schlesinger. Eugene invited me to his home to spend some time together. He proceeded to share with me his stories of growing up in a small village and surviving the holocaust in Czechoslovakia. Eugene gave me permission to share them with you.
Eugene grew up in very traditional Jewish home in a small village which had a handful of Jewish families. There were similar villages in the area, all with their handful of Jewish families. None of the villages had a synagogue or the capacity to make a minyan. So Shabbat rotated from village to village, with the families from close by villages staying with families in one of the villages to be able to make a minyan and to hold services. They had no rabbi, but in Europe regular Yiddin were well educated religiously and could organize their services without a rabbi. I was very touched by this picture of a movable minyan and the readiness of these pious families to move out of their homes for an entire Shabbat to create community with their ‘landsmen’ in another village. This shows that you do not need a building to create community. What really builds community is the love and desire to share special time with others. Sabbath is what ideally binds the Jews. What a remarkable illustration of its power.
Eugene told me many amazing stories about the holocaust, but this one stands out. When the Nazis came to take him, he had to part with his mother. She told him to wrap his Tallit and Tefillin each morning in order to stay alive. Through four years in the camps Eugene kept her command, wrapping his tallit and tefillin often in the most extreme conditions. Toward the end of the war he escaped from one of the camps as the German war machine was collapsing. He recovered a German army uniform from a dead soldier and put it on to disguise his identity. One day he came upon a field and saw a large assemblage of German soldiers standing with their arms up. He realized that they were prisoners of an advance Russian unit. He started to walk toward the prisoners but was stopped by a Russian soldier who ordered him to hand over his knapsack. He rifled through it and pulled out Eugene’s talit and tefillin bag. He looked at Eugene and said, ‘Ivri (Hebrew)?’. Eugene nodded. The Russian soldier pointed to the forest and Eugene realized that he needed to leave right away. He ran toward the forest to safety and heard the machine gun fire behind him as the German prisoners were gunned down by the Russians. He realized that the Russian soldier was a Jew and realized that Eugene was wearing a German uniform to survive.
A couple of weeks ago at Shabbat morning services I asked people to share with me their most vivid Shabbat memory. Eugene told me that he did not speak up at the service because his most vivid memory was deeply painful. Eugene came to his home village after he was liberated and found himself to be completely alone. Apparently, no one had survived from his family or his neighbors. Friday evening arrived and Eugene lit the candles in his empty house and observed Shabbat by himself. At this point in our conversation, Eugene wept. I was so deeply moved that he shared this Shabbat memory. May Eugene be blessed with many more joyous and loving Shabbat memories. I hope that Beth Shalom will be a place for many of those joyous and loving Shabbatot.
As a young man I came to affirm my Jewishness as I learned of the holocaust and heard accounts of those who came through it. I eventually chose the rabbinate in part because of my passionate commitment to help strengthen the Jewish people after this great trauma. I have been a rabbi for over twenty years and as one would expect it is easy to forget the reasons for choosing the arduous life for the rabbinate. Eugene’s moving and emotional accounts of his experiences brought me right back to my convictions for being a rabbi and serving the Jewish people. I was honored to be in the presence of a person who survived these very dark days and emerged from the crucible a mensch. He has blessed this community, this country, and the Jewish people with his exceptional leadership, generosity, and courage.
I have heard other amazing stories from the folks of Beth Shalom will try to share them or to get the tellers to share them with our community and with the younger generations. Please feel free to tell me your unique story and what brings you to our community.
Shalom, Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
In this Igeret (epistle) I would like to share with you a few stories I heard this week from a long time, beloved, and respected member of our congregation, Eugene Schlesinger. Eugene invited me to his home to spend some time together. He proceeded to share with me his stories of growing up in a small village and surviving the holocaust in Czechoslovakia. Eugene gave me permission to share them with you.
Eugene grew up in very traditional Jewish home in a small village which had a handful of Jewish families. There were similar villages in the area, all with their handful of Jewish families. None of the villages had a synagogue or the capacity to make a minyan. So Shabbat rotated from village to village, with the families from close by villages staying with families in one of the villages to be able to make a minyan and to hold services. They had no rabbi, but in Europe regular Yiddin were well educated religiously and could organize their services without a rabbi. I was very touched by this picture of a movable minyan and the readiness of these pious families to move out of their homes for an entire Shabbat to create community with their ‘landsmen’ in another village. This shows that you do not need a building to create community. What really builds community is the love and desire to share special time with others. Sabbath is what ideally binds the Jews. What a remarkable illustration of its power.
Eugene told me many amazing stories about the holocaust, but this one stands out. When the Nazis came to take him, he had to part with his mother. She told him to wrap his Tallit and Tefillin each morning in order to stay alive. Through four years in the camps Eugene kept her command, wrapping his tallit and tefillin often in the most extreme conditions. Toward the end of the war he escaped from one of the camps as the German war machine was collapsing. He recovered a German army uniform from a dead soldier and put it on to disguise his identity. One day he came upon a field and saw a large assemblage of German soldiers standing with their arms up. He realized that they were prisoners of an advance Russian unit. He started to walk toward the prisoners but was stopped by a Russian soldier who ordered him to hand over his knapsack. He rifled through it and pulled out Eugene’s talit and tefillin bag. He looked at Eugene and said, ‘Ivri (Hebrew)?’. Eugene nodded. The Russian soldier pointed to the forest and Eugene realized that he needed to leave right away. He ran toward the forest to safety and heard the machine gun fire behind him as the German prisoners were gunned down by the Russians. He realized that the Russian soldier was a Jew and realized that Eugene was wearing a German uniform to survive.
A couple of weeks ago at Shabbat morning services I asked people to share with me their most vivid Shabbat memory. Eugene told me that he did not speak up at the service because his most vivid memory was deeply painful. Eugene came to his home village after he was liberated and found himself to be completely alone. Apparently, no one had survived from his family or his neighbors. Friday evening arrived and Eugene lit the candles in his empty house and observed Shabbat by himself. At this point in our conversation, Eugene wept. I was so deeply moved that he shared this Shabbat memory. May Eugene be blessed with many more joyous and loving Shabbat memories. I hope that Beth Shalom will be a place for many of those joyous and loving Shabbatot.
As a young man I came to affirm my Jewishness as I learned of the holocaust and heard accounts of those who came through it. I eventually chose the rabbinate in part because of my passionate commitment to help strengthen the Jewish people after this great trauma. I have been a rabbi for over twenty years and as one would expect it is easy to forget the reasons for choosing the arduous life for the rabbinate. Eugene’s moving and emotional accounts of his experiences brought me right back to my convictions for being a rabbi and serving the Jewish people. I was honored to be in the presence of a person who survived these very dark days and emerged from the crucible a mensch. He has blessed this community, this country, and the Jewish people with his exceptional leadership, generosity, and courage.
I have heard other amazing stories from the folks of Beth Shalom will try to share them or to get the tellers to share them with our community and with the younger generations. Please feel free to tell me your unique story and what brings you to our community.
Shalom, Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Info on the Blog-Flapping at Home Depot
‘Igrot Mei Hof Hayam’-Epistles from the Seashore
Emails from Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Friday, Aug. 10, 2007 Email V.1;E3
To the folks at TBS and cyberspace,
Introducing Rabbiblog
Thank you for the positive feedback to the Epistles from the Seashore. I will try to keep these coming. I will now be posting them on my blog. It is dangerous for Rabbis to discover new media. We tend to be long winded in general and the blog is well suited for rabbinic windbags. I have for the most part learned the art of keeping my live sermons short (It took two decades of rabbinating to do that) but I am still mastering the blog form. In any case you can log onto my blog which is artfully named, Rabbiblog. I know you will want to bookmark this, so here it is: http://rabbidovblog.blogspot.com/ .
My Purple Period
You can read postings from the last three years. Like artists, rabbis go through periods. Picasso had his blue period and rose period. The last nineteen years was my teal period, a Northwest color, still worn occasionally by the Seattle Mariners during Spring training. The last three years were my hot teal period, a time of creativity and new ideas. I started a new non-profit and experimented with some new rabbinic approaches. You can read about them on the blog. Many of these ideas were generated because I was out of the pulpit and had the opportunity to create without the pressures of a pulpit life. So you will see a different side of my rabbinate.
I think I am entering the purple period, when rabbis have the chance to summon experience, wisdom, and insight from years of service. Purple is the color of the priesthood as well, so I hope I demonstrate the worldly wisdom of the Cohanim. In any case, I hope this recent turn in my career will bode well and will be reflected in the blog. Please feel free to comment, since the blog allows for that. While I cannot promise to respond promptly, I will try to do so to realize its potential for communication.
Sermon Postings
I will also post sermons I write out on the blog for your review. I know most people don’t make it to shul or don’t want to come. But people do tell me they would like to read or hear the sermon. Any sermon I write out I will post here on the blog. I will post them after Shabbat after I have delivered the sermon, but for a special fee I will send out previews so you can decide whether it is worth coming to shul for a live version. (If you think I was serious, don’t read on.)
I am currently doing a series of sermons named after an impressive book by my colleage, Rabbi Alan Lew, the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco, (another shul in the Beth Shalom franchise, 100,000 polyester kippot sold!). The book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared gives a beautiful interpretation on how to understand the High Holiday period. Rabbi Lew argues that the High Holiday period runs from Tisha B’av, the fast day in mid summer to the end of Sukkot in the fall. In this framework he gives a deeply spiritual understanding of this annual journey we do as Jews. I have been teaching from this book and adding my own insights during this series of Friday evening sermons which will continue through Sukkot. I suggest that you get the book in preparation for your own holidays. I think it will greatly enhance your experience of services and beyond. Look at the emailed or hard copy, Hasofer Lashavua-The Weekly Scribe, for the sermon schedule.
Shabbat Morning Live
On Shabbat mornings I have introduced a new (for TBS) form of rabbinic presentation called a ‘Limud’. Limud means study. I take a few verses from the portion of the week, illuminate their meaning while also bringing one or two texts from the Talmud * or Midrash . I ask questions, encourage comments, and keep the content rich, stimulating, and funny. My main goal is to show the infinitely fascinating world of the rabbis and how they understood life through our great texts. I was very pleased to see the level of participation, especially from the young people.
Flapping Hands
I was in the Home Depot on one of my recent moving shopping ventures and I saw a teenager with his family in the aisle flapping his hands wildly. As I approached I saw the mother take his hands and put them at his side, pleading softly with him to calm down.
I have an autistic son who I love deeply. He does similar things. His name is Mori. I likes to walk tiptoe and to put his forefingers on his temples. He coos out loud and makes funny faces. I grew to be proud of his eccentricities and the strange encounters his expressions would engender. I melt every time I run into an autistic person in a public space. So when I passed by the family, I commented to the mother, “I have one too.” She turned to me and said with some relief, “So you know what it’s like.” I nodded and smiled and we went on our way.
There is a blessing upon seeing a unique individual: “Baruch ….Mshaneh Haberiot. Blessed are You, Adonai, who has made all your creatures different from one another. “ I said it to myself as I passed and meditated on our shared fate as parents of disabled children. Nothing like going to Home Depot to have meaningful human encounters.
I am attaching the talk I gave about Mori the week before his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. This is one of my favorite sermons. I hope you like it too.
May you have a restful and joyful Shabbat,
A Proper Blessing at a Bar Mitzvah
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Jan. 25, 2003 Shabbat Yitro
Next week our children, Moriel and Fay will be marking their Bnei Mitzvah at Shabbat morning services. During rehearsal this Sunday we practiced the parental blessings. After chanting the Birkat Hacohanim, we started to chant the Baruch shepatarani blessing over our son, Mori. I realized at that moment that I could not really say this blessing over him. I paused for one moment before turning to Fay and practicing saying it over her.
This blessing, which parents recite over children when they reach the age of Bar or Bat Mitzvah, is Baruch ata adoshem eloheinu melech haolam shepatarani meonsho shelazeh. It is translated in the new RA manual as Praised are You, Adonai our God who rules the universe, who has freed us of some responsibilities and conferred new ones upon this child. Perfectly appropriate for Fay, but not for Mori, who will never have the ability to choose responsibility for the observance of Mitzvot. I wondered, what blessing should we say for Mori?
In Parshat Yitro, we celebrate the giving of the Decalogue and remember that great turning point at Sinai. Jews over the generations regard the giving of the law as God’s greatest gift. Every Bar Mitzvah is a reenactment of that great moment when God brings us into a holy way of life. Our sages understood the gift as a precious burden as well. That is why the Bar Mitzvah blessing is formulated in the negative --shepatarani meonsho shelazeh.-God has exempted us (the parents) from the punishment for his transgressions of the Torah.
It is strange when a parent covets the possibility of punishment as part of the vain hope that a child may gain the capacity for conscience.
It is the transgression of the 10th utterance, thou shalt not covet, that a parent of a severely disabled child commits over and over again. I cannot deny that when I see another child Mori’s age, for a fleeting moment I covet his health, his capacity for making friends, his plans for his future. I covet a family’s relaxed air at a restaurant while I sit nervously afraid that Mori might make a scene over food. Paul, the first Christian, so alienated from his Judaism and so misunderstanding of it, at least had it right about thou shalt not covet. This Mitzvah makes you aware of how deep seated jealous longing is and how painfully difficult it is to consistently fulfill this divine command.
On NPR’s Talk of the Nation this week there was an hour devoted to describing the life of families with autistic children and siblings. I was particularly struck by the observations of callers about how afraid they were to go out in public with their autistic children for fear of embarrassment. The expert on the show observed that families with autistic children often shut themselves in their homes because they feel that no one can understand their autistic child or be sensitive enough to respond to his strange behaviors. I listened as the callers described their own peculiar struggles to make what was familiar to them acceptable to the outside world.
As painful as it is, it is totally understandable when people react negatively to a disabled person’s disruptive behavior or strange appearance. We actually find this attitude in the sources. When determining whether or not a Shoteh, a mentally incapacitated individual, is entitled to monetary compensation for insult, one finds this comment in Baba Kama: “It may be said that the Shoteh by himself constitutes a disgrace which is second to none,” meaning that one who is already disgraced to such a degree is not vulnerable to further degradation, and thus is not entitled to compensation.
But here is what Mori’s presence in my life has brought home to me: I believe that one of our main purposes in this life is to progress from gnut to shevah- the Rabbis’ phrase for describing the narrative progression of the Passover Seder. Translate it as the move from degradation to praise--the journey from disgrace to dignity. One such way for us to provide a semblance of that journey to our son is to allow him to participate in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony.
When my daughter Fay began thinking about her Bat Mitzvah she offered to share her Simcha with her brother, Mori. Mori was already 14 at the time and we had not given serious consideration to having a ceremony for him. How could a person who would never be obligated for Mitzvot have a Bar Mitzvah ceremony? But as we thought about combining their simcha, we imagined that this occasion would not only mark Fay’s becoming a commanded Jew, but give Mori a chance to receive loving attention and praise from his community – to be seen.
Each child with autism is an individual and will be different from other children with the same diagnosis. Like every other autistic child, Mori has a unique personality. He is a very affectionate child. He loves to smile, hug, and kiss those around him. He is most of the time very responsive to requests and instructions. He lets you know what he likes and dislikes. He appears to be happy most of the time. He is also a great mystery to us. We do not know the extent of his self-awareness or even his intelligence. While he appears to be low functioning he constantly surprises us with his capacity to respond to complex commands and to show a wide range of emotional expression.
The decision to include Mori in Fay’s Bat Mitzvah ceremony was not an easy one. But it was guided first by Fay’s willingness to share this with her brother. Siblings of severely disabled kids have a special lot in life. They grow up knowing that their lives are often very different from others. They have to develop special sensitivities and responses that most other young people never have to deal with. I greatly admire Fay’s decision to share her special moment.
We did mull over the issue of a joint ceremony, however. We decided to go ahead with it because we were convinced that Mori had the capacity to participate in the rituals with some degree of intention and cooperation. We have rehearsed every week for over four months and he very early on showed his ability and willingness to perform several parts of the service. Recent problems with his medication have made his cooperation less predictable, but I know one thing for sure: he loves to be on the Bimah.
Another reason guided our decision to carry this out. Because of Mori’s disability he remains hidden to the community and unknown by his peers. His strange behaviors are sometimes misunderstood and among some adolescents held up to ridicule. But Mori, like any other young person, deserves a place of dignity in his community. Like any other child he should be given an opportunity to develop and fulfill his potential as a human being.
Finally we decided to do this as a way to celebrate our unique expanded family. Mori and Fay is only one combination. Mori and Zach is another. Mori and Nancy and Ed, his incredible loving guardians are another. Mori and Joanne and the many loving caregivers and teachers are other special relationships. A Bnai Mitzvah ceremony is a family celebration that takes place within community. . In our case we have a very large, unusual family--natural and adopted, Jewish and non-Jewish--who will mark this holy moment.
On one level I hope next week is not different from any other Bar or Bat Mitzvah. I would just like to shep nachas like every other parent for that ceremony that we wait 13 years for as parents. As Rabbi of a congregation I know that I am at the very center of congregational life. But as a parent of a severely disabled child, I also know what it feels like to be on the margins of community. I also know how difficult it is for any family in our situation to share with others our reality that we more often seek to keep out of view. I hope that my speaking about Mori today will encourage other parents who struggle with the demands of special children to know that our community welcomes their children and gives them a special place in our collective life. I hope that this will inspire our Beth Shalom community to actively reach out to families with disabled children and to educate our young to be caring and loving to children with special needs.
There is a beautiful passage in tractate Megillah quoted in the name of Rabbi Yosi: “For a long time I was perplexed by the verse, “And you shall grope at noonday as the blind gropes in the darkness.” (Deut 28:29) Now what difference does it make to a blind man whether it is dark of light? (I didn’t find out) until the following incident occurred. I was once walking on a pitch black night when I saw a blind man walking in the road with a torch in his hand. I said to him, ‘My son, why are you carrying this torch?’ He replied, ‘As long as I have this torch in my hand people see me and save me from the holes and the thorns and the briars.
Some who are disabled know how to let people know that they need help; they can let themselves be seen. Other disabled people need help from loving people to put the torch in their hands so they can be seen. With that assistance we enable our community to respond with love and compassion to help a disabled person avoid the holes and thorns and the briars in life.
So what should we recite for Mori this coming Shabbat when the time comes to give the parental blessing? I have chosen a different blessing: the one we say when seeing something good in the world: Baruch….. Hatov vhametiv. It will be so good to see Mori outside of the shadow--so good to see him next to his sister and brother, so good to see him amongst his community, so good to let him sit, twitching and shouting, bathed in the love and acceptance of both family and friends.
I appreciate the opportunity to share this part of my life with you. Shabbat Shalom.
Emails from Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Friday, Aug. 10, 2007 Email V.1;E3
To the folks at TBS and cyberspace,
Introducing Rabbiblog
Thank you for the positive feedback to the Epistles from the Seashore. I will try to keep these coming. I will now be posting them on my blog. It is dangerous for Rabbis to discover new media. We tend to be long winded in general and the blog is well suited for rabbinic windbags. I have for the most part learned the art of keeping my live sermons short (It took two decades of rabbinating to do that) but I am still mastering the blog form. In any case you can log onto my blog which is artfully named, Rabbiblog. I know you will want to bookmark this, so here it is: http://rabbidovblog.blogspot.com/ .
My Purple Period
You can read postings from the last three years. Like artists, rabbis go through periods. Picasso had his blue period and rose period. The last nineteen years was my teal period, a Northwest color, still worn occasionally by the Seattle Mariners during Spring training. The last three years were my hot teal period, a time of creativity and new ideas. I started a new non-profit and experimented with some new rabbinic approaches. You can read about them on the blog. Many of these ideas were generated because I was out of the pulpit and had the opportunity to create without the pressures of a pulpit life. So you will see a different side of my rabbinate.
I think I am entering the purple period, when rabbis have the chance to summon experience, wisdom, and insight from years of service. Purple is the color of the priesthood as well, so I hope I demonstrate the worldly wisdom of the Cohanim. In any case, I hope this recent turn in my career will bode well and will be reflected in the blog. Please feel free to comment, since the blog allows for that. While I cannot promise to respond promptly, I will try to do so to realize its potential for communication.
Sermon Postings
I will also post sermons I write out on the blog for your review. I know most people don’t make it to shul or don’t want to come. But people do tell me they would like to read or hear the sermon. Any sermon I write out I will post here on the blog. I will post them after Shabbat after I have delivered the sermon, but for a special fee I will send out previews so you can decide whether it is worth coming to shul for a live version. (If you think I was serious, don’t read on.)
I am currently doing a series of sermons named after an impressive book by my colleage, Rabbi Alan Lew, the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco, (another shul in the Beth Shalom franchise, 100,000 polyester kippot sold!). The book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared gives a beautiful interpretation on how to understand the High Holiday period. Rabbi Lew argues that the High Holiday period runs from Tisha B’av, the fast day in mid summer to the end of Sukkot in the fall. In this framework he gives a deeply spiritual understanding of this annual journey we do as Jews. I have been teaching from this book and adding my own insights during this series of Friday evening sermons which will continue through Sukkot. I suggest that you get the book in preparation for your own holidays. I think it will greatly enhance your experience of services and beyond. Look at the emailed or hard copy, Hasofer Lashavua-The Weekly Scribe, for the sermon schedule.
Shabbat Morning Live
On Shabbat mornings I have introduced a new (for TBS) form of rabbinic presentation called a ‘Limud’. Limud means study. I take a few verses from the portion of the week, illuminate their meaning while also bringing one or two texts from the Talmud * or Midrash . I ask questions, encourage comments, and keep the content rich, stimulating, and funny. My main goal is to show the infinitely fascinating world of the rabbis and how they understood life through our great texts. I was very pleased to see the level of participation, especially from the young people.
Flapping Hands
I was in the Home Depot on one of my recent moving shopping ventures and I saw a teenager with his family in the aisle flapping his hands wildly. As I approached I saw the mother take his hands and put them at his side, pleading softly with him to calm down.
I have an autistic son who I love deeply. He does similar things. His name is Mori. I likes to walk tiptoe and to put his forefingers on his temples. He coos out loud and makes funny faces. I grew to be proud of his eccentricities and the strange encounters his expressions would engender. I melt every time I run into an autistic person in a public space. So when I passed by the family, I commented to the mother, “I have one too.” She turned to me and said with some relief, “So you know what it’s like.” I nodded and smiled and we went on our way.
There is a blessing upon seeing a unique individual: “Baruch ….Mshaneh Haberiot. Blessed are You, Adonai, who has made all your creatures different from one another. “ I said it to myself as I passed and meditated on our shared fate as parents of disabled children. Nothing like going to Home Depot to have meaningful human encounters.
I am attaching the talk I gave about Mori the week before his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. This is one of my favorite sermons. I hope you like it too.
May you have a restful and joyful Shabbat,
A Proper Blessing at a Bar Mitzvah
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Jan. 25, 2003 Shabbat Yitro
Next week our children, Moriel and Fay will be marking their Bnei Mitzvah at Shabbat morning services. During rehearsal this Sunday we practiced the parental blessings. After chanting the Birkat Hacohanim, we started to chant the Baruch shepatarani blessing over our son, Mori. I realized at that moment that I could not really say this blessing over him. I paused for one moment before turning to Fay and practicing saying it over her.
This blessing, which parents recite over children when they reach the age of Bar or Bat Mitzvah, is Baruch ata adoshem eloheinu melech haolam shepatarani meonsho shelazeh. It is translated in the new RA manual as Praised are You, Adonai our God who rules the universe, who has freed us of some responsibilities and conferred new ones upon this child. Perfectly appropriate for Fay, but not for Mori, who will never have the ability to choose responsibility for the observance of Mitzvot. I wondered, what blessing should we say for Mori?
In Parshat Yitro, we celebrate the giving of the Decalogue and remember that great turning point at Sinai. Jews over the generations regard the giving of the law as God’s greatest gift. Every Bar Mitzvah is a reenactment of that great moment when God brings us into a holy way of life. Our sages understood the gift as a precious burden as well. That is why the Bar Mitzvah blessing is formulated in the negative --shepatarani meonsho shelazeh.-God has exempted us (the parents) from the punishment for his transgressions of the Torah.
It is strange when a parent covets the possibility of punishment as part of the vain hope that a child may gain the capacity for conscience.
It is the transgression of the 10th utterance, thou shalt not covet, that a parent of a severely disabled child commits over and over again. I cannot deny that when I see another child Mori’s age, for a fleeting moment I covet his health, his capacity for making friends, his plans for his future. I covet a family’s relaxed air at a restaurant while I sit nervously afraid that Mori might make a scene over food. Paul, the first Christian, so alienated from his Judaism and so misunderstanding of it, at least had it right about thou shalt not covet. This Mitzvah makes you aware of how deep seated jealous longing is and how painfully difficult it is to consistently fulfill this divine command.
On NPR’s Talk of the Nation this week there was an hour devoted to describing the life of families with autistic children and siblings. I was particularly struck by the observations of callers about how afraid they were to go out in public with their autistic children for fear of embarrassment. The expert on the show observed that families with autistic children often shut themselves in their homes because they feel that no one can understand their autistic child or be sensitive enough to respond to his strange behaviors. I listened as the callers described their own peculiar struggles to make what was familiar to them acceptable to the outside world.
As painful as it is, it is totally understandable when people react negatively to a disabled person’s disruptive behavior or strange appearance. We actually find this attitude in the sources. When determining whether or not a Shoteh, a mentally incapacitated individual, is entitled to monetary compensation for insult, one finds this comment in Baba Kama: “It may be said that the Shoteh by himself constitutes a disgrace which is second to none,” meaning that one who is already disgraced to such a degree is not vulnerable to further degradation, and thus is not entitled to compensation.
But here is what Mori’s presence in my life has brought home to me: I believe that one of our main purposes in this life is to progress from gnut to shevah- the Rabbis’ phrase for describing the narrative progression of the Passover Seder. Translate it as the move from degradation to praise--the journey from disgrace to dignity. One such way for us to provide a semblance of that journey to our son is to allow him to participate in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony.
When my daughter Fay began thinking about her Bat Mitzvah she offered to share her Simcha with her brother, Mori. Mori was already 14 at the time and we had not given serious consideration to having a ceremony for him. How could a person who would never be obligated for Mitzvot have a Bar Mitzvah ceremony? But as we thought about combining their simcha, we imagined that this occasion would not only mark Fay’s becoming a commanded Jew, but give Mori a chance to receive loving attention and praise from his community – to be seen.
Each child with autism is an individual and will be different from other children with the same diagnosis. Like every other autistic child, Mori has a unique personality. He is a very affectionate child. He loves to smile, hug, and kiss those around him. He is most of the time very responsive to requests and instructions. He lets you know what he likes and dislikes. He appears to be happy most of the time. He is also a great mystery to us. We do not know the extent of his self-awareness or even his intelligence. While he appears to be low functioning he constantly surprises us with his capacity to respond to complex commands and to show a wide range of emotional expression.
The decision to include Mori in Fay’s Bat Mitzvah ceremony was not an easy one. But it was guided first by Fay’s willingness to share this with her brother. Siblings of severely disabled kids have a special lot in life. They grow up knowing that their lives are often very different from others. They have to develop special sensitivities and responses that most other young people never have to deal with. I greatly admire Fay’s decision to share her special moment.
We did mull over the issue of a joint ceremony, however. We decided to go ahead with it because we were convinced that Mori had the capacity to participate in the rituals with some degree of intention and cooperation. We have rehearsed every week for over four months and he very early on showed his ability and willingness to perform several parts of the service. Recent problems with his medication have made his cooperation less predictable, but I know one thing for sure: he loves to be on the Bimah.
Another reason guided our decision to carry this out. Because of Mori’s disability he remains hidden to the community and unknown by his peers. His strange behaviors are sometimes misunderstood and among some adolescents held up to ridicule. But Mori, like any other young person, deserves a place of dignity in his community. Like any other child he should be given an opportunity to develop and fulfill his potential as a human being.
Finally we decided to do this as a way to celebrate our unique expanded family. Mori and Fay is only one combination. Mori and Zach is another. Mori and Nancy and Ed, his incredible loving guardians are another. Mori and Joanne and the many loving caregivers and teachers are other special relationships. A Bnai Mitzvah ceremony is a family celebration that takes place within community. . In our case we have a very large, unusual family--natural and adopted, Jewish and non-Jewish--who will mark this holy moment.
On one level I hope next week is not different from any other Bar or Bat Mitzvah. I would just like to shep nachas like every other parent for that ceremony that we wait 13 years for as parents. As Rabbi of a congregation I know that I am at the very center of congregational life. But as a parent of a severely disabled child, I also know what it feels like to be on the margins of community. I also know how difficult it is for any family in our situation to share with others our reality that we more often seek to keep out of view. I hope that my speaking about Mori today will encourage other parents who struggle with the demands of special children to know that our community welcomes their children and gives them a special place in our collective life. I hope that this will inspire our Beth Shalom community to actively reach out to families with disabled children and to educate our young to be caring and loving to children with special needs.
There is a beautiful passage in tractate Megillah quoted in the name of Rabbi Yosi: “For a long time I was perplexed by the verse, “And you shall grope at noonday as the blind gropes in the darkness.” (Deut 28:29) Now what difference does it make to a blind man whether it is dark of light? (I didn’t find out) until the following incident occurred. I was once walking on a pitch black night when I saw a blind man walking in the road with a torch in his hand. I said to him, ‘My son, why are you carrying this torch?’ He replied, ‘As long as I have this torch in my hand people see me and save me from the holes and the thorns and the briars.
Some who are disabled know how to let people know that they need help; they can let themselves be seen. Other disabled people need help from loving people to put the torch in their hands so they can be seen. With that assistance we enable our community to respond with love and compassion to help a disabled person avoid the holes and thorns and the briars in life.
So what should we recite for Mori this coming Shabbat when the time comes to give the parental blessing? I have chosen a different blessing: the one we say when seeing something good in the world: Baruch….. Hatov vhametiv. It will be so good to see Mori outside of the shadow--so good to see him next to his sister and brother, so good to see him amongst his community, so good to let him sit, twitching and shouting, bathed in the love and acceptance of both family and friends.
I appreciate the opportunity to share this part of my life with you. Shabbat Shalom.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
The Torah as a Way of Wisdom
Torah as a Way of Wisdom
How I Bring Torah to You
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Shabbat Devarim 7/21/07
In selecting me as your rabbi, you have entrusted to me the interpretation of the Torah. I serve as your mediator between the tradition and yourselves. That is the classic role of the rabbi, a teacher who makes the Torah relevant, meaningful, and authoritative in the lives of each generation.
Given this role you have asked me to fill in your lives, I thought it wise to share with you a bit of my approach to teaching Torah. It is Chutzpadik of me to just start giving you sermons and Divrei Torah without sharing with you how I approach teaching and interpreting the Torah. How do I mediate this vast tradition to you? And what makes my approach different from others who seek to make this text relevant and meaningful to people?
We live during a time when the Bible has again become a controversial book. Recently I heard an account of the new creation museum in Kentucky. The $27 million museum was funded by evangelists and features the same set designer who developed the Jaws exhibit at Universal Studios. The museum is the reverse of a natural history museum. Its purpose is to present the biblical account of creation as fact using quasi scientific justifications. Its primary purpose is to show that the world is 6000 years old (or to be more precise it is 5767 years old. (Read the NY Times Review of the Museum) It is a monument to the literal reading of scripture which rejects other ways of knowing nature, history, and the human experience.
The website of the museum states proudly, “The Bible speaks for itself at the Creation Museum. We’ve just paved the way to a greater understanding of the tenets of creation and redemption. Our exhibit halls are gilded with truth, our gardens teem with the visible signs of life.” (Read Creation Museum Website)
There are many in our country and around the world who read scripture with piety and absolute faith that the text is never wrong and its truth overwhelms all other claims to truth. This is because the Bible, according to these readers is unlike any other book; it is the product of a divine hand. Of course, each group of readers denies the truth of other groups of pious readers. Each group of readers thinks its reading is the only way to read the text.
On the other side of this view of the Bible stands a newly strident group of antagonists, culture warriors against the Bible. Popular books like the End of Faith and the God Delusion pummel the Bible as a book of dangerous folly and antiquated world view. This is not new. The attempt to criticize the bible, to diminish its sanctity, and to reduce its cultural and religious influence began with Spinoza in the 17th century.
In a skeptical secular culture the Bible can at best teach us parochial and historical truths about the beliefs of the ancient children of Israel. It is the Jew’s national book, which is in fact, how it is taught in Israel in the secular schools. But the more radicalized critics in our time, especially since 9/11, see the Bible and other religious scriptures such as the Koran as lethal sources of fanatic faith and religious narrowness. This view is held so strongly that a recent attempt to offer a course on religion and faith at Harvard University was defeated by a faculty protest.
Ultimately this view leads to the rejection of the Bible as an essential book for a literate person.
A few years ago I was asked to give a lecture about Judaism at an elite private high school in Seattle. One of my kids from the youth group was a student there. She warned me that the kids did not know the Bible at all. I taught one of the Genesis stories about Abraham, and indeed, outside of my student, the 60 others in the class did not know who Abraham was.
Our culture is polarized over the bible, with one side reading it with super reverence and the other disparaging and dismissing its relevance. One side elevates the bible to infallibility while the other rants about its folly.
We are reading the Torah at this present polarizing cultural moment. We cannot take the Torah for granted. But then how should we read and study it? What role does it play in our lives?
I was inspired to do this teaching from Leon Kass’s excellent book, Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Kass argues that we must read the Bible as a source or wisdom. It is much broader than the narrow role claimed by biblical antagonists but it is not the singular source of truth claimed by the pious reader. He calls for a philosophic reading of the Bible by which he means an effort of wisdom seeking and wisdom loving. This is a way of reading the Bible in which we “single mindedly and whole heartedly-yet thoughtfully and self-critically seek to discover the truth about the world and our place within it and to find thereby guidance for how we are to live. “ (p. 1)
Kass adds that the Biblical narrative is a “vehicle for conveying the timeless psychic and social elements of principles of human life in all their moral ambiguity. The stories cast a powerful light, for example on the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, shame, guilt, anger, and the human response to mortality. The Bible shows us not so much what happened as what always happens in the realm of human experience. By holding up a mirror in which we readers can discover in ourselves the reasons why human life is so bittersweet and why uninstructed human beings often get it wrong.”
The Bible is concerned with this key question according to Kass:
Is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life, responsive to both the promise and the peril of the human creature, that accords with a human’s true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?
The key term here is “way of life”. We seek guidance on how to live. As a rabbi, I am dedicated to helping people live lives of meaning and self awareness. Such a life must lead to action and to building full and meaningful relationships with a large web of others, partners, families, communities, peoples, strangers, and enemies.
The question is not merely meant for religious people. My teaching is for both secular and religious people, more precisely to anyone who seeks a broader and deeper life, anyone who is asking serious questions about life, and anyone who fights against falling into the pit of purposelessness, cynicism and hopelessness.
How then do I approach teaching Torah?
1. I try to understand the text in its own terms, but also try to show how such an understanding may address us in our real lives.
2. That the Torah and the bible in general when fully understood helps to illuminate the most important and enduring concerns of our experience as human beings.
3. That the Torah and the Jewish tradition have a unique approach to the questions of how to live an ethical and spiritual life which is not only worth preserving but should be more widely known.
4. I open the text as a possibility and entertain different readings and interpretations with the conviction that the multiplicity of readings gets us closer to the truth. This is also a distinct and honored Jewish approach.
Is there a prerequisite for reading the Bible? Ironically the fanatic believer and disbeliever agree. The believer argues that a blind faith must be prerequisite to know the Bible’s teaching. The unbeliever agrees and declares the Bible irrelevant because his he regards his faithlessness makes the Bible a closed book for him.
I ask every reader, everyone who bothers to come to shul and to listen to the Torah, to try a third option: to foster an attitude of thoughtful engagement, to suspend belief in the truth of any biblical text, and to be open to where the text may take us when we explore it deeply.
Biblical texts when read in this way offer a gift which makes reading them a great and unexpected pleasure. The Bible is a sparse text, filled with “ambiguity, reticence, and a lack of editorial judgment” that invite us to interpret and argue over its meaning. This is truly Judaism’s unique way of understanding the Bible. We have always recognized the open form of the biblical text. We can sense its reluctance to offer us final and indubitable interpretations. The Bible and subsequent Jewish literature help to cultivate and openness, thoughtfulness, and modesty about our own understanding. This according to Kass is the hallmark of the pursuit of wisdom.
Do we want to devote our lives to the pursuit of wisdom? Where do we find wisdom in our world today? What are the choices and what are the paths? The mindless life is the choice of most, awash in a sea of chattering media and numbing entertainments. My job is to make it easier for you to find wisdom in the cacophonies of modern life, to focus on this book as the say in Long Beach-an oil well-a source of rich wisdom hidden deep within our ancient text. May I be able to inspire in you a return to this book and the capacity to share its insights with those who you encounter in your journey of life.
How I Bring Torah to You
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Shabbat Devarim 7/21/07
In selecting me as your rabbi, you have entrusted to me the interpretation of the Torah. I serve as your mediator between the tradition and yourselves. That is the classic role of the rabbi, a teacher who makes the Torah relevant, meaningful, and authoritative in the lives of each generation.
Given this role you have asked me to fill in your lives, I thought it wise to share with you a bit of my approach to teaching Torah. It is Chutzpadik of me to just start giving you sermons and Divrei Torah without sharing with you how I approach teaching and interpreting the Torah. How do I mediate this vast tradition to you? And what makes my approach different from others who seek to make this text relevant and meaningful to people?
We live during a time when the Bible has again become a controversial book. Recently I heard an account of the new creation museum in Kentucky. The $27 million museum was funded by evangelists and features the same set designer who developed the Jaws exhibit at Universal Studios. The museum is the reverse of a natural history museum. Its purpose is to present the biblical account of creation as fact using quasi scientific justifications. Its primary purpose is to show that the world is 6000 years old (or to be more precise it is 5767 years old. (Read the NY Times Review of the Museum) It is a monument to the literal reading of scripture which rejects other ways of knowing nature, history, and the human experience.
The website of the museum states proudly, “The Bible speaks for itself at the Creation Museum. We’ve just paved the way to a greater understanding of the tenets of creation and redemption. Our exhibit halls are gilded with truth, our gardens teem with the visible signs of life.” (Read Creation Museum Website)
There are many in our country and around the world who read scripture with piety and absolute faith that the text is never wrong and its truth overwhelms all other claims to truth. This is because the Bible, according to these readers is unlike any other book; it is the product of a divine hand. Of course, each group of readers denies the truth of other groups of pious readers. Each group of readers thinks its reading is the only way to read the text.
On the other side of this view of the Bible stands a newly strident group of antagonists, culture warriors against the Bible. Popular books like the End of Faith and the God Delusion pummel the Bible as a book of dangerous folly and antiquated world view. This is not new. The attempt to criticize the bible, to diminish its sanctity, and to reduce its cultural and religious influence began with Spinoza in the 17th century.
In a skeptical secular culture the Bible can at best teach us parochial and historical truths about the beliefs of the ancient children of Israel. It is the Jew’s national book, which is in fact, how it is taught in Israel in the secular schools. But the more radicalized critics in our time, especially since 9/11, see the Bible and other religious scriptures such as the Koran as lethal sources of fanatic faith and religious narrowness. This view is held so strongly that a recent attempt to offer a course on religion and faith at Harvard University was defeated by a faculty protest.
Ultimately this view leads to the rejection of the Bible as an essential book for a literate person.
A few years ago I was asked to give a lecture about Judaism at an elite private high school in Seattle. One of my kids from the youth group was a student there. She warned me that the kids did not know the Bible at all. I taught one of the Genesis stories about Abraham, and indeed, outside of my student, the 60 others in the class did not know who Abraham was.
Our culture is polarized over the bible, with one side reading it with super reverence and the other disparaging and dismissing its relevance. One side elevates the bible to infallibility while the other rants about its folly.
We are reading the Torah at this present polarizing cultural moment. We cannot take the Torah for granted. But then how should we read and study it? What role does it play in our lives?
I was inspired to do this teaching from Leon Kass’s excellent book, Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Kass argues that we must read the Bible as a source or wisdom. It is much broader than the narrow role claimed by biblical antagonists but it is not the singular source of truth claimed by the pious reader. He calls for a philosophic reading of the Bible by which he means an effort of wisdom seeking and wisdom loving. This is a way of reading the Bible in which we “single mindedly and whole heartedly-yet thoughtfully and self-critically seek to discover the truth about the world and our place within it and to find thereby guidance for how we are to live. “ (p. 1)
Kass adds that the Biblical narrative is a “vehicle for conveying the timeless psychic and social elements of principles of human life in all their moral ambiguity. The stories cast a powerful light, for example on the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, shame, guilt, anger, and the human response to mortality. The Bible shows us not so much what happened as what always happens in the realm of human experience. By holding up a mirror in which we readers can discover in ourselves the reasons why human life is so bittersweet and why uninstructed human beings often get it wrong.”
The Bible is concerned with this key question according to Kass:
Is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life, responsive to both the promise and the peril of the human creature, that accords with a human’s true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?
The key term here is “way of life”. We seek guidance on how to live. As a rabbi, I am dedicated to helping people live lives of meaning and self awareness. Such a life must lead to action and to building full and meaningful relationships with a large web of others, partners, families, communities, peoples, strangers, and enemies.
The question is not merely meant for religious people. My teaching is for both secular and religious people, more precisely to anyone who seeks a broader and deeper life, anyone who is asking serious questions about life, and anyone who fights against falling into the pit of purposelessness, cynicism and hopelessness.
How then do I approach teaching Torah?
1. I try to understand the text in its own terms, but also try to show how such an understanding may address us in our real lives.
2. That the Torah and the bible in general when fully understood helps to illuminate the most important and enduring concerns of our experience as human beings.
3. That the Torah and the Jewish tradition have a unique approach to the questions of how to live an ethical and spiritual life which is not only worth preserving but should be more widely known.
4. I open the text as a possibility and entertain different readings and interpretations with the conviction that the multiplicity of readings gets us closer to the truth. This is also a distinct and honored Jewish approach.
Is there a prerequisite for reading the Bible? Ironically the fanatic believer and disbeliever agree. The believer argues that a blind faith must be prerequisite to know the Bible’s teaching. The unbeliever agrees and declares the Bible irrelevant because his he regards his faithlessness makes the Bible a closed book for him.
I ask every reader, everyone who bothers to come to shul and to listen to the Torah, to try a third option: to foster an attitude of thoughtful engagement, to suspend belief in the truth of any biblical text, and to be open to where the text may take us when we explore it deeply.
Biblical texts when read in this way offer a gift which makes reading them a great and unexpected pleasure. The Bible is a sparse text, filled with “ambiguity, reticence, and a lack of editorial judgment” that invite us to interpret and argue over its meaning. This is truly Judaism’s unique way of understanding the Bible. We have always recognized the open form of the biblical text. We can sense its reluctance to offer us final and indubitable interpretations. The Bible and subsequent Jewish literature help to cultivate and openness, thoughtfulness, and modesty about our own understanding. This according to Kass is the hallmark of the pursuit of wisdom.
Do we want to devote our lives to the pursuit of wisdom? Where do we find wisdom in our world today? What are the choices and what are the paths? The mindless life is the choice of most, awash in a sea of chattering media and numbing entertainments. My job is to make it easier for you to find wisdom in the cacophonies of modern life, to focus on this book as the say in Long Beach-an oil well-a source of rich wisdom hidden deep within our ancient text. May I be able to inspire in you a return to this book and the capacity to share its insights with those who you encounter in your journey of life.
A Mourning Mover and an Unmovable Cart
‘Igrot Mei Hof Hayam’-Epistles from the Seashore
Emails from Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 Email #2
Emails from Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 Email #2
To my TBS and cyberspace friends,
Temple is an interesting term for a Conservative congregation. In the 50s many Conservative and almost almost all Reform congregations were called ‘Temple’. Jews historically did not call their synagogues ‘Temple’, out of respect to the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem (Beit Hamikdash). Rather synagogues were called in Hebrew ‘Kehilah Kedoshah’ (Holy Congregation), (Adat) Assembly of …. , or Beit ….. (House of ….). The term Temple came into popularity in the 50s as a way to give synagogues a sense of greater dignity and majesty than had been associated with them in the past. It is no longer common for Conservative congregations to be called Temple, so I won’t use the term by itself. But I do respect the local tradition of designating our synagogue as a Temple.
I have been calling members from the roster bit by bit to say hello. I have found that there are some errors with the phone numbers. Because of this I have met some interesting people I would have not met otherwise. Instead of John Williams I met a friendly person named Brian who told me all the calls he got for John. He told me his life story and how appreciative he was to talk to a rabbi for the first time. I told him he was always welcome to come to TBS even though he was not Jewish and that we offered free circumcisions.
In the course of these errant calls I have met
· A tattoo artist
· A pornographic movie maker
· A full time surfer
· The mayor of Los Angeles
· A Laotian Shaman
I am grateful for this opportunity to meet such interesting people. If you feel this is wasting the rabbi’s time, please send in your amended membership form and give us your most updated information and I might be able to talk to you.
On Sunday I met with a Havurah of TBS to begin what I hope is a frequent encounter with small groups within the congregation. I asked people to share their Jewish journeys and shared my own. What followed was a most fascinating telling of people’s Jewish stories. One person was a survivor of the camps and told a touching story about how she met her American husband as a refugee in a mid-Western town. Another person told how he discovered he was Jewish in his 40s after having been brought up as a Christian. Another person told how they got out of Germany on the last boat and living in England with a new family during the war. There were many more amazing stories.
The participants in this Havurah had been meeting monthly for over 10 years, but had never shared their personal stories in this manner. This is something I hope to do with all of you. I want to hear your stories and have you share them with your friends and family. This is the way we build community. After all, the Jews are a storytelling people. The word, Haggadah (used for the Passover story), means ‘telling’. When we tell our stories we make meaningful connections and build lasting relationships.
Please let me know if you would like to host a gathering at your home with your Havurah or friends from the synagogue so you can experience this special time of storytelling and connecting to the hopeful future of our congregation.
Last Friday my movers finally came. One of the movers was a local Black man who helped the driver to unload my boxes. At the end of schlepping all my things we sat down for some refreshment. He asked me about my family and I asked him about his. He told me that his mother had died the night before. I asked him to talk about his mother and her life. I asked him how he could work given his loss. He told me that he wanted to work to get his mind off his sorrow and to earn a few dollars to help toward the funeral.
I gave him a generous tip and watched him as he walked away to catch the bus. Loss is so surreal. We try to keep the routine to diminish its shattering impact. I did not feel comfortable knowing my stuff was born by a mourner. The restrained grief sticks to my boxes and furnishings. I felt sorrow for him to have to work instead of being with his family.
I have been shopping a lot of late as I have had to acquire some household items to help in my settling in. I was at the new Target near the shul on Atlantic which just reopened (Yes, a new shopping opportunity in our neighborhood!). I was with my wife, Robbie, and we had parked our car on the street. As I made my way with my cart to the ramp leading to street, the cart jammed and would not go further. I kept on trying to free the wheel and to push the cart, but it refused to budge. I yelled out to Robbie, “I can’t move! I can’t move! I kept on trying for about 5 minutes until a Target employee came buy, helped unload my things and bring them to the parked car. Then he told me that the wheels have electronic sensors which when the cart reaches the ramp causes them to lock to prevent people from going down the ramp and possibly walking away with the cart.
What happened to the days when carts moved without effort? The tradition talks about the ‘locking of the gates’ on Yom Kippur. We live in a world of secret locks and gates. It is not as easy to get around in a world of multiple fears and insecurities. The next time you get stuck, look around for electronic sensors and wonder at how easier it is for things to be locked down in our world.
Shalom and Kol Tuv,
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Southern California Boy
July 20, 2007-5th Av, 5767
To my new Southern California friends,
At this writing I am starting my first week at Beth Shalom. Thank you for the many warm invitations, calls, and notes from people. I am adjusting rapidly. It is hard to get used to the sunny days following one after another. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest for several years, I had come to expect gray and overcast skies most of the time. I went to Walgreens and bought a lot of suntan lotion.
I have noticed a number of things about my move back to S. California. There are a lot of cars here. Cars and anything related to cars are everywhere. The freeway is full of them and so are the parking lots.
I have also noticed that the barbecue sections in the hardware stores are huge with dozens of different types of cookers. There are even Shabbat barbecues that stop cooking before Shabbat and turn into heating trays. I figure that if you have sunny days all the time, then there is a lot more time to barbecue. That is the most plausible explanation or S. California must have more manly men than the Pacific Northwest. In any case, I am trying to not covet my neighbor’s barbecue which is an explicit prohibition in the Torah.
I have also noticed that there are four public radio stations that I can pick up on my car radio. In Seattle we only had two. How to choose? I also realize that there are a lot more baseball teams in the area. I only had an American League team up in Seattle and they had to have a special roof to prevent the rain from falling on the players and the fans. .
I had the opportunity to meet Maury Wills, the Dodger great during my visit in June. I told him I was a Giant fan and almost ended the conversation right there and then. But he is a generous and understanding man. He signed a baseball for my father and called Sandy Koufax to tell him that he was schmoozing with a rabbi. We only got his answering machine. Too bad.
Before coming to Long Beach I was in Israel for 10 days. My trip helped me to acclimate to the weather here in Long Beach. I am much better adjusted than having come directly from Seattle. In Israel I graduated as a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute where I have been on a fellowship for four years. The fellowship involved two visits to Jerusalem each year and a weekly commitment to study with the Hartman scholars. This was a fantastic experience for me. I hope to share with you in the coming months and years some of the great learning I did in this program.
The other purpose of my visit was to celebrate my parent’s 55th wedding anniversary with my brothers and my Israeli family. We had a very lovely family reunion and managed to bring under one roof a very diverse family. One part of the family is very ultra-orthodox. Another brother of mine is gay and his partner is a Reform Cantor. My other brother married a convert and has two children who are not recognized by the ultra Orthodox part of the family. And I am a Conservative rabbi. We cover all the bases of Jewish life. But we all had a good time honoring my parents for their successful union. I call them the parents of the Jewish people.
August is a slow month for everybody but Rabbis. We start working on our High Holiday sermons and the fall schedule. I will continue getting to know the community better and setting a direction for our community. I encourage you to get in touch with me as I get to know the members of the congregation. You can reach me at my email at rabbi@tbslb.org. Enjoy the rest of the summer.
Shalom, Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
To my new Southern California friends,
At this writing I am starting my first week at Beth Shalom. Thank you for the many warm invitations, calls, and notes from people. I am adjusting rapidly. It is hard to get used to the sunny days following one after another. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest for several years, I had come to expect gray and overcast skies most of the time. I went to Walgreens and bought a lot of suntan lotion.
I have noticed a number of things about my move back to S. California. There are a lot of cars here. Cars and anything related to cars are everywhere. The freeway is full of them and so are the parking lots.
I have also noticed that the barbecue sections in the hardware stores are huge with dozens of different types of cookers. There are even Shabbat barbecues that stop cooking before Shabbat and turn into heating trays. I figure that if you have sunny days all the time, then there is a lot more time to barbecue. That is the most plausible explanation or S. California must have more manly men than the Pacific Northwest. In any case, I am trying to not covet my neighbor’s barbecue which is an explicit prohibition in the Torah.
I have also noticed that there are four public radio stations that I can pick up on my car radio. In Seattle we only had two. How to choose? I also realize that there are a lot more baseball teams in the area. I only had an American League team up in Seattle and they had to have a special roof to prevent the rain from falling on the players and the fans. .
I had the opportunity to meet Maury Wills, the Dodger great during my visit in June. I told him I was a Giant fan and almost ended the conversation right there and then. But he is a generous and understanding man. He signed a baseball for my father and called Sandy Koufax to tell him that he was schmoozing with a rabbi. We only got his answering machine. Too bad.
Before coming to Long Beach I was in Israel for 10 days. My trip helped me to acclimate to the weather here in Long Beach. I am much better adjusted than having come directly from Seattle. In Israel I graduated as a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute where I have been on a fellowship for four years. The fellowship involved two visits to Jerusalem each year and a weekly commitment to study with the Hartman scholars. This was a fantastic experience for me. I hope to share with you in the coming months and years some of the great learning I did in this program.
The other purpose of my visit was to celebrate my parent’s 55th wedding anniversary with my brothers and my Israeli family. We had a very lovely family reunion and managed to bring under one roof a very diverse family. One part of the family is very ultra-orthodox. Another brother of mine is gay and his partner is a Reform Cantor. My other brother married a convert and has two children who are not recognized by the ultra Orthodox part of the family. And I am a Conservative rabbi. We cover all the bases of Jewish life. But we all had a good time honoring my parents for their successful union. I call them the parents of the Jewish people.
August is a slow month for everybody but Rabbis. We start working on our High Holiday sermons and the fall schedule. I will continue getting to know the community better and setting a direction for our community. I encourage you to get in touch with me as I get to know the members of the congregation. You can reach me at my email at rabbi@tbslb.org. Enjoy the rest of the summer.
Shalom, Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
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