Ahz mah (So what)

When I was a teenager I was chronically dissatisfied. I spent most of my after-school hours at my best friend's house, wishing that I had her family (including her dog). I longed for adventure and romance, but pretty much experienced neither. (Or so it seemed to me.) I couldn't wait to grow up and have a life that was other than what it was. These days, although I am older and hopefully wiser, I am still aware of that inner voice which is quick to judge the present moment, longing for it to be other than what it is. In the biblical tale of Joseph which we are currently reading in the annual Torah cycle, Potifar's wife is the embodiment of dissatisfaction. Joseph has been sold by his brothers into slavery, and comes to work in the home of Potifar, a wealthy Egyptian. Potifar's wife is smitten by this handsome young man, and attempts to seduce him. When Joseph rejects her repeated advances and finally flees from her, she howls in outrage and seeks revenge. Thankfully, the...

Chanukah is a funny holiday. The more you investigate it, the stranger it gets. Most of us know the basic story that we learned as children, about brave Judah and the Maccabees versus the evil Greek empire. But it turns out that there are several tellings of the story; and the more you investigate, the less clear it is who were the “good guys” and who were the “bad guys.” Add to that the historical fact that the Maccabee (Hasmonean) dynasty became corrupt within about a century of their victory, and were political opponents of the early rabbis, and the story gets even stranger! In the United States, the proximity of Chanukah to Christmas eventually led to an emphasis on the giving of gifts on Chanukah. It has also led to the perception among Christians (and many Jews) that Chanukah is a major Jewish holiday – which it never was, likely because the rabbis who created what we know of as Judaism had reason to be wary of those corrupt Hasmoneans and what they stood for. Meanwhile, we insti...

I love faces. Wherever I am, I love looking at people's faces. It's one of my favorite things to do. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes: "A face is a message, a face speaks, often unbeknown to the person. Is not the human face a living mixture of mystery and meaning? We are all able to see it, and are all unable to describe it. Is it not a strange marvel that among so many hundreds of millions of faces, no two faces are alike? And that no face remains quite the same for more than one instant?" In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, it is written: "And God said, let us make a human in our image and our likeness." Have you ever wondered what the ancient Israelites meant by that? Did they really believe that we physically resemble God, or that God physically resembles us? Or were they trying to say something else? I believe that this mythic story was worded purposefully, in order to point towards the wondrousness of our essential nature and the inherent worth ...

We are currently in the month of Cheshvan, which is also called in Hebrew “mar (bitter) Cheshvan.” Although no one knows why for sure, some say that this name refers to the fact that Cheshvan is the only Jewish month with no holidays. (Although from a rabbi’s point of view, after the holiday-packed month that precedes it Cheshvan can feel like a welcome relief!) But of course in America this month, we do have a holiday. When I was younger my mother used to remind me that our rabbi (who immigrated to this country as a child from Germany) always praised the American holiday of Thanksgiving. I agree with him – Thanksgiving is a very Jewish holiday (not just because it was modeled after Sukkot!), and a wonderful time to express our gratitude for this great country and its values. It is also a fine time to express our gratitude for all that is good in our lives. As I know I have mentioned before, the Jewish practice of saying 100 brachot/blessings each day points us toward the val...

When my son Jacob was a very little boy, I shared with him a practice for helping us ease our way out of agitating, seemingly insolvable dilemmas. The practice was to sit very quietly, with our eyes closed, and simply breathe, and wait, and trust that an idea would "bubble up." It always worked. For me, it still does. In Genesis chapter two, we read that God ceased on the seventh day after all the work of creation. The verb is often translated as "rested," but the plain sense of the root sh-v-t is to cease. This is the root from which we get the name sabbath, or Shabbat in Hebrew. A few verses later, in the account of the creation of humans, the Torah tells us that God formed the human from the dust of the earth. God blew into its nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a nefesh chayah - a living being. The root n-f-sh in biblical Hebrew signifies a person, but could also be translated as soul. These two root words - sh-v-t/to cease, and n-f-sh/soul - come...

Life is messy and fundamentally out of our control. Over and over, we learn the lesson - I certainly do, pretty much on a daily basis - that efforts to control situations and other people are largely efforts in futility. The mind continually generates images of how things ought to turn out, and life continually turns out differently. Other people (and nature) stubbornly do what they feel is best, rather than what we are certain that they ought to do. How much energy do we expend each day - physical and emotional energy - on attempting to have life turn out the way we think it ought to - only to receive the humbling lesson that Life had other plans for us? The words of our prayerbook on the High Holidays, and on Shabbat as well, point to this truth - there is a bigger picture within which we live, which is beyond our control. And the liberating message is: that's okay - it doesn't have to be a problem. We can loosen our grip a little. Now paradoxically - and the rabbinic traditi...

Sometimes we meet someone, or learn something, and in the process we are changed. We are not the same person as we were before this encounter. The trajectory of our life has shifted - sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly. When someone or something opens our eyes to a reality that has been there all along, thereby providing us with the opportunity to act in response to a human need, some say this is God acting in the world. Whatever our understanding of God might be, we are transformed by such encounters. Rosh Hashannah is about transformation. It is not just about saying "I'm sorry" and promising to do better (although that's an important start). It's about believing in the possibility of being re-created. The prayer book reminds us, today is the birthday of the world! We are each of us being re-born. We have the potential to change in ways we cannot even imagine. We have the potential to encounter someone or something that blows our mind, that cracks our heart ...

In a way, the Jewish High Holidays are about spiritual housecleaning. Think about it. Much of the focus of the liturgy as well as the many commentaries written to accompany us during the holiday season are about taking stock of who we are and how we behave, and doing an honest self-appraisal of what we need to throw away. The "tashlich" ceremony of throwing crumbs or pebbles into the water on Rosh Hashanah is a perfect example. As far as anyone knows tashlich was not instituted by rabbis. Tashlich was something that ordinary people developed hundreds of years ago as a very physical way of showing our intention to throw away those aspects of our behavior and our personality that are no longer serving us well. Whether you use the term "sin" or not, the concept is the same as it has been for hundreds if not thousands of years. So we could say that the High Holidays are about spiritual housecleaning. What we experience on the material plane, we can experience on the spi...

This past year I unearthed a large stack of old letters from my best friend. She and I have been friends since we were about twelve years old! These letters date back to when we were teenagers in high school and college, in the 1970s. Re-reading these letters has been a remarkable experience. Not only is it a relief to find that the various exploits which once brought us so much angst no longer hold any emotional juice - but even more gratifying is the joy I experience, feeling the depth of my friend's love for me. All these decades later that voice of love comes through in these letters loud and clear. There is one letter in particular which moved me to tears. Apparently responding to something I had complained of in my previous letter, my friend wrote an intense apology and pledge to change her behavior - because, she said, she valued my friendship so highly. Teshuvah - which literally means returning, or turning back - involves the honest admission that we've done something ...

The people stood at a distance, and Moses approached the thick cloud where God was. - Exodus 20:18 Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav's spin on the Torah verse (my translation): "When you have been going through your whole life in the material world, and you get inspired and want to be on God's path - God's judgmental side puts obstacles in your way. But God's loving side hides in the obstacles! If you are knowing, you will look into the obstacle and find God within it. But if you are not knowing, you will simply see an obstacle and will immediately turn around and go back.... And this is how to understand the Torah verse: The people saw only the thick darkness of the cloud, and turned away; but Moses knew to seek God within the thick darkness." Okay, so name one thing in your life that you are experiencing as an obstacle, or that you are witnessing is an obstacle for someone you know. What might it mean for you that God is within the obstacle?

When I did my chaplaincy training years ago, one of the most striking differences I encountered between myself and my Christian colleagues was the ease and frequency with which they uttered "spontaneous" prayers and blessings. My sense is that as more rabbis go through chaplaincy training, this skill is gaining in popularity. In my own work, I have found that there are situations where it is both appropriate and powerful. Still, I continue to ponder the relative merits of spontaneous versus established blessings. In the biblical Book of Numbers, set in the wilderness, we encounter instructions for the Israelite priests on what to say when blessing the people. The words of this brief blessing, considered by scholars to be extremely ancient, are beloved in both Jewish and Christian contexts to this day: May God bless you and guard you. May God shine God's face upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift up God's face toward you and grant you peace. Rabbinic commentato...

When I was about eight or nine years old, I wrote a letter to the President of the United States. My older brother was not keeping his fish tank clean, I told the president, and I was distraught at the possibility that the fish might die. My mother apparently intercepted that letter before it reached the mailbox. I don't remember any other details of the incident, but I do have a pretty good sense of how I felt... because it is a familiar feeling even decades later. What was I feeling? Outrage, righteous indignation - and a sense of unfairness - because he got the fish tank when I was the one who wanted it (and was, of course, the one more worthy of having it). My concern for the fish may have been genuine, but I imagine that my distress was primarily due to my sibling envy and sense of unfairness. The Torah is full of expressions of envy, particularly (although not always) between siblings. In the book of Genesis alone, there are many famous examples: Cain and Abel, Sarah and Hag...

One summer evening, my friend Leah and her daughter took me and Alan and Jacob away from the bustling, tourist-filled streets of Bar Harbor Village to the end of a side street. It was low tide, and a sand bar leading to a nearby island had emerged. It was dark, about 9:00pm, and a fog hung over the water. With only the faint glow from distant lights, we set out to cross the sand bar. No one spoke. We were all concentrating on feeling our way forward in the dark. The salty air was so moist that our hair was wet. As I took one step at a time, unable to see my feet, I had an "aha" moment. Here was a window into the mythic experience of the Israelites crossing the Sea of Reeds out of slavery! The water is "parted" - temporarily - and passage across the sand bar is possible. But for how long? And how far is it, and how long will it take us? Who can see where we're headed? How do we move forward when we can't even see two steps in front of us? How to trust that th...

How many times have we heard the expression, or said it ourselves: "I don't just want to be a number"? Jews traditionally have a complex attitude regarding the notion of counting people. In fact, we have a very ancient tradition of avoiding counting people directly. With roots tracing back to the Bible itself (and likely earlier), counting people directly has been considered taboo. When counting was necessary, as for a military census, it was supposed to be done indirectly - for example by having all the eligible men contribute a half-shekel coin and then counting the coins instead of the men. When we need to know if there are ten Jews present to make a minyan, a quorum for public prayer, it is traditionally forbidden to simply count - rather we are taught to count indirectly by reciting a biblical verse (such as from Psalms) containing exactly ten words. Is all of this merely superstition? In this week's Torah reading from the beginning of the Book of Numbers, the Is...

The ancient impulse to hold back chaos is something we can relate to. The world feels very chaotic and frightening sometimes (perhaps often). Disasters strike. Innocent people suffer. It could happen to us - it does happen to us. So it becomes a very real question - How do we create space in our physical world that will provide some spiritual structure for holding back chaos? In the ancient realm of the book of Genesis, holy space is found - it is encountered. For example, when Jacob dreams of a stairway/ladder with angelic messengers ascending and descending, he wakes up and expresses awe at having happened upon a holy place. By contrast, in the equally valid worldview of the book of Leviticus, holy space is created. You want God's presence in your life? In the life of your community? It's up to you to create the space, to set up boundaries to hold back the chaos of the world. So what is this book of Leviticus? If you think of the Torah - the Five Books of Moses - as a story ...

Remember when I wrote back in September about re-learning how to swim? Well, I'm still at it! Turns out that there are several distinct pieces of the process that I am having to unlearn and re-learn - and that takes time. I haven't yet gotten to the point of being ready to put all the pieces together. So in addition to practicing breathing, stroking, kicking, etc, I find that I am practicing patience. Turns out that change in our congregation is kind of like that, too. We are moving forward in a variety of ways, and putting all the pieces together is going to take patience. Along the way, I would like to urge everyone to practice not only patience but also generosity. There are many ways to practice generosity, right? - giving of your time, energy, patience, creativity, attention, talent, and yes - your money, too. The more you give of yourself, the better you feel and the deeper the connections you create in the community. Remember what Mother Teresa said: "In this li...

Religious education is a puzzle and a challenge. Jewish religious education is perhaps even more of a puzzle and a challenge, because Judaism is a culture overlapping with a religion. How are cultural and religious values best transmitted from one generation to the next? Rivers of ink have been spilled about the merits and pitfalls of various types of Jewish education, and about the "watering-down" of Jewish knowledge with each generation, etc; I can't begin to address all of that here. I just want to speak from the heart: We need to have the courage to leave behind the post-WWII model of religious education that no longer serves our purposes today. In fact, it hasn't served our purposes for several decades! - but somehow we keep re-creating it, perhaps simply because it feels familiar. But the lesson of the past several decades is clear: Sending the children off to religious school and hoping in some vague way that someone else will "make them Jewish" - whe...

In the Torah scroll, there are a handful of scribal oddities - letters that are too big or too small, or upside down or backwards, or with dots over them - and for whatever reason they were originally written that way, the tradition demands that those oddities be preserved. As a result, a rich tradition of interpretation has developed to find meaning in these oddities, because it is believed that every aspect of the Torah is precious and has something to teach us. One of those scribal oddities appears at the beginning of the book of Leviticus. The first word of the first chapter of the book of Leviticus is va-yikra. The first verse says: Va-yikra el Moshe/God called to Moses. In the word va-yikra, the final letter - the letter aleph - is smaller than the rest of the letters. So what meaning could there be in one tiny letter? There is a Hasidic teaching that this tiny aleph is a symbolic hint of the humility of Moses, who is traditionally said to have been the most humble man in history...

How often do we reveal our "alter-ego" publicly? Jewish tradition provides a safe space for doing precisely that once a year - on Purim, the topsy-turvy holiday in which nothing is quite what it appears to be, when silliness and irreverence are commanded , and our usual attempts at being "proper" and "mature" are turned on their heads. [Speaking of which: The Dean of my rabbinical school has a custom of doing headstands daily, in public, during the weeks leading up to Purim!] So don't be fooled into thinking that Purim is a holiday for children - it is much more than merely an opportunity for kids to dress in costumes and make noise in the sanctuary. (And by the way, if you read the text carefully, you'll discover that the Book of Esther is definitely R-rated.) The holiday of Purim is about hiding and revealing, on many levels. For example: * Esther hides her Jewish identity from the king until she chooses to reveal it in order to save herself and ...

Mother Teresa once said, "In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." I believe that implicit in her message is that together, combining our "small things" over time, we can indeed do great things. I believe that this is the message of Yes we can. In his inauguration speech, President Obama said: "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task." I am inspired by our new president in a way I have not been inspired by a political leader in my adult life - inspired to renew my intention to do "small things with great love," and to see those small things as part of a greater whole. I am als...

There is a traditional Jewish practice of saying 100 brachot/blessings each day. Not long ago, two teams of students on Sunday morning came up with lists of things in their lives for which they would say a bracha/blessing. Between the two teams they came up with a long list. I would like to share a sampling from this list with everyone, because it is good to be reminded often of all the blessings in our lives: Waking up, brushing teeth, getting dressed, school, shelter, food, life, physical ability, brain, birds, hearing, talking, feeling, beauty, our heritage, democracy, freedom, stuffed animals, companions, technology, clothes, health, cars, plants, friends, parents, Shabbat, money, guidance from God, Torah, tools, doctors and dentists, hospitals, Jewish holidays, warmth, family, education, love, teachers, peace, trust, weather, the Jewish people, comfort, Israel, beautiful things, ugly things, water, toys, books, nature, pets, the Earth. Truly we all have much to be grateful for eve...

This is the time of year when I begin to think that hibernating animals have the right idea! We plan so many events in winter here in New England, only to have them canceled at the last minute due to weather. Perhaps it would be wiser to admit that we have no control, loosen up on the planning, and slow our pace down. That said, it is also true that one thing that we humans can do that hibernating animals probably cannot do is imagine a different reality. Our Jewish tradition is all about living within that paradox: on the one hand, accepting reality however it presents itself in each moment; and on the other hand, imagining a better world and working to bring it into being. Of course, there is a third option, manifested by our fortunate Snow Birds - denying reality and temporarily moving to Florida! And then there is a fourth option, which I would encourage for our community: gathering together as often as possible to share in the warmth of fellowship. Wherever you are this month, may...

I've been thinking a lot about swimming lately. Not because of the Olympics, but because a friend of mine is teaching me to swim all over again from the beginning! She is trained in Total Immersion swimming, which is light-years from the swim instruction I suffered through as a child. You may be surprised to hear that our ancient sages thought about swimming, too. The Talmud - an amazing repository of teachings, stories, and folk wisdom - tells us: The rabbis used to say that it is every parent's obligation to teach their children Torah, a trade, and some say how to swim too. I am curious what you think of this list. Of all the possible things in life that could have been included, how is it that these three things are the ones mentioned? Here is what I think: By saying "Torah," the ancient rabbis meant that if you learn how to access the wisdom of Torah, you will be able to handle whatever comes your way in life. (I believe this.) Then the rabbis said "a trade...