Finding our holy, persuasive voices

Dvar Torah:  Parshat Vayera

5774/2013

In late June of 1863, Isidor Bush, Jewish leader of the German-American community in St. Louis Missouri, spoke his mind that emancipation of slaves was absolutely necessary in the face of a state government that favored 1876 as the year for emancipation of slaves.

Here are some of his concluding words:

“I pray you have pity for yourselves, not for them.  Slavery demoralizes, slavery fanaticism binds you; it has arrayed brother against brother, son against father; it has destroyed God’s noblest work-a free and happy people…”

A lone, strong voice, calling out to the chamber, to think again, to persuade them.  What was the message?  It is the leadership that should be ashamed of its actions, having been twisted by enslaving others, eventually causing the implosion of self and country, an offense against the Creator.

Eloquent.  Powerful.  Courageous.

How do we convince anyone of anything?  Do we put together the best information?  Do we speak softly and gently from the heart?  Do we stand on the desk and shout the truth to the world?

I am partial to the first two methods.  Solid information and the passion from a person’s well-informed and positive convictions tend to convince me.  I tend to shut down when there is shouting, bullying, and standing on principle to the last like Butch Cassidy and his partner shooting out their last bullets with the army closing in outside.

Abraham tries methods one and two, information and heartfelt words, to try and save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  He also shows his humility, “I am just dust and ashes,” he is not arrogant.  God listens to his entire line of thinking, all the way until he argues that these cities, however wicked their people overall may be, deserve to be saved on account of at minimum 10 righteous people that may be found in these places.  After all, God saved Noah and his family from the Flood amongst the countless inhabitants of the world at the time, so it would make sense that if there were 10 good people in just one or two cities, they would merit being saved.

Think of a time that we convinced someone else of something for the better.  What was the “tipping point” and how did we get there? 

Abraham, unfortunately, is unsuccessful in the end.  Even his strategy of starting big and ending with a minimum number of good people to be found, reducing expectations, does not work out.

Is there still a victory here?  Has Abraham taught us something of value?

The Shinever Rav teaches that once God destroys the cities, and Abraham ‘returns to his place’, Shav limkomo, he keeps up his strong level of faith in God, does not question God’s justice.  Difficult as it can be to watch any project of ours fail, or to see others in crisis, worse still is the possibility that we might lose faith altogether, that me might lose all motivation to help ourselves and others, that we might give up hope, turn inward, and in doing so become more like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah than the righteous and good people who Abraham had hoped to find.

After all, the Rabbis teach us that the way the people of Sodom think is “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours.”  We’ll stay apart, not share, and instead of being like a community we’ll just tolerate each other like two ships who pass by each other as they both use the ocean but don’t share supplies and information with each other about the waves and weather from they directions they both came from.

Now, we cannot live this way if amongst ourselves we are meant to teach the messages of the Torah.  We need to summon the courage of Isidor Bush and Abraham, to stand before people and God to proclaim with judgment, gentleness, but with full conviction of our souls the truths and teachings we want to pass on.  We need not be proselytizers or zealots in this work.  We simply need to let the message fill us up and it will overflow in our words and actions.  And this energy that will radiate from within will be longer lasting than the best cup of Joe, the strongest energy drink, or the push from the best workout at the gym.

If Abraham’s story (either our ancestor or the President who pushed through the Emancipation Proclamation) is an indication, when we advocate in this way, God is listening.

Shabbat Shalom.

Separation Anxiety

It has always been difficult for me to drop off one of my children to school when she or he cries and protests.  The older of my two eventually grew out of this behavior and now separates smoothly each day.  On occasion she may even ask me to leave!  My youngest though is still adjusting to the new rhythm.

I wonder if I, and other parents who experience the anxiety of separation, contribute to the anxiety with non-verbal communications that we do not ourselves recognize.  Often I hear parents and teachers say that it is more painful for the parents than it is for the children.  The first time around I felt guilty, pained, and agitated long after I walked away.  As I watch how the kids calm down in class later on, years later I am more comfortable and confident that the ability to function in a social environment outside our home is worth the temporary discomfort at goodbye, and that my regular presence at drop off is reassurance that the leave-taking is as temporary as the discomfort at drop-off.  As Arnold Schwarzengger likes to say, my son knows that, “I’ll be back.”

In a wider context, separation anxiety is a key part of faith.  We are meant to feel anxious about separations of all kinds, separation between people an God, between people and other people, and within ourselves – between the person we are and the person we want to be.  These gaps, or separations, are the most painful in our lives since they impact us both physically and emotionally.  The wounds are deep and take a long time to heal, if they ever heal. 

On a recurring, weekly basis, nothing reflects personal and communal desires to close these separations better than Shabbat afternoons, the time and melodies of Mincha and the Third Meal, “Shalo’shiddus”.  Between the meaningful and thick work of prayer and study of the morning service and the bittersweet end of Shabbat at Havdalah, the Shabbat afternoon time is the great weekly liminal moment, the time that we are warmed-up, in the fullness of the holy day, when the music turns to melodies of longing, as with the repetition here of Yedid Nefesh, the statement of God as our soul-friend, full of love and compassion for us, that helped to bring Shabbat in on Friday evening.  Now the music says, “Would that this were the case, now and always!”  We sing Psalm 23, “God is my shepherd” in a melody that does not shed tears at our mortality, but that celebrates life’s journey.  After all, in Psalm 23, the valley is really not in the ‘shadow of death’, it is simply a valley, a valley where as the shepherd leads his flock into its floor, the walls block out the sun and cast a shadow – the warmth and reassurance of the sun disappear only until the shepherd leads the flock back up and into the plain, armed with a walking stick to help us endure the journey and another pole to beat away predators that may come after us along the way.

Longing is a feeling we need to cultivate, the sense that our sincerest visions of a self and a world renewed have not been achieved yet.  Longing is a positive and strong heart-filled feeling, not a flimsy wish on a star for an item we want or a person whose company or relationship we seek. 

God longs for us, too, and the Divine energy that comes our way is likely what makes the music of Shabbat afternoon so strong, so uninhibited, however tired or in-between we may feel at that time.

Decorum in synagogue - An ongoing conversation

When I took a summer Hebrew class at the Jewish Theological Seminary back in the summer of 1999, I lived in a campus apartment overlooking the Seminary’s quadrangle on 122^nd and Broadway, a peaceful patch of grass and trees in the Morningside Heights neighborhood.  From my window, I looked across the quad at a hallway and in my direct line of vision was the portrait of Solomon Schechter, a bold portrait of the great Rabbi, clothed in dark academic garments, with eyes looking back at me as if to say “It’s up to you now.” 

United Synagogue is celebrating it’s 100^th anniversary this year, 2013, and Schechter was the father of this organization, and he had a vision that amongst other things included a vision of decorum in the American synagogue, a reaction to the way that in some traditional communities one might observe a ‘lack of decorum’, but I am not sure that those communities would all agree on what decorum was or should be.  My teacher Joel Roth taught me that Rabbis at one time made rulings regarding the presence and use of spittoons in shul.  There is the Miami Boys Choir song that includes the teaching, “Asur ledaber bi’shat ha’tefilah,” or as they sing, “Don’t talk, just daven, so your tefilah can reach Hashem.”  There are teachings that focus our attention on the prayers rather than studying other Jewish texts during services.

And at the same time, there is a dynamic tension, a tension between the group activity of prayer and the individual’s kavannah, or ability to focus attention to both the letter and spirit of the prayers.  As we move into and out of group-prayer, we find that some people continue at their own pace. 

And then there are the kids, the kids of all ages who move into and out of the service.  They may sit for a while and participate.  Babies may cry.  Kids may laugh.  What is a congregation to do in order to make the prayer space welcoming for those who are focusing attention on the prayers and the potential distractions of distractions of all kinds? 

The Rabbis also teach that it is important to bring kids to shul so that they learn how to be in shul, how to behave. 

As with many dynamics in Jewish tradition, I do not think there is a good answer to this question that fits in with all communities.  When we lived for a year of study in Israel, we belonged to a congregation in which it was acceptable for the congregation to interrupt the divrey Torah and pose questions or reactions.  Kids roamed freely and one young red-headed girl would sit under the bimah table and munch chips.  Once, even a dog waltzed into the room and then back out again without anyone so much as wondering what or why it happened.

My personal view is that decorum should be a guide rather than a final answer in synagogue.  Children and adults must respect moments when silence and attention are required, but at the same time we should be open and abundant enough to live with some dissonance, some distracting noise, and more lest we alienate the very people we want to include, the very generations we are trying to mold and shape into the future of synagogue goers and leaders. 

A friend of mine once spoke to me after I became upset at the noise made by kids during a service.  He said, “Everyone prays in his or her own way.  I think these kids are praying in their own way.  If we’re upset, it’s our problem, not theirs.”  While there always needs to be balance, in other words, running and laughing during the Memorial prayers and kaddish, during the middle of a Dvar Torah, are inappropriate, this friend I believe is right. 

I am reminded of the many versions of the story that a Jewish person, young or older, a person without Jewish education attends a service and cannot participate in the prayers, but because he or she knows the Alef-Bet, the Hebrew alphabet, the person sings out the aleph-bet during the service as a praise to God, as the best offering he or she has to give. 

I believe the reality is that we need to look carefully and work together on our services so that they are both children and family friendly as well as adult friendly too – we should not assume that these things are mutually exclusive.  I think that 100 years later, on this issue as on many others, Schechter would be willing to continue the effort to creating a more unified and wholly participating people in the same way he did 100 years ago.

Fear God more than people

At least three times, the Rabbis of the Talmud, teach us that ‘Everything is within God’s power, except the fear of heaven.’  God is connected in to the entire universe and its functioning, except that God does not determine that a person ‘fears heaven’, that a person lives with that mysterious mixture of reverence, awe, wonder, and acceptance of responsibility to Jewish thinking and living.  ‘Fear of God’, as one of my recent Bar Mitzvah students wrote in his D’var Torah, ‘is not the fear that we feel at a scary movie,’ the fear of a ghost or other frightening image that will make us jump out of our seat.  The fear of faith is one that, on the contrary, helps keep our feet firmly planted, that reminds us most of all that fear of God should always be much greater than the fear of other human beings.  As our tradition emphasizes, God is an eternal source of Truth, even if God does not speak or act in ways we perceive or understand, whereas human beings are unreliable and unfortunately not as truthful in the practical and larger sense of the word ‘truth’ as we might hope – The poet of psalm 116, one of the Hallel psalms, simply says, ‘kol ha’adam kozev’. 

And even so, we may find ourselves living more in fear of other people than in fear of God, and in doing so we are doing exactly what the Torah warned us against, taking ourselves back to living in Egypt – returning ourselves to living under the oppressive rule of other flesh and blood rulers like the Pharaoh, who’s interests are his and his alone.  Of course, many of us who work for other people do in fact ‘serve’ others and we are accountable to our bosses and supervisors and managers.  The Torah and the Rabbis were aware of these realities and even many of the Rabbis were working people who were responsible to their customers – The ancient Rabis were tailors, porters, blacksmiths, shoe-makers, millers, scribes, tanners, even lumberjacks.  Their teachings though reminded them, and us, to whom we should express our deepest thanks, our most holy devotion, our biggest and most perplexing questions, our pain and doubt.  There are many people in our lives with whom we can talk and share about these feelings, and ideally our spouses, and good friends can help us, but what happens when our loved ones and friends are struggling themselves, or when we’re piled up with work and obligations and cannot carve out time?  For this reason, among others, we have daily prayers, time to have a regular dialogue, and check-in with God and ourselves.

I think we can compare the idea that we should fear God more than fearing other people with the electric power that comes to our homes.  During storms and hurricanes, power may go out at our homes, because there’s a break down of a wire, or a utility pole, but ideally I imagine that at the central station they are well-protected and the power is ‘on’ but simply cannot be transmitted.  The same is true with the fear we’ve been discussing, between us and other people there can be breakdowns for many reasons, relationships can break down, we may suffer in silence without even words to express what is happening, but there at the heart of the universe is God, an eternal and unending source of energy, a source of light we can reconnect to without wires, without circuits, and without limits.

Strengthening Jewish organizations - A constant pursuit

Bar and Bat Mitzvah is central to the life of my synagogue, the synagogue where I grew up, and many other synagogues across the country and the world.  No doubt, life-cycle events in general are such important building-blocks of religious communities of all faiths:  birth, coming of age, marriage, sickness-health, end of life.  Religious belief and life are both spiritual journeys that ideally are life-long projects, rather than one time or occasional ceremonies, detached and disembodied from the communities where they happen.

The ideal is always a reach, a hoped for status, and here the ideal is that the ceremony, Bnai Mitzvah in this case, is part of the flow of Jewish learning and experience, that the student and her family participates actively in community and that the community members see and interact with the student and family over time.  This is not to say that all things we do need to be part of a larger picture, an overall plan, a mindful and deliberate process.  There are moments when creativity, innovation, and taking a chance may lead to previously unseen possibilities.  At the same time, if we live life always shooting from the hip, always making decisions without some grounding in a process, in values, in a web of friendships and traditions, then life is fleeting, anarchic, and may lead to loss of trust in us.

The practical issue of the cost of Jewish living and experiences in the 21^st century is problematic.  The costs of running Jewish organizations, education, summer camps, day schools, and the like can add up.  There is also a prevalent psychology that, as we have seen in the health care industry, people or ‘patients’ have become ‘customers’ and as this psychology carries over into the spiritual world, people evaluate affiliations or memberships as to whether they receive sufficient return on their investment, much more a bottom-line model, tricky when part of religious experience is something that is intangible.  Still, it is up to Jewish leadership to be humble, to be better at evaluating our performance so that we do in fact provide the highest quality experiences.  We do have much to learn from, for example, service organizations like school systems that seek to evaluate success and promote excellence.  We should pursue excellence in all areas, not because we want to win a chamber of commerce award, but to be better about teaching the inspiring, meaningful, and sustaining message that  Jewish living is worthy of our time, our energy, and our patience, most of all, our loving care.