Airport Security, Ben Gurion Style

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

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?

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

Too good. Thanks to Yehudis for passing it on:

Unsettling II

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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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)

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

A band called Rootwater from Poland.

A Story Too Good To Be Trewish

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

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

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

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

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)

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.