A Grain of Sand

Time Out for Fun: The Sway Machinery play the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow

2012-01-12T16:06:00.001-07:00

Nothing else like them...

Put A Lid On It

2012-01-07T22:07:00.003-07:00

Put a Lid on It
Can an article of clothing say something profound about the universe?  
Jews think so. The yarmulke (yes, it’s spelled that way, and pronounced yahm-ikah) is the Yiddish word for the Hebrew kippah (kee-pah). It’s just a little piece of fabric (cloth, woven, satin, leather, among other things) that we put on our heads. Why?

A folk etymology demonstrates a primary purpose of the kippah. The Aramaic words yarei (awe or fear) and malka (king), when put together – and said very quickly! – sound like yarmulke, and so a tradition has emerged that this distinctive Jewish garb is a symbol of our awe in the presence of God.

It emerges from a period in which it was impolite to walk around bare-headed (in American culture it is the opposite now) in the presence of another. So to dawn a kippah was to acknowledge that you were in the presence – always – of Another

There is a big debate that we don’t have to get caught up in here about whether the wearing of a kippah is a halachic (Jewish legal) requirement, or just a venerable custom that should be maintained. The short version is that even though wearing a kippah is now universal in religious settings, historically speaking some very significant and influential rabbis ruled that wearing a kippah is not required by Jewish law.

But the real point is that it symbolizes a core Jewish spiritual posture: that we should constantly have a sense of awareness that there is more to life than what we can see, that there is a greater purpose to our lives. All our acts and even our thoughts should follow from this core fact of existence.

And we put the kippah on top of our dome, the container of our mind. It is a reminder that our thoughts, our sense of self, our ego, our drives and wishes, our very consciousness that orients us in the universe – that none of these things is the final take on reality. There is something else that we cannot name, or describe; something that invests our lives with meaning. We acknowledge this without demeaning ourselves, with the subtle act of politely topping off our consciousness with the kippah.

Hat Trick
Got that? A piece of clothing that represents a spiritual consciousness? How…Jewish. Our tradition is a tapestry of symbols, metaphors, gestures and deeds that are all intended to elevate our souls by reminding us what matters. So, it’s a little hat…but really so much more.

From the perspective of secular culture, and from the perspective of non-Jews, these peculiarities of the Jewish people are simply strange. Not eating certain kinds of foods at the same meal? Not driving or using electronics one day of the week? Eating unleavened bread for eight days in the spring?
 It might seem odd that we rely on these things, and on a peculiar little piece of cloth to remind us of a fundamental truth of our lives. One could say, “Can’t you just remember to tend to your spiritual life without all that stuff?” The Jewish answer is, “Actually, no!” To be human is to be constantly caught in the cycle of remembering and forgetting. Beautiful moments of awareness punctuate our lives – as though we can see to the very core of the world, and there is the intimation of something transcendent. And the next moment we are sitting in front of the TV munching on a bag of chips.

So, the kippah – and the mitzvoth – perform a beautiful kind of trick. They are simple (sometimes not so simple) things we do in the material world to raise our awareness that life is not just about the material world.

Heads Up
My kippah also serves as an inspiration to good behavior. When I’m in public and wearing it, there’s part of me that is aware that I’m representing our tradition, our God, and our people. It’s a powerful reminder to myself that there’s a person I want to be, a way I want to act, in each moment. Acting in the right way is a good in and of itself, and we should all merit to be motivated by goodness for its own sake. But, truth be told, all of us forget our higher selves, and we can be impatient, rude, disrespectful, and unkind – all in a day’s work! Listen, we’re human. The kippah, this public declaration of who I am and what I stand for, can help me remember to be the person I want to be and need to be.

All Together Now
There is another reason that we wear the kippah, though. It is a way of saying, “I am a part of this People, I am part of this Story.” I wear my kippah with pride because it allows me to share my love for the Jewish people and to acknowledge that so much of who I am, and how I think, and what I care about is informed by the Jewish past and present. There was a time when to be a Jew was to be the subject of ridicule, and certainly to be a religious Jew was to endure cruel barbs, so wearing a kippah is also a way to honor the Jewish past and Jewish pride.

Got a Light?

2011-12-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

Little Myth Thing
Chanukah begins Tuesday night. The magnificent Festival of Lights (Chag Ha-Urim) is a beautiful, inspiring puzzle.

Little Jewish kids grow up thinking that Chanukah is a celebration of the Jews, who wanted to preserve their culture, triumphing over the Romans, who wanted to get rid of it. This is myth. Bear with me for a brief - I promise, brief - bit of history.

It wasn't the Roman's, it was the Seleucids (SELL-you-sid). This empire spread Greek cultural influence throughout the ancient world. And these guys had the backing of certain Jews who wanted to see Hellenistic (Greek) culture spread. The plot thickens.

The Seleucids and their Jewish supporters fought other Jews who resisted Greek culture. They outlawed certain observances and to the horror and dismay of the Jews, they desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. The Maccabees, also known as the Hasmoneans, led the Jewish fight against this, and purified and rededicated the Temple.

’Cause We Are Living In A Material World
How do modern Jews make sense of this? We are profoundly touched and shaped by the broader culture. How can we make sense of this festival that is both a commemoration both of a battle for preservation of Jewish values, and also….Jewish civil war?

Chanukah is a mix of deep truth and confused myth. The core of the truth: it is about the effort to preserve a holy space from desecration and the belief in the power to rededicate a space to holiness in the wake of that desecration.

Do you believe in something kadosh, holy? Forget for a moment whether you can describe exactly what that is, or where it resides, or precisely how you can access it. Do you believe that there are values, ideas, perhaps places that could be, but must never be desecrated? That must never be trampled upon?

Wait before you answer - because to believe so is, in our culture, radical. Here where everything from music, to toothpaste to religion can be priced, marketed, sold, repackaged and disposed, claiming that some things are separate and distinct - (the literal meaning of kadosh/holy) - is indeed radical.

And beautiful. Ah, the possibilities and promise of a soul that holds some things holy! Chanukah reminds us that in a world in which our wants and desires, and so often our lowest impulses are either sold back to us or celebrated, we are called upon to stand for what is holy, to kindle lights against the encroaching dark.

Unwrapping the Presence
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “Judaism does not always simplify itself in order to accommodate fashion or society….It demands nonconformity with what prevails in the marketplace, the courage to be different, depth of insight in a world where inane … values are acclaimed through the loudspeakers.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p 28.
Uncovering this courage within ourselves is a taxing spiritual pursuit. Do you believe in that part of ourselves that always sees the dignity in others, no matter their social standing, that draws from hidden wells of generosity, no matter our culture's approval of selfishness, that discovers awe in life, no matter the rush of daily business? Chanukah is about finding that Presence, that something that insists on life's holiness in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Lighten Up
The lights of Chanukah remind us to look for this.

Remember the desecration of the Temple? The oil required to keep the (seven branched) menorah always lit had to be "ok'd" as ritually pure by the Priests. When the Maccabees came to rededicate (in Hebrew, chanukah) the Temple, they found only enough of this kosher oil for one day. According to the Talmud, it miraculously lasted for eight days, enough time to press more olive oil. Voila.

So, now we light our chanukiah with a branch for each night. The Chanukah light is not supposed to be used for anything - not to light a room, not to read by. It is only to remind us of the holiness and the miracle. The candles can't even be used to light one another, which is why we have the shamash, the "servant" candle in the ninth branch, to light the others.

The central mitzvah of Chanukah? Making known the miracle by placing the chanukiah near a window. While for most passersby the Chanukah lights can't remind them of a miracle they don't know about, I think of this as a powerful statement of Jewish pride, and a public commitment to our own personal rededication.

In the Talmud Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai disagreed: do we begin with eight candles and work our way down, or start with one and work our way up. Hillel's answer prevailed: that each night should increase in holiness.

What does it mean to increase the holiness of Chanukah? One way is to make sure that each of the eight days we rededicate ourselves to our deepest values. What if, instead of asking for things that we don’t need, or giving things that our loved ones don’t need, we gave something significant to those who really do need? Make this Chanukah light on family gifts and heavy on tzedakah (support of the needy).

Burn and Learn
Chanukah means 'dedication' but also can be connected to chinuch, education.

The legacy of Chanukah is complex. We are inheritors of the dream of our ancestors, charged with preserving holiness in a world that so often seeks to drown it out. Yet, we are modern Jews in a largely non-Jewish culture, with all of the complexities and dilemmas that this presents. More to the point, this culture is amenable to us and some of its values we hold dear. How do we sort out what this story means for us? In other words, which Jews are we? The assimilators? Or the Maccabees?

I see each of us as containing the spiritual energy of both parties of Jews. Those Jews who drew on their surrounding culture to understand themselves and to broaden themselves, but also those Jews who tended to the lights, preserved the place of holiness within and were dedicated to unfolding the spiritual message of our tradition. Our task is to learn enough about our past, our people, our tradition and ourselves to bring these two dimensions together in a whole way.

Chag Urim Sameach - Happy Festival of Lights!s

The Death of a Shtarker: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

2011-12-15T22:46:00.001-07:00

The great Christopher Hitchens has just died. I had such affection for this person I did not know. And why? As a rabbi I suppose I should have been put off or offended by the contemptuousness with which he regarded the religious. Instead I found myself always moved by his breadth of knowledge, appreciative of his deep moral convictions and commitments, and somewhat in awe of his brilliance. In reading Hitchens, there was always a beautiful sense, whether you agreed with him or not, of "so, this is what a human mind can do."

For the meaning of the yiddish shtarker, click here and see the last paragraph of what I think was Hitchens' last piece, a meditation on suffering and it's meaning/lessness.

Wikipedia entry on Hitchens here, a good sense of Hitchen's brutal honesty along with his moral vision (and humor) here, his takedown of Mother Theresa, which gives a good sense of his iconoclasm, here.

It says in the Talmud (Berachot 6a), "The merit of attending a house of mourning lies in the silence observed." It is perhaps the only fitting response to the amazing life of this nearly archetypal man of words.

Bowing and Tebowing

2011-12-12T23:08:00.003-07:00

Tonight I become the 3,065,449th blogger to address the Tim Tebow/prayer phenomenon. A Jewish perspective here, a Christian evangelical perspective here, a non-evangelical Conservative-cum-Democrat Christian perspective here, a mocking (or maybe just-good-fun?) website here.

What is it about the prayer pose of this Denver Broncos QB that is driving everyone so crazy? Why do we care?

I'm a praying person, so I shouldn't be bothered by these public prayers, should I? I should get it, I should sympathize in the spirit of ecumenism, etcetera, etcetera. But it just...bugs me. There's something so performative about his prayer. "Oh, don't mind me, while I quietly and humbly offer a prayer to the creator of the universe in a private moment in front of millions of television viewers and many thousands of cheering fans."

I think that, whether it reflects what is in Tebow's heart or not, a healthy suspicion of his authenticity is at work here. Yeah, yeah, maybe we shouldn't judge that, but, you know what? When you get down on one knee in front of millions of people who are watching you get down on one knee....you're inviting that.

Tim Tebow is no Jew, that's for sure. But a Talmudic discussion about prayer raises some of the issues at issue here. In discussion bowing in Jewish prayer, the Talmud offers a pretty tightly controlled prescription for when to do it. What's the big deal? Why not just bow when you want? Medieval commentators thought that it had to do with humility. A 13th century Spanish Rabbi wrote "Submissiveness...in an inappropriate place is arrogance because he imagines he is a righteous person." (Uri Ehrlich, The Non Verbal Language of Prayer, p 62).

In the Jewish tradition the gesture of bowing, a limited but important part of prayer's choreography, is , in part, a non-verbal expression of humility. As Rav Kook taught, true humility is not an act of groveling submission, but a step towards profound spiritual growth. A kind of ego-emptying that brings one toward a deeper reality beyond self.

An act of humility performed in front of millions of people - is that humility? I guess only Tim Tebow can know that. A bow, properly performed with the appropriate kavanah, or inward focus and understanding, expresses and even creates, an inner sense of the pray-ers reality in the face of the Divine. When the act is so publicly demonstrated by a person who has had millions cheering for him and watching him for hours, the result is a kind of humbled ostentatiousness.

Maybe if the act wasn't so resonant with the arrogant and empty piety of the political world in this moment of our nation's history, it wouldn't be so bothersome. But Tebow's lowering himself reminds us a bit too much of candidates genuflecting before the Christian electorate to win their sympathies. So, the spectacle of candidates with decidedly irreligious pasts tripping over one another in heart-wrenching expressions of pained piety in order to win votes - well, let's just say it doesn't inspire one to remember the highest virtues of human beings. For sure, these candidates may be real-live Christians on the inside and out.

But the performative nature of it not only raises questions about its religious meaning, it also makes life uncomfortable for religious minorities, who might wonder whether a candidate leading an evangelical prayer rally for 30,000 Christians might always protect their interests.

But wouldn't it be funny to see the Jewish Tebow, davvening on the 50 yard line, tzitzit flying? I'd forgive him.

Tebow praying: Louis Lopez/Cal Sport Media/ZUMAPRESS.com; Rick Perry praying from deathandtaxes.com

The Dark Side, Part II

2011-11-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

A reader shares an insight:

Characters are rather one dimensional in Star Wars, particularly the prequel trilogy. The Emperor is more a source of pure evil than a person, but to the extent that a name can be put to the evil it is the pursuit of power. The beguilement of power is treated more comprehensively in the Lord of the Rings where again the greatest power is associated with complete corruption. The ultimate victory over evil in both is ultimately achieved by the hero within himself. Another way to see Jacob and Esau is an internal battle within each of us. But the story here is more complex and includes much more than just a quest for power.

Regarding the inner struggle: there's a beautiful commentary by the [previous] Slonimer rebbe that discusses the idea that the twins represent the yetzer ha tov and the yetzer ha ra, our good and evil inclinations, respectively. When Rebecca cries out during her pregnancy, distraught that the twins are struggling within her womb, "Lamah Zeh Anochi," either "why is this happening to me?" or "Why do I exist?" she is articulating the agony of this ancient struggle.

The Slonimer says that the Torah tells us that the prophecy that The older [brother] will serve the younger actually refers to this struggle.

Esau, representing our evil inclination, is 'older' because people have this inclination dominant within them first, as children. We have a moral instinct but not great moral strength as children. Around adolescence, he says, this 'older brother' serves the younger - that is, more recently powerful - good inclination by being subservient to it.

True, the one dimensional characters (Han Solo is maybe the only multi-dimensional character) don't allow for exploration of this development and wrestling.

Use the yetzer....

The Dark Side

2011-11-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

Channah and I introduced our almost four year old to Star Wars. He was blown away, literally from the first frame (the enormous ship that flies across the screen).

It's a strange mix: a great film with really bad writing, some questionable acting ("Uncle Owen, this R2 unit has a bad motivator!") But the mythological foundations of the movie, constructed with the help of Joseph Campbell, are worth exploring.

How do you explain The Force to a little boy (maybe you don't). There is a force in the universe that is unbelievably powerful but can be used for good or evil.

You can't see it, but you can "use" it!

As Jacob and Esau come together again the Torah, two brothers separated by years of pain an animosity, I'm reminded of the key relationship in the Star Wars saga. Like Luke and Darth, Jacob and Esau are of the same flesh yet have taken completely different paths. Our Sages associated Esau with great wickedness (dark side) and Jacob with saintly goodness. What I'm interested in is how the different aspects of the Force are mediated by human relationships. The Dark Side is limited by the power of human goodness - Darth's "I am your father" moment has a deep tenderness as he "unmasks" himself of his wickedness. When Jacob and Esau embrace and weep, it is hard not be to moved by this same undoing. Rashi tells us that Esau is only embracing Jacob so he can get close enough to do him harm. But I'd rather see that essential human element, that part of us that is constantly bubbling up with possibility and goodness, at work here, overcoming the years of resentment.

Thank Jew Very Much

2011-11-25T10:17:00.001-07:00

OK, ok, the obligatory Thanksgiving post.

Some curiosities: The word for Jew in Hebrew, Yehudi, can mean "grateful one." (Because Judah is one of the sons of Jacob and one of the tribes, it 'really' means 'A Descendent of the Tribe of Judah.') The other curiosity is that the word Hodu in Hebrew means both "Give thanks" (plural, imperative) and "turkey." Hmmmm.....

Thanksgiving is an American holiday - I guess the American holiday - but giving thanks is the Jewish activity. The Talmud tells us to say one hundred blessings per day. One hundred! There is a blessing that we say giving thanks for being able to wake up, to stand, to relieve ourselves, a blessing for having ground to stand upon. There is nothing too insignificant or banal to warrant giving thanks.

Try this out for a week. Pause for a moment to give thanks in this coming week, not just for the grand miracles - having healthy family, the blessings of loved ones, freedom - but the very smallest things in life, those things we take for granted.

Giving thanks can change our very thinking, taking self out of the center of everything, so we stop measuring the world by what we want it to do for us, and start noticing how much it already has. The next challenge is to start to be a blessing - to become something that others are thankful for.

Time Out for Fun - The Staple Sisters, I'll Take You There

2011-11-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

A song so hope filled it might have been a Psalm:

Paragraph Break Broke

2011-11-04T14:48:00.003-06:00

I have done everything I could think of and everything recommended to me to get paragraph breaks to show up on the blog, and no luck.

My apologies. If I can't find a solution soon I will move the blog to another site.

Thank you and Shabbat Shalom

Hmmm....now it seems to be working. Onward...

Occupy Judaism

2011-11-04T14:30:00.001-06:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement is forcing us to face some difficult questions about ourselves as a society. The underlying theme that unites the movements in different cities is the vast economic inequality in our country. What does Judaism have to say about this movement? To understand that, we have to understand two major modes of viewing spiritual life in the Jewish world.

One mode is what we might call the inner or mystical mode, in which we seek to understand an interior spiritual challenge that we face. My previous post on Parshat Lech Lecha is an example of this kind of spiritual meditation and truth-seeking. Chasidism has had a massive influence on modern Jewish culture because it speaks to a need we have for a depth understanding of our individual experience in the world and how to imbue our experience on the planet with meaning.

There is also the Prophetic mode (to be clear, these are not absolute, or imporous, categories - nor are they the only two ways of understanding Jewish life). The Prophets were concerned with the Jewish people as a whole and its collective failure to live out the responsibilities imposed upon it in its relationship with God. The Prophet examined his society and held up a mirror to it. Abr We can't view these two modes - the inner and Prophetic - as unrelated or totally separate. They are resonant with one another.

Isaiah's inspiration comes from the fact that he senses the world teeming with the Divine Presence, so much so that he is in pain when the People stray from the Divine Path. There is a deep and beautiful interiority to his words because he is so deeply connected to and touched by God. And, going in the other direction, an authentic mystical experience inevitably takes us beyond the interior realm to see the deepest unity of Creation, a unity that shows us that we are never alone, and never from from responsibility for others. The movements across the country are expressions of outrage. Certainly these are political.

But I think we should try to see them as having their roots in a prophetic intuition that we all have. Both the Tea Party Movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement, while using very distinct vocabularies and seeking very different solutions, have at their core a sense that the moral order of the universe has been violated. That there is a concept of "right" and "good" that human societies can attain that has been ignored or violated by the powerful and wealthy.

At moments like this that prophetic point within each of us, that part of us that has an intuition about the need for goodness and compassion and fairness to be more than just concepts, and to be made real in the world, begins to burn brightly. Our society views religion as a private, interior experience. In the world of Torah it certainly is that. But Jewish teaching has of course always seen it as imperative that values be brought in to the world. We do not "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" because there is no area of existence that is beyond Divine concern.

A test of our own connection to our tradition, to our success in living a Jewish life, is how we respond to this moment. Of course Torah does not call on us to find solutions in the Republican or Democratic party. But we must hear in the stirrings of our country the cry of the Prophet calling for justice. Infographic of Wealth Distribution found on andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish Photo of Oakland protest taken from motherjones.com

Get Outta Here - Parshat Lech Lecha

2011-11-01T23:43:00.001-06:00

I cannot make the blog accept "return" commands...so there are no paragraph breaks. This renders the text graphically unreadable (it may be textually so, but that's for you to decide). Good luck....This week's parshah [torah portion] is one of the most over-analyzed yet oversimplified parshiyot in the entire Torah. Seriously, can it really just be about God saying to Avram [soon to be Avraham], "Hey, get outta here. Make your own place in the world."? What is this, some cheap airport novel? I don't know where that grumpiness came from, but I want to share some deep Torah from the slonimer rebbe (thanks, Rabbi Marc, for turning me on to the rebbe's work Netivot Shalom, the work that inspired the thoughts here]. The Slonimer Rebbe begins with the question, 'Why is the command to Avram written in this particular order: Lech l'cha [Go out] mei'artzecha [from your land], umimoladatecha [and your place of birth] umibeit avicha [and from your fathers household] el ha-aretz asher arecha [to the land that I will show you] (Genesis 12:1). If God were just giving geographical instructions, the order would be reversed - the father's house being the first thing Abvram would leave behind in departing, then the 'place of birth' (presumably the Slonimer thinks this means 'town' or the equivelant, and then 'the land.' But the instructions, the Slonimer Rebbe finds, unsurprisingly, are spiritual. God begins with the easiest challenge and ends with the immensely difficult. As we fashion ourselves, and purify ourselves of the masks and falsehoods that we've inherited - as we come to a level of self-awareness that enables us to see that we are not, at some point in life, being who we are perhaps supposed to be, we begin a journey away from those forces that impinge upon us, those things that we feel falsely define us. When we do this, we find that it is easiest to loosen the grip of the broadest, or most distant influence: that of our land, our country, or culture. It is in fact an enormous achievement to break free of the conditions of one's culture [and, in fact, some would say it cannot be done - that it runs the deepest]. We may then find that we cannot find ourselves for the pervasive influence of the values and assumptions that are slightly closer to home. The extended family and social circles of our local community, with all of its powerful relationships, its egos, social pressures and expectations. At this level, the influence is personal - we can feel the social pressures bearing down When we are young we may be too weak to know whether those feelings of dislocation and resentment at such pressure emerge because of the falsity, arbitrariness, and superficiality of such pressure, or our own incapacity to push back against it for lack of spiritual imagination and courage. Many of us never escape the powerful hold that these social expectations have on us and we live our lives attempting to live in a house that is not our own. But the deepest and most profound hold is that exerted by our parents. This relationship does not have to be adversarial or troubled to create spiritual challenges. The challenge is existential - it cannot be avoided. To be sure, a painful relationship may aggravate the challenge of finding oneself within that relationship. But even when a child has been raised without a great deal of pain, the attempt to locate one's own vision of the world, to determine one's own gifts, and one's own purpose within the context of that cloud of parent-child relation can seem impossible. Can we know whether the self we find there is really our own? Everywhere we turn is a thought, a desire, a dream that belongs to those who brought us into the world. But there is a singular purpose, a unique soul, to be found within all of that. Our life's task is to find that, and to be honest about it - because the influences of our land, our birthplace and our parents might lead us to deny or run from that purpose! Abraham is not a young man when he hears God's call to leave behind everything he has known. It is deep, hard, work with no guarantee of success. The spiritual challenge lay not in escaping the particulars of our own experience to find some untouched core within. Any search for the soul within you that remains pure of all the complicated social and familial relations will come to nothing, because that soul doesn't exist. It is precisely those particular conditions of our own lives that give shape to our particular spiritual journey. Abraham will declare the unity of God and forego the idolatry of the middle east. And yet this was the person whose father, the mid rash tells us, was the chief idol maker for the King. The mid rash is not mentioning this fact of his father's occupation as an incidental fact. It is precisely because of this particular reality of Abraham's life that he discover's his unique role. The challenges of our own lives that so often seem to be the roadblock are, in fact, the path. Those conditions of your past and your present experience that seem to be holding you back are in fact the very challenges that you have to face to fulfill your particular purpose, the reason for which you were created. So, lech l'cha - often translated as "go" or "go forth" but literally "go to yourself" or "go into yourself" is precisely the point. We can't just walk away from the particular influences of our lives. We have to go through those conditions of our experience that shape - and even seem to limit - us if we are to walk the path of the deepest self discover and the fulfillment of the purpose with which the creator invested our lives.

A Jewish Apartheid State?

2011-11-01T11:42:00.000-06:00

Richard Goldstone, the author of the famous Goldstone Report who eventually conceded that it was written with insufficient information, has written a nice op-ed on Israel and the accusation by its severest critics that is an "apartheid state."

In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.

The whole NYTimes article (behind the paywall) is here. There is something of "damning with faint praise" in saying that Israel is no South Africa. But that's what false and hyperbolic accusations do: they force you to weaken your moral standing by having to defend yourself from charges of moral failure. I've ranted about this before, but, oh, well: Israel is a vibrant (and teeming) democracy. Troubled, to be sure. The coalition style government has created all kinds of deep and real problems. But it is a democracy where the rule of law prevails and holds those in power accountable. On the other hand, it's neighbors in the region are dictators openly contemptuous of democracy. We can certainly celebrate the fact that Western liberals (and I am one, by the way) have reacted to the "Arab Spring" by finally recognizing this fact. Confronted with Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and video evidence of state brutality, it was hard not to. But what took them so long? Long before the recent social movements for democracy burst open, it was quite clear that these goons represented the antithesis of everything Western liberals are supposed to hold dear. But for years, silence - and the only democracy in the region was criticized with hyperbole and vitriol. What's up with that?

Return, Again

2011-10-30T22:04:00.002-06:00

Another long delay since my last post. Apologies - I'm not even sure if anyone is reading at this point. In the world of blogging, silence indeed equals death. If you are not writing, you don't exist. Sometimes silence speaks volumes. In this case, the absence of blog posts tells of the madness of life with three beautiful children. I love writing. I love reading. I discover myself through the study of Torah and self reflection. There has been no time for this. What is the balance between being a good father and husband and being a non-person? If we become merely a good person in relation to others, if we exist solely for others, we can't really become and grow. So, how to take control of our spiritual lives when the moral and familial demands are overwhelming? In other words, im ein ani li mi li u'kshani b'atzmi mah ani v'im lo achshav ematai? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When I am only for myself what am I? And if not now when?

Pinko Past and Future? Israel, Socialism, and Zionism

2011-08-04T15:06:00.000-06:00

I use the term pinko with affection.

Interesting article here by Shlomo Avineri in Ha'Aretz, who sees the true spirit of Zionism in the social protests happening there now.

A really fascinating question - can one be a Zionist without adhering to the original values of Zionism?

Netanyahu Hates Israel?

2011-08-03T14:41:00.000-06:00

What to make of this piece of news? After Obama spoke about Israel in late May, powerful parts of the American Jewish Community were outraged at the President's supposed recklessness in affirming the Green Line as one of the bases for future for peace negotiations (See my posts on "What's the Deal in Israel?) Netanyahu was outraged as well.

Well, what to make of Netanyahu's endorsement of the same position? A position that, as I mentioned in May/June posts, was essentially the recognized position of Israel and America for years. Those pundits who criticized Obama for being anti-Israel - I'm guessing that they are not going to accuse Netanyahu of being anti-Israel.

Rosebud

2011-08-03T14:35:00.000-06:00

No, not the Orson Welles thing.

This morning, Channah and I welcomed a beautiful little boy into the world. Healthy and heavy (9 lbs), he's doing beautifully and Channah is as well.

Baruch Ha-Ba (welcome) little one.

We are both exhausted - Channah much more so - but are feeling very blessed.

My Father: Father's Day 2011/5771

2011-06-19T21:25:00.000-06:00

Throughout the Torah the people who we sometimes anachronistically refer to as "Jews" and with abbreviation refer to as "Israelites" are more precisely, b'nei yisra'eil - the children of Israel. So common is this phrase that we don't even notice it's significance. It is a name that brings past together with future, a name that defines the present as a way of honoring the past. The Israelites are those people who are the children of a particular person: Israel, that is, Jacob.

This collective, national recognition of the power of our antecedents to define us, is made more particular in our Jewish names. Every traditional Hebrew name - the name by which we are called to read Torah - follows the formula of "So and so, son of so and so." We take our stand at the Torah under the protection of our father's (and now also our mother's) name.

My name is Yehoshua ben Ha-Rav Imanuel. I am very much my father's son. My father is Rabbi Emanuel Rose. It is certainly no coincidence that he is a rabbi and I have followed that path - sometimes in pursuit of him, I think. He made his own significant mark upon the Jewish life of his community, drawing on the spiritual fire of the Prophets to guide and goad his congregation, involving himself as a voice of conscience in national and local issues of moral importance, teaching Jewish wisdom and inspiration to generations of Jews in Portland.

He built his congregation to a place of strength spiritually, ethically, and materially. Any rabbi will tell you that it is no small feat to accomplish all of these. He is now Rabbi Emeritus but was Rabbi for 46 years at Beth Israel in Portland. Before that he was at Temple Emanu-el in New York City.

My father passed on to me his deep love for Jewish teaching, for Jewish thinking, for the Jewish moral vision that emerges from the poetry of Jewish wisdom. His commitment to Torah as a way of seeing the world is inspiring and beautiful.

As a father he has supported me in finding my own path to Torah. My path has been quite different from his - it has wandered more, it has drawn on a style of observance that is not his own, it has challenged some dimensions of his own thinking. He provides counsel and support, empathy and patient, very gentle rebuke. In doing so he has allowed me to discover my own place at Sinai, a place where I stand in debt to him for his teaching, his infinite patience, his encouragement and his endless support.

My father's way of teaching has sometimes been from a distance. Proverbs 22:6 says "Train a child according to his way." My father knows my stubbornness, and more than once the space he has allowed me to grow has enabled me to find an answer that I suspect he wanted me to find.

Kiddushin 29a describes a father's obligations to his son. They are to circumcise his son, to perform [the mitzvah of] ‘Redemption of the firstborn,’ to teach him Torah, and to teach him a trade, and (some say) he must also teach him to swim.

Yasher Koach, Aba. Thank you.

The Intolerable Chutzpah, Ctd.

2011-06-12T00:13:00.000-06:00

The effort to ban circumcision in Santa Monica has been derailed. The woman backing the bill has decided to withdraw it. This comes following outrage in response to a comic book that apparently used horribly anti-semitic imagery to criticize circumcision (I say apparently because I have seen a few images from the book but haven't seen the book itself). Some more information on the withdrawal of the bill and the comic book here and here.

The author of the comic book is named Matthew Hess - definitely a famous Jewish last name, for whatever that's worth.

While I'm happy that the bill has been withdrawn, it is unfortunate that it wasn't rejected on the merits. The woman who was pushing for the bill, as far as I know, had no connection to the author of the comic book. So, in a sense it was a fortunate accident that the bill was derailed - this comic book author accidentally destroyed a bill he supports.

The New York Times article contains a confusing and misleading sentence: "...many leaders expect that similar efforts will crop up in other cities." Expect Shmexpect: there is a proposed ban in San Francisco that will be voted on in November.

Black Fire on White Fire

2011-06-08T21:49:00.000-06:00

Last night began Shavuot, the day on which we received and receive Torah. Midrash Tanchumah describes the Torah as being black fire on white fire. And the Shulchan Aruch, the principal code of Jewish law, begins its summary of how Jewish tradition instructs us to wake up in the morning with the beautiful and mysterious sentence, "One should rouse oneself like a lion to get up in the morning and serve the Creator so that he awakens the dawn."

This happened this morning, the morning of Shavuot. I wasn't able to figure out what time this happened - if someone has that info, I'd love to know. I would like to think it was right after shacharit prayers.

More detail:

Gilad Shalit Update

2011-06-06T14:40:00.000-06:00

Gilad Shalit is the IDF soldier who was captured by Hamas nearly five years ago (June 25th, 2006). His father, Noam Shalit, is now filing suit in Paris that he hopes will put pressure the French government to in turn put pressure on Hamas to release him.

What a horrible ordeal for this young man, for the family, and for the nation. May he be kept safe and healthy and be returned soon.

More information on Shalit here and also in the column to the right, under "Kosher Sites."

The Intolerable Chutzpah of the Anti-Circumcision Movement

2011-06-05T10:43:00.003-06:00

The New York Times has an article here about anti-circumcision activists gaining ground in California.

As you might imagine, I have very strong feelings about this. My feelings are grounded not only in my belief in the centrality of brit milah (the covenant of circumcision) in Judaism but also in my political makeup. So, even if legislators contemplating a ban include an exception for religion, I'm am still strongly opposed to this foolish and offensive movement.

This is a very long post, so I'll present brief summaries of my major points up front.

1) The state must not interfere with rights of parents unless there is a significant danger to a child.
2) There are harmful things than circumcision that parents do to children that are widely accepted in our culture.
3) Circumcision does not harm the baby.
4) There is no analogy to female circumcision, which is something that is widely abhorred in the west.
5) The idea that there is no moral justification for making a choice like circumcision for a child before the age of consent is refuted by our common experience in the world.
6) The philosophical basis for the anti-circumcision movement is flawed.

Those involved with this movement are referred to as anti-circumcision activists, but they should be called value-imposers, and that's how they'll be referred to here until I think of a better phrase. The reason I'm changing the language is because what is really material in the debate is not circumcision and it's harm - they are welcome to try to persuade whomever wants to listen. What is significant about the movement is that these people seek to impose their own values on others.

Here's why the value-imposers are terribly wrong:

1) The state needs to be kept very, very far away from the relationship between parents and children. Are there limits? Obviously, there are. The state must intervene if a child is being abused, if parents are so neglectful that the child is in danger, etcetera. But there is no basis for making this argument about circumcision. The burden of proof must remain on those who want to dictate to other people what decisions they can make for their families - not on parents who are choosing a medically accepted practice that causes no harm.

2) There are far greater harms that a parent can do to a child - should the state prevent parents from piercing the ears of little boys and girls? Of course not, but ear piercing is a purely decorative practice, it does not have any health arguments on its side (as circumcision does), nor does it have thousands of years of cultural tradition behind it. Should the state make it illegal for parents to feed junk food to babies? I've seen babies that are clearly not eating healthfully and are way too fat at a very young age. Those parents are doing far more harm to their child than circumcision does. What would be the argument against state interference in the diet of the baby? What about the choice to expose children to the wildly materialistic values inculcated by television? While I don't judge it, nor would I ever have the chutzpah to seek to make the state prevent it, I believe that it is obviously and demonstrably true that parents who expose young children to television are doing far, far more damage to their children than I've done to my sons by circumcision. The logic of the value-imposers would dictate that children should be age 18 before they can watch.

3) Circumcision does not harm the baby. Those who are attempting to impose their personal beliefs on others like to call it male genital mutilation. It is not. It does not change the essential function of the sexual organ of the child. Yes, it does change the appearance, and what I find interesting about this is that if this is the basis of calling it mutilation - which it must be, since no harm to the function of the penis comes from circumcision - then it is quite tellingly a particularistic and biased movement. It is using the aesthetic standards of a particular culture, of North America, protestant/secular culture, in the 21st century, to make judgments about what is right.

Billions of healthy males have lived healthy lives - sexual and otherwise - for thousands of years with this practice. And yet the value-imposers would have us believe that suddenly this should be considered an intolerable harm imposed upon a child?

4) The value-imposers want to you associate circumcision with female genital mutilation, as though these two things are the same (When someone's argument depends on discrediting by association, you know they are on the losing side of the argument). Female genital mutilation falls in a different category - it is, in fact, mutilation. Here's why the two are essentially different. First, the female genital mutilation I have heard of (I believe there are other kinds) involves removal of the clitoris, permanently and drastically altering the future sexual function of the baby to whom it is done. The difference between the sexual life of a woman with a clitoris and without is fundamental and vast. There is no way to make the argument that anything similar happens with a male. Circumcised males lead full and complete sexual lives. Second, the practice of removing the clitoris takes place in patriarchal societies in which women have very little power and the most significant choices in life are determined for them by men. Male circumcision is practiced on males in cultures that are overwhelmingly patriarchal and come from patriarchal traditions in which men are the ones who have made the rules and norms. Patriarchy isn't something to be proud of, but the point is that we're talking about a (harmless) practice that affects the most powerful people within the society. Males in North America, whether secular, protestant, Muslim, or Christian, are at a power advantage in the society, and circumcision cannot be seen as an expression of oppression.

5) Finally, we hear all the time that we mustn't do something to a child until they are old enough to decide for themselves. If they want to circumcise themselves at age 18, they may. This argument is impossible for me to take seriously. It is revealingly blind and naive. Is there such a thing as an infant who makes choices for him or herself? Did they choose to grow up in families in North America? Might they not be better off somewhere else - a place with more balance between work and leisure? The United States is nowhere near the top of the happiness indices that have developed over the last few years, indices which compare the relative happiness of the populations. My sons did not choose to grow up in this culture in which happiness is a bit further out of reach than elsewhere. But their life here is just a fact.

Parents many all of the most significant choices in a child's life for the child, choices that will define the boundaries of the child's life, their intellectual environment, their values, etcetera. Raising a child in an environment in which it is normal to play video games, or only listen to Britney Spears without exposure to much more complex and beautiful art does more damage to a child than an essentially harmless snip.

There are of course, thousands of other examples of very significant aspects of life that are chosen for us, not by us. Circumcision is a slight ritual that simply affirms and recognizes this reality - a reality that, for me, has religious significance. That we are NOT essentially free to choose essential aspects of ourselves and our identity - whether our culture, our DNA, our religion, our secularism - is to me an essential feature of existence. Westerners are deeply uncomfortable with this existential fact. Our entire political philosophy, the entire idea of the social contract, is founded upon the notion that a person attains total freedom when they are left alone by all others, when no decision is made for them. This is a fantasy that exists only in theory.

I am not suggesting that there is an analogy here between choosing to circumcise your child and passing on your DNA, or raising your child in a given country. My point is to identify what I think is the philosophical foundation of the value-imposers. I believe that these people are beholden to a false notion about what constitutes freedom, and choice. They consider this falsity (that a person should choose everything that happens to them) to be a universal truth, and therefore they believe they have the right to impose it on others. My point is that the philosophical foundation for their outlooks is wrong. The world isn't like that.

Should we hand over to the state these acts that have a much greater impact (and greater harm) on the child? Why not? Is the answer 1) that there is some essential difference between circumcision and other forms of harm that we impose on children? Or is it 2) that banning these other commonly accepted practices just wouldn't be practical? That is, we'd like to create laws to ban all harm that a parent might do, but it isn't politically feasible. If the answer of the value-imposers is answer #1, they have an obligation to explain their reasoning - because it is hard to imagine what it would be. If it's #2, then we should all - regardless of our religious tradition, political affiliation, or cultural traditions - be very afraid of the value-imposers, because they would be speaking the language of dangerous fundamentalists.

More to come on this topic, for sure.

All Night Long - Shavuot

2011-06-03T15:25:00.001-06:00

Please join us for what will be an amazing night, on June 7th at 8:30 pm at Rembrandt Yard, 1301 Spruce in Boulder. Traditional learning, yoga, music (Mark Megibow from FACE), rabbis leading discussions on finding Jewish meaning, Coffee by Ozo, ice cream, cheesecake, cereal and more. Hope to see you there. (Click on the image to see a bigger version)

What's the Deal in Israel? Ctd.

2011-06-02T14:10:00.000-06:00

One of the things I'm becoming interested in is how we talk about Israel within the Jewish community. What parts of the discussion are "out of the question," or "beyond the pale" in the debate? I'm interested in this for two reasons. Philosophically I see deep and powerful and open debate as essential virtue in Jewish life; I see it as a religious principal, really.

Practically, I think that Israel's future depends on our being able to talk in an open way about what is best for Israel. It depends on our not branding anyone as an "Israel hater" if they make an argument about what is best for Israel's future.

Along these lines, as I indicated in a previous post ("What's the Deal in Israel?"), I was pretty confused by the response of many American Jews to President Obama's proposal of using the 1967 lines as the basis for negotiations ("with land swaps," as he put it). This was something that has been part of the discussion for years, it has been the basis of previous negotiations that Israel has participated in, it was the de facto position of the previous two American Administrations....and now everyone is outraged at Obama.

To add to my confusion, I just read an article in which Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad (Israeli intelligence), urges a return to the 1967 borders and pursuit of the Saudi Peace Plan from 2002.

The point here is not that Dagan is necessarily correct (I happen to think that he is) but that you have the former head of Mossad using the same language as Obama used - language that caused Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to say that Obama was throwing Israel "under the bus."

Does that mean that the former head of Mossad is throwing Israel under the bus? Does he hate Israel? I would hate to be the person to tell Dagan that he's an Israel-hater. This is a guy who headed an elite military unit in combating PLO violence, and who the right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had enough faith in to appoint to head Mossad.

I think the message from the history of actual negotiations, and from the criticism of the present leadership offered by Dagan and many others, is that there is not just one set of solutions that can be considered "pro-Israel."

I think we have to be careful about slinging arrows about people on the Israel issue. Because in Israel, many extremely committed, extremely thoughtful people, from intellectuals to soldiers, people who have put their lives on the line for Israel and whose lives are wrapped up with its future, often propose ideas that over here get you branded as naive at best, or even worse, an enemy of Israel.

Don't Miss Shavuot on June 7

2011-05-30T14:28:00.000-06:00

Shavu-what?

A community wide Shavuot Celebration, called Up All Night, will be held this year at Rembrandt Yard, 1301 Spruce Street in Boulder, beginning at 8:30 pm on June 7th. I will be teaching as will other rabbis from the Boulder community. There will be Torah yoga, music, Jewish art, traditional learning, conversation, not to mention Ozo coffee, ice cream and other treats. Please come and stay as late as you like. “Up All Night: Shavuot in Boulder” is being sponsored by Rabbi Rose’s and Rabbi Goldfeder’s project, Soulfood, with a generous grant from 18 Pomegranates.

For those who want some basic information on Shavuot:

A Little Bit About Shavuot
Shavuot falls on the 6th and 7th of the Hebrew Month of Sivan. This year that corresponds to the 7th and 8th of June. In the Torah Shavuot (“Weeks”) is an agricultural festival. Along with Sukkot and Passover it is one of the three pilgrimage festivals during which the ancient Israelites would come to Jerusalem to make special offerings at the Temple. Eventually the rabbis of the Talmudic era proclaimed that Shavuot marks the day on which the Torah was given to the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai. Even for those of us who do not understand the Sinaitic revelation literally, Shavuot has become a day recognized as holy because it represents our receiving of Torah as a way of life.

Important customs associated with Shavuot are: Tikkun Leil Shavuot (“Set Order of Learning on the Night of Shavuot”), during which the community gathers to stay up all night (see below for details of the community-wide celebration this year); eating of dairy foods such as blintzes and cheesecake; using floral decorations in the synagogue and home; and reading the Book of Ruth.

A Bit More
Agricultural Origins
Shavuot, or Chag Ha-Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, is one of three names for this holy day. It is called “Weeks” in Leviticus 23 because the Israelites are told to start counting off weeks from the Second Night of Passover until they have counted seven full weeks, at which point they make offerings of bread and animal offerings.

In Exodus 23 it is referred to as Chag Ha-Katzir, the Festival of the [wheat] Harvest. It would have fallen at the time that the wheat crop was beginning to ripen.

The third name is comes from Numbers 28, where the holy day is referred to as Yom Ha-Bikkurim, the Day of the First Fruits. On this day the Israelites were to bring the first fruits of the season and offer them at the Temple. They would continue to do this until Sukkot (in the fall).

Shavuot and Revelation
Clearly Shavuot observance was rooted in agriculture, as at least the second two names – the Festival of the Harvest and the Day of the First Fruits – suggest. We should continue be blessed to view the creation of food as evidence of a divine presence active in the universe, creating and overseeing a mystifyingly complex web of life. And as the Torah tries to get us to see our food as a gift for which we must be thankful, and which we must offer back in some way to God, we should view the overwhelming material bounty of our own lives as a spiritual challenge to us to remain grateful, giving people – rather than people who act as if the whole world was created just for them.

But it is also true that each generation must breathe new life into Torah, to find new meaning that is concealed within ancient teaching. For our Sages – the spiritual leaders of the Talmud and early Judaism – Shavuot’s importance was not in its placement in the rhythms of the earth’s sustenance. It was that Shavuot was the day on which the Jewish people received the Torah at Mount Sinai.

How so? Step one is that the Torah tells us that the Exodus from Egypt happened in the month of Nisan. Step two is that Exodus 19:1 tells us that they entered the wilderness of Sinai on “the third new moon” after leaving Egypt. This would be the month of Sivan. Step three is that the rabbis agree that the Torah was given on Shabbat. The first Shabbat in Sivan would bring us to the current date of Shavuot (a rabbinic argument about a detail in the Torah results in the actual day of Shavuot being moved from the 7th to the 6th).

Finding Meaning in Shavuot Today
For us this rabbinic notion that Shavuot was the day on which the Israelites received the Torah continues to have meaning. But the power of the Festival is not in looking back and seeing the 6th of Sivan as a commemoration. Rather, we should view it as the day on which we will again receive Torah.

Torah in the broadest sense is what we celebrate and seek out on Shavuot. Not just the Five books of Moses but the centuries of interpretation, insights, extensions, and inspiration that have flow from this regenerating source in every generation, in every moment.

What role does Torah have in our lives? Jewish teaching begins with the assumption that each of us must learn to become a certain kind of person, that we must learn to create a certain kind of society, and that we must learn to develop fill relationships with other people and with God if we are to understand what it means to be fully human and to live a righteous life.

This is a tall order, but on Shavuot we open ourselves and commit ourselves to this reality. We affirm that the daily striving of our lives, the material concerns, the stress, the anxiety, the financial worry, the ambition – that it all has a broader spiritual purpose. We affirm as well that through a life of commitment to Torah values – to learning wisdom, to inspiring ourselves to become better people – we can imbue our lives and the lives of others with real meaning and inspiration.

The Talmud teaches that even the words of a great teacher in the present day were actually revealed at Mount Sinai. That is, the teachings of Torah are not just a collection of laws that happened long ago. They can be present and very real in our own lives.

It is significant that Torah was revealed on a mountain. It is a high place, removed from ordinary experience, a place to look up to, a place of transcendent beauty. But most important, it is an earthly place. High up, yes, but not beyond reach. Moses, an actual person, went up to Mt. Sinai and came back down, his face radiating the light of revelation. He came back down to the people Israel to share this light with them.

As Shavuot approaches, we prepare ourselves for this encounter with Jewish teaching and instruction, so that we might reinvigorate our spiritual lives with the energy of Torah.

Please join me and many, many others on Tuesday, June 7th at 8:30 pm at Rembrandt Yard, 1301 Spruce in Boulder.

What's the Deal in Israel?

2011-05-29T23:32:00.000-06:00

Completely confused by the dustup about Israel over the last week and a half? I think this review will clarify what some of the handwringing was all about.

I've been thinking a lot about the reaction of much of the Jewish community to President Obama's speech about Israel (full transcript here).

Obama said, principally, that any future peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians must be based in the 1967 line (the "Green Line"), with the assumption that there will be land swaps (which I believe can be understood to mean that Israel will not have to abandon or dissemble important settlements in the West Bank).

The President also said that Hamas must recognize Israel, and he made clear his opposition to the UN Vote currently expected in September in which the UN will vote to recognize Palestine as a state. It will pass the General Assembly, we can assume, and then be vetoed in the Security Council.

The reaction from important quarters of the Jewish community to Obama's comments regarding the 1967 line was one of outrage. Many people felt that he had, to quote Mitt Romney, "thrown Israel under the bus."

My reaction to this anger and frustration was one of puzzlement. Here's what I said in the Intermountain Jewish News, in an article quoting several area Jewish leaders.

I’m a bit baffled by much of the critical reaction to the president’s speech.

First, Obama made clear his opposition to the UN vote and affirmed the necessity of Hamas’ recognition of Israel.

Second, in asserting that the 1967 line should form the basis of negotiation (and not, as some have characterized it, ‘insisting’ that Israel withdraw to it), Obama formalized what has been universally recognized inside and outside Israel as the de facto starting place of any peace initiative. It was the basis of Oslo and the informal position of the previous two administrations.

The status quo is unjust, contrary to our highest values, and unrealistic. If our love for Israel leads us to fear any step toward negotiation, we will end up endangering Israel.

Most puzzling to me is the fact that Obama's comments appear to be identical to those made in a Novemeber 2010 joint statement from Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They said,

The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that "the United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements." Those requirements will be fully taken into account in any future peace agreement.

So, what gives? Well, a very astute article by Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor points out a very subtle difference between the Obama speech and the Netanyahu/Hillary statement. Obama didn't characterize the 1967 line as a "Palestinian goal," which the joint statement does. Those who would like to read a great deal into this (supposed) omission argue that Obama made the shift from merely acknowledging the neutral fact that 1967 line as a Palestinian desire to stating it as a desire (a policy) of the United States.

I'm still not quite convinced that we should read that heavily into the omission of the phrase "Palestinian goal." Here's Aryeh Eldad of Israel's nationalist National Union (Ichud Le'umi) party said

I wonder why all the pundits were so excited about Obama saying '1967 borders' as if he invented something knew. We tend to forget these were the Clinton guidelines, that Barak negotiated with Arafat based on them. Ehud Olmert also negotiated on these terms with Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] - and they all failed.

At its core, Obama's statement that a future peace should be based upon the 1967 line, with land swaps, is very old news indeed. It has been known inside and outside of Israel for many, many years that this is the only possible future for a Palestinian state, and therefore, for peace. In 2000, 2001, and 2008 the Israeli government used those lines as the basis for (failed) negotiations with the Palestinians.

The notion that because of those failures, Israel or should now back away from negotiations on that basis is a sad and dangerous one. So, Israel takes the position that is always mischaracterized as being the more knowing, more realistic, more "tough" stance and gives very little. What then? (Look at The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg writing in Bloomberg online for an argument as to why the Palestinians should be thrilled with Netanyahu's current position).

What does the future hold for Israel under circumstances in which the Palestinians are not offered a viable state? An Israel that is not Jewish? An Israel that is not democratic? An Israel that is in constant conflict? An Israel surrounded by Arab neighbors whose governments are currently unknown quantities? Dependent on the United States for billions of dollars in aid at a time when support for Israel is less and less strong and widespread among Americans?

Those are the questions that must be answered. They must be answered before we reject as unrealistic the only path to peace that Israeli and American leaders and negotiators have taken seriously for years.

Fullness of Years: Dylan Turns 70

2011-05-24T23:44:00.003-06:00

Indulge me in a little bit of Dylan rambling (or ramblin' as he would have once said).

For starters, I wanted to post a video of Dylan playing this song, but the only live versions are not so great. This is the original posted by someone, I know not who. Apologies for the cheesy video.

Also I tried to find the obvious birthday wish Forever Young from the Last Waltz, a truly amazing performance. But it no longer available on Youtube, even though other Dylan performances from that movie are. So, a beautiful song with inevitable overblown rock all star cast singing along appears at the end of this post.

Here's a link to a wonderful written tribute to Dylan, and another, and another. Thank you to Allen Taggart who is always so generous in sharing his passion for music for these links.

I'm a huge Dylan fan. No person has a right to craft so many songs that are brilliant and that just don't age - but he did. I don't imagine that his status as an artistic genius can be debated at this point, but I just want to express marvel at and gratitude for the amazing creative energy that God invests human beings with. Very few people in any generation can open themselves to it as fully as Dylan and other artists of his stature do. The danger of the genius label is that it separates the artist into a different category, as though they are super human. But of course what is so astonishing about the work of a genius is its deep resonance, its ancient familiarity. In fact a genius does not transcend the ordinary human experience but delves deep into it, drawing on a source that is in each of us but which is left unexamined by most.

In any event, I listened to "My Back Pages" (for obvious reasons) today. Not his greatest song, but it is sung with incredible power (so many people ridicule Dylan's nasal tone but I think he is one of the great singers in music. Really. His sense of rhythm as a singer, his ability to bend phrases around the beat, is just phenomenal. Try singing along with a Dylan song you know and you'll see what I mean). What struck me about it was that it feels like it was just written today, like he is singing about an experience, or an awakening, as it is unfolding. At the end of the same album (Another Side of Bob Dylan) is "Ballad in Plain D." A beautiful, cruel, self-flagellating and self-justifying, brutal and terrifyingly honest song. You can hear his fury and his devastation. Actually a frightening song. And it, too, sounds like he is revealing himself today, in the present.

The newness of Dylan's music is its most beautiful quality to me. I mean this in three ways. First, as I said above, so many of his songs just don't age - they are alive whenever you play them. Second, Dylan refused to allow these songs to become self parodies, refused to allow himself to become bored by them and so when he played them live he would reinvent them. This could be maddening if you fell in love with the recorded version and then heard him play a song live that had only the lyrics in common. Often he made you hear a new life in the song that was concealed in the original.

The third aspect of the newness of Dylan's music is the most important to me. That is his constant reinvention as an artist and public figure. No one ever owned Dylan, no one ever had his number. Look at this video - at the 4:40 mark you get a sense of this (Dylan was probably the least friendly and most entertaining interview subject in music). He was interested in becoming ("he not busy being born is busy dying") and not resting on some image that he had conjured or that others perceived. His themes, his style, his concerns, his influences, his forums for expression, all of these were changing constantly and still are.

This is powerful to me because I see it as a kind of spiritual striving (I'm not making claims about Dylan's spiritual life). We are challenged by Torah to reject faith in the idol of self, not to mistake the person we put out there for others to see with the truest being that no one else gets to see. And it is a Jewish struggle to constantly emerge and grow, and not be satisfied with what we have become already. There is always teshuvah to be made, always something new to become. In the yotzer prayer (recited every morning) we acknowledge God as the one who m'chadesh b'chol yom tamid ma'aseh bereishit, who renews the work of creation every day. That includes us. And in the second prayer of the Amidah we pray to God as m'chayei ha-metim, revives the dead, which I see as a prayer for ongoing spiritual life, an expression of fear of dying internally.

The Aish Kodesh taught that such ongoing renewal was an essential part of the Jewish spiritual struggle. If we don't do this, he writes (in Tzav v'Zeruz, #2), it is as if we are living in the body of a person who lived years ago, rather than living today. He interprets the phrase from Genesis 24:1 that Abraham was old, ba b'yamim, which is usually translated as "advanced in years" but very literally means "he came into his days" to mean that even in old age, Avraham was still becoming. This is the great life-affirming feature of Torah, that we are invested with a divine spark that has an eternally renewing power. So, for me, striving towards constant renewal and becoming, and avoiding the slow death of spiritual stagnation is essential to a life of mitzvah.

Pirkei Avot 5:25 says that at age seventy a person should achieve "fullness of years." That sounds a little too staid for Dylan, so my wish is that he keeps becoming Dylan in whatever way he needs to be.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Bob Dylan, and thank you.

Netanyahu's Speech

2011-05-24T14:18:00.000-06:00

Prime Minister Netanyahu speaking before a join session of Congress. Fascinating and impressive. More later.... I can't figure out how to embed it, so here's the link

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43150056/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/

Obama on Israel, Ctd.

2011-05-23T12:08:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure how to square this with the outrage of those who criticized President Obama for referring to using 1967 lines as the basis for future negotiation. It is from November of last year following a meeting of Secretary of State Clinton and Prime Minister Netanyahu:

The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that "the United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements." Those requirements will be fully taken into account in any future peace agreement.

‪
It comes from the official website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Day After the End of the World

2011-05-22T21:32:00.000-06:00

I'm sure we all heard that the world was supposed to end yesterday. The man who predicted it was "flabbergasted" that it didn't happen.

While I was not surprised to wake up this morning, there was an interesting resonance that I haven't seen written about.

Saturday night began Lag B'Omer, the 33rd day of the counting of the Omer ('Lag' comes from the Hebrew alphabetic equivalent of 33, the letter lamed plus the letter gimel) . We are commanded in the Torah to count the days between Pesach and Shavuot. Over time this became a period of mourning, associated with the death of thousands of Rabbi Akiva's students. The 33rd day of the Omer is seen as a break in the period of mourning.

The tradition took on new forms over time and the 33rd day of the Omer became recognized as the day of the death of Shimon bar Yochai, who is, according to tradition, the author of the Zohar.

There is a talmudic story about Shimon bar Yochai that connects (at least in my mind) to the 'end of the world' anxieties. Pursued by the Romans, he fled to a cave where he was miraculously sustained by a carob tree and lived for many years. He studied Torah continuously there and when he emerged, he was so immersed in Torah learning, and so cut off from the real world, that he was contemptuous of the lives of those he encountered - they were engrossed in banal physical tasks such as planting, rather than studying Torah. Such was his indignation that everything he gazed upon was destroyed.

This kind of angry, world-destroying piety was not looked upon kindly by God, who sent him back to the cave so God's world would not be destroyed by Shimon bar Yochai's pious gaze. When the sage re-emerged, he did so at greater peace with the world, and could live in it, having accepted its imperfections.

We remembered this Sage's death just hours after the world was supposed to have been destroyed.

Apocalyptic warnings - and fantasies - are a way to resolve the gap between the perfection of Divine reality and the ugliness of the messy world. They imagine a kind of awful perfection in which the world is completely destroyed so that true perfection can begin.

There is a resonance here with Shimon bar Yochai's initial attitude toward the world. Steeped in the perfection of Torah and Sagely meditation, he cannot face the real world in its spiritual imperfection.

But God's lesson to him is that Shimon must not permit his longing for deeper spiritual connection lead to contempt for the physical world, nor to a desire for its destruction. Thus, the Sage is sent back to the cave.

Retreat to the world of Torah, of prayer, and our desire for the magnificent quiet of deeper spiritual development, must not lead us to bitterness. True Torah is in the world, engaged with the world, with all of its brokenness. That is, in fact, the essence of Torah.

This powerful story has real contemporary relevance and import. While it is true that not so many people are apocalyptics, there is a parallel spiritual development in our culture to which many of us fall victim.

So many people - whether they consider themselves spiritual seekers or not - seek solace from the messy and painful world outside. The search for meaning in our culture is so often expressed in an utterly internal way. We seek "inner peace," we try to "get away from it all," we try to "find out who I really am," or to "get at peace with" ourselves. None of these things is bad, and in fact, each has a place in the spiritual search. But when the interiorization of the spiritual search ends where it begins - within the individual - we become like Shimon bar Yochai, stuck in the cave, looking for perfection, growing ever distant from God's world.

So, look: the world is still here, thank God. Go to it.

Obama on Israel

2011-05-20T16:27:00.001-06:00

A significant and not-so-significant speech from the President yesterday.

Significant in that he formalized a policy toward Israel: the US endorses using the lines drawn after the 1967 War as the basis for future negotiations. Significant also in that he said Hamas must recognize Israel for there to be peace, and that he expressed opposition to the proposed UN vote.

Not-so-significant because the 1967 line (not a border because it is not yet a state nor a negotiated boundary) has been the de facto basis of every serious discussion about peace. It was for Oslo, it was for the Clinton and Bush administrations, it is for peace proponents inside and outside of Israel. So Obama merely made formal what has been guiding the discussion for a long time.

Many Jews and Jewish organizations have reacted with outrage and anxiety. Sometimes our People's love for eretz yisrael is expressed through fear, and so this is inevitable. But Israel has always been founded on hope, and its future will only be secure if the Jewish people can find the strength to balance fear (expressed as reasonable caution) with hope.

Oseh shalom bimromav hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisraeil. May the One who makes peace in the high heavens bring peace to us and to all Israel.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Joshua Rose
303.499.7077
3950 Baseline Road
Boulder CO 80303

Hell No

2011-04-28T23:16:00.000-06:00

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat gives Hell a good name. He argues that belief in hell is necessary to a meaningful religious outlook:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

I'm sure that Hell will have currency for those who are made uncomfortable by the supposed obfuscation of boundaries between good and bad in contemporary society. If you need the idea of eternal post-mortem punishment to shore up your vision of the Good Life here on earth, enjoy yourself.

But how distant this is from the Jewish vision of an inspired life of meaning. While ancient and early rabbinic Judaism did have an idea of a place of torment after death, it does not have a central role in Jewish thought.

Look at this beautiful teaching of Rabbi Natan of Breslov. An antidote to the grim notion that a life of meaning takes shape only against a backdrop of eternal pain.

Pesach Passes

2011-04-24T20:00:00.000-06:00

A beautiful teaching I came across in preparing for Passover:

B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot atzmo k’ilu yatza mimitzrayim.

In every single generation, one must see oneself (atzmo) as if one had come out from Egypt. - The Haggadah

Rabbi Aaron Friedman of Sadagura (Ukraine), in Kedushat Aharon, focuses on the dual meaning of atzmo to come up with a surprising interpretation of this well known phrase.

Atzmo usually means "himself." But Rabbi Friedman uses a related but distinct meaning of the word, which is "essence." He writes:

I think that atzmo refers to the atzmiyut, the essence of a person – the soul which is a part of God....One must look to see the inner essence, the divine life point that is within... When one attains this level of religious devotion, it is considered as if he or she has left Egypt...

When a person ceases looking merely at outward forms and instead looks at the spiritual essence then one’s devotion becomes an Exodus from Mitzrayim: from every confine, from materiality, from all boundaries....

This teaching is so beautiful. It amplifies the radical nature of the Exodus and personalizes it. We have within us a confine-destroying light, if you will. That light cannot be extinguished by any external condition of our lives. Not by social decay, not by corruption, not by poverty, not by slavery. It is always there. If we can reconnect with this essence we are reminded that we carry part of God within us. It is that pure point that cannot be overcome, and that can give such fierce hope that it can give us a vision of what our lives, as individuals and as members of a community, should look like.

The challenge is that we spend most of our days focusing not on our essence, but instead on externals. But we carry this around with us always...

J Street Conference

2011-03-24T14:56:00.000-06:00

Rabbi David Saperstein, a national Jewish leader and a mentor to me, delivered the opening remarks at the J-Street Conference. His remarks to the group are below.

I agree with his main point: if those who consider themselves to be pro-Israel chase away those who have legitimate moral questions about Israel, this works to Israel's political and moral disadvantage. And, if those who criticize Israel don't ground their criticisms in a way that takes account of the complexity of the situation they do real damage to Israel.

Here you go....

Rabbi David Saperstein Addresses J Street's Conference from Isaac Luria on Vimeo.

Another Week, Another War

2011-03-18T13:24:00.001-06:00

It is clear that the US is prepared to fight another war - this one in Libya. True, there won't be any US troops on the ground - at least at the outset; I wouldn't expect that to hold if things get messy, as they tend to do in war - and the cause seems just. But isn't our culture growing too comfortable with war? Yes, the situation in Libya is already out of control and is already militarized, but does our nation's response need to be sending in men and women to put their lives at risk

Also - is President Obama unaware, as President Bush seemed to be, that we have a Constitution? It didn't used to be the case that the President could just declare war in all cases without the Congress being involved. Why isn't every editorialist and Congressperson in the country outraged at the President for this?

Here is a paper I wrote on Judaism and war. It is not quite on topic - my subject was Jewish teaching concerning the taking of civilian life in war - but there are some useful sources there.

Wikipedia entry on Judaism and war is here.

A Responsible Life, Part IV, ctd.

2011-03-13T15:22:00.000-06:00

Notes on Chapter 15

The challenge of a life of Torah is to remain "awake" to the true reality of the world. We are seduced into sleep by our inability to confront our responsibilities. The method for keeping awake to the true nature of reality and to our responsibilities to others (and to ourselves) is a life of Jewish observance through halachah (Jewish law). In fact, halacha's (he spells it halakhah) power and authority stems from its capacity to keep us morally awake

if halakhah is to have any authority or hold over us, then it must by its very nature carry this compelling wakefulness with and for us. (p 119).

I want to point out here that Rabbi Stone is trying to find a foundation for Jewish life and Jewish observance that does not rest simply on tradition (that's how it's always been done) or divine authority (God told you to observe) in the commonly understood sense. In other words, he is answering the question, "Why should we observe Jewish law and teaching?" His answer is that Jewish law helps make us be better human beings, more awake to the realities of our world, more attuned to our responsibilities; Jewish law won't let us "go to sleep."

Having said that, though, I should also be clear that by no means does Stone flee from the idea of God. Not at all. In fact, he writes immediately after the quoted passage above "Halakhah is the vehicle by which the divine makes its way into our experience, as the burden we carry for another." (119).

Halakhah is not just a list of laws that are passed down and observed (or ignored). Halakhah also is shaped by the experience of our own lives in the present day. Jewish law

is based in Torah but it is equally based on avodah (worship) and gemilut hasadim [acts of loving kindness]...Insofar as halakhah is based on Torah, the shape of the acts it requires is determined by Jewish experience. (120)

That is, Torah records the experience of the Jewish people. I think he means Torah in the broadest sense here. Not just as the five books of the Torah, but as all Jewish teaching, which draws its wisdom from reflections about human experience. By the phrase "the shape of the acts it requires" he means the sorts of acts Jewish law requires or prohibits.

Insofar as [it] is base on avodah, the shape of its acts is determined by the voice of those who suffer and cry out. (120)

Prayer (avodah), Stone has written previously, gives the individual and the community the opportunity to cry out in need and in pain. Halakhah (Jewish law) has to take human suffering into account.

Insofar as [it] is based on gemilut hasadim, the shape of its acts is determined by the imperative to respond to another's suffering... (120)

Jewish law must also take into account our experience of the suffering of other people and take into account our sense that we are responsible to help alleviate that suffering and come to the aid of our fellow.

[Halakhah] is a whole cloth constantly being woven, un-woven, and re-woven, depending on the circumstances. (120)

Again, Jewish law is not just a list of habits and requirements passed down from generation to generation. It has to adapt to human experience, to be flexible to take account of how we live our lives in response to the divine call to to care for others. So, it is always being revised to take account of our changing reality.

A Responsible Life, Part IV, ctd.

2011-03-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

I'll continue my summary of 'A Responsible Life.' I'll deal with chapter 14 here.

For those in my '613' class, I hope this is a helpful summary of a reading that has been difficult for many people. For people not in the class - you might find the ideas in his book very useful.

Stone says that to be a human being is to live with a constant choice between good and evil and that this imposes a "terrible responsibility" on us (p 112).

Awareness of this responsibility brings what is traditionally called yirat hashem ("awe of God"). Fulfillment of our obligation - doing what is good - brings a sense of fulfillment and pleasure. In seeking out this pleasure we are experiencing ahavat hashem ("love of God").

To seek what is good we have to "choose the good of our neighbor." That is, we have to care about doing good for other people.

"This principle reaches us in the language of scriptural commandment: ve'ahavta le'rayakha kamokha, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18)."

But why do we need all of the mitzvot - all the 613 commandments of Jewish life? Why not just take "love your neighbor as yourself" as a kind of general commandment, and use that to guide our lives. Wouldn't that inculcate the kind of responsible life that Rabbi Stone thinks is essential to Jewish life?

Stone argues that human beings want to run from the responsibility of being alive. We just want to be left alone when confronted with yirat hashem, awareness of our responsibility. The responsibility feels too much too bear, so we want to "go to sleep," as he puts it, and be relieved of responsibility. This is where the mitzvot fit in. The mitzvot

keep us awake to our...obligations. Moreover they allow us to invoke the community to share the burden that...would otherwise be all our own. (114).

So, two points here. First the hundreds of mitzvot help create a kind of mindfulness (he calls it wakefulness) that keeps us attuned to our responsibility as human beings. This is why he says the mitzvot are important in mussar. The mitzvot remind us and help us to live with the middot.

The second point is that Jewish life is communal and that helps us share and endure the burden of yirat hashem. For example, the responsibility to care for those who are ill is an overwhelming responsibility for one person. But because it is a communal obligation, we share in the responsibility and help one another fulfill it.

A Responsible Life, Part IV

2011-02-21T12:27:00.001-07:00

As promised for the 613 Class, some notes on Rabbi Stone's book. Here are some observations on Ch. 13. More to follow on Chs 14 and 15

In Part IV of his book, Rabbi Stone makes an argument that Judaism is an all-encompassing way of life that helps us live better, more meaningful lives. To simply focus on self-examination and self-improvement without the grounding practices and ways of Judaism is insufficient.

He argues (page 100-101) that taking up Jewish practices, Jewish learning and Jewish prayer is “not a rejection of universalism, but…our way toward it.” In other words, we might ask “why do we have to live as Jews? Can’t we just be better people in general and be like everyone else?” The answer is that yes, we could, but Judaism offers a full and rich approach to living and it is our inheritance.

Then he begins to explore three foundational aspects of Jewish life: Torah study, prayer (worship) and acts of goodness. He quotes Shimon the Righteous in Pirke Avot (part of the Mishnah):

Shimon the Righteous… used to say: The world stands on three thing: on Torah, on Worship and on Acts of Saintly Compassion.

Why is Torah foundational? When we learn – he uses the term “acquire” – Torah

We acquire a thirst for a call or [moral] claim upon us. We acquire a desire to be called upon by another and another and another…an infinite desire.

That is, Torah (he means Torah in the broadest sense: not merely the “five books of Moses” but the accumulated teachings of Judaism over the centuries) will focus our attention on learning how to become more responsive to other people. We can expand the possibilities of this learning in our generation, so we “discover additional possibilities for accepting even greater responsibility for others than were discovered by the maters of our tradition in the past.” (103)

Why is Worship/Prayer (Hebrew: Avodah) foundational? Prayer helps us identify our individual and communal pain, our needs: Prayer “is an expression of our human cry. Individuals in prayer give voice to the ir own needs and the community praying together gives voice to the cumulative needs that afflict the…the entire human community.” (106).

And we help each other through prayer: “By participating in the community’s life of prayer, we effectively make our burden available for others to bear.” (107) In participating in this ritual of sharing our deepest needs together, we give support to and get support from the community.

Why are Acts of Saintly Piety (Hebrew: Gemilut Chasidim) foundational? Torah and Worship are “incomplete unless accompanied by action.” (107) If we consider study and prayer to be the ultimate expression of our Judaism we are failing because we don’t bring our acts into the world to change the world.

But “Gemilut Chasidim is not merely about doing good deeds, though they are surely required. Rather, it is about orienting oneself intellectually, spiritually and practically…to meet the world with love.’ (108-09)

Soulfood Presents: "How We DON'T Talk About Israel" Tonight, Falafel King on Pearl, 7:30

2011-02-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Gavriel and I will host a discussion about what too often doesn't get said about Israel. Why is there pressure from the left and right to SHUT UP about certain aspects of this this issue that is so central to the Jewish people?

The Limb King

2011-02-19T23:44:00.002-07:00

A strangely affecting video for a new Radiohead track called Lotus Flower from the just-released (Friday) King of Limbs. I have so say I was ready to dislike the album - their post-Rock music, which I really loved @ first, has been stuck in this smooth, easy-listening rut for years. Nonetheless, the video is completely engaging.

Their music and angst-filled lyrics are constantly giving voice to the tension between the organic and aritificial, and the pain that results from living in a de-humanized environment. Somehow Thom Yorke's movements against the musical background capture this perfectly. The smoothness of the music - it's artificiality - is so striking against his sort of grubby trampishness and the crazy jerkiness, the pulsating aliveness and unpredictable movements of his limbs.

So, why does this find space on this Blog? There's something very spiritual about this tension to me - the pain of it, the aliveness of it.

Powerful to see real-ness conveyed through such artificiality. That's the stuff. Take a look:

Extinguishing the Burning Bush, or: Spiritual v. Religious

2011-02-19T23:29:00.002-07:00

Ah, Boulder - the land of the "spiritual not religious." I hear it all the time; I'm actually sympathetic to the idea when I hear people use it as a self-descriptor and explanation for why they are not engaged in Jewish life. But it bugs me.

Rabbi Scott Perlo has an article on HuffPo about the tension. For him, spiritual is the immediate, direct experience of God. Religion, on the other hand

incorporates generations of learning and has grown wise and thoughtful. Religion is patient in a measure that spans lifetimes, and knows the depth of things. Its foundations are hesed -- care and tzedek -- justice. It has plumbed both our mortality and our divinity, and speaks to us of our greatness and our smallness in the same breath. Religion helps us understand life.

Religion ... smothers spontaneity and individuality. It struggles to see people as different from one another (a relatively recent psychological discovery, as an aside). It does not thrill with its quickness, for it is not quick, and prefers rhythm over syncopation, harmony over innovation.

Yes, BUT. "Religion" is a collection of memories/texts/experiences/discourses/traditions/memories that tries to describe spiritual experiences. Religion is, in part, spirituality in the past.

Whether it is Moses at the burning bush, the four who entered the PaRDeS, or the ecstatic expressions of Chasidic insight, Jewish "religion" is made up of what we now call "spiritual" experience. So why is that so often lost?

So why is the fire of the burning bush so often stamped out in our synagogues? We need to keep the fires burning....

Time Out For Fun - Peggy-O

2011-02-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

Grateful Dead performing a traditional piece American Music, a spooky tale of unrequited love - Peggy-O. The music starts at about 1:00. Enjoy! It's another of my favorites.

Israel and Egypt - Netanyahu's Beautiful Statement of Support

2011-02-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

Words from Netanyahu on the uprising in Egypt:

The Israeli people, some 20 percent of which are Arab, want the Egyptian people's good and will respect any decision regarding Egypt's internal regime. That is your decision and we have no intention of interfering with your sovereign right to shape it. We hope that as peace was preserved in the past 30 years, the historic achievements it entails will be preserved in the future as well.

If only. Actually these are the words of Shlomo Avineri, proposing the statement that Netanyahu should make.

Netanyahu's statements over the last week have been puzzling and seem to reflect an significant misjudgment about the scope of events. His encouragement of Western governments to tone down criticism of Mubarak while vast portions of the Arab world - Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan - are rocked by unprecedented anti-totalitarian protests will not be remembered fondly. My guess is that we will see some backpedaling on that, but it is possible that Israel's failure to seize the moment is what will be remembered through the Arab world.

What I'm Reading

2011-01-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people ask me to recommend good books, so here's what I'm reading these days. I don't have the time right now to create links for these, but you can look 'em up. Shabbat Shalom.

The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Elliott Friedman. Color-coded Bible text to reflect scholarly consensus about which passages are written by which author/groups of authors (JPEDR theory).

Commentary on the Torah by Richard Elliot Friedman. A scholarly commentary on the Torah. As he writes in the intro, the purpose of the volume is to "be in the tradition of the classical [medieval] commentaries but to use...new learning" such as archaeological material, recent revelations about contemporaneous religious texts from other cultures, etc. Also there are some great literary insights as well.

A Responsible Life by Ira Stone. Familiar to those in my mussar class. A deep, contemporary Jewish theology grounded in mussar.

Lessons in Tanya. The Tanya by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi is the foundational book of Chabad and a chassidic text of great nuance, insight and beauty. This volume includes summaries and adaptations of classic chabad insights and the contemporary editor's explanations. I'm learning this in telephonic chevrutah with my friend Rabbi Matt Reimer.

Derech Ha-Melech. A work of stunning insight an psychological/spiritual nuance by Rabbi Kalman Kalonymous Shapira, known as the Aish Kodesh. Hebrew only. Also studying this in Chevruta.

Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow by Art Green. Powerful combination of insights from Kabbalah and modern theology. Green approaches both the mystical tradition and modern intellectual and ethical realities with seriousness and integrity.

The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow.

Time Out for Fun - I and I

2011-01-20T20:53:00.001-07:00

Dylan's interpretation of Exodus 33:20, lo tuchal lirot et panai ki lo yirani ha-adam vachai, "and God said 'You cannot see my face; no person can see my face and live.'"

Let me know if you think this song has any mussar insight....

By the way, if you think you hear Mark Knopfler here, you do (and even if you don't, you do):

A Moving Story

2011-01-17T23:16:00.003-07:00

A beautiful teaching from Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev on this week's Torah portion. Moses' ~~brother in law~~ (oops! Thanks, Don) father in law Yitro (Jethro) is dumbfounded that Moses is trying to adjudicate every single issue that arises among the people. He says to Moses Why are you doing this all alone with the people standing in front of you all day and night? (Exodus 18:14) and he warns him that this is too great a burden for Moses. He goes on to suggest that Moses create a system of lower-courts that will be administered by others, while Moses will just hear the most difficult cases.

Focusing in on the notion that the people are always "standing" in Moses' presence, Levi Yitzchak turns this moment of administrative problem-solving into an insight into the spiritual quest. He writes,

A person should constantly be moving from one spiritual level to the next, and should not stand in one position, with a static quality [lit: with a single aspect/point of view].

Moses was challenged not by the work of sitting all day hearing court cases. It was that a person of his spiritual stature was speaking all day with people who were always "standing in one position" and who didn't seek to move from level to level.

The exhausting challenge for Moses - the reason Yitro tells him a couple of verses later this will wear you out....it is too heavy a task for you - is to spend all day trying to lift the spiritual state of others around him, trying to get them to go from one level to the next.

How often have we in our own lives reached a point of comfortable stasis. Everything is just right but so, so wrong (there's a song about that). We stop growing, stop becoming.

The tzadik (righteous person) Moses is presented here by Levi Yitzchak not as the dispenser of judgments about Jewish law but instead as the great nudge trying to push people to get moving, to leave behind where they are to go to the next level. To live, to grow, to ascend.

Torah tries constantly to move us from one level to the next, to get us to refuse to accept our lives, our identities, our world as "given." It is constantly to be renewed and uplifted.

I Have A Dream

2011-01-16T22:39:00.002-07:00

Reverend Dr. King starts at about 1:08.

Love: Where Mussar Gets Mystical

2011-01-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Parts of Sha'ar Ha-Ahavah, "The Gate of Love" in The Ways of the Tzaddikim, are hard going (see my previous post on this topic).

Along with other religious traditions, Jewish teaching suffered under the illusions of patriarchal thinking for centuries. Passages like those on 108/109 and 122/123 are reminders that we have to be vigilant in fighting attitudes that denigrate the dignity and full humanity of any person groups of people. In the terms of Torah, this is the ongoing work of hitgalut, revelation.

There is nonetheless much beauty in this chapter. "The Gate of Love" is a doorway to contemplation of the bounds of love and the relationship between love and wisdom. Negotiation of such boundaries are central to the spiritual path of mussar - and central to the human experience.

This middah is also a gateway to mystical dimensions of mussar practice. Focus in particular on pages 124/1255 through 130/31. When the text refers to "knowledge" it is brushing up against a central idea in Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism). The word for "knowledge" is da'at and is one of the ways that Divine consciousness manifests in the universe. This is very far from our understanding of ordinary knowledge, which usually refers to information of some kind. Our awareness of da'at takes us to a realm of consciousness that is far beyond ordinary knowledge. We will have a chance to dwell deeper into these mystical dimensions on Thursday.

Love also plays a central role in the theology presented in Rabbi Stone's A Responsible Life. Here he talks in quite different way about the relationship between Divine-human love and love between human beings. Love is central to the idea of responsibility and embracing of ever-widening circles of love and responsibility.

I want to draw out one point in particular: in both Ways of the Tzaddikim's "Gate of Love" and in these first three Chapters of Stone's A Responsible Life we see the idea that the ethical (relationships between human beings) and the mystical (relationship between humans and God) are inextricably bound (see in particular Stone p 24-25). We must never choose between being seekers in the spiritual sense and being people who carry a sense of responsibility and obligation with regard to other people. Their integration is core to a true understanding of Torah.

See you soon.

Debbie Freiedman, may her memory be for a blessing.

2011-01-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

Debbie Friedman has died. She was an important songwriter and creative force in American Jewish life and recognized internationally for her art. Somebody referred to her recently as the "Shlomo Carlebach of the Reform Jewish Movement." She was accomplished in her own right and on her own terms but here might be something to that. Her influence was so widespread and she was beloved by so many.

Like thousands of others, my family can claim a nice connection to her. When my father was the resident rabbi at Camp Swig in California, Debbie was just getting her start as a songwriter. Though in general Dad is more likely to go in for chazzanut (traditional chanting) than anything, he was supportive and encouraging of her because he could see (hear) the quality of her work and its integrity. She remained grateful to him for his support.

In any event, she opened doors to Jewish life for many, many people who were drawn to her music. May her memory and her music be a blessing.

Tribute page here: http://urj.org/debbiefriedman/

All You Need is Ahavah

2010-12-24T13:23:00.001-07:00

The Ways of the Tzaddikim identifies Love as such an important middah that it

includes more acts than any of the other [middot], and when one employ's [one's] love for good, it is the highest of all the [middot]...

I want to point to one troubling passage and one fascinating passage in the chapter on Love.

First, the troubling. In describing the dangers of love that is not informed by wisdom, the text refers to ahavat nashim, love of women, as being a danger. All of the attitudes we might expect of a text written in the 16th century manifest here: a woman has the capacity to morally destroy a man; women lead men to "fornication" and "lewdness." In the passage describing the benefits of harmonious love, the text states that in a proper relationship

she keeps him from promiscuity, through her he fulfills the mitzvah of having children, she rears his children...she serves him all of her days, preparing his meals and looking after the other household needs, thus freeing him to study Torah and to perform mitzvos.

One wonders whether some essence can be derived from this that allows us to apply it to a loving relationship between adults. It is not at all clear that this can be "gender neutralized" so to speak - it may be inextricable from its patriarchal views.

I do think there is a larger point to be made about a balanced love between adults. We'll try to explore that territory in the next class.

The fascinating part is the passage about Olam Ha-Ba (page 110-111 in the Feldheim edition). Notice that his description of the World to Come in this passage is not at all mystical or mysterious: it is ethical. This jibes perfectly with Rabbi Stone's rather obscure argument in A Responsible Life.

Time Out For Fun - Terrapin Station

2010-12-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands in one of their best years. Grateful Dead, Terrapin Station, 4/27/77. Enjoy.

Rational, Animal

2010-12-15T21:48:00.001-07:00

Aristotle defined humans as "the rational animal." I'm thinking a lot about rationality these days because one of the primary assumptions of mussar is that we are controlled by irrational impulses that are deeply resistant to conscious, rational attempts to overcome them. The class this week (Thursday night, at Har HaShem) will explore the idea of the unconscious as described in the writing of Rabbi Israel Salanter and Sigmund Freud. Musar is a method for understanding the place of these unconscious drives in our personality and actions and then rehabituating the spirit to overcome (repress?) them.

In any event, a fascinating article in this week's New Yorker (abstract here) had a particular resonance because of my thinking about these things. Lehrer reflects on a recent movement among a small number of scientists in various fields who are raising questions about the use of the scientific method.

Neither the mussar writing nor the article point toward the conclusion that rationality is hopelessly lost. Merely that it is much more elusive than we think.

Time Out For Fun - Late to the Lennon Tribute Edition, Part II

2010-12-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

Beautiful, beautiful song:

Time Out For Fun - Late to the Lennon Tribute Edition

2010-12-12T22:28:00.002-07:00

I haven't done a "Time Out for Fun" in a bit, and I'm late on observing the anniversary of Lennon's death (12/8/80), but here it is. What can you even say in remembering John Lennon? Any one song is ludicrously insufficient to capture his impact on music; and even all of his music posted simultaneously wouldn't get as his cultural impact. In any event, "I Dig A Pony," a great and underrated Lennon tune. A bit of a throwaway for him, I'm sure, but a great tune:

The World to Come

2010-12-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

Chevruta study links us with another person and so creates the future.

In Chapter Seven of Rabbi Stone's A Responsible Life, which we are reading in my 613 Habits of Highly Effective People class, a new and surprising understanding of Olam HaZeh and Olam HaBa appears. I want to summarize this dense chapter here for those in the class but I will do so by addressing the topics of present, future and past in a different order. Interspersed with the summary are my own interpretations of Rabbi Stone's ideas.

The past is pure spirituality. That is, it is not material - we can't touch it. Nonetheless, it is more than memory because it has a real effect on our lives. It shapes us. What makes the past Torah is the extent to which that shaping of our lives is purposeful. A whole series of events in the past may affect my life, but those might just be a collection of random experiences that have no purpose. But the Torah, the revelation, of the Jewish past, is trying to shape my life in a particular direction: cultural memory, the teachings of the Jewish tradition, the mitzvot, these all are trying to make me act in a certain way. The past reaches into the material world to guide it.

The present is where I exist. To exist in the present is to be conscious. Consciousness is most immediately tied to one's own experience, one's own needs. What it means to be me is to see the world through the lens of my consciousness of my own perceptions and needs. In this sense, the self is the "location" of the present.

This present is 'olam hazeh' - this world, the material world.

The present (the world of self) is interrupted by the awareness of the needs of another person, awareness of the reality of another consciousness that exists along with us. We suspend our interest in the self - we set aside the present - when we encounter another and we therefore have to look to the future to return to our self, with all of its demands on us. This is what Rabbi Stone means when he says that "waiting for another creates the future for me." If we sit and stare at our belly button, and a needy person knocks at the door looking for food, we stop staring at our belly button and think "I'll get back to that later, in the future" as we go to answer the door. That is a silly illustration of what he means.

The future is 'olam haba' - the world to come, a world that is both material (there is another physical being that causes it to exist) and yet spiritual (the process of waiting for time to pass is a spiritual experience, according to Stone).

We move between olam ha-zeh and olam ha-ba as we switch between a consciousness focused on self and a consciousness focused on others. Though orientation toward others is "responsibility" and in this sense is a burden, it is also liberating, freeing us from the unsatisfying entrapment in the prison of the present and the prison of self.

Apologies to Rabbi Stone for any possible misrepresentations of his ideas that may appear in this post.

Chevrutah, Part II

2010-12-08T22:12:00.001-07:00

Some of you in my mussar class (The 613 Habits of Highly Effective People) are pressing against the limits of chevruta. You wonder about the propriety of moving beyond the text of the class to the personal, you are afraid to do so. I wrote previously that chevruta study should not be limited to the text (nor can it be free of the text) that you are studying. It must include reflections from your own life and tales from your own experience.

But in our society, so focused around the sanctity of private space, sharing deeply emotional experiences is unusual - and even "impolite." But Torah is illuminated when lived experience confronts tradition and each informs the other. What prevents us from opening to others in this way? Why do we cover up - and what are we covering up?

We follow in these weeks the story of Joseph. Throughout the story Joseph is covered up and then revealed. His famous katonet pasim, the "technicolor dreamcoat" is a source of his brother's envy. They strip it off of him. In the house of Potiphar, his refuge in Egypt, Potiphar's wife strips Joseph's clothes off of him. Eventually he will be dressed in the clothes of an Egyptian nobleman and his brothers will not recognize him.

This cycle of enrobement and revelation has its emotional counterpart this week, in Parshat Vayigash. Judah, unaware that he is speaking to the brother that he nearly killed, pleads with Joseph to have mercy on the brothers. Finally, Joseph "was no longer able to hold back" and bursts into tears. "I am Joseph" he reveals.

The Sefat Emet points out that this is preceded by Judah's speech, which begins "Judah approached him" (Gen 44.18). He writes

The 'him' here refers to Joseph, to Judah's own self, and also to God. The meaning is as follows: Judah offered nothing new in his words [that is, there was no argument here that the brother's had not previously made to Joseph] nor did he have a good claim with which to approach Joseph. But as he clarified the truth of the matter, salvation came to him. 'Truth grows from the earth' (Ps 85.12).

The Sefat Emet suggests that in Judah's approaching Joseph there was immense power. The act of reaching out beyond the boundary of self was revelatory. It cut through Joseph's pretense so that he could no longer be false and v'hitapek, "he could no longer hold back." Joseph's reaction is to finally reveal the truth, "I am Joseph."

But the Sefat Emet is also pointing out to us that this psychological unveiling is at the same time a spiritual revelation. He renders the verse as "Judah approached God." As Judah reaches across the boundary of self, cuts through the cloak of concealment and defense he also reaches across the boundary of the material into the divine within himself and his brother.

I want to suggest the chevruta learning has the same potential. We can cut through the falsity and pretense that we use to get through the business of everyday life in these moments. There is nothing inherently bad about our initial reluctance to reveal something real from our own experience. We need these garments of self and identity in order to function in the world.

But two souls revealing something more true beneath the veil have the ability to uncover great truth and to access the deeper divinity that is trying to reveal itself - that source of divinity that is trying to make itself manifest through the process of self-examination and teshuvah that is part of mussar.

But it starts with one of the two people in the chevruta "approaching" first - just as Judah had the courage to do.

Nietzsche is Dead, part II

2010-12-08T21:39:00.001-07:00

I pointed in the last post on this topic to an article from nytimes.com about religion in the modern world. The article points out that the truth claims of religion have been limited by modernity.

I see two points in the article. First, in modern, diverse democracies, multiple truths are accepted as legitimate. In the absence of any broad shared Truth (capital T truth) we use tolerance as a way to live together. In the good old days, we could condemn a heretic because they rejected a truth that was universally accepted. In the more complicated modern world no one has the authority to say that someone's take on Truth is wrong. This is the 'practical' problem of religion in modern society - our diverse society just can't function without a very broad and deep tolerance of multiple Truth systems.

Is anyone still reading? The second limit on religious truth claims in the modern world is not practical but substantive: science and history have decimated traditional religious views, at least in the realm of the 'revealed' religions.

These are two distinct problems and I won't deal with either of them here! I will deal with them both eventually.

Let me just say two things: first, I don't have a definitive answer to these problems. I struggle with this essential problem often, constantly, but I have been unable to resolve it in a way that the philosophically trained part of me finds satisfactory.

Ultimately the part of me that continues to need and affirm my relationship to the Holy One simply trumps my philosophical impulses. To those reading (?) who are inclined toward rationalism - or rather those whose rationalism is totalizing - that will sound ludicrous. And I can actually empathize with, I can inhabit, that view.

I feel very much of two minds. It is as though there are two distinct consciousnesses within me that really should not be able to live together but do. And their cohabitation (!) is not due to their harmony. It is due ultimately to my emunah that there is something true but unresolved in their cohabitation.

Ultimately I believe that this philosophically trained part of me is blind so something that is more elemental and true. What that is, and why that is, cannot, by necessity, be explained rationally. Nor can I convince anyone of it.

Nietzsche is Dead, and We Have Killed Him

2010-12-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

Great article in the New York Times online "The Stone" section, which deals with philosophical issues as they pertain to contemporary culture. The author is Sean Kelly of Harvard's Philosophy Department.

He writes about whether it is possible, in an era when belief in God is no longer central to the culture's claims about truth, to have a religious belief with integrity.

One can imagine a happy suburban member of a religious congregation who, in addition to finding fulfillment for herself in her lofty and ennobling religious pursuits, experiences the aspiration to this kind of fulfillment as one demanded of all other human beings as well. Indeed, one can imagine that the kind of fulfillment she experiences through her own religious commitments depends upon her experiencing those commitments as universal, and therefore depends upon her experiencing those people not living in the fold of her church as somehow living depleted or unfulfilled lives. I suppose this is not an impossible case. But if this is the kind of fulfillment one achieves through one’s happy suburban religious pursuit, then in our culture today it is self-deception at best and fanaticism at worst. For it stands in constant tension with the demand in the culture to recognize that those who don’t share your religious commitments might nevertheless be living admirable lives. There is therefore a kind of happiness in a suburban life like this. But its continuation depends upon deceiving oneself about the role that any kind of religious commitment can now play in grounding the meanings for a life.

This is the tension for the modern religious person. I wonder about his premise in this passage, though. Does it have to be the case that a person who experiences the hold of God in her life sees those without that experience as living diminished or "untrue" lives? Is there such a thing as religious humility?

More on this later...

I Found a Chevruta Partner - Now What?

2010-12-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

In response to some queries about how chevruta should work, I want to post some thoughts on how you might approach this powerful Jewish learning methodology.

Both partners should arrive at the learning session having read the text.

Both partners should bring a copy of the text they are studying. Trade off reading out loud to one another, one bit at a time. Sometimes this bit will be a whole paragraph, sometimes just a sentence, and sometimes even just a word. It depends on what you find in it.

After you've read the paragraph or sentence, go back over it to make sure you've understood the most basic meaning. What is the author saying?

If you are the kind of person who is quite shy, make sure you are contributing to the conversation. If you are the kind of person who loves to talk and is brimming over with thoughts about the text, make sure you make plenty of space in the conversation for your partner to participate.

Keep in mind that every person has something unique to bring to the text. If you hold back your insights, or if you prevent your partner from participating, you are silencing the insights, culled from a lifetime of experience of being a human, that are waiting to come out.

What are your reactions to the text? Do you agree with it? Does it resonate with other things you believe? Do you disagree? Why? How does one paragraph connect to the next - is there an argument that is being built? What are the assumptions of the text? What assertions about human nature are being made? What assertions about God are being made?

What are your emotional responses to the text (this may not always apply, of course)? Chevruta study doesn't have to be a mere intellectual exchange. If you find your anger swelling at a certain passage, or if you are particularly moved by a particular passage, that's important. Delve deeper to find out what about the passage is hitting you so hard.

The conversation should be informed by your life experience. The conversation should absolutely drift from the text at times so you or your partner can "open up" or clarify a certain passage with insights from personal experience. How far afield you run will depend on your judgment, and your partner's, as to how valuable the conversation is. However, you should avoid the temptation to read one paragraph and then have it become a schmooze session. Make time to schmooze afterward. Make sure you return to the text.

Don't feel that the primary purpose is to get through the entire chapter. All things being equal, if you have enough time, or if you are meeting more than once between classes, this is the best thing. But if you are rushing through the text just to finish, you are shutting down all the best parts of the conversation. At the same time, if you only cover one paragraph in the session, you won't really have a chance to engage with the work.

It is 'ok' not to agree with the text. Keep in mind that Orchot Tzaddikim is 550 years old! You need to avoid simply giving up on the text. This wouldn't be giving kavod to this teaching which has touched so many lives.

Make notes about the parts that bother you. There can often be great insights that emerge from disagreeing with a passage if you can be patient enough to stick with the text and explore where it is coming from and then articulate where you are coming from.

You and your partner may disagree about the value of a passage, or even about its meaning. It is important to explore those disagreements. But do so with a sense of respect and humility. The point of chevruta is very much NOT to convince the other person that they are wrong. I would expect that many disagreements will simply be left unresolved.

Your book should look messy with pencil marks, underlines, marginal notes, and questions when you are done.

There are some further resources here.

Mussar Resources

2010-12-01T21:04:00.001-07:00

I promised to post some online mussar resources. Here they are. These might be helpful for those who need to delve further into the middah that they have chosen (of course, these may also be useful for the middah - currently anavah, or humility - that the class is working on together).

Your individual middah may or may not be covered by the resources below. If you cannot find resources on your middah, please send me an email so we can find out how to connect you with the teachings you need.

1) http://www.mussarleadership.org/ This is the website of Rabbi Ira Stone, whose book, "A Responsible Life," we are reading in the class.

Go to "Mussar Pathways" along the top menu; select "Middot" and then choose one of the middot. For many but not all of these, Rabbi Stone has written an essay exploring the topic in some depth.

2) Alan Morinis' Mussar Institute lists some online English mussar classics. Please let me know if you want to pursue this route so I can aid you in your learning. The links are at http://www.mussarinstitute.org/wisdom-way.htm

Within You Without You

2010-11-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

There are two tensions in the practice of Mussar that are important for us to talk about.

First is the tension between the physical and spiritual dimensions of change. We can change our behavior but not go the next step of transforming ourselves internally. For example, a person might be trying to become more generous (in relationships, with money, etc). Through mussar practice, one could be trained in a kind of Pavlovian way, to perform the right actions. So, you make it a habit to give money, you make it a habit to make sure that people you are in relationship with are taken care of. Yet, internally, your spirit is in rebellion against this and constantly resenting your giving, dubious about the needs of others versus your own needs. This is not the goal of mussar. We are striving to change internally as well - though this may begin with reluctant acts in the physical world. Ultimately, mussar practice is pointing to a higher consciousness, toward a unity underlying all physical existence, so that the practitioner becomes more aware of this deeper reality and more willing, therefore, with the ethical dictates that flow from it.

The second tension is between an awareness of one's flaws and a sense of magnificent spiritual potential within each individual. Mussar practice begins with a very deep sense of self-awareness. The self-aware person will see the many shortcomings, missed opportunities, wasted time, selfish and cruel acts, misguided strivings, etc, etc, that is at the heart of so much of our time here. This self-awareness can lead to a sense of shame and a very low and dejected spirit. If this low state persists, it will become impossible to ascend to the next level - we can't lift ourselves up if we are always focused on our shameful character. The Aish Kodesh (I'm on a big Aish Kodesh trip right now and you will continue to hear much about him in the coming weeks) writes about the impossibility of drawing down Torah from heaven when we are in such a debased state. It becomes impossible to access and draw out the divine potential that is within us if we are blinded to it.

The answer is of course not to try to lower of our self-awareness - ultimately our ability to transcend our current state hinges on our capacity to see a brilliant light within ourselves. The challenge is to see ourselves as complex beings who have a deep core of holiness but who are guided away from that and are led to be out of touch with that. Rav Simchah Bunam famously taught that we should have in one pocket a note that says "I am but dust and ashes" and in the other pocket a note that says "For my sake the world was created." The trick is to know when to reach for each one.

Finally, the lyrics to George Harrison's "Within You Without You" are either terribly insightful, or just ludicrous. But the title fits here, and it's a great song:

We were talking-about the space between us all
And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth-then it's far too late-when they pass away.
We were talking-about the love we all could share-when we find it
To try our best to hold it there-with our love
With our love-we could save the world-if they only knew.
Try to realize it's all within yourself
No-one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small,
And life flows ON within you and without you.
We were talking-about the love that's gone so cold and the people,
Who gain the world and lose their soul-
They don't know-they can't see-are you one of them?
When you've seen beyond yourself-then you may find, peace of mind,
Is waiting there-
And the time will come when you see
we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

Lashon Ha-Ra no.3: Last Words on Lashon HaRa

2010-11-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

1) Please share your thoughts on the relationship between Lashon HaRa and idolatry in the comments section below.

2) I want to relate a story about the Chofetz Chayim (see previous post). It is suspiciously similar to a story about Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk that ends quite differently.

He was travelling on a train to another town, inconspicuous in simple garb. On the train he encountered a Jew and they be began to talk. After some time, the Chofetz Chayim asked him where he was going and he answered that he had heard that Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, the Chofetz Chayim, would be teaching in such and such a town, and he was going to hear this luminary among this generation, this incredibly pious and brilliant scholar.

"I know him," the Chofetz Chayim responds. "He's not so great." Outraged, the Jew slapped him. "How dare you speak in this way about such a Torah scholar!" They parted ways.

Later the man goes to see the Chofetz Chayim teach and, of course, recognizes him. Horrified, he approaches the Chofetz Chayim and apologizes profusely.

"Please, don't worry," says the Chofetz Chayim. "You taught me a great lesson. I knew, of course, that it is a great sin to speak lashon ha-ra about another person. But I did not know that it was also a great sin to speak lashon ha-ra against yourself."

Lashon Ha-Ra no.2: The Word on Bad Speech

2010-11-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

For those who want to pursue learning on Lashon HaRa, the main source would be Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chayim, after the title of his book about Lashon Ha-Ra.

613 Habits - Lashon Ha Ra #1

2010-11-15T14:23:00.001-07:00

This is the first of what will be several entries connected to my class, "The 613 Habits of Highly Effective People: Get Over Your Self." I am teaching about the spiritual discipline of mussar. The class will draw on several primary sources from the tradition, but principally is based on Orchot Tzaddikim (The Ways of the Righteous) and Mesilat Yesharim (The Path of the Upright). We will also use Rabbi Ira Stone's "A Responsible Life."

In this month's reading, "Sha'ar Lashon Ha-ra," which is translated by Rabbi Silverstein as "The Gate of Slander," there is a puzzling observation in the second (English) paragraph. The text reads,

Certainly, one who is given to slander removes from himself the yoke of Heaven, for he sins without pleasure and is worse than a thief or an adulterer, who pursue pleasure (Shochar Tov 120:3).

First of all, the "yoke of Heaven," (ol shamayim). This phrase denotes the acceptance of the obligation to live in accordance with the Divine will. The image seems to be one of a painful burden and when we read it we might say, "What am I, an ox? What a drag (pun intended)." If you allow the image to play out you might see it as more meaningful and beautiful. One of the reasons an animal carries a yoke is to pull a plow behind it. The plow digs into the earth to make possible the planting of seeds that will ultimately grow into something beneficial. We uphold the Torah because our goal is to turn the fallow fields of earthly life into something that is abundant with life and sustenance.

What about this idea that this is a more serious sin because we don't derive pleasure from it? I don't actually accept the premise. One of the reasons that lashon ha-ra is so easy to do is that it brings immense pleasure to the one who speaks it. Part of the pleasure is taking the person down a notch or too, perhaps satisfying some deep insecurity we have. That we satisfy this insecurity by our worst impulses (dragging someone down) rather than with our best (elevating ourselves) is one of the signals of the harm of lashon ha-ra: we damage ourselves in the process (as the Talmud says in Arachin 15b, "Lashon ha ra kills three people: The one who speaks it, the one who hears it and the one about whom it is spoken").

There is another pleasure in lashon ha-ra, and our desire for it actually stems from holiness: lashon hara creates solidarity between the speaker and the listener. There is a kind of warmth, the comfort of a bond between one person confiding something that is mutually morally repugnant to another person. This desire for connection and sympathy with others is essential to human holiness, but of course this particular expression of that desire is evil.

The Aish Kodesh writes that every thought, desire and deed that we have can be revealed to have at its core a dimension of holiness. Even within an act as ugly as lashon ha ra is the potential for holiness to be revealed. Lashon Ha-ra is an ugly garment covering, as it were, a light of holiness. While the teshuvah (repentance) that we must do begins by refraining from lashon ha-ra and making a good faith effort to undo damage that we have caused, it should also include an examination of the desire for holiness, warped as it may have been, that might have been at its core.

Does Hitch Pray?

2010-08-09T22:00:00.000-06:00

The great Christopher Hitchens, with whom I do not always agree but from whom I always learn something, has cancer. There has been an interesting online debate recently about whether it is proper to pray for this evangelizing atheist.

In this video from the Atlantic he speaks with Jeffrey Goldberg about illness, atheism, agnosticism and prayer. Martin Amis joins in for a bit.

Gay Marriage Decision: A Victory for Jews

2010-08-05T11:54:00.000-06:00

I can't make any comments on the legal thinking that went into the Prop 8 decision - some supporters of gay marriage are saying it was a bad decision because its breadth makes it an easy target for Supreme Court conservatives.

However, I do think that Jews should be happy with the outcome. Why? Because the only arguments against gay people marrying are arguments grounded in religion. Wha? Judaism is a religion, so we agree with them, right? Wrong.

While certainly there are many Jews who feel that the Torah calls on them to oppose loving intimate relationships between members of the same sex, that is not really the point (the Orthodox Union supported Prop 8). If we could have the state of Colorado enforce the laws of Shabbat as described in the Torah would we want that? Of course not, because we accept the principal of separation of church and state - we wouldn't want that any more than we would want the state to force people to observe Christian holidays.

And this is why even those Jews who consider themselves religiously bound to oppose gay relationships should celebrate. It is a victory for value-neutral secular law. That is good because it permits us to practice our religion, and permits our neighbors to practice theirs, but is doesn't allow us to force our views on them and visa versa.

If you have any doubts about who has the most at stake in the anti-gay marriage side, look no further than the Alliance Defense Fund. Their lawyers are litigating the case. Their website describes them as a "servant organization that provides the resources that will keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel through the legal defense and advocacy of religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and traditional family values." The first two lines of their "Statement of Faith": "We believe the Bible to be the inspired, infallible, authoritative Word of God. We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

Do I want these people making laws about what kind of society I can live in? No more than I want the Orthodox Union to.

In a religiously diverse society, doesn't it make sense to have religiously-neutral laws that are non-coercive. Let's agree that no one should force anyone into a gay marriage - if you don't want one, don't have one. And no one should stop anyone else from having a gay marriage. Doesn't that allow for harmony in a diverse society?

And isn't it dangerous for Jews to support anti-democratic, religiously grounded arguments while living in a society that is 98% non Jewish?

Mosque at Ground Zero

2010-08-03T11:47:00.000-06:00

It looks like the mosque to be built near the WTC site will go ahead. I think this is an excellent turn of events.

I was astonished to find the ADL's Abe Foxman on the wrong side of this issue. It seems to me that the only grounds for opposing the mosque is the charge that one of the supporters of the mosque is CAIR, which has been accused of having links to terrorist organizations. Those accusations don't appear to have much credibility. Foxman's argument, however, does not rest on links to CAIR (though he does allude to the need for more information about the mosque's backers) but rather on Americans sensitivity to having a mosque - apparently, any mosque - at this site. We should remember that the attack on America on 9/11 was an attack on all Americans - including on Muslim Americans.

Parshat Devarim - The Opportunity in Wilderness

2010-07-16T15:08:00.001-06:00

Each of experiences a spiritual wilderness from time to time - we feel out of place, alienated from the very core of what we've become and who we are. There is a sense of being cast aside by our own lives and decisions - suddenly a world and way of living that felt rich and plentiful is burdensome and lifeless.

In the Torah portion this week Moses recounts the earlier episode when the Israelites, anxious that their journey will not end well, accuse God of bringing them out of slavery to die in the desert because God hates them.

The Zohar argues that this wandering into the wilderness was an opportunity. The wilderness is a place controlled by the 'sitra achra' - the forces that act against life and goodness. God prepared the journey so that Israel would have strength there and could vanquish those forces once and for all - by wanderin theough the darkness they could overcome it with internal strength. But the Israelites could only see the danger and not the opportunity.
We have to look again at these wilderness walks, their dry arid threats of danger and dissolution and disorientation, and see them not as places empty of meaning, but as places that challenge us to overcome them with internal strength. They are not wrong ways but are rather essential to our development.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Joshua Rose
303.499.7077
3950 Baseline Road
Boulder CO 80303

Shema, Yisra'el: Being Present

2010-07-11T23:02:00.000-06:00

In the past two weeks I have been doing a lot of sitting in front of my computer, in between diaper changing, sleeping, feeding, and tending to both children. It's led me to more Face-booking, blog-reading, headline surfing.

I've accumulated and shared a lot of information, but what's been lost in this frenetic information exchange? I'm a physical presence, but I'm barely here.

The fundamental religious challenge for me right now is, I think, to try to maintain a sense of presence in the lives of those around me - to really listen - amidst the increasingly frantic pace. But also to maintain a kind of presence and groundedness in whatever it is that I'm doing. I know that the medium is only the medium, a tool is only a tool and all that, but there's something about computers that takes us away.

On that note, goodnight...

Time Out For Fun - New Baby Version

2010-06-30T17:36:00.001-06:00

In something I wrote in honor of Eliav's birth, I quoted this song. So, here's another go for another baby. What a hat....

Baruch Ha-Ba

2010-06-30T12:39:00.000-06:00

Channah and I welcomed our new baby into the world on Monday morning. A beautiful, huge tiny person, great sleeper and good eater. Pretty overwhelmed right now by the shower of blessings raining down. How to become worthy of that? . So, baruch haba, in the words of the traditional welcome.

(Bradley Shavit Artson wrote a great article on the meaning of baruch. In the context of the beracahot that we say over food or events, we usually translate it as "blessed" but that raises a theological puzzle. If God is blessed, who is doing the blessing? Obviously, humans - but if we stop blessing, is God no longer blessed? Artson argues that the word actually means bountiful, or abundant. So, "You are bountiful God, the one who brings bread from the earth." In the context of Baruch Ha-Ba, which we say to welcome someone (including a new baby), "blessed" makes more sense. I can't find the article online, but for those who care, Journal of Conservative Judaism, Winter 1994).

Reb Zalman encouraged Channah and I to "coo" possible names to the baby and mark his reaction so his neshama can weigh in on the decision. So, we will choose together in advance of the bris on Monday.

Tweeting the Torah

2010-02-18T10:02:00.001-07:00

So I read online about a project to turn famous novels into Twitter messages. Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables people to send 140 character messages to a list of subscribers.

So, here's the challenge: I'd love for the brave to take a crack at reducing a torah portion/book of the torah/entire torah to a tweet. 140 characters. This week's Torah portion is Terumah, Exodus 25:1 - 27:19. Give it a shot.

Hope v. Fear

2010-02-11T21:27:00.001-07:00

Extraordinarily unsettling news out of Iran, as we have all heard. And while the dangers of a tyrannical and oppressive Islamist (as opposed to simply Muslim) regime acquiring a nuclear weapon cannot be turned away by words and hope alone, William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech from 1949 inspires confidence. Hope is not enough, but any attempt to turn away such dread must be rooted in it.

Wednesday night at Har HaShem - Special Event

2010-02-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

Gergg Drinkwater from Mosaic will be at Har HaShem on Wednesday night at 6:30 to talk about his work. Come join us. Here's the blurb:

In-Queeries into Torah
February 10th, 6:30pm
Congregation Har HaShem.

Gregg Drinkwater, co founder and director of Jewish Mosaic, will be at Har HaShem Wednesday February 10th at 6:30 pm. Gregg is co-editor, with the head of CU’s Jewish Studies Department Dr. David Schneer, of Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. The book is a collection of revelatory and incisive commentaries on the Torah portion from a LGBT perspective (or through a “bent lens,” as the book’s author’s write).

Gregg’s organization, Jewish Mosaic, was included three years running in “Slingshot,” a guide to “the most creative and effective [Jewish] organizations in America.” Jewish Mosaic encourages LGBT inclusion in Jewish life through advocacy, education, research and by increasing visibility of LGBT Jews in the community.

Gregg will talk about Torah Queeries and discuss how the Jewish world can be more inclusive

Rabbi Rose will participate by discussing the Jewish tradition’s perspectives on sexuality and how we can confront the tradition with our modern, egalitarian views while preserving ancient ideas about living in a holy way.

Israel Photography Trip from Boulder

2010-01-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

I will likely lead another trip to Israel in 2011 but for those who have a particular interest in photography, Byahad Trex is leading a great trip in April.

Good Golem

2010-01-13T16:25:00.001-07:00

Thanks to R, who sent me a great article on Professor Henry Makram's Blue Brain project to create consciousness from a computer. You can read it here.

The obvious point of reference for thinking about the meaning of artificial consciousness from a Jewish perspective is the golem. These legendary early animated non-human beings were imagined in the talmud. Significantly, they could be created only by righteous and learned rabbis. This introduces a measure of control over the animated being. Still, though, the golems that were created could wreak havoc. The presence of the world "emet" (truth) on their foreheads is significant for two reasons: one, it suggests that the being is subject to the normal laws of reality (this is my reading of this part of the legend) as we know them. Second, when the first letter of the word emet is erased, it becomes "met" (dead), and the being dies.

A good article on Golems here, Wikipedia entry here.

My tiny brain is not equipped to deal with the Jewish or ethical significance of this now real prospect. I'm going to do some reading on this over the next few months.

Economic Pressure on Israel....from the US

2010-01-12T15:38:00.001-07:00

Interesting. George Mitchell (administration envoy for mideast peace) indicated in an interview (transcript is here) that one of the tools in the administration's belt in dealing with Israel is preventing loan guarantees.

As I've written before, I think that Israel's long-term security can only come from peace and stability - something that in my opinion its government is moving away from. Nonetheless, the administration must not use Israel's economic vulnerability against it - not good policy, not good for Israel.

If you are pro-Peace, and pro-Israel, as I am, and you think this is a good option for the US to wield, just think about how it could be used. If we go down the road of the US putting serious economic pressure on Israel, one can imagine Israel being put in a totally untenable position one day. Having to act against its security interests in order to avoid the danger of the loss of US aid.

The Administration is trying to walk it back by saying that he was taken out of context; that clearly, Mitchell was simply talking descriptively, not proscriptively, about the mechanisms that the US could use as leverage. That is, he was just saying that this was technically possible, and nothing more, in response to Rose asking him about possible options.

The transcript itself makes that pretty hard, if not impossible, to defend. My read is that he threw out there, in very careful terms, a very mild and vague warning. He even suggests – depending on how you understand his subsequent remarks – that this is something that the Administration is “discussing.” Obviously it’s not to be understood as a suggestion he’s making for US policy, but a subtle message to the Israelis, “we’re not screwing around.” I just think a guy as diplomatically experienced as Mitchell – which is to say, very – doesn’t throw around such things by accident.

What's strange is how little play this is getting in various media. I can't find anything on it from NYT or CNN. It is very big news in Israel. Reuters has a good read on the Israeli reaction here. The article notes that Israel doesn't intend to use guarantees at least for the next two years.

Time Out for Fun - Miles Davis Quintet, 1966, "Footprints."

2010-01-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

I've rediscovered a Miles Davis album I had forgotten about: Miles Smiles. This is a live performance from one of the great combos in music.

The Tehilim (Psalms) were set to music, regal religious music. This to me feels like religious music: I like to think of them accompanying King David.

Pluralism Gone Wild

2010-01-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

This article could have appeared in satirical pages of The Onion but it is an actual editorial that appeared this week. It is the idea of western pluralism taken to absurd extremes. If pluralism is so pluralistic that it can't place blame on axe-wielding murderers but rather on their victims, then it can't survive.

As a religious person, I would like to state for the record that I'm offended by the author's supposed defense of religion. Set aside for the moment that the term "religious people" lumps together radical terrorists and people like me. If religious people can't be expected to act rationally, to accept criticism and satire of their culture, without resorting to murderous violence, then they can't be defended.

The author's vision of the religious/secular divide would make it impossible for religion to exist in a pluralistic society. This is how pluralistic/liberal societies consume themselves and become anti-pluralistic: insisting that anti-pluralistic, anti-modern, anti-democratic violence is a legitimate political expression.

Tiger, Save Yourself: Abandon Buddhism!

2010-01-03T20:14:00.000-07:00

That's what Brit Hume, in a moment of contemplative babble, tells the world. What can one even say? Nothing, so we'll let Brit speak for himself):

Airport Security, Ben Gurion Style

2009-12-30T15:15:00.002-07:00

If you've flown from the US to Israel in the last 8 years, then you're aware of the stark contrast between American and Israeli airport security.

In America, the process of going through security takes way too long (too much time in lines), is ludicrous (pulling aside 90 year old women for explosives search) and cumbersome (mam, even though you're a seven months pregnant and traveling with a two year old, we need you to dig up containers of toothpaste and shampoo from your luggage and then to step aside so we can scan your socks). And as a reward for our lemming-like patience, we continue to find holes in the system either via TSA agents who are able to sneak explosives on planes or via actual threats that are fortunately derailed by courageous passengers.

In Israel, the process is quick, efficient, rational and there are no security breaches. This article explains why. I love the very Israeli-ness of the guy they interview.

Time Out for...Vic

2009-12-26T23:05:00.000-07:00

Very sad news tonight in the NYTimes - the wonderful singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt has died. I've posted an amateur video (just still pics and lyrics) of his song "I'm Through" because there are very few high quality videos. Very spare guitar playing and a voice of immense power. Zichrono livracha.

Is a Political Rabbi a Bad Rabbi?

2009-12-23T13:17:00.002-07:00

The Tikkun Olam Committee at Har HaShem recently sent out a letter advocating support for the health care bill and encouraging congregants to call their Congressional Representatives and Senators to encourage the bill's passage. It was signed "Rabbi Rose and the Tikkun Olam Committee."

I have received four responses from Congregants saying, essentially, "It was inappropriate for the Rabbi to advocate a particular political position and to encourage congregants to adopt that position." I'm not capturing the nuance of the letters, some of which were particularly thoughtful, but that is the gist.

First, I want to be clear that, as we said in the letter, you can certainly be a good Jew and oppose this legislation. The Jewish tradition does not require anyone to support this bill. Going further, there are some people who will find that Jewish values require them to oppose this legislation – that is a legitimate perspective. I want everyone to feel that the Jewish tradition and Har HaShem are foundational to their spiritual lives even if they disagree with others in the synagogue about any particular issue.

Second, though, I wanted to open this for discussion. Is it ever appropriate for a Rabbi in a synagogue to encourage passage of a particular piece of legislation? If so, under what circumstances?

Guidelines: keep responses brief and respectful. This is not a place for anger-filled polemics.

My argument is
All Jews, rabbis included, have obligation to make their voices heard when their tradition calls upon them to speak out.

Because we live in a diverse democracy, all people must use neutral language that is not particularistic in their political discussions. Though you may feel that “God wants me to support/oppose this or that legislation,” in a diverse society you must use rational, secular language to be persuasive.

There is no such thing as a moral issue that is not sullied by the particulars of legislation. The civil rights debate in the 50s and 60s were not just about “Inequality is immoral and must be stopped!” It was about legal language, constitutional powers, the balance between state and federal power. So, a Jew can’t seriously advocate/oppose a moral position on issue X without rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty with particulars.

Finally, Judaism is a religious tradition oriented toward not only the cultivation of individual spiritual life but also toward the creation of a just society. It requires us to look after the well-being of other people. One may say that conservative or liberal policies are the best way to achieve this, but my argument is that Judaism does not want us to disengage from political issues – which, I’m arguing, are actually moral issues.

What do you think?

Hamfisted

2009-12-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

Too good. Thanks to Yehudis for passing it on:

Unsettling II

2009-12-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

A while ago I posted here about Netanyahu and the settlement freeze. This New York Times article on Netanyahu suggests that he does, in fact, have an endgame. I don't see it.

War in Afghanistan Just?

2009-12-10T13:53:00.001-07:00

I haven't had time to look at the President's speech. But The Times' coverage indicates that he referred to "just war" theory - or at least he argued that is a "just war."

There's information about just war theory here, which I think is not only a compelling way to approach the ethics of engaging in any particular war, but also an intellectually elegant argument in general.

You can find a paper I wrote about Jewish ethics and war here; part of the paper explains the just war theory. Judaism has no comparable theory.

Let me know your thoughts.

Time Out for Fun - The Story

2009-12-07T14:29:00.001-07:00

OK, I was trying to find a way to tie this song into Torah in some way, because most of my "Time Out for Fun" vids have some Jewish tie in. I could try to connect the "I was made for you" line to some kind of existentialist theology, or the "blessing" line into some simpler religious notion.

The truth is that I just love Brandi Carlile's music. Her voice is a formidable weapon. I have just been knocked out by the force of it on a few occasions. But she is also a sly and skilled singer, dancing around the beat, dragging out sssylables. She's a bit of a Muhammad Ali of singers: brutally powerful but also capable of incredibly subtle movement. Enough blather; give it a listen and let me know your thoughts.

Strange Frequencies

2009-12-06T21:50:00.001-07:00

Incredible story in the jpost about correlations between the frequencies of colors and the numerical value of the words representing them:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1259831450363&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Rabbi Joshua Rose
http://onemoregrainofsand.blogspot.com
303.499.7077

UnSettling

2009-12-03T13:43:00.001-07:00

This can't work. I just don't see how Israel can continue to conduct itself in this way and create any long term security for itself.

Netanyahu met with settlers in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and showed his true colors. To placate the United States, Israel has agreed to halt settlement. Netanyahu sends a signal of his contempt and his unseriousness about it though to the world during this meeting: "There are nine months and three weeks left," he tells them. In other words, we'll keep building as soon as possible; this whole thing is an illusion.

What is the play here? What is the long term goal of Netanyahu? He seems to be acting as though it is still 1989.

I can't read this without this week's Torah portion in mind. After years of bitterness and fear, Jacob and Esau see each other again. Jacob sends gifts in advance - yes, out of fear, as he seems to acknowledge - and they embrace, years of animosity dissolving in a moment.

No, I'm not arguing, as some simplistically do, that if Israel is just generous enough and warm-fuzzy enough, all will be good. That's foolish and disproven by history (Israel's history and diplomatic history in general). But what creates peace between Esau and Jacob is a genuine transformation and acts of self-sacrifice (not to mention inner transformation, at least on Jacob's part).

Diplomatic shell games are not going to do it.

Gratitude - Overstuffed Turkey edition

2009-11-25T16:02:00.002-07:00

I’m opening this blog to those in my Musar class, The 613 Habits of Highly Effective People (well, it was open before, but I’m steering the class here now). The next class will focus on the middah (attribute) of gratitude. I’m encouraging people in the class (and feel free to jump in if you’re not in the class) to comment on the post, and comment on the comments. In other words, let’s use the blog as a place for discussion.

But first, something strange for Thanksgiving. In Hebrew, the word hodu means both “turkey” and “give thanks.” Think about that coincidence over the holiday…

Back to gratitude. In this week’s Torah portion, Vayeitzei, Jacob famously lays down to sleep and dreams of a ladder reaching up to heaven. God addresses him, assuring him that the Divine presence will be with Jacob as he journeys.

Then Jacob wakes up. Startled, he says “Ah, yes, God is in this place – and I did not know.” This is commonly understood in two ways. Some people (Ibn Ezra, Rashi) say that the actual spot where Jacob went to sleep was loaded with prophetic energy. But others (Genesis Rabbah) point out that “this place” could refer to the whole world.

If we go with this second interpretation, then we should constantly be saying, like Jacob, “God is in this place and I did not know.”

This fits nicely with the phrase that best conveys gratitude in Hebrew: hakarat ha-tov, literally “recognition of the good.” Simply put, that’s what gratitude is: recognizing what is good in our lives, without either denying or getting caught up in the myriad problems we know are there, too.

Gratitude is essential to a Jewish life. It’s in our prayers, blessings, rituals. We are supposed to wake up to it, sleep to it, eat to it. Having said that, it’s easier to talk about gratitude than to feel it. How is it going for you?

Happy Thansgiving, and please share your thoughts about gratitude. For those in the class, you may also decide this is a good place to comment on the theme’s of last class: humility and patience.

So, let me express my genuine gratitude for those of you who read this blog and share your thoughts with me on and off line. And a heartfelt thank you also to those who have already made the 613 Habits class so rich already.

- Rabbi Josh

Human Rights? Watch!

2009-10-20T23:04:00.002-06:00

A very surprising article (Thanks, for sending it along, Bill) in the New York Times: The founder of Human Rights Watch criticizes that organization for their biased treatment of Israel.

They Don't Call it Um Shmum for Nothing

2009-10-18T23:08:00.005-06:00

The abbreviation U.N. (United Nations), when translated into Hebrew, becomes "um" (pronounced 'oom'). Among Israelis, the U.N. is derisively referred to as "um shmum." Why? Things like the following, from Ha'aretz:

Goldstone slams UN council for ignoring Hamas war crimes

South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who headed the United Nations investigation over the Gaza offensive, criticized on Friday the Human Rights Council's decision to endorse the report his commission had compiled.

Goldstone told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps before the vote that the wording of the resolution was unfortunate because it included only censure of Israel. He voiced hope that the Human Rights Council would alter the wording of the draft.

Feh.

Words Create (Editors Destroy)

2009-10-12T21:35:00.006-06:00

In this week of Bereishit, in which we read again and celebrate again, the story of creation, my thoughts drift to the power of language (a concise, if not completely accurate summary, of Bereishit would be "Words, Matter" If you think of a more concise summary, let me know).

Genesis postulates that there is a relationship between words and language. God says y'hi or (let there be light) va'yhi or (and there was light). I do believe that a words opens up a universe of meaning and this is how I understand the relationship between the importance of language in the creation story and the importance of language in the brit between the Jewish people and God. Whole realms of ethics, subjects for theological speculation, are opened up by Divine articulation. More than that, though, words of the tradition inspire actions and personal transformation. Language leads to creation.

This is why Judaism is constantly renewing and developing: the texts are always opening to people to take on new meanings and to discover in our own lives how language leads to creation.

Why all this? Because I'm working creating a new Kabbalat Shabbat service (starts this Friday at 6pm, come check it out) that is going to be truly great. It will draw on the psalms of a full Kabbalat Shabbat service. But I can't use the Reform prayerbook for the service. Why? Because the editors (some of them former teachers of mine for whom I have a great deal of respect) decided to remove large chunks of the readings in this (and many other) parts of the prayerbook.

To be fair, this most recent prayerbook has restored much language that had been removed from earlier Reform prayerbooks, so this has to be seen in context. But Reform Jews are robbed of the possibility of new creation, new meaning, by editors who have decided that it is not a priority that Reform Jews have access to certain traditional readings in their prayers.

The great contradiction of Reform Judaism: it is on the one hand a very democratic movement. It values individual Jewish experience and the search for meaning in the establishment of communal practice and in the articulation of individual obligation. But there is another anti-democratic strain, in which the intellectual elites of the Movement make editorial decisions to remove large swaths of prayers that have existed for centuries, essentially making spiritual choices for millions of Jews, choices that preclude the creation of universes of meaning.

This is why I encourage people to own our Reform siddur but to also own many other "traditional" prayerooks that have all the other good bits...

Time Out for Fun - Hava Nagila/Polish Heavy Metal

2009-10-06T21:32:00.000-06:00

A band called Rootwater from Poland.

A Story Too Good To Be Trewish

2009-10-05T11:53:00.001-06:00

It sounds like the story about Ahmadinejad having a Jewish past is, in fact, too good (bad?) to be true.

A Sukkah Born Every Minute

2009-10-01T14:18:00.003-06:00

I actually don't have a post to go with that title, though we could think of one.

So, if you don't know, Sukkot it coming up Friday night. (At Har HaShem, by the way, there is a Sukkah-decorating program for families at 5:00 on Friday, followed by a family service and picnic. The "grown-up" services are at 7:00).

Anyway - a couple of thoughts. Each year the chagim (Jewish festivals) have a different meaning for me (and for all of us). This year, there's a sort of anti-materialism tradition that I'm digging.

There's a whole social critique connected to Sukkot that we can read as an anti-consumerist impluse, cutting against the insane bounty of our society. Even in a time of economic difficulty - and I'm sure some reading this have been personally affected by job-losses - Americans live with expectations that we should have cell phones, stereos, enough food to make us flabby, cars, computers, iPods, BlackBerry's huge TVs, etc.

Maimonides writes that Sukkkot reminds us of our time in the desert in order "to teach people to remember, during time of prosperity, harder times. We will then want to thank God repeatedly and to lead a modest and humble life."

Can hanging out in a booth with gourds hanging from the roof really bring us to that level of awareness and modesty? What do you think?

Polanski and Forgiveness

2009-09-29T22:10:00.004-06:00

I've been so out of the loop with the chagim and all the work (I should say avodah) around them that I've been in a kind of news exile.

In any event, Roman Polanski was arrested on charges of child rape. He was charged over thirty years ago in California with raping a 13 year old. He fled the US and has been living in Europe since. US authorities arrested him as he was traveling to Switzerland (?) to receive an award. He is awaiting the judgment of a Swiss (?) court as to whether his extradition to the US for prosecution of this long ago event.

I came across the story in an article, in the NYT I believe, in which the French culture minister, Mitterand, said, essentially, that Polanski had erred many years ago, but his contributions as a great artist far outweighed this error. There is a United States that the French loved, he said, but that there was a United States that scared people, and that was the one showing its face with this arrest.

Many others have come to the defense of this beloved and brilliant filmmaker and have argued against his arrest.

This article from Salon is a powerful and plainly stated reminder of why such sentiments are so terribly wrong.

The defenders of Polanski who I have read online are not necessarily arguing that he didn't commit the crime. There seems to be a theme that he did commit the crime but that we should forget about it.

Our capacity to create, even to create great beauty, does not negate our horrible acts. Those acts have to be confronted, contemplated, understood and punished. Polanski has made no attempt at reconciliation - he fled the country. We have a tendency to be dazzled by beauty - but we can't become so dazzled that we no longer can see right and wrong.

There is also an impulse to be sympathetic because of Polanski's age and that fact that the alleged crime took place 32 years ago. But forgiveness doesn't just seep into one's skin over time. Polanksi is charged with raping a young girl - having sex with her against her will. How could this just melt away?

The religious dimension of repentance is that when we hurt someone - and clearly 'hurt' doesn't begin to describe the experience of this young girl (now a woman in her mid 40s) - we have to attempt to make amends. We seek forgiveness and reconciliation with the other person and we also engage in an internal process known as teshuvah - contemplation, reflection, commitment to change.

Both this external and internal process are hard to imagine in the case of a child rape - how could one seek forgiveness? The notion that he has the power to assuage her is offensive - what could be done? Halachah states that one who refuses to be assuaged takes on a burden of guilt but I do not know if the halachah is equipped to deal with such traumatic cases (I'm not saying this rhetorically; I really don't know). And second, it would seem likely that she would only be traumatized by any encounter with him and would want to, and should be entitled to, avoid it.

The legal (that is, US law) dimension is clearer. How can we not charge such a crime, even three decades late? If the law can not bring justice in the case of a 13 year old girl raped by a predator...then what good is the law?

Soulfood Presents: Metal from the Shtetl

2009-07-24T15:14:00.002-06:00

August 23rd, Rock and Soul Cafe, time TBA but probably 7ish.

We'll be trying to figure out why so many Jews are Metal artists: most recently, the guys from Anvil, but of course the illustrious Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Dee Snider, C.C. DeVille, Slash, etc.

What is this about? Anger? Loudness?

We'll be enjoying frosty beverages and probably some food; join us.

Meditations on Jewish Psychedelia, Vol III

2009-07-14T12:04:00.003-06:00

Does God revive the dead? Many Jews think that resurrection is a Christian belief, some strange holdover from the Jesus cult. Makes sense; I mean, they think that God died and was resurrected...so that must be their territory. Well, as in many other cases, the Christians stole our best chops.

Resurrection of the dead is a traditional Jewish belief. Three times a day we bless God for being m'chayeh ha-meitim, the one who gives life to the dead.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about hearing Sammy Davis Junior crooning again in the afterlife, so for me the prayer doesn't bring much on that level. I have been struggling recently with another kind of deadness - a lack of umph/enthusiasm. Part of it has to do with returning from the emotional high of Israel and part of it is just who I am.

When I meditate daily to M'chayeh ha-meitim, I'm thinking of the possibility of coming out of these periodic slumps, a struggle that in itself is life-affirming. So, I pray for a kind of life-giving, if not for bodily resurrection...

Loving Exile (On Main Street)

2009-07-09T10:09:00.003-06:00

Listening a lot these days to the Stones' Exile on Main Street. What a glorious set of songs. The band at their apex, I think.

Also, what a great title - a Chasidic title, almost, in its use of galut (exile) not as a location in space but as a state of mind. It is possible to be in the "right place" and in a state of mind (or soul) that feels like exile.

I've been trying to listen to other albums, but this keeps demanding another play. Yesterday I put in a CD that I love so I could finally kick the Exile habit. It was Yonatan Razel's Sach Ha-Kol, an album of beautiful religious music in Hebrew. I couldn't listen to more than a song or two because it was so....one dimensional. Exile on Main St. is so textured and has a hundred years (at least) of musical tradition pouring out of it, each strain bouncing off the other.

Anyway, if you are a fan of the Stones and don't know the album, get a copy. The Yonatan Razel album is beautiful as well.