TBE BAR/BAT MITZVAH COMMENTARY

 Week after week, our students come forward to explain the deeper meaning of their Torah portions, connecting them to their lives.  Here are many of those given this year, included (with permission) with the most recent ones at the top.  To go back to earlier ones from 2008, click here and scroll down.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Jake Silver on Bereisheet

Last school year I had the opportunity to hear Gabriel Bol Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, speak about his escape from the oppression in southern Sudan and how he built a new productive life. From his experience he is committed to building a school in southern Sudan to give opportunity to children to receive an education that they otherwise wouldn’t get. This made me think about my portion, Bereisheet, and the challenges and opportunities that Adam and Eve faced after eating from the tree of knowledge.

I studied the story in detail and came up with three important lessons that, it turns out, have a lot to do with my life and this bar mitzvah

Lesson # 1: The importance of education

The story of the Tree of Knowledge is often misunderstood. People think it was a bad thing that Adam and Eve ate from the tree. It was definitely against what God said; but good things came out of the experience. When God told Adam he was forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, Eve wasn’t even created yet. So it was easy for her to misunderstand God’s command when she was talking to the snake. And why was that talking snake put there in the first place?

It was all a set up! I think that God wanted them to eat from the tree. He wanted them to be able to reason and make their own choices. Before that, they were no smarter than animals. But afterwards, they were capable of doing great things, including acts of kindness – mitzvot. It wasn’t just a tree of knowledge after all, but the knowledge of good and evil. Judaism has always taught us that education is very important, especially learning right from wrong. That belief was there right from the very beginning.

In order to connect with my portion and this theme of education, I chose to do a mitzvah project of collecting school supplies for middle school students in Stamford who can’t afford them.

Lesson number two: Everyone is a unique individual

My portion teaches us that all human beings were created in God’s image. This means that everyone is equal but also unique.

I’ve certainly tried to be my own person. I play the bass, which not many people do. Most want to play guitar and drums. But if you think about it, most bands can’t survive without a bass. It makes me unique, and music is a way of expressing my uniqueness. Once I have a little more time on my hands – like tomorrow – I’d love to start up band practice again.

Lesson number three: The process of growing up

As we’ve seen, God seems to want Adam and Eve to be rebellious; to disobey God’s word and make their own choices in order for them to grow up. It’s as if God set them up to break the rule so that they would learn from their mistakes and begin their life outside the garden.

The tree incident was like their bar mitzvah. After it, they gained wisdom and were considered adults. They also gained responsibility and learned that life is not always easy.

Today I begin to leave the garden. Not that I’ve done anything wrong or EVER disobeyed my parents. This is just part of growing up.

As I become a bar mitzvah today, I hope that I can help create a world a little more like the garden was, but where everyone has an equal opportunity to eat from the tree of knowledge as much as I have.

 

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Hannah Freund on Rosh Hodesh Cheshvan

Happy Rosh Chodesh, You may not realize it but this holiday is very important, and I have come to learn about one of the most significant reasons:

If you have patience and confidence, things work out.

It all goes back to the story of the Golden Calf. The men were impatient for Moses to come back, because he was up on Mt. Sinai for forty days (you know how men are) – but the women were patient, and waited for him. In the end, they were rewarded by being given the holiday of Rosh Chodesh so that they could have a day of rest.

There have been many times that have tested my own patience. Like last year at camp when we put on the show Hairspray. Putting the musical on was very difficult, and a lot of cast members dropped out. No one thought that it would come together, but a few girls and I stayed in because we thought that it might work out. In the end it did, even though the director had to play one of the lead roles.

Back in ancient times, before there was a set calendar, the new month began only after people saw the moon reappear. It took patience for that, just like the people had to have patience when they were waiting for Moses.

But we’ve had to learn patience a lot throughout our history:

• It took patience for the children of Israel to wander in the wilderness for 40 years…

• And the Jewish people waited almost 2000 years to return to the land of Israel. Facing Jerusalem, Jews prayed to return to our home land, three times a day. Finally those dreams came true.

Here is how I have had to learn patience in my own life:

o Rehearsing and waiting to do a show like the Nutcracker takes a lot of patience, not to mention all the practice that went into becoming a bat mitzvah

o As my friends all know I spend lots of time at my ballet school. Learning new dance steps can take long time, but it feels great when you master them.

What I have noticed these days is that my friends and I are always rushing, texting, and multitasking. My teacher told the class a story about how his daughter was sitting in the front seat of the car, and she was texting her friend in the back seat of the car.

Heshvan is the only month without holidays – some call it Mar – (Bitter) Heshvan. But after all the holidays we’ve had, we could certainly use a break. And then, when Hanukkah comes – at the end of the next Jewish month – Kislev, we’ll be good and ready. I can wait – with a little patience, we’ll enjoy it even more when it comes.

Another example of where I needed to have patience was my Mitzvah Project. I ran bingo for the seniors at Sunrise Assisted Living. You really need patience for this activity. . . many residents have disabilities, so it’s important to speak slowly, speak loudly, and repeat your instructions frequently. . . and you have no idea how many times I said, “B14”.

Broadway shows, and movies are often about kids rushing to grow up too quickly. Well, I’m in no rush! But I also know that today, as a bat mitzvah I’m in some ways becoming an adult. And one thing that shows we’ve grown up is learning that, WHAT’S WORTH HAVING IS WORTH WAITING FOR.

This has been a year of learning and growing for me. At Temple Beth El, Bat Mitzvah students become involved with both a Mitzvah and a Tzedakah project. For my Mitzvah project, I spent my Sunday evenings at the Sunrise Assisted Living Center running bingo for the seniors. At Sunrise I met many elderly people who played bingo after dinner. Watching the elderly play bingo and have a good time, filled my heart with joy because I knew I was doing something to make other people happy. I know now that I was doing a Mitzvah – also know as good deed – and I would like to do more.

For my tzedakah project, I was on the Teen Tzedakah Foundation Council. The Council allocated funds raised by the teen tzedakah program. We researched many non profit organizations, and then selected a few to receive donations. From that research, I know that the non profit organizations we donated money to will help people in need.

Monday, October 5, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Stacey Hazen on Sukkot

Those of you who know me know that I’m a dancer. I’ve been dancing for 9 years (which is a long time when you are 12). I’ve always loved it. I dance everything from hip-hop to ballet. I’ve been on pointe for about two years, during which time I had the opportunity to dance as Tinkerbelle.

The more I learned about Sukkot, the more I’ve come to realize that is the perfect holiday for me. It’s a holiday that celebrates the body, a holiday of happiness, a holiday of nature, a holiday of thanksgiving and most of all, a holiday with a lot of dancing.

After we’ve spent lots of time indoors praying and fasting on Yom Kippur, Sukkot is the exact opposite. We go outdoors, build a sukkah, celebrate, and enjoy a great deal of food. Even when we are inside the synagogue, we are constantly in motion, shaking the lulav, parading around the sanctuary almost every day, and at the end of the festival, dancing frantically with the Torahs on Simhat Torah. No wonder this festival is called “Z’man Simhataynu” “the time of our rejoicing.”

When we are in the sukkah, we feel connected to nature. In fact, when you look up at night, you are able to see the stars through the roof. My dancing has also connected me to nature in many ways. I’ve performed as everything from a lion to the Ugly Duckling and as both Winter and Fall in “The Four Seasons.”

Sukkot is also a holiday not just for the Jewish people, but for all the nations of the world. My Torah portion speaks of 70 oxen that were brought as sacrifices, a very high number. The commentators suggest that those 70 animals represented each of the 70 nations that were known to exist at the time. While Passover tells a story of how the Jewish people began, Sukkot is about being thankful for the harvest and that is a lesson for all people everywhere. Everyone feels thankful at harvest time. It is not surprising that when the American pilgrims in Plymouth were looking to base their new Thanksgiving holiday on a festival from the Bible, they used Sukkot as a model.

Being thankful for our food is something people should never take for granted. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. Ten years ago I was diagnosed with Celiac and since then I’ve had to avoid all gluten products. In fact, at today’s Kiddush there will be many gluten free items; we even had a special gluten free challah made for the occasion.

For my mitzvah project, I raised money to donate to local food banks so that they could make sure to have food available for people with allergies. We’ve bought special cereals, pasta, crackers and cookies, as you can see displayed in the bima baskets.

So you can see why I’m so glad that my bat mitzvah fell on this festival, the kind of holiday that reminds us to celebrate life all the time, and the best way to do so is to dance!

Tuesday, September 29, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Matthew Katz on Nitzavim Vayelech

A few week’s ago, I had the chance to see a game at the new Yankee Stadium. It was amazing and reminded me of how it felt the first time I saw the old stadium, back when I was about 6. Everything was perfect. The manicured grass was a perfect shade of green. The infield dirt was raked perfectly, not a pebble in sight, smooth and nice. I was amazed seeing the huge monitors in the outfield. I loved the smell of the peanuts – the entire atmosphere was indescribable.

How green it is, how perfect the field looks, how peaceful. It was like a scene out of “Field of Dreams.” A baseball field can be the next closest thing to heaven.

Amazing though it may seem, that exact same vision is described by the prophet Isaiah in my Haftorah. He could have been talking about how I felt when I went through the turnstiles at Yankee Stadium when he said, “Pass through, pass through the gates! Clear the road for all the people; build up the highway, remove the rocks…”

Of course, Isaiah never saw Yankee Stadium. He was actually a Red Sox fan. (The rabbi told me to say that). Look at the bible, where in Isaiah, Chapter 1, verse 18, he states, “If they are as red as crimson, they shall be wool.” He was either talking about the sins of Israel, or about his pick for the AL Pennant.

But in our verse, Isaiah describes how the land of Israel will not longer be desolate and forsaken – how beautiful it will look. And from all the pictures I’ve seen, it certainly does.

One way to highlight the beauty of a place is to build baseball fields. In “Field of Dreams,” Kevin
Costner says ‘If you build it they will come,” The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, said almost the exact same thing about a century ago, long before the State of Israel was born: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

My dream is to combine both of those dreams and to make the land of Israel even more beautiful by helping to build baseball fields there.

It’s called “project Baseball,” and it’s being organized the Jewish National Fund, which has helped build the land in so many ways. I’ve raised over $2,000 so far to build new diamonds cities and towns all over Israel.

So you might be asking, why and I doing this?

In my portion, Nitzavim, Moses begins his speech, saying, “Atem Nitzavim hayom,” “You who are standing here today.” But the word used for “standing” also means to “take a stand.” Moses is telling us how important it is to stand up for what’s important to you. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Baseball and Israel are both important to me.

So, now you may be asking. what can baseball bring to Israel, and what about baseball do I love so much that I want to help build fields over there?

Here are four explanations.

o First, baseball teaches the importance of INTER-DEPENDENCE, something I’ve learned all about at camp, in school and on the field. You can be the greatest pitcher ever, (I’m not, but I’m pretty good), but if the shortstop can’t field, it won’t matter. Israelis also know how important it is to work together as a team. I learned that especially from my soldier Eran, who stayed with us about five years ago. Just about every Israeli goes into the army, and that’s where they really learn about the importance of teamwork.

o Secondly, baseball teaches sportsmanship. Many of us will remember that story about the girls softball team, when Western Oregon’s Sara Tucholsky suffered a knee injury when she hit a home run and the players on the opposing team carried her around the bases.

o Third, baseball teaches how important it is to have a level playing field, both in and outside the stadium. In Israel, the new baseball league is a place where all people can come together and get along:, rich and poor, Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, all playing a game that they all have to learn at the same time. If people can learn a sport together, it will help them to live together in peace.

o Finally, a baseball game is a great place to relax and appreciate nature. Much less intense than other sports, like soccer, basketball — or politics (unless the Yankees and Red Sox happen to be playing).

So now you can see why I’ve chosen to honor baseball as I become a Bar Mitzvah today.

Friday, September 11, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Max Weinberg on Ki Tavo

Those of you who know me know that one of my favorite things to do is skateboard. I love it so much that this past summer I went to skateboard camp for two weeks and skated with professionals. I can do things like “ledges and rails,” which means that I can leap off of high walls (especially when my mom is not looking) and skate onto rails that are high and narrow. I can also tilt my board up and flatten it out so that I can skate downstairs.

When I’m on my board, I can go very fast; but it’s important also to stay in control and not lose my balance. At this time of year, we realize that even when we are not on skates, we are moving very fast. We’re all so busy. But in two weeks, we’ll slow down on Rosh Hashanah to catch our breath and take a look at how far we’ve come.

Being on a skateboard also teaches us that every action has consequences that we need to understand. To turn on the board, all you have to do is lean a little. If you lean too much, the board can slip out and you’ll fall down.

My portion, Ki Tavo also talks about facing the consequences of our actions. It addresses the time when the Israelites settled in the Land. It talks about Moses telling the people to donate part of the fruits of their harvest to the priests at the sanctuary. The food is then distributed to “the Levites, the strangers, the fatherless and the widows”. This Torah portion is about how Jewish people are supposed to donate, to give something of themselves.

Part of the parasha speaks about specific things that the Jewish people are not supposed to do. The portion talks about how if the Jewish people do bad things, they will be punished. It also talks about how, if they do good, they will be rewarded. Moses tells the Jewish people to “observe faithfully all the terms of the covenant, that you may succeed in all you undertake.”

So that’s why it’s important to give to charity. Some of the things that I did for my Bar Mitzvah to fulfill my obligation to be charitable were:

1. I’m donating the food from my bimah baskets and lunch table decorations to Person to Person. Because my Torah portion is about harvest time, it seems appropriate to donate food.

2. My dad and I chopped wood to sell to raise money for Operation Fuel. Operation Fuel gives money to poor people who cannot pay for fuel during the winter. While I’m warm in my house during the winter, I’ll know that I’m helping other people with their fuel money problems.

3. Instead of spending money on expensive invitations that people would just throw away, we decided that for every invitation sent we would donate a tree to be planted in Israel. My family is trying to teach me how to give back in a lot of ways. It is important in Judaism to give back in many ways just because it’s the right thing to do, and not because you think you’ll be punished.

I’ve also learned that from skateboarding. My friend Mike got hurt when he, Miles and I were at the skate park a few years ago. Mike fell and broke his arm. Immediately everyone started crowding around the bowl. An adult came down and said his arm was broken and we called 911. After Mike went to the hospital, Miles’s mom took us to the hospital so we could stay with him. We did the good thing—-instead of continuing to skate, we went to the emergency room to be with our friend. Being charitable can also mean giving your time.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
 

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Brandon Temple on Shelach Lecha

In case you happened to have looked at the “All About Me” section of my booklet, you may have noticed my favorite prayer is the “Sh’ma.” I like it because it is repeated more often than any other prayer and also because it helps me to concentrate on how proud I am to be a Jew.

Little did I know until recently that part of the Sh’ma is found in my portion – and in fact, I just read it as my maftir! The third paragraph of the Sh’ma is found at the very end of my portion; this is the part that speaks about the tzitzit, the fringes found at the end of a tallit.

These tzitzit have many different meanings, but mostly, they are reminders of the 613 commandments.

But this paragraph doesn’t just remind us about all good things we’re supposed to do. It also teaches us how to do them.

Very often, people will do favors for others hoping to get a reward. People do it all the time. It’s an old custom when kids begin their formal Jewish studies, to dip Hebrew letters into honey so that the study of Torah will be sweet for them. We have a similar custom here at Beth El. When we contribute to a class discussion, our teacher gives us M and M’s. I know that I would contribute even without the M and M’s! But it’s nice to have them too.

Well, in the paragraph from our portion, the Torah tells us that we should wear the tzitizt, “Le’m’a’an tizzzkeru,” so that we will be reminded. In other words, so that we will remember that God rescued us from Egypt and then gave us these commandments. It is traditional to stretch out the “z” sound in Tizzzkeru, because if we mistakenly pronounce it “tisskeru,” with an “s” instead of a “z,” then it would mean “you shall be rewarded,” which implies that the only reason to follow the commandments would be to get a reward.

That’s something we should try to avoid. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”

I agree with that completely, and I’ve learned this recently in many ways. First, as part of my mitzvah project, I’ve been going to Greenwich Woods Nursing Home and visiting senior citizens there. I usually spend about two hours there, mostly helping them with their bowling, using a Wii video game. There’s one person there named Theresa, who always asks for me. I’ve developed a real bond with her. Last month, when I visited her, she offered to buy me a soda and I said, “No, that’s OK.” This was before I had even studied about the tzitzit, but I understood already that I was getting so much out of this, simply from seeing her be happy, that I did need any reward. That was reward enough.

Generally speaking, I like making people happy and often will cheer people up when they are in a bad mood. Sometimes when a young child is unhappy and makes a frown, I mimic their face, and most of the time it makes them laugh.

I’ve learned about how to do this kind of mitzvah from my dad. He often goes away to identify the remains of people who have died in tragedies like Hurricane Katrina or the nightclub fire near Providence. I know that one reason he did this was to set an example for me. But it wasn’t just an example of how to do a good deed – it was an example of why. There was no reward for all his efforts, except for the reward of knowing he had helped the families of the dead.

So it is true that I have learned the lesson taught by the paragraph regarding tzitzit in my portion. But I wouldn’t want to carry this thing too far. As I become a bar mitzvah today, I know that I am not leading these prayers because I’m hoping to be rewarded with lots of gifts. But you shouldn’t feel that you have to go through all the trouble of returning those gifts either! And keep in mind that I’ll be donating the money that we saved by making my bar mitzvah invitations myself to a number of medical charities: American Heart Association, Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center, Tourette’s Foundation, and Cystic Fibrosis.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Amber Kitay on Beha’alotcha
Shabbat Shalom!
In this week’s parsha, בהעלתך- B’nai Yisrael complained about the lack of food in the desert. They remembered fondly the fish and vegetables that they had back in Egypt. They were so afraid of not surviving that they were willing to go back to Egypt and be slaves again.

It’s natural to want to turn back when you are afraid, but it is important to be able to move on. The only way to move on is by learning how to overcome fear.

For me, fear comes in the form of a big science test or getting a shot. But if you ask a kid from Sderot what fear means, they’ll talk about not making it to school or a parent not making it home. Fear can be captured in the 15 seconds between the sound of the siren and the crash of the rocket.

For my mitzvah project I helped to organize a walk raising money to send children in Sderot to summer camps, far the fear of rockets. We raised about $5,000 – and we are still collecting, if you would like to donate.

A fear that I’ve had to overcome was in gymnastics. For those who don’t know me that well, I love gymnastics and have been competing since I was 8. Right now I’m ranked first on bars for my level and age group in the state. Even now, I still have to overcome fears when I do new skills and sometimes even old ones. So I had to overcome the fear of doing my first flyaway on bars (that’s when you let go and flip in the air), and I’m still afraid of it today – but I always get it right. On the balance beam, I used to find a back walkover scary when I’m on high beam, which is four feet high and four inches wide. But now that I’ve got the hang of it, I hardly ever fall. On floor exercises, there’s the round-off back-handspring back-tuck. I used to be scared of it, but now I can do it anywhere. In fact, my mom suggested that I do it as my entrance at the party. The rabbi even said it would be Ok to do it right here. But I said, “It’s OK.”

Believe it or not, the best training I’ve had at overcoming fear has been at a place my family visits a lot: Disney. When I was little I used to be afraid of all the roller coasters, but after I went on Rock and Roll roller coaster, followed by Tower of Terror and Mount Everest, now I can go on every ride in the park and not be scared.

Despite all the experiences I’ve had with fear, I can’t imagine how they must feel in Sderot. But that’s what makes me all the more determined to help kids there live a normal life. No child deserves to live in fear – anywhere. As a bat mitzvah, I will do my best to help make this kind of world possible.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Rachel Katz on Shavuot and Ruth
A few weeks ago, I surveyed my friends and family, asking them the first thing that comes to mind when I say ‘Judaism.’ I got some interesting responses. Some of them include: the Torah, being Kosher, pride, and bagels and lox.

After learning about the story of Ruth, which was read earlier this morning, and very nicely done, Cantor, I think my answer would be kindness. On a holiday that talks about the Torah, one might think that the focus is all about laws and how important it is to obey the commandments.

However, Ruth teaches us that what’s most important is kindness. Two words that appear several times throughout the story are ‘Chesed’ and ‘Chen,’ both of which mean “kindness.” In the book there are many examples of people who do incredible things for others. Ruth chooses to stay with Naomi, her mother in-law, even after Ruth’s husband dies, when she could have gone back to her own home and family, instead. Ruth says to Naomi, “Where you go, I will go; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d.” This act of commitment was the first form of conversion to Judaism, and shows that it’s not about what you’re born into, but how you choose to live. If you choose to be Jewish, then what counts the most is being kind.

Another example of kindness in the Book of Ruth is when Boaz lets Ruth glean barley from his field, and eventually, marries her. Here is where it gets interesting. Boaz and Ruth have a child, who has a child, who has a child who happens to become a KING, King David. According to tradition, the Messiah will be a descendent of David. Any math teacher could tell you, that this also means that the Messiah will be a descendent of Ruth. Ruth, not Moses, not Aaron, sorry Aaron. While Moses and Aaron’s lives were centered around law and justice, Ruth was all about kindness. In the end, kindness is the most important Jewish quality of all.

Knowing that, I looked for some way to bring more kindness into the world. For my mitzvah project, friends of mine and I knit over 100 hats and sent them to newborn children all over the world. Some of the countries include Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bolivia, and other African nations. Just thinking about giving these babies their first experience of human kindness and warmth makes me smile.

I also knit some more hats and brought them to patients at the Norwalk Cancer Center. I talked to two women and I gave them each a hat that I made. One even offered me money, but I told her I was just glad that she would have the hat.

That experience of giving the hats really showed me how important it is to be kind, because that is what being Jewish is all about.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Lauren Schechter on Naso

Today is Memorial Day, a day to commemorate the soldiers who have given their lives defending our country. These men and women have demonstrated remarkable qualities, such as courage, loyalty and most importantly, leadership.

Leadership: what does it really mean?

In this week’s parsha, Naso, we read about the gifts brought by the leaders of each tribe when the Mishkan was dedicated. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for leader, Nasi, comes from the same root as the title of the parsha, Naso. In modern Hebrew, Nasi means President.

What makes these tribal leaders special? Unlike Moses and Aaron, they aren’t really known at all, but they stand out in a different way.

According to the Midrash – they became leaders because in Egypt, they were taskmasters and they refused orders from their supervisors to whip the slaves, so they themselves where whipped. Because of their loyalty to their people, they were seen as worthy to become the leaders of Israel.

In the desert, it came time to bring the voluntary gifts at the celebration of the dedication of the Mishkan. Strangely enough, each Nasi brought the exact same thing: a silver plate, a silver bowl, and a gold spoon filled with sifted flour, along with a lamb, a bull, and a ram. The Torah then goes on to repeat this twelve times, once for each tribe.

Why does the Torah repeat the exact same thing? Each of these leaders gave with all his heart, and that spirit of generosity and love cannot be measured or compared to another person’s.
In addition, each gift was the only one that came on that given day. So on that day, that person’s gift was special. In fact, that day became a holiday for the tribe.

We also learn that leadership is not always about making a big splash, but about making a difference, even when you seem identical to everyone else.

On Memorial Day, we think of the soldiers and how they look when they are standing together, dressed in exactly the same uniform. But each brings a unique love for the country and a gift that no one else can bring – his own spirit, personality, and life. They give all of this but do not get a lot of credit, and today we give them that.

What the soldiers and tribal leaders teach us is that the best kind of leader is one who can simultaneously blend in and stand out.

Another person who fits that description is Nancy Drew. As you might guess, I’m a big fan of the Nancy Drew series. Most of the time she seems like a normal girl, but when someone is in need of help, she’s the first one to volunteer. She always tries her best but never looks for the credit.
As I become bat mitzvah, I’ve learned that I should try to become the kind of person Nancy or the tribal leaders would be proud of, someone humble, but never afraid to help.

Those who are involved in cancer research are much like the Nesi’im. They work behind the scenes to save lives, but their accomplishments are rarely recognized. For my mitzvah project, I made Hanukkah gift bags and sold them to raise money for cancer research. In addition to this, today during the party, in the lobby, there will be a table where people can decorate bags that hold aero-chambers and Epi-pens. These are medicines that kids like me, with asthma and allergies have to carry around wherever we go. The bags will be given out to underprivileged children in clinics at Montefiore Hospital.
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Jonathan Rich on Naso

My portion’s name, Naso, means “to lift.”

It’s a very appropriate portion for someone whose family has been involved in the moving business. But I found out that it means much more than just that. Because this is the portion where moving is a mitzvah. You see, the portion begins by describing how it was the special job of the Levites to carry the ark of the covenant which contained the two tablets with the ten commandments.

The ark was very heavy. One commentary says that it was so heavy that it took the strength of many men even to budge it. But then, the story continues, once they lifted it, it carried the carriers. A Hasidic rabbi once said, regarding a very heavy torah scroll that he was lifting, “Once you’ve picked it up, it is no longer heavy.”

Over the past several months, I have been volunteering at the Stamford Nature Museum for my bar mitzvah project. The first day I got there, I was a little scared and did not know what to expect. I even told my mom that I didn’t want to go. When I got home, I told her how much I enjoyed it. At first, cleaning out the animals’ living spaces was hard. After a little while, I got the hang of it. When I first saw the animals I was scared, because they were wild. Try cleaning out the stall of a Clydesdale horse – with the horse there! Still today, I am a little uneasy around the bigger animals, but it’s gotten a lot easier and a lot more fun. Just a few weeks ago, 12 lambs and two goats were born. Now I feel comfortable picking them up and holding them – I even named one. “Bo” the goat. I gave him that name after he put up a fight while he was getting de-horned.

The nature center is not the only place where doing a mitzvah might have been hard at first, but got easier and easier as I went along. The same is true at Hospice. Following in my brother Jeffrey’s footsteps, I’ve gone there several times. I was a little nervous at first seeing the residents in end of life care. But after a couple of my brother’s events, I got used to it and now I really enjoy talking to the patients. In fact, part of my mitzvah project is that I am selling bracelets to raise money for hospice. Again, just like carrying the ark, once you get the hang of something, it is no longer heavy.

When I was younger, I used to be scared of my brother David’s fastball. As we played more and more, I started even being able to hit home runs against him. And speaking of lifting heavy burdens, I want to pay tribute to David and all who are serving this country on this Memorial Day weekend.

Finally, what’s true about carrying the Torah is also true about reading it. When I first got my binder, I looked into it and said to myself, “I’m never going to be able to do this!”

Within a few weeks, I knew lots of the Hebrew and now I can even read out of the Torah.

So next time you think you can’t do something, try it a couple of times, and you’ll amazed how quickly you make progress. My portion’s title might speak about heavy lifting, but once you get the hang of it, there is no mitzvah that’s too difficult to do.
 

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Ross Lang on B’midbar

My d’var Torah is about the most neglected person in all of human history: of course I’m talking about…. the middle child.

Through all of Jewish history, either the oldest or youngest child gets all the attention – never the middle one!

Today we begin the book of Numbers, and when it comes to birth order, numbers count. My

Torah portion of B’midbar describes a census that was taken of the Israelites while they were wandering in the Wilderness. In that report, the tribe of Reuben is listed first, because he was the eldest son of Jacob. In the Torah, the oldest usually inherited from the father.

The oldest comes first, but in the Torah, it is the youngest child who usually ends up as the winner. When you think about it, all the younger children end up on top: Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Moses over Miriam and Aaron.

Meanwhile, the special Haftarah that we read today, on this day before Rosh Hodesh, is about David, before he became king. David was the youngest of eight brothers. Some say it was seven, but either way, he was still the youngest.

So either the oldest or the youngest always wins. So what about the middle child????

The subject of my being a middle child comes up a lot in my house.

My family thinks I use my birth order as an excuse to get attention. There may be some truth to that, but if you were in my position, you would too.

But now that I am a bar mitzvah, I need to get over it. I’ve now matured to the point where I can publicly admit that there are benefits to being a middle child.

Yes, it’s true.

So, in the spirit of the book of Numbers, here are a number of reasons why:

1) As someone who is both younger and older than his siblings, the middle child is very flexible and learns to shift roles very quickly. We also can see both sides of many issues, because we’ve grown up looking at see things from all perspectives. Middle children make excellent peacemakers. Moses’ brother Aaron, for instance, was considered a real man of peace – and he was a middle child.

2) Because of our ability to adapt, middle children usually make friends very quickly and often reach outside the family for significant relationships. I’m close to my family, but I’ve always been able to make friends easily at school. Whenever a new kid comes into the school, I try to become his friend.

As a certified middle child expert, I’ve come up with some suggestions on how to survive as a middle child. Again, I’ll list them by number, in honor of my portion.

1) Make trouble! That will get you lots of attention… but seriously…

2) Do what you can to stand out – in a positive way. Do chores around the house. I’m really good at that.

3) If you find yourself really lacking in attention, keep on asking for what you want until you become very annoying. Usually it takes about 25 minutes of whining to get an iTunes download, and up to a few months for a go cart. I think I’m wearing them down for that go-cart, though!

4) Be funny! Middle children usually make great comedians. When you are stuck between two siblings, having a good sense of humor really helps. Did you know that David Letterman is a middle child?

5) Don’t give up hope of standing out some day! Other famous Middle Children include: J.F.K., Madonna, Donald Trump, Barbara Walters, Bill Gates and Rabbi Hammerman. (He asked me to mention that – he needs the attention). Each of these people is an example of just how successful middle children can become.

But seriously, there are people in this world who really do need attention. Some of them are children in hospitals. That’s why for my mitzvah project, I will be donating toys to the children’s unit of Stamford Hospital.

In the end, I’ve learned that it’s not about the amount of attention your receive; what matters most is the amount of attention you give others. As I become a bar mitzvah, that’s something that I will try to do more and more.

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Adam Lee on Rosh Hodesh

Happy Rosh Chodesh Sivan!

It was exactly one month ago, on April 24, Rosh Chodesh for the month of Iyar, when I was heading home on my bike. Suddenly, my front tire hit a pothole. My foot slipped from the pedal, and I fell forward. Somehow I stayed on the bike, but when I looked down, I saw that my leg was cut open. I was in shock! All I knew, at that moment, was that I had to get home, and despite the pain, I rode the whole way back.

Now here we are, just one month later, and I am riding my bike again. Everyone knows that when you fall off a bike, or a horse, you have to get right back on. I know this firsthand because I happen to have fallen off both a bike AND a horse, and I am pleased to say that each time, I have gotten right back on!

Rosh Chodesh is the first day of each new Jewish month. The moon begins a new cycle on that day. In ancient times Rosh Chodesh was important because the calendar was dependant on the moon so that people knew when the holidays were supposed to occur. It also symbolizes a renewal for the people. The thought is that Israel may suffer but it always survives and renews itself.

That is also the theme of Rosh Hashanah, the start of the new year, when people are given a chance to start again. This holiday declares the new beginning with the sounding of the shofar.
Not long ago, I had an encounter with a shofar… sort of. Unfortunately, it was still attached to the ram. You see, I’m an animal lover, but it seems that not all animals love me. As part of my mitzvah project, I volunteer at the Nature Center. One day, while I was raking some leaves, I was suddenly shoved from behind. I turned to see that a ram had hit me! Obviously, he did not want me in his space! This particular ram was one of the more aggressive ones and known for butting other animals, but not usually people. Lucky me!

This was not the first incident that happened at the nature center. While cleaning out the chicken coop, I was attacked by two turkeys. One pecked my ear while the other jumped on me! I did not let these incidents stop me from helping at the Nature Center, I was just more
careful around the animals after that.

At hockey camp last summer, I was given the Mr. Hustle Award for my dedication and perseverance. I may not have been the most talented player but I never gave up. The coach thought that I had a great attitude. It was a grueling week but I always tried my best.

I am known for my efforts in other sports as well. In lacrosse last year, the coach gave me the award for the most improved player. He spoke about how I always get right up when I am knocked down, which happened more often than I would like to remember. He also mentioned that I am always smiling, no matter what.

However, I must admit, that when I biked home after I cut my leg, I wasn’t smiling. I also wasn’t smiling in the emergency room when I had to get 21 stitches or when I hobbled out of there on crutches, realizing that my bar mitzvah was just a month away. My mom tried smiling for my benefit but it wasn’t the best day I have had.

In studying for my bar mitzvah, there were moments when it felt like I could not it. But with encouragement from many people, I kept working at it and here I am today. No stitches, no crutches.

No problem.

I know that there are many people who face many difficult challenges every day. As another part of my mitzvah project, I will be donating money to the Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind, to help cover the cost of training these guide dogs. A guide dog will allow people to achieve independence, so that they, too, can have a new beginning!

Monday, May 18, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Josiah Boyer on Behar

There is a Talmudic story related to my parasha. Two men are in the desert, and there is only enough water for one man to make it to the next oasis. Who should get the water? The rabbis say that the person most likely to survive may drink the water, even if it means the other person dies.

It’s fitting that Behar is being read on the day of my Bar Mitzvah, because, like this portion, I am very concerned about how we use scarce resources.

The agricultural laws of Behar have a lot to do with giving tzedakah. Elsewhere in the Torah, God states that each farmer must not harvest the corners of his field so that the poor may come and gather what remains. My sister, Aliya, and her class from WFHA, just helped to fulfill this mitzvah. When she was in Israel for two weeks with her 8th grade class trip, they harvested hundreds of pounds of beets which a farm was growing so that it could be distributed to the poor.

In my parashah, the Torah requires that we give the land a rest every seven years and do not plant a crop. But whatever grows, and whatever fruit grows on our trees, is to be left for poor people to harvest. But we also now know how important it is to give the land time to rest, in order to make it stronger and more productive. If you keep working the land, year after year, it loses some of its nutrients. You have to give it time to regenerate. So the Torah was way ahead of its time in its concern for the environment.

Right from the beginning of Bereisheet, it is clear that we are God’s partners in taking care of the land. God planted the first garden, Eden, and gave it to Adam to till and tend. Since then, it’s been our job to protect the environment.

I’ve taken this responsibility very seriously. I have created a website that teaches you about sustainable agriculture.

The URL is http://web.me.com/landsrest/josiahs_site/Introduction.html

I’ve been working on it for several months. Of course, my family has always had a concern for the environment. We compost in the backyard, raise three chickens and use their eggs, and no visit to our yard is complete without seeing our honeybees. Of course, I still have my two guinea pigs, Peanut and Taffy.

On my site, you will find information about sustainable agriculture and links to other sites that explain it in more detail. I also posted links to several organizations dealing with Judaism and the environment. Judaism has a lot to say about protecting our planet and the environment and it’s a good thing that there are so many organizations raising awareness about this.

In addition, part of the money I receive for my bar mitzvah will be given to some of the organizations listed on the site, including Canfe Nesharim, which means “Wings of Eagles,” an innovative Israeli environmentalist site and COEJL, The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. Of course, also JNF, where people can plant trees in Israel—did you know that in the last 107 years the Jewish National Fund has planted over 240 MILLION trees?

One other aspect of the Shmita year needs to be mentioned. The laws apply only to the Land of Israel. That’s because that land is considered “God’s Land.” Elsewhere in the Tanach, we read that Israel is supposed to be a “Light unto the nations.” I believe that by keeping the laws of Shmita and letting the land rest every seventh year, Israel can set an example for the rest of the world to follow. We might follow the laws more strictly there, but we need to be stewards of the earth everywhere. If all nations followed these laws, there would be more productivity and a longer time window of productivity.

But that having been said, there is something extra special about the land of Israel. I’ve had the good fortune to visit there many times and there’s no more beautiful place on earth. The sun’s always a little warmer there, the fruit is tastier, and the colors of the landscape are more vivid. I love rafting on the Jordan River, looking into the clear water, where you can almost see the bottom, and passing the willow trees hugging the shore and listening to the sweet sounds of the birds chirping while Elias falls off the raft.

Returning to the Talmudic story that I mentioned at the beginning, water is very scarce in Israel. But leave it to Israel to find ways to conserve water and uncover new sources. If Israel has its way, both of the men in that story would not only survive, they would have swimming pools in their backyards.

As I become a bar mitzvah, I now understand how each of us can pay a crucial role in protecting our planet, because all the land belongs to God.

 

Friday, May 15, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Lauren Tuckman on Emor

Shabbat Shalom!

In my portion, as you can see, the priests had a very set script. There were lots of rules that they had to follow and very little room for self expression. They were like the actors and actresses of their day, and the presentations they put on were very powerful… but no one ever really thought of them as leaders. Moses was the leader… the priests weren’t.

As many of you know, and the rest of you might be able to guess – I love acting. I go to acting camp and I’ve been in a number of shows, both there and back home, including “Music Man” twice!

I’ve always loved Broadway shows. I went to my first one when I was around the age of three. I’ve been to lots and lots of shows; in fact, just in the past few weeks I’ve seen Shrek and Hair. My all time favorites are Hairspray and 13.

The great thing about both shows, especially Hairspray, is that they talk about the tough choices teens have to make. It’s so important that teen feel free to be able to express who they really are.

The funny thing is, that the actors who are doing this are actually reading SOMEONE ELSE’S WORDS! They are not being themselves at all, but are going according to a script and a director’s instructions.

I also love to dance, and can tell you that the same is true for dancers. We’re dancing to someone else’s music and someone else’s choreography.

The key is to be able to take those words and that choreography and fly with it – to make them your own.

That’s what I try to do when I dance and when I act.

And that’s what a bat mitzvah does too. This morning, I’ve been chanting words written twenty five HUNDRED years ago – and the key is to make them my own. That’s what I’ve tried to do here today.

One way to make those words come alive is through speeches like this. Another way, is through performing mitzvot. For my mitzvah project, I’ve been selling hand-made bracelets to raise money. I designed them and made them myself, with some help from my friends. You can find more about this project in my booklet; I’ll be taking orders all day today.

Thursday, May 7, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Alex Weinberg on Kedoshim

Shabbat Shalom!

My double portion of Acharay Mot – Kedoshim contains some of the most important laws found in the entire Torah, but one of them seems a little out of place. In chapter 19, verse 11, it says, “Lo Tignohvu v’lo te-hach-shoo v’lo tir-shak-eru eesh ba-amito.” “You shall not steal, you shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with another.” Commentators note that the instruction not to steal is already found in the Ten Commandments, so why repeat it here?

Ibn Ezra suggests that “stealing” here refers to the prior verse. Where we are told to leave the corners of our field for the poor. If we don’t do that, then we are, in effect, stealing from them. The things that grow in those corners are not really ours to keep, even if they are growing on our property.

The 11th century commentator Joseph Kara states that we are commanded to help the poor find enough to eat so that they will be not be driven to steal. Rambam went one step further, saying that the highest level of tzedakkah is to find someone a job, so they won’t need to receive charity any more, much less to have to steal.

Tzedakkah has been a topic that has really interested me lately, since I became part of the community’s Teen Tzedakkah Foundation Council program at the JCC. In Teen Tzedakkah Foundation Council, the kids research different charities and then decide as a group, which ones to support, using money that we raise through our own donations and matching gifts.
The whole process is a lot of fun, especially when we get to choose.

So I thought I might give all of you here today a little taste of what it’s like with a brand new reality show:

Welcome to today’s edition of “Choose Your Tzedakkah!”

Today we’ll get to decide among the top three candidates. I’ll describe them all and then you get to text your vote to 1-800-Mitzvah! No, just kidding, we won’t be doing any texting.
So here they are, the three finalists:

· The Koby Mandell Foundation
· Friends of Yemin Orde
· Chai Lifeline

Now, I’ll tell you a little about each of them. Keep in mind that I’ll be donating part of my bar mitzvah money to the winning charity! It’s all up to you.

Each of these three causes is very worthy, which is what makes Teen Tzedakkah so challenging as well as fun. It’s like when the UJF or United Way have to make some tough choices about how much money to give to different places. It’s even harder this year, when so many people are out of work or don’t have as much to give.

The Koby Mandell foundation helps families in Israel who are harmed by terrorism. It is named in memory of a child who was killed by terrorists in 2001, when he was just 13 years old. Some of these kids attend Camp Koby, which helps them to receive the special care that they need while also enabling them to have a fun camp experience. The experience doesn’t stop there retreats help grieving families become stronger despite obstacles.

Yemin Orde is a youth village in northern Israel which is home to more than 500 immigrants, disadvantaged and at-risk children and youth from 20 countries around the world. many of them survivors of trauma and displacement. Many of the programs at Yemin Orde are designed to rebuild the self-esteem and self-confidence of the children as many of them are survivors of trauma and displacement. Yemin Orde is particularly known for its work with the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel.

Since 1987, Chai Lifeline’s programs address the emotional, social, and financial needs of seriously ill children, their families, and communities, here in America. One project of theirs is Camp Simcha in Gen Spey New York, which offers children and teens a chance to forget about illness for a while and enjoy all the fun that camp has to offer.

So what will it be? Koby Mandell, Yemin Orde or Chai Lifeline? We can only pick one!
In the bar mitzvah booklet, you’ll find three little pieces of colored paper. You can see that the basket is going around the room. If your choice is Koby, put the Green piece of paper in the basket. If your choice is Yemin Orde, put the Yellow paper in the basket. And if you prefer Chai Lifeline, put the WHITE paper in the basket.

We’ll see which one wins, and that will be the tzedakkah that I will choose!

THE FINAL RESULTS (TABULATED AFTER SERVICES):

Koby Mandell Foundation -54 votes
Chai Lifeline -33
Yemin Orde – 27

There are many other charities that we could have chosen, of course. But I hope this gave you a taste of what it’s like. Now that I am a bar mitzvah, I realize that it’s not a matter of choice for me at all whether or not to give tzedakkah. It’s part of my responsibilities as a Jew.

Thursday, April 30, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Alex Benjamin on Tazria-Metzorah
Today we begin a very special month, the month of Iyyar. Part of what makes it special is that it includes Israel’s Independence Day, which takes place this coming Wednesday.

So what does this all have to do with me? Well, it begins with my Hebrew first name, Lavi, which means “lion.” You see, one of the symbols of Israel is the lion of Judah, and that lion appears on the emblem of Jerusalem. Also, one of Israel’s most famous fighter jets is also called the Lavi. There’s even a kibbutz in the north of Israel called “Lavi”!

I’m named for my grandmother Lois, who died shortly before I was born. She had the heart of a lion, fighting off sickness for many years. For me, I had to learn to be a fighter right from the start, when, like my grandmother, I had to fight for life. My grandma also wanted a red headed grandchild –she said my dad was her best shot— and here I am.

Actually, my hair isn’t really red. I guess if you were to limit it to the four basic hair colors, red would be the closest. It’s more of a strawberry blonde – some might say it is the color of a flame. And flames aren’t really red. Flames, lions and I all share a red-orangey mix.

Well, if you look at my Haftarah, chapter 66, verse 15 of Isaiah, it says, “The Lord is coming with flaming fire…with fire will the Lord contend.” So indirectly, I’m mentioned in my portion. Now, here’s where it gets weird. If you look up “Lavi” in the Hebrew dictionary, it will say that it means “Lion,” but another definition of the word is “flame colored.”

Lions are known for their physical strength and royalty, but in Jewish texts, they are known even more for spiritual strength and courage. For Jews that means the courage to care. I especially care about those who are hungry. For my mitzvah project, I organized food drives at my school and at the temple in order to donate to an agency called Person to Person. I donated a total of 1,330 pounds of food. I’m hoping to add some more to this donation to make it an even ton, starting with the baskets of food on the bimah today.

I wanted to end this speech with the worst pun possible. So… I guess I would be “lion” if I was to say wasn’t having a “roaring” good time.

Friday, April 24, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Matthew Morgenthaler on Parashat Shmini

Shabbat Shalom!

I’ve heard that in the old days, bar mitzvah students have stood and said, “Today I am a man.” Well, that’s not really true. I’m not a man yet, but becoming bar mitzvah is sort of the half way point, when a boy really starts becoming a man. But that’s something I’ve already had to think about for a long time. It’s hard enough to be a good role model as an adult, but I’ve had to do it as a kid.

Because my parents are leaders in USY, I’ve spent many weekends of my childhood going to teen conventions and other events. I love to go; in fact, I was at Spring convention just a couple of weeks ago. Even though I’ve always been much younger than the rest of the kids there, I’ve had lots of responsibilities: helping out, setting up, cleaning up, hanging out – and basically just not getting into trouble.

That wasn’t the case in my Torah portion. Aaron’s kids didn’t know how to stay out of trouble and they paid a very steep price. They brought a strange offering, which some have said was an attempt to upstage their father, and because of it, they died in a flash fire.

Unlike Aaron’s sons, I have no need to upstage my father. I have my own way of showing him up without getting into trouble – its called golf!

About two years ago, I became a better golfer than him. Now, I beat him a lot… well, sometimes. The best part of it is that I get to beat him, … and we get to hang out together.

I’ve also learned that young people can be role models if they focus not on tearing things down but on building things up. In USY, we talk about something called Tikkun Olam – it means repair of the world. In other words, Mitzvah projects.

That is one way a younger person can be a role model. Aaron’s sons were reckless. I don’t like to wreck anything. Instead, I like to fix things. I’ve had lots of practice with legos. (the biggest most impressive thing I’ve built is a boat – from scratch, without any instructions.)

I’m very handy, and in my house have been known to fix anything and everything, all I need is a hammer or screwdriver and I’ll fix a kitchen door, the garage door and stain the deck in no time. Outside the house, I do lots of hauling and carrying. I’m really handy with machinery – I’m really good with lawnmowers and snowblowers. I even mow the lawn at my grandfather’s and other neighbor’s houses and our summer home. And I don’t even charge them that much!

For the last few years, I’ve been helping my dad to finish the basement on the Cape. We’re halfway there. I’ve put up sheet rock, insulation, and wood paneling.

Building and fixing is all part of what it means to be helpful and responsible, not to mention kind and caring. In USY, in school and from my parents, I’ve learned how important it is to be caring. I also learned that from my grandparents.

As some of you know, my mitzvah project involves raising money for ALS, in memory of my Grandma Phyllis. I’ve participated in the ALS walkathon for the past two years. Our first year my grandmother was there and my mom pushed her the three miles in her wheelchair. The following year, we participated in memory of her and we will continue to do so for years to come. I’m also going to be donating the supplies in the bima crates that you see in front of you. They are filled with school supplies, that will be put into backpacks and then given to children who are from families with ALS.

My grandma would have approved of this, because education, learning and reading was so important to her, as she was a librarian for years.

So while it isn’t always easy for a 13 year old to be a role model, it’s much easier for me, because of the role models I’ve had, my parents and both sets of grandparents.

Friday, April 17, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Ben Lavietes on Pesach

Shabbat Shalom! Oh, and Happy Passover!

I’ll bet you’ve never been to a Passover Bar Mitzvah before. Well, I haven’t either! Well, it might seem complicated, but actually, Passover and Bar Mitzvah have a lot in common. Yes, it does pose some problems, but it also made me think more about my place in the Jewish people – and we Jews have always found ways to overcome challenges. For instance, there will be no Bar Mitzvah cake at my party. But actually, there will. It will be an ice cream cake! But it won’t matter anyway, because after two seders and a bar mitzvah feast, no one will be hungry for dessert anyway.

Another challenge was the candy. We always throw candy at bar mitzvahs, but today we had to use Passover-friendly candy. And we couldn’t just simply toss gobs of horseradish or chocolate covered matzahs. Now, I’ll compare Passover and Bar Mitzvah by looking at each item on the seder plate:

First, the matzah. The matzah reminds us of how quickly our ancestors had to leave Egypt when they were given the chance to be free. Well, I’m always in a hurry too, to get things done. I’m sure I’m not the first bar mitzvah student who was told to slow down. And, just as matzah crumbles easily, you can take the crumbs and turn them into matzah meal, which can be used to make matzah balls; or you can fry it up and make my personal favorite, matzah brei. But the most important thing is to not be in a hurry all the time, otherwise it won’t get done correctly and you’ll wind up doing it again.

The egg reminds us of the miracle of being born. My haftorah talks about the people of Israel coming back to life in the vision of the dry bones. When you become a bar mitzvah, it is like a new beginning to a Jewish life, since I’ll now count in the minyan and be able to fast on Yom Kippur as well as performing other mitzvot.

The bitter herbs remind us of the times when you think you’re not going to make it – the way every bar mitzvah student feels until the end of the process, when things suddenly come together.

The green vegetable is dipped into salt water, to remind us of the tears of the slaves.
Remembering is very important to Jews, even when it involves remembering sad events. Today I want to remember my mom. I didn’t really get a chance to know her, but from the stories I’ve heard from family and friends, I feel like I’ve known her all of my life, and I’ll always remember her.

The haroset reminds us that during sad times, there is always sweetness. In just a few minutes, when I’m done with all this hard work, the feeling will be sa-weeeeet, like the haroset. The haroset reminds us of the mortar that helped glue the bricks together that were used by the slaves. The bar mitzvah is sort of like the glue that helps to bind together the building blocks of my life. And I have lots of important people who have helped to make this all the sweeter here in Stamford, including my Dad and Diane, Rebecca, Jenna and Adam, Aunt Hillary and Uncle Craig, cousins Zachary, Nicholas and one soon to come, and Grandma Roz and Grandparents Joyce and Stanley. Plus so many other friends and relatives both locally and far away – but always close to my heart.

In the end, I’ve discovered that a bar mitzvah is like a matzah ball. The soup is the party, and the matzah ball is the service. Even though everyone enjoys the soup, what you really remember is that matzah ball. And the fluffier the better. And, like a matzah ball, once you finish your haftorah, you really feel like you’re on a roll.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Julie Arditti on Vayikra

My portion begins the book of Leviticus, which some people call the most boring book of the Torah. True, it is a lot less exciting than Genesis and Exodus, which we’ve just completed. The crossing of the Red Sea and the giving of the Ten Commandments are a hard act to follow, and it is difficult to find much that is interesting about sacrifices, which is the subject of my portion, Vayikra. But it is that simplicity that also makes it so interesting and powerful.

The first word of my portion is Vayikra, meaning God called. The ancient rabbis and commentators wondered why God called to Moses and didn’t just speak to him. Why did God need to get Moses attention in this way? Their answer is that when God called, Moses thought all the hard work was already done. The people had left Egypt, received the Torah, and built a sanctuary, so what more was left to do? By calling to Moses, God is telling him that the most important work is yet to come – the sacrifices of daily worship. The message here is that the things that matter most are the simple things.

For me, the simple things I appreciate in life are sometimes more important than the big things. Such as, waking up and having a roof over my head, being able to have breakfast, petting my dogs, having clothes to wear and a family that loves me.

Every morning when I get onto my bus I say good morning to the bus driver. And when I get off I say thank you. In the course of my life these bus rides are just bus rides. By thanking him, I am showing my appreciation for the little things.

At Camp Kenwood when there are thunderstorms, I get frightened. Last year there was a huge thunderstorm and we all had to wait in the gymnastics building for hours. I now appreciate that building and how it kept us from getting wet or even hurt.

For my mitzvah project, I made and sold breast cancer ribbon pins and will donate all the proceeds to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. By the way, if you still want to purchase a pin, please contact me. I have decorated the pins with simple objects that remind us that even the simplest things can be meaningful.

My Torah portion has not only taught me the importance of appreciating things, but also to be humble.

As I said before God called to Moses using the word Vayikra. There is a story that Moses was so humble that he didn’t want people to think that God talked just to him. So Moses changed the word to Vayikar, which means that God just happened upon Moses. When God insisted that the word be Vayikra, showing that God had a special relationship with Moses, Moses compromised to keep the word Vayikra, but he made the alef small.

In fifth grade when I was elected president of student council, although I was excited and wanted to scream, I went straight to the runner-up and told her how great she did and that she ran a great race.

So, from my Torah portion I’ve learned to be gracious, humble and appreciative. I guess Vayikra isn’t so boring after all.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Sam Baden on Shabbat ha-Hodesh

Happy New Year everyone!

In case you were wondering, the biblical new year is Nisan, which begins this week. Today, not only is it my Bar Mitzvah, but it is the first day of spring and shabot hachodesh, the special shabbot announcing this new month. For those of you who don’t know this I was born on the 1st day of Passover, known as chag haaviv, the holiday of spring, and Nissan is known in the torah as chodesh haaviv, the month of spring. So everything, as you can see, really ties together.

At this time of year so much comes alive. From deer frolicking in the fields, and all the snow birds coming back from Florida, and all the flowers growing in your yard, the Yankees getting ready for opening day, except A-roid I mean rod, and of course those annoying bird waking you up at 5am. And this year another cycle of nature is renewed. The day before Passover, we are going to say a special blessing of the sun, which marks the return of the sun to the exact place where it was at the moment of creation, according to Jewish tradition. We only say the blessing once every 28 years, so it kind of a big deal.

As this new cycle begins, it makes me wonder what the world will be like in another 28 years. When I imagine the future I think of flying cars, a giant whole in the ozone layer and maybe by then the economy will be turned around, maybe. And I’ll be 41, wow that’s old.
However, some things will stay the same. For instance, Judaism. It has been going on for 3000 plus years, and it’s still going strong. And I think my mom is old (hold for applause). But seriously, my family also has deep roots, they’ve been right here in Stamford for a very long time. I am the first of the 5th generation to be in Stamford.

I am so lucky to have so much family. Today there are 4 generations in this very room. I’m very privileged to have 5 living great grandparents, 5 grandparents, 12 cousins, and 8 aunts and uncles. I’m the first of 8 on one side, and the second of 10 on the other. I want to give special mention to my 2 talises. One is all the way from Israel, and is from Grandpa Manny, and this talis will be passed all the way through the Leferman side and eventually it will come back to me. My 2nd talis is from Mema, it is very special to me because it’s mine to keep forever.
So once again, happy new year, and I hope you paid attention because I am not repeating this speech for another 28 years

The Torah and the Cross: Supreme Symbols and the Supreme Court

I delivered the following sermon this past Shabbat / Shmini Atzeret:

Tonight and tomorrow, we’ll be dancing circles around and with our most sacred object – the torah.

Isn’t it fascinating, when you think about it, that our most sacred object is not really an object at all, but a book – an open book, one that is in so many ways a living document. It occurred to me this week that we are most careful never to turn the torah into an object – even an object of veneration. Yes people have been known to risk life and limb to save a torah from a burning building. and yes, we never discard it when it is no longer usable – we bury it, as we would a human being. But that’s the point – the torah is more of a person than an object – and we treat it that way.

So what about the kissing, then? Isn’t that almost idolatrous – to kiss an object? A kiss is a way of expressing love, not worship. In our tradition, no one kisses the ring of the rabbi. When we kiss, we kiss our spouse or our parent or our child. Most parents don’t worship their children. Well. Maybe not. But the kiss is not indicative of worship, at least. Kissing the torah is a way not of expressing love for an object, but for all that it symbolizes, and for God. So I don’t see it as idolatrous.

Torahs are not used in art very much (similar to human beings) – you see lots of Jewish stars and menorahs. Ancient Jewish art, especially synagogue mosaics and coins – are filled with zodiac signs, menorahs and also especially lulavs and etrogs. Almost never do we find a torah.

And at the cemetery, we’ll see menorahs on gravestones, and other symbols, like the pitcher for the Levite or the hands of a Cohen – but again, rarely if ever a Torah. When a Jew dies in the military, his grave will most often be marked with a simple Jewish star.

We’re very careful not to make too much of our symbols – they should never become more important than they are – and even the torah, our most sacred symbol, gains its power not as an object, but as a summons – calling upon us to choose life.

So what are we to make of the current case now before the Supreme Court, which was argued this week?

Salazar v. Buono deals with the constitutionality of a 6 1/2-foot cross sitting on what originally was public land in California’s Mojave National Preserve. The memorial was constructed 75 years ago to honor World War I victims, but 10 years ago it was challenged by a National Park Service employee who thought it violated the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of religion.

Congress passed legislation in 2004 declaring the site a national memorial. The legislation transferred the ownership of the land on which the memorial sits to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in exchange for five privately owned acres in the preserve.

This week an ACLU lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia tangling over the meaning of a cross to honor war dead.

Scalia, according to media reports, responded that the cross was the “common symbol of the resting place of the dead” and asked whether the lawyer would instead want erected “some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half-moon and star?”

Eliasberg responded, “I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.”

The justice retorted, “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”

I think that is an outrageous statement!

Legal observers said the court may end up deciding the case on the narrower issue of whether Congress acted legally in transferring ownership of the land to a private entity rather than the constitutionality of the cross sitting on public land. I hope that is the case.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank argues that the case doesn’t have nearly the import that interest groups suggest it does — but there are benefits for talking about it in such stark terms:

For the interest groups on both sides, a good fight can bring in money and members — even if that means making the “fight” appear to be something larger than it actually should be. The “injury” claimed by the ACLU was rather a stretch: that Buono, a former National Park Service official, would “tend to avoid” the area when he returns to visit Mojave. So, too, was it necessary to inflate the menace posed by the pipe cross, which stands 100 yards off of a dusty road at an elevation of about 20 feet. Congress, in one of its legislative actions to defend the cross, even gave the place the status of a national war memorial, as if it were another Gettysburg.

The other side, too, had to pretend that taking down the cross would jeopardize veterans and God-fearing folk everywhere. “We pray that those who laid down their lives will be properly memorialized with a cross so tenderly placed in the lonely desert,” the Rev. Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council preached outside the Supreme Court.

A JTA summary of the case details some of the statements made by the two sides in its report on the case. Some of those statements are almost apocalyptic in nature: “What’s next?” demanded Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Will we sell a few steps of the Supreme Court to some group that wants to put up a Jesus-in-the-manger scene year-round?”

On the contrary, declared Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel of the Liberty Legal Institute. “If you have to tear down a cross in the middle of 1.6 million acres of desert, then what do you do with the 24-foot-tall Cross of Sacrifice in Arlington Memorial Cemetery?” he asked. “Anything that has religious imagery now has to come down?”

Both scenarios are, of course, equally absurd. But fear and loathing fill interest-group treasuries. But as a JTA blogger quipped this week, “It is a cross they must bear.”

Why the Supreme Court took on this case I can’t quite figure out, but I also hope they won’t use it to make a broad statement about church state separation. As Wendy Kaminer wrote in The Atlantic, “If the Court seizes the opportunity and denies taxpayer standing to challenge federally sponsored religious displays, then constitutional prohibitions of such displays will be effectively unenforceable.”

No one would question the right to having crosses at individual people’s graves in military cemeteries. That’s free expression of religion. And no one should question that the cross is a powerful religious symbol – as important to Christianity as the torah is to Judaism. And the Torah is the only symbol that is analogous – it evokes the same passion (though not in a Mel Gibson kind of way), which the menorah doesn’t and certainly not the lulav or Jewish star, at least not today. There really is no parallel to the cross other than the Torah.

And that’s when it occurred to me that there is a major difference. The torah never is used in connection with death. It is etz hayyim – the tree of life. The cross is not only a symbol connected to death it’s origin as a symbol was related to a death. A death followed, in Christian tradition, by a rebirth. We have a similar Jewish story from that era, of Rabbi Chananya, who was burned at the stake wrapped in a torah scroll. We’ve got plenty of martyrs who died holding torah scrolls – still it forever has remained a tree of life – etz hayyim.

Actually, Judge, Scalia, I do believe that a cross would only honor Christian war dead! Even one erected out in the middle of the Mojave desert! I do not mean to denigrate a proud and great religion, but Christianity is simply different from Judaism. Our greatest religious symbol would never have been considered for such a memorial. We just think differently, that’s all. Judaism is all about the affirmation of a life that is. Christianity focuses much more on life hereafter.

We are about redemption, they are about resurrection.

Neither faith is better, we are simply different. And that difference is demonstrated clearly in our supreme religious symbols, even if those differences are not recognized by some on the Supreme Court.

There is much that we share, but that is something that we do not. And that is why this case is so important. But only if the Supreme Court chooses to make it so.

Why I Volunteer: Rosalea Fisher and Jared Finkelstein

Rosalea Fisher and Jared Finkelstein were honored at our Simhat Torah services with the special aliyot marking the end and beginning of the Torah reading cycle.  Here are the remarks each of them made to the congregation in honor of the occasion:

Rosalea Fisher:

As a child, I watched my mother as she modeled for us the art of volunteering. She was the treasurer of our school’s PTA; she volunteered for ORT which provides skills-training and self-help projects word-wide. She was a life member of Hadassah, and in her later years, she volunteered at a nursing home to turn pages for a pianist. Volunteering was a part of her everyday life. My sister also worked tirelessly for Philadelphia’s renowned Children’s Hospital and still does to this day. 

When Dick and I moved to Stamford, he got involved in Jr. Achievement and the Stamford Symphony as well as our son’s Boy Scout troop. He has served on the Alzheimer’s Board and is now their Chairman for the state of CT. He continues to attend morning minyan here every week and serves on the Cemetery Association.

My first experience in the world of volunteering was working with mothers and their babies. I became a certified La Leche Leader. It was a perfect fit for me as we raised our two children.

When we joined Beth El, I joined Sisterhood and served on many committees throughout the years, culminating with my appointment as president of the Board of Trustees. It was an honor and a privilege to volunteer in this position. I continue to serve our synagogue; just recently I have been working with a committee to explore the possibility of establishing a preschool here. And just two weeks ago I helped to unload food bags at Person-to-Person.

For my mother, my husband, my sister, and for me, volunteering is woven into the fabric of our lives. I hope that we can also be a model for our children and for our grandchildren and for everyone one of you here today.

Chag sameach.

———————–

Jared Finkelstein:

In being honored today, I have also been given the great opportunity to talk about volunteering.  If you had told me when I joined TBE over 12 years ago that I would be standing here today being honored for my volunteer efforts at TBE I would have thought you were dreaming.  But I am here and I have volunteered.  How and why did I go from where I was when I joined TBE to today?

First, I think is the power of role models.  My parents were both very involved in their synagogue and Jewish organizations when I was growing up – my dad was the president of his synagogue, was very involved in Israel bonds and B’nai Brith and my mom was very active in the sisterhood and Hadassah.  My mom’s father was the secretary for his temple in upstate New York for years and years.  Even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time and they didn’t hit me over the head with it, they were being role models.  I believe the power of role models is a good reason to volunteer.  If you believe in what we are doing here at TBE or there are things you want TBE to be doing, by spending your time to achieve those goals you are sending a very powerful message to your children and others in the community.  You may not see the impact of that message immediately but I am proof that the impact can be felt decades later.   The concept of l’dor va dor, from generation to generation, is very powerful and passing on a belief in volunteerism and helping others from one generation to the next is vitally important.

Second, is the belief that you can make a difference.  There are many ways to volunteer at or through TBE.  In reality, this is a very small congregation and a small community.  If you have a passion or interest in something you will not be lost in a crowd – you will be able to make a difference in what TBE is doing both within these walls and outside in the larger community.  Even if you have an interest we aren’t currently involved in, odds are you can chair a committee, recruit your friends and tap into the TBE community to get something done.  There is also no project that is too small.  Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world, takes many shapes.  You need not solve world hunger or even the health insurance debate.  The world is repaired one person at a time, one block at a time, one community at a time.  In that regard there are things I would like to see TBE do in Stamford.  For example, there are men and women at the shelters in Stamford at times of the year other than Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when TBE and another temple bring in and serve those wonderful meals to the residents.  I would love TBE to be there at least one other time during the year – even to simply make sandwiches and be there to talk to the residents.  There is also a soup kitchen in Stamford run by the Bridgeport diocese – I would love to have TBE become involved there on a regular basis.  TBE as a community within the larger community can make a difference in the lives of people around us and there are so many more people in need these days.

Finally, volunteering feels good and can be a learning experience.  Being involved in the TBE preschool initiative I learned so much about early childhood education from Rosalea and the other amazing people on the exploratory and search committees.  We truly have a wealth of talent to tap into here at TBE with great people on the Board of Trustees and Board of Education, the Mens Club and Sisterhood and other organizations.   I want to thank all of them for their time, dedication and passion.   In the current economy, if you are “in transition” as I am, it can be a way to do something productive that you wouldn’t otherwise do if fully employed and is a change of pace from the grind of the job search routine.  Further, in this environment, if you are not able to contribute as you have in the past with dollars, you can donate something even more valuable: your time and energy.  If any of you are in a similar position I urge you to volunteer, you won’t regret it.  Even if you are fully employed, there are opportunities to volunteer that won’t take up a lot of your time.  For example, making sandwiches and serving at the shelters would only be a couple of hours on a weekend and will make such a big difference in the lives of others.  Let me take this opportunity to put in a word for my wife Liz who is the chair of Beth El Cares – she has done a great  job the last couple of years working on the Passover Food Drive and the Christmas Eve dinners at the Stamford shelters.  She is making a difference.  So please contact Beth El Cares through Steve or via a new email that is being set up bethelcares@tbe.org.  We need your help to enable TBE to better serve our community.

I want to thank TBE for this honor and for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the community we are building together.  The best is yet to come.

Yom Kippur Sermons 5770

For audio of all sermons, please see the rabbi’s library section of this website.

 

Kol Nidre 5770

Mitzvah, Money and Madoff

By Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

 Mitch Albom, author of “Tuesdays with Morrie,” has a new book that is being published in a few weeks, in which he talks about his childhood rabbi and mentor, Albert Lewis of blessed memory.  In it, Lewis talks of a Yom Kippur sermon where the subject is death, and he informs the congregation that everyone is going to die.  After the service, a man comes up to him all excited.  The rabbi asks, “Why are you so excited?  I just told the entire congregation that they are going to die.”  “Yes,” said the man, “and THAT’S why I’m so excited.  I belong to another congregation!  I’m just visiting!”

On the day of Ted Kennedy’s death, I was speaking to one of the kids here after services and she said something very wise.  “He was very lucky to have lived until he died.”  She meant, of course, that he was fortunate to not have had his life cut short unnaturally, like his brothers.  He made it all the way to 77.  But in a real way he also lived until he died by making the most of each day, knowing, more than most of us, that every day actually could be his last. 

Most of us don’t have a bullet proof vest hanging in the closet, as he did. Most of us choose not to live with such intensity.   We shove death to the farthest reaches of our closets and our minds.  

True, a preoccupation with death and suffering can paralyze us, rendering us cynical and hopeless.  But most often it is denial that is the enemy.  And denial feeds on itself – we build a huge scaffolding of lies and masks and excuses until it ultimately collapses all around us.  Inertia develops its own strange momentum.  It’s a momentum that won’t let us move.  It’s a refusal to believe in the urgency of the moment, that change is possible and that our lives can have an impact.  To confront an ultimate reality, death, we need to cultivate the ultimate degree of honesty.

But Yom Kippur clears away the scaffolding and the masks.   Yom Kippur provides us with the glimpse of mortality – we stare death in the eye by fasting and the denial of all bodily pleasures, and then, at the end of the 25 hour day, it shepherds us gently back into the realm of the living. 

So let’s not fear looking closely at ourselves.   Yom Kippur is a time for hard truths.  And folks, we’ve been needing to do this for quite some time. We’ve been talking about mitzvot this week.  On Rosh Hashanah I focused on how they are instruments of connection and obligation.  Tonight we look at the mitzvot of Yom Kippur as agents of change in the public sphere. 

In 1937 in Crakow, the Yiddish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig composed what was to become his most well-known song: Es Brent, “It Burns.” It spoke about the looming dangers of the Nazis, just across the border.  But it really was a call to his fellow Jews to rise up and respond to the growing threat:

Es Brent!

It is burning, brothers, it is burning.
Our poor little town, a pity, burns!
Furious winds blow,
Breaking, burning and scattering,
And you stand around
With folded arms.
O, you stand and look
While our town burns.

            And today, we are doing the same.  There are dangers abounding and we are stuck in a state of paralysis. 

            There are external threats to be sure, as there were in Crakow in 1937.  As Professor Ruth Wisse said at a Hillel conference last year, speaking of the many existential threats Israel now faces, “Ultimately, history is going to ask us only one question, ‘Did you or did you not secure the Jewish homeland.’”

And indeed, we all must search our souls and ask what we are doing to make sure that a precious gift of a Jewish state, 2,000 years in the making, will be with us for generations to come.

But ES BRENT, it burns, not because of the Iranian nuclear program or Islamic extremism.  We burn because when we take a moral inventory, we come up lacking.  The list of al chets we’ve just begun reciting – it is only the beginning.  We’ve got to take a hard look at ourselves.

As one congregant, writing to me recently about the Madoff affair, the Syrian rabbis of Brooklyn and Deal and the indictment of Ehud Olmert, said: “I guess the “game is on” about Jewish business ethics throughout the world…now, don’t get me wrong, we still probably represent a small percentage, though, the impact of the Madoff affair will be felt for generations, I truly believe we should start to reevaluating our beliefs and who / what we think we are… I think we might be a bit misguided in our personal evaluation of the Jewish people.”

These revelations have been humiliating to all of us.  You can throw in any number of other recent scandals that have Jewish connections, including the Agriprocessors fiasco in Postville Iowa.  Earlier this month, on the very day that school began both in Israeli and Stamford, which children attend to learn right from wrong, here’s what happened in Israel: Shas Knesset member Shlomo Ben Ezri began a four year prison term for corruption charges, former Finance Minister Hirschson arrived at the Hermon prison to begin serving a five year sentence for embezzlement, and the trial of former President Moshe Katzav began, on charges of sexual harassment. And former Prime Minister Olmert was indicted.  Four corruption cases, four major public figures, all in one day.   Who knew that the expression “Chosen People,” would be meant in terms of a police lineup?

Something is wrong with this picture.   If you Google “Jewish” plus “Scandal” you’ll come up with 2,980,000 hits.  Even assuming some of them come from anti-Semitic sites, that’s a lot of hits.  Yes, there may be a lot of anti-Semites too, but that’s a lot of hits!  Narrow it a little, by adding the term “Madoff” and the number is 868,000.  In other words, almost one third of the Jewish scandal hits have to do with Madoff.  It’s humiliating.

But I really don’t care what anti-Semites think about us.  I care what we think about us.  And I can only imagine what Jews in their 20s and 30s are thinking right now.  They are the ones who need to choose to embrace a Jewish vision for themselves and their families if there is to be any Jewish destiny at all. If they don’t then I will have failed and all my sermons will be like that proverbial tree falling in the forest.  No one will hear it.  It won’t matter.

But how in the world can I expect people to embark on a Jewish journey when our most venerated institutions have been devastated by greed and corruption and denial, and all the little people have suffered, and even some big people, but no one seems to care!  And it just gets worse and worse and worse and no one cares!

The margin for error is so small.  One moral slip up in Gaza, or not even, and the world comes crashing down on Israel with accusations of crimes against humanity.  And again, I don’t really care what the world thinks.  But what the world thinks has a lasting impression on what Jews think, until Jews don’t know what to believe.  And then they’ll do what is most logical in a free society.  They’ll opt out. 

While accusations against Israel are damaging for the Jewish self image, the accusations involving Jews and the Wall Street scandals are simply devastating, feeding into every anti-Semitic stereotype that has haunted Jews since the middle ages, when transient and landless, Jews took up the only field open to them, finance. And now we have scandal after scandal, from Bear Sterns to Bank of America, and everyone is obsessed with looking for Jewish names.  And there are plenty to be found. 

When American Jewish Committee director David Harris wrote in the New York Times that the media should not focus so much Barnard Madoff’s Jewishness, he was reacting in panic and anger, but his anger was misdirected.  He claimed correctly that no one was speaking of Rod Blagojevich’s religion, or Kenneth Lay’s.  But that begged the point.  It’s not that the New York Times and others in the media were preoccupied with Madoff’s Jewishness.  It’s that we were.

The Madoff scandal tapped into the deepest veins of anti-semitic mythology.  Journalist JJ Goldberg commented, “His being Jewish is relevant in some way that I think most people can’t put their finger on. It’s exactly what everybody has in the back of their minds… Jews and polite gentiles don’t want to talk about it because it reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes.”

It’s relevant because his story seems to be an anti-Semite’s fairy tale come true.  It confirms all the horrible, hateful things we’ve been told since childhood.  How do you get two Jews into a taxi?  You know, throw a penny in.  Remember hearing that for the first time and either running home crying or pretending to smile, or, if you were really brave, saying, “Uh, Joey?  Guess what.  I’m Jewish.”

“Well of course it’s not about YOU!  Can’t you get a joke?”

Well now you don’t even have to throw in a penny!  Just throw in 10% annual return – or even less, a letter promising that 10% signed by “Smilin’ Bernie!”

And these sentiments were suddenly released in a torrent of rumination.  That’s what we do best.  Ruminate.  The YIVO institute sponsored a public bull session a few weeks after the story broke, and Pandora ’s Box was opened widely before hundreds of people.

Martin Peretz talked about the materialism in the American Jewish subculture, “with the million dollar Bar Mitzvahs and the lavish Viennese table,” he said, “there’s something built in-even the fact that lower middle class Jews feel compelled to bankrupt themselves on these elaborate Bar Mitzvahs.”  He was booed lustily by the crowd, Just like Philip Roth was berated when he wrote “Goodbye Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.”  Such is the punishment of those who reveal uncomfortable truths.

Moses Pava, a Professor of Business Ethics, writing in an op-ed in the Forward, went even further in calling out the Jewish community. 

“Perhaps the biggest enabler …is the prevailing ethos of the business world. We live in a world that has become increasingly oriented toward a bottom-line mentality. Ours is a culture of money first. In every business school I know of, we teach our students to maximize profits. Good enough is never enough.

Our Jewish communities, which once honored rabbis and scholars, now almost exclusively honor those with the biggest bank accounts. Our students and children surely take note of this.

Bernie Madoff should be punished for his wrong-doing, but we simply fool ourselves if we think that jailing Madoff will solve the deeper problem of which he is just the most recent symptom.”

The Madoff disease did not just infect one person.  He was evil.  No doubt a special circle of Hell – if only we Jews had hell – has been reserved for him.  But he was not alone and he was part of a culture that is trying very hard not to go away.  And what is the proof of that?  The deafening silence that followed the Madoff revelations from those very organizations – from our institutions and leaders.

The paralysis stemmed from the fact that Madoff was not merely a thief who crashed the party.  He was the party’s host.  He was the toast of New York’s Jewish elite, especially among the modern Orthodox, although he was not Orthodox himself.  As the Times’ Samuel Freedman wrote of that community, “Their leaders and members overlap like a sequence of Venn diagrams. They are bound by religious praxis, social connection, philanthropic causes. Yet what may be the community’s greatest virtue — its thick mesh of personal relations, its abundance of social capital — appears to have been the very trait that Mr. Madoff exploited.”

So when all these institutions were so shamelessly exploited by one of their own, someone so enmeshed in their social circles, what was lost was not merely trust.  “The currency is not so much trust;” said Princeton professor Jenna Weissman-Joselit. “The currency is community.”

Communal ties were shaken to the core.  But something else was lost as well.  The moral voice.  The sense of outrage.

 Es brent!!!

 Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “we are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage.”  And if that was not the case back in Heschel’s day, with Vietnam and racial injustice – and it has certainly become the case now.

 Witness Hadassah.  And I love Hadassah.  My wife is a life member.  I’ve often spoken about how moving it was to spend time in the new pediatric unit in Ein Karem and see how Hadassah is the place where Arabs and Jews not only coexist, but care for one another.  From out of Zion will come forth the Torah, and from Ein Karem and Mt Scopus will come Middle East peace.

I really believe that!

But what do I say to those 20 and 30-somethings about an organization that not only betrayed its investors by figuratively cohabiting with the creep Madoff, it betrayed its investors by literally cohabiting with the creep Madoff.  Go to Hadassah’s site and you won’t see anything about the current scandal involving their ex-CFO’s affair with Madoff.  Their leadership has told the press they knew nothing about it.  Fair enough.  Except that while she was CFO and before she became a best selling tell-all author, Sheryl Weinstein WAS Haddasah. 

“Hadassah was shocked to hear the news reports of Mrs. Weinstein’s personal admissions regarding this relationship,” Hadassah president Nancy Falchuk wrote in a memorandum to board members in mid August. “We knew nothing of her relationship with Mr. Madoff until today, and her departure was unrelated to Mr. Madoff.”

Not good enough.  Yes, Sheryl was in some ways a victim too, and yes, Hadassah’s current leaders can’t be blamed for the sins of their predecessors.  And yes, I still love Hadassah. 

But we needed “Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu” and instead we got a publicists’ idea of damage control.

What they needed to say was this:

This is horrible.  We have betrayed your trust, our dear members and investors.  We have betrayed the values of the Torah we hold so dear.  We have betrayed the cause of holiness and the destiny of the Jewish people.  We’ve betrayed the very people whose lives we are trying to save.  We were taken in but we are not blameless.  There are no excuses.  Please forgive us.

There is redemption in such a statement.  There is the beginning of a possibility – the possibility of change.  Without it, there is nothing but blame and excuses and the scapegoating of Madoff.   Excuses are what creates the momentum of inertia.  And not since Flip Wilson has “The devil made me do it” worked as an excuse.

This is the perfect time to talk of scapegoats – we’ll read about it tomorrow.  The scapegoat was invented for this holiday.   But my advocacy of excommunication for Madoff was not so that he would be our sacrificial lamb to exonerate us from all sin. No, it was to do precisely the opposite.  The goal was to isolate the evil and identify it clearly, to explain to ourselves and the world why his deeds were so alien to all the values we stand for and to proclaim with great clarity that for such a person there is no redemption. 

I consider the title Jew to be something to be proud of, and I wanted to rob him of that honor.  Like Haman, Madoff was completely absorbed in ego and honor, able to cultivate the trust of the powerful through the manipulation of truth and half truth until, ultimately, the end result was a lie.  I wanted him to bear the full burden of the truth of what he had done.  In the end, no mask was big enough to hide it.

Elie Wiesel suggested that the best punishment would be to sit him in front of a computer screen all day, with photos of his victims flashing before him.  But I don’t think that suffices.  He saw those victims every day for decades and it never moved him.  No, for a person so corrupt and sociopathic, the only punishment that would suffice would not be a life sentence, but one taking him beyond this life: for him to know that no rabbi will eulogize him and no synagogue or Jewish cemetery will welcome his corpse and no minyan will say amen to his wife’s kaddish.  For him to know that those circles of connection that fed his insatiable greed were now going to exclude him entirely.

Only then would he realize that there is no redemption in this case.  Otherwise he might expect to get the treatment of other supposedly reformed crooks.  Jailed terrorists the world over know that it’s only a matter of time before they are freed, either through the extortion of a prisoner exchange or, in the case of the Scottish leaders last month with the terrorist from Lockerbie, a lack of moral backbone. 

It burns!  Es brent!  

But while the Jewish organizational elite fiddled, the Jew on the street burned with anger.  And that’s the voice that helped me to see the danger of doing nothing.  Thank God I have a congregation to keep me grounded, because I too would likely have fallen into the crusty doublespeak of equivocation that has infested our institutions, religious and secular.  I wrote that we needed to take a strong stand to affirm the values of our Torah, but the organized Jewish world did very little, preferring to pass the buck while counting up their losses.  There was no excommunication, no joint statement, little outrage, just a few choice press releases and a prayer that I would all soon blow over.

I heard from many, many non machers, from all over the world, some of them Madoff’s victims, people with heartbreaking stories to tell. The damage was Katrina-esque.  Never minimize it.  Our moral levees broke and thousands of lives were shattered.  Many homes were lost.  People lost their livelihoods, their scholarships, their life dreams, their retirement and in some cases their lives.  When Katrina happened, President Bush paid a steep price for being asleep at the wheel.  People lost faith in him and that faith was never regained.  The Madoff affair has smashed the levees of American Jewish life and it has caused us to lose faith in the very principles of philanthropy that have been our lifeblood as Jews and as Americans.  Whether we regain that trust remains to be seen.

People were waiting for action but the powers-that-be said, “Let the legal system do the work.”  OK so now it has.  He’s in jail, but still there has been no kapparah, no cleansing. 

As novelist Thane Rosenbaum wrote, “Among the 11 counts of criminal activity, Madoff will not end up serving any jail time for reinforcing an ugly stereotype — the pernicious connection between Jews and money. He admitted his guilt for committing fraud, but not for defaming Jews, for resurrecting a blood libel with a grotesquely contemporary twist: the commingling of Christian and Jewish blood not for the making of matzo, but for the losing of money.”

As a result, the old canard that Jews are crooks has been allowed to stand.  And grow.  And Jews have come to believe it.  It’s a little like that case that we heard about a few weeks ago, of Jaycee Dugard, the girl who was kidnapped and held hostage so long that she began to relate to her oppressors, the Stockholm Syndrome. 

Well, have we heard these Big Lies so much that now we’ve come to believe them and relate to them, and because of it, have we begun to hate ourselves?  Must we wake up each day staring into the mirror and repeating, Nixon-like, “I am not a crook?”

So how do respond to all this, constructively?  By writing letters and angry blogs?  Nah.  Been there.  Excommunication was a nice trial balloon that became a water balloon.  It helped me and others to express outrage, but that’s about it.  So what else is there to do? Throw up our hands up walk away?  So where will we go to?  We are at the edge of a moral abyss.  There aren’t too many directions we can walk.

Perhaps we can take some comfort in that Madoff went to jail utterly friendless.  Not one letter was written in support of him.  Not one of his circle of friends wrote in attesting to his good deeds and fine character.  He also spared us a trial, probably knowing that no jury in the world would fail to convict him.

But we are still left feeling uneasy.  On this Yom Kippur, we ask, how can we achieve kappara, a real cleansing?

No, the best thing we can do now… is to change the system one person at a time, one deed at a time.  They used to say that Jews should have an extra child to replace the 6 million.  I never bought into that.  No one should be considered an “extra child.”  But maybe we all need to be extra honest.  Maybe our business practices should be extra fair?  Extra transparent?  As good as we try to be, maybe this year we need to try to be just a little bit better.  If we have the means, maybe we give more tzedakkah to restore faith in our system of philanthropy. Maybe we give our normal amount for ourselves, and another 50%  to counteract Madoff.  If we have oversight over a nonprofit, maybe we are extra vigilant to restore that trust.  When we are paying our taxes, maybe we go the extra mile to make sure we’re not cutting corners.  If we know of someone who is doing something wrong, maybe we take responsibility to make sure it stops.

At Harvard Business School they’ve taken a first step.  According to the New York Times, nearly 20 percent of the graduating class signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

Will that really happen?  There’s a Talmudic expression, “halavai,” “It should only happen.”  It’s a nice idea and worthy goal.  But the Daily Show gathered some of those students and they collectively stuck a fork in that idea.  One Harvard MBA said: “It’s impossible to uphold the oath and still be responsible to your shareholders.” And another:  “I feel that ethics is a really fuzzy subject.”

Maybe the best way to blot out the name of Madoff is to blot out his impact, by setting on the other side of the scale so many acts of goodness and kindness and justice and charity and honesty and transparency that it might outweigh even the massive damage he has caused.  Maybe we force ourselves to believe again in the goodness of people and the promise and hope embedded in the Jewish message.   Maybe that way – that is the ONLY way, to assure that my children and grandchildren – and yours – will choose to have a Jewish destiny and won’t hate themselves.

For our collective future rests on that choice.  It is the choice of mitzvah.  For the traditional approach of Judaism to money is about as far from Bernard Madoff as you can get.  To leave a corner of your field for the poor, that’s mitzvah #44 on the Maimonides’ list of 613 that I linked to our website.  Not to commit fraud – that’s #181.  Not to cheat in weights and measures, that’s number 182.  Not to collect excessive interest, that’s #173.  Not to delay the payment of wages, # 184.

These are mitzvot of justice and conscience.  These are what we need to put out the fires.  Es Brent!

But that requires a restructuring of priorities in Jewish education.  Brooklyn College professor of marketing and business Heshy Friedman told the Jewish Week:

 I feel that the yeshiva system is partially to blame. There is an obsession in the yeshiva world with the legalistic aspects of the Talmud, without focusing on the practical law. More than 100 of the 613 precepts in the Torah deal with economics and business, yet so little time in yeshiva is spent on this area.

            Elie Wiesel now suffers the irony of being once again a victim of a crime of unprecedented proportions, though the destruction of his foundation cannot compare to the crimes of 70 years ago.  Still, he picked up on this theme of victimhood running through his life in an interview a few months back, telling the USA Today, “All my life has been about learning and teaching and building on ruins,” he says. “That will not change.”

He will rebuild – and already is doing that.  And while his resolve won’t change, as we’ll see when we hear him at the 92^nd St Y next month, his life is living proof that things can change.  Society can change.

In the end, as I often say, American Jews are exactly the same as all Americans, only more so.  The issues we face in self perception are the same issues confronted by all Americans following the Wall Street meltdown.  If we Jews can find our way out of the morass, we can help lead the rest of America to a future that will truly be enriching, in ways that go far beyond money and material possessions.

So who will lead us from this dark place and toward an era of moral renewal in business ethics, who will restore our pride in who we are and help us dream again about what we can become?

Religious leaders need to play a role, for Jews and for Americans in general.  But rabbis long since ceased being prime moral authorities for Jews.  That stopped as soon as we stepped onto these shores.  Did you know that at the time of the founding of the oldest synagogue in New York, Shearith Yisrael, they established a rule that if you violated the Sabbath, you got fined?  It didn’t work, and rabbinic moral authority that had held sway in the shtetls was a thing of the past. 

We need to create a new model now, a partnership between religious and business leaders and elected officials, one that can restore a sense of moral purpose.  We’ve seen again and again that the business world cannot regulate itself, nor has Congress been very effective.  Only the leaders of the business world themselves can get us out of this mess, but they need moral guidance and support.  This rebirth can begin with anyone, so it might as well begin with the Jewish community.  

It might as well start with us.

Google “Jewish business ethics” and 487,000 hits will appear.  Not quite as many as “Jewish” and “scandal,” not by a long shot.  But we can build from that.  We can reaffirm a sense of Jewish Business Ethics in this age of scandal, and that can help lift us all out of the morass.

I’ve mentioned Ted Kennedy a couple of times in these sermons, but I want to close with a quote from his brother Bobby, whose words are as relevant today as they were in 1968 when he spoke them on the campaign trail in Lawrence, Kansas.

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts …the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

The true source of our wealth as Jews comes from the priceless legacy that we’ve been schlepping across the face of the earth for 3500 years.  We need to remind ourselves that we are the people of the Book, not the people that cooks the books.   We are driven to make the world better for our stakeholders, not our stockholders.  And our principle stakeholders are the next generation.

According to the Talmud, the first question a person is asked in the next world after death is:  “Nasata v’Natata b’emunah?”  (Shabbat 31a) “Were you honest in your business dealings?” The very first question!

Let each of us be supremely honest in answering that question.  Let our signature mitzvah be that whenever we apply our signature to anything, we appoint God as our witness.  Let us repent today as if it is our final day, for it may yet be.  Let us rip aside the masks of denial and feel the wind whipping on our naked faces.

Furious winds blow,
Breaking, burning and scattering,
While our town burns.

It is time for us to put out the fire.

 

Yom Kippur Day 5770

Mitzvah and Mindfulness: God’s Tweets

By Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

I don’t want to jump the gun, but I want to begin this sermon by talking about what’s going to happen a little after 7 tonight as we end Yom Kippur. 

Oh, great!   That’s all we need!

No really.  I want you to imagine everything.  We’ve just finished Ne’ilah.  Wasn’t that fun!  The smells of bagels and coffee are wafting through the air.  OK, OK. Sorry.  And we’re just about to hear all the shofars sounded for one final blast.

Now hold that thought.  Freeze that moment.  So tonight, I’m going to invite you to do something that you will think somewhat, well, counter-intuitive.  At the moment when we sound that final shofar blast, I’m going to ask you to take out your cell phones. 

Say what?

Yes.  I mean it.  If you are going home and coming back, by all means, bring your cell phones.  Please do not turn them on, of course, until that moment.  But at that moment, I’m going to ask you to take them out… and call someone.

Someone you love.  Someone who is not here; maybe he’s in the hospital or a nursing home.  Maybe she has swine flu at home or maybe she is simply too young to bring.  Maybe he’s depressed and stayed home or is too busy for these “meaningless rituals” and went away on a business trip.  Maybe she’s taking a gap year in Africa or a junior year abroad in Italy.  Maybe he decided not to come out of protest to God for not helping Uncle Joe in his battle with cancer last year, or for not providing a winning lottery ticket.  Call them.  Spontaneously.  And then  say, “Hi – I love you – now listen to this!”

That single moment will speak volumes about the power of mitzvah.  Even given the fact that we don’t get very good reception in here.  Maybe we’ll all crowd around the windows.  But someone, somewhere out there, will hear the sound of a real shofar, our shofar… enhanced technologically, but still real, and still very much a sound that is coming from the deepest, most confounding, most mysterious place, from God, as it were, a natural sound, not artificial at all, a sound saying, “Hi.  I love you.  Now listen up!”

You can call it God’s Tweet.

Back on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I pledged that I was going to try to bring mitzvah back, by helping us to redefine it from a number of perspectives, in anticipation of this year’s “Mitzvah Initiative.”  So on the first day, we looked at mitzvah as a path of connection.  On the second day, we saw mitzvah as a path of obligation; last night, as a path of conscience and change, to counteract the momentum of inertia.  Today, we’ll look at mitzvah in a different way, as a path to a life of mindfulness and a God of connectivity, as we discover God in the details, God in the moment.  We’ll consider a life guided by mitzvot, and then we’ll take it to the streets. 

And there is nothing that expresses mindfulness more spontaneously than that final shofar blast, a single moment that we remember all year long, one that transports us from past to future, that takes us from the intensity of Yom Kippur to a newly intensified and purposeful life.  We feel really grungy but we all feel real good too.  We feel embraced by the love of our sacred community – and that is divine love.  We feel hopeful.  We feel that change is possible.  And we can share that with the world. 

We can’t begin to imagine the way God was perceived even by our own grandparents, much less those who lived many centuries ago.  Back then, God’s function was very different.  God was supposed to explain science, hear prayers.  We now have a great deal of difficulty perceiving God in such a literal manner, one that seems naïve to us. 

But we have a huge advantage over our ancestors.  We don’t need to see God as father and king.  We can experience God’s Tweets.   Instant global communication has a power that can awe and amaze us and send empires to their knees.  And it has done precisely that, from China to Iran.   In 140 characters or less, or a single snap of a cell phone camera, or in the sound of a shofar heard round the world, everything can change in an instant.

Our little shofar call tonight will be the heard everywhere, that cosmic sound coming forth from this sanctuary.   Some calls will be going a few blocks, others as far as California or Israel perhaps, and still others piercing the outer reaches of the Bronx.  The cry tekiah will send seagulls fluttering on the Jersey shore, or across the ocean, becoming the cry of our community, our Shaliach Tzibur - this will indeed be the Shatz heard round the world.

The key is not to let your loved ones know in advance.  For one thing, I’m not sure your phones will work in here.  For another, the surprise is part of the experience.  If they‘re not home, leave it on the machine.  They’ll get the message. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel put it this way: “Mitzvot aren’t acts of compliance so much as acts of inspiration. They are the songs that express our wonder.”

Mitzvot express that wonder.  The joy, the meaning, the clinging to life.  The reaching out to the person next to you and the person around the world.  The words that we utter here that are heard THERE.  Wherever THERE may be.   We need to see mitzvot not so much as orders from on high so much as a musical score for universal connectivity. 

You know, this old-man-in-the-sky God is soooo 20^th century!

Tonight, we’ll show that.  Tonight we’ll be sounding – and sending God’s Tweet.

The maximum number of characters you can Tweet is 140.  Every word, every letter, must be meaningful.  It brings us back to the old days of Western Union, where you paid by the letter.  You know, like original Jewish telegram: “Start Worrying.  Letter to follow.”

But long before Twitter, or even Western Union, God was already tweeting away.   I found online a version of how God might have Tweeted the Ten Commandments:  Number 3 is “No omg’s.”  Number 9? “Dnt lie re:bf.”

The Sh’ma is a perfect Tweet.  It’s one of those six word memoirs that’s popular out there now.  One line that says it all. 

Shma Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Ehad

One could say that Hillel wrote the first Jewish Tweet.  He’s the one who was asked by a non Jew to tell him the essence of the entire Torah while standing on one foot.  And he replied, on one foot, “What is hateful to you do onto do to your neighbor.  The rest is commentary, now go and study.” 

A church in Jackson, Michigan has really gotten into Twitter.  While one pastor preaches, the other Tweets the congregation questions to guide their response to the sermon, and the tweets of congregants are in turn flashed on a video screen as a means of responding to the preacher – while he is still talking. 

We’re not there yet.  But this kind of interactivity has changed the way we do things. I’ve set up a Twitter account though haven’t started tweeting yet.   But imagine what I could have been Tweeting from up here while the service has been going on.  Every thought. 

“Mrs. Schwartz sitting by window this year, just two rows from Mrs. Goldberg, with whom she hasn’t talked in five years, since that comment about 3rd hubby’s 1^st wife.”    That’s exactly 140 characters.

Whether or not we can fully grasp them yet, these new ways of communicating are enabling us to reach more people in less time.  But that is not the ultimate goal here.  The goal is to enhance the experience of being alive by living each moment to the fullest. 

No one can deny the power of instant global reach.  What we saw in Iran this summer was nothing short of miraculous.  I just kept thinking, if only there had been Twitter and YouTube 70 years ago, there may never have been a Holocaust. When witnesses escaped to the West to tell what the Nazis were doing, no one believed that such atrocities were possible.  But no one had pictures to prove it and they weren’t believed.   Now such pictures are beamed around the world instantly.

 A picture is worth a thousand LIVES.

Tweets increase mindfulness, even when they seem inane.  Same thing with Facebook postings.  Do I really want to know what my 8^th grade classmate whom I haven’t seen in 30 years is eating for breakfast?  No….but…

Yes.  

From the minutia of these details a web of connection is constructed.  And every detail is holy.   God is in those details. 

These details are the songs that express our wonder.

Do you know that the system of mitzvot goes as far as to instruct us to put on our right shoe before our left shoe?  Now that might seem a little inane – and certainly we may decide to struggle with that one, but the underlying message is an important one.  Kabbalah teaches us that the universe exists in a precarious balance between divine qualities existing in relationship with one another – especially the quialities of strength and mercy.  Well one would think that, if we were to map out this divine system, that strength, gevurah, would be on the right side, the strong side for most people.  But in fact, it is mercy, hesed, that emanates from the right side.  The hope is that, for God and for us, kindness and mercy will come first.

So, in putting your right shoe on first, you are reminding yourself that even this seemingly trivial activity can imbue our lives with meaning and restore balance to the universe.  By putting on the right shoe first, we are reminding ourselves to let kindness overcome anger, that gentleness trumps power. 

All from that simple act.  And by the way, we all put our shoes on in ritualized fashion anyway, each morning.  It is in that sense a religious activity, so let it become a mitzvah – a mindful activity.  And if these simple acts can be lifted from the realm of the trivial, maybe evefry action of our lives can become imbued with meaning.  

Putting on your shoes, then is a mindful act.  A mitzvah.  A song that expresses wonder!

So flood my Facebook wall with all the inane stuff you got!  Lay it on me!

Waiting for the bus?  We’ll I’m waiting for the messiah!  We’re all waiting! 

Packing the kids’ lunch?  Well, that will help remind me of the millions of kids who have no idea where their lunch is coming from.

Arriving in Maui for a vacation?  Well, great, by all means let me know that, so I can live my vacation vicariously through you!

These inane posts are the stuff of real life.

This summer, the word “Staycation” officially was added to the dictionary.  Just in time for me to take one!  We took some short trips here and there, but basically it was a stay-cation, and instead of making magical moments that I’ll remember the rest of my life, I spent several weeks remembering all those magical moments from years past.  It was the perfect thing to do just as you’re about to send your first kid off to college. 

So I scanned hundreds and hundreds of family photos, going back to my parents childhood photos and wedding slides, and uploaded them all into digital albums online.  One of the gifts I gave Ethan on the day he left home was the link to the Picasa albums, so that he could see his entire childhood and his family whenever he wants to.

These photos are sacred.  They preserve the precious moments of life, moments that are all too fleeting.  How quickly childhood comes and goes!  And now it’s gone.  Many of you have been telling me for years, “Enjoy your kids now, because their childhood will be gone in the blink of an eye,” and I knew you were right and I cherished all those family dinners and we took lots of trips and I took lots of pictures, but it didn’t slow things down as I had hoped.  It was still gone in an instant. 

So I spent a few weeks scanning photos and sending them out into the cyber universe, one album at a time, like so many sacrificial thanksgiving offerings brought to the temple in Jerusalem, the memories sent heavenward in a burst of cybersmoke.

Posting photos online is not without its complications: A family in Kansas City posted their Christmas card photo in high resolution on Facebook last winter, and this spring a friend of theirs passed a grocery store in the Czech republic, looked up at a big billboard advertising the simple goodness of the store’s products and happy clientele,  and there it was, the same photo, blown up to life size.  Imagine their surprise that something so personal could become so public so far away.  But there is a certain immortality that comes from that.  Suddenly, that anonymous family photo resonated half way around the world; somewhere in Prague, this anonymous family, one among millions, became a poster child for Czech happiness.

Sometimes the desire to capture moments for immortality drives us to do strange things.  A writer for the Catholic journal Commonweal recently commented derisively on something he saw in Rome: a man standing with his back to the Trevi fountain, arm outstretched with his cell-phone in his hand, taking a photo of himself in front of the fountain.  The experience of taking a picture of yourself at the place takes precedence over the experience of the place itself.  The same thoughts were echoed by a writer in the Times this summer, who stationed himself at the Louvre this summer and noticed that almost no one was stopping to look at the art, but everyone was clicking away and moving on.

Yes, we need to take the time to look straight at the Trevi fountain, but that photo of that man at the fountain has meaning too.  It has, for him, immortalized that moment, that experience.  And now, posted online, in some way that moment will never die.

And isn’t that why we are so in need of making every moment count to the point where we try to capture each one and freeze it?  It is our way of trying, vainly, to defeat death.  Those Tweets, those postings, those blogs, those e-mails, those book of remembrance listings, it all comes back to that one thing. 

We want to preserve something, anything, about us and those we love.

We don’t want to die.

The poet Mary Oliver has written:

To live in this world

You must be able to

To do three things

To love what is mortal;

To hold it;

Against your bones knowing

Your own life depends on it;

And when the time comes to let it go,

To let it go.

So today on this Yom Kippur, we cling to life; we are holding it against our bones with all our might.  But today, we do it without the Tweeting and the photography.  We do it in a very different way.  We make each minute count today not by freezing it, but by living it.  Not by multitasking, but by going very slowly and focusing on one single task.  No diversions, no editing; it’s just us and God – the raw footage of life.  A single moment stretched to twenty five hours. 

Today we embrace the boredom.

Erica Brown writes in her new book, “Spiritual Boredom,” “When we get bored and take responsibility for our boredom, we arrive at a new level of interest, introspection, or action that has been stirred by the very creativity used to keep boredom away. The relationship between boredom and creativity is far from accidental. Creative minds are often stimulated by boredom, regarding it as a brain rest until the next great idea looms on the horizon of the otherwise unoccupied mind.”

So today we stay off Facebook and slow down and avoid technological enhancement, but for the same reason we are so attracted to those Tweets – to find God in the details of life, the ones that we don’t otherwise notice.

Heschel, who called mitzvot the “songs that express our wonder,” also called Shabbat “the pause between the notes.”  And if Yom Kippur is the Sabbath of Sabbaths, this is the pause of pauses.  There are no notes all day long, nothing at all from the Shofar.  It’s as if we are holding our breath for 25 hours.  But when we are holding our breath, life becomes all the more precious.  There is nothing more boring than sitting there holding your breath.  Nothing is happening, not even breathing.  But there is also no act more dramatic.  Life hangs in the balance.  Will we exhale?  Can we hold this pause for 25 hours?  Will we make it through?  Will we survive the ordeal? 

Today we embrace the boredom – and we find that it is not so boring after all. 

And we do it not with fear and trepidation, but with love and joy, with confidence that indeed the decree will be the right one – not in terms of the length of our days, but in terms of the quality of each minute – and the immortality of each act. 

It comes back to that.  The immortality won’t come from the photos that we post, but from the love that lies behind each of those precious smiles, and the acts of love that precipitated them. 

Each mitzvah is an act of love that plants a seed of immortality.

If this were my last sermon, that’s the message I’d want to convey.  Like Randy Pausch in his bestselling “Last Lecture.”  He knew that, with only a matter of months to live, he would need to make the most of each moment.  So all of life became like one long Yom Kippur to him.  He became mindful of even the smallest, simplest act.   What Pauch, a college professor, was doing in fact, is what we are all supposed to be doing today. Rabbi Eliezer said, “Repent one day before your death.” His students asked, “How do we know when that day will be?” to which he replied, “All the more reason to do teshuvah today – everyday.”

When he used the self-scan aisle at the supermarket one day and realized that he had accidentally swiped his credit card twice, he had a decision to make.  He could have tracked down the manager, filled out some form, taken his credit card to the register and gotten them to remove one of the $16.55 charges.  It would have taken 15 minutes and been zero fun.   Instead he left the store, happier to have the 15 minutes than the 16 dollars.

How many of us waste so much time on so much nonsense.

Pausch learned to prioritize, that it was not necessary to polish the underside of the banister.  

Don’t sweat the small stuff!

His mother called him Randolph.  He HATED being called Randolph.  But in light of his illness he gave up his lifelong struggle to stop his mother from calling him that.  Life is too short, he realized, and surrendering became the right thing to do. 

He learned not to waste time obsessing about what other people think of him. 

He learned from Disney not to dwell on the negative, but to make every living moment count.  At Disney, they never will tell you that the park closes at 9.  They will say that the park remains open until 9. 

He learned to let people finish their sentences and to seek common ground when working with them.  He learned how important it is to praise and thank other people and to look for the best in others.  He learned that a bad apology is worse than no apology. He learned that it is better to live like Tigger than like Eeyore, and he learned always to tell the truth.

Pausch stood before his students on that day as we all do today, standing before a vast celestial mirror, seeing ourselves as we really are, and knowing where we are inevitably headed.   He delivered his last lecture on that day, as we do on this day, and the focus was on the little things, as it is for us in the machzor: not the wars and recessions, but the snippets of gossip and the courteous “thank yous,” the scoffing language and the idle thoughts; not the mountains scaled in Nepal but the simple act of lending money or making a promise.

In Mitch Albom’s new book, “Have a Little Faith,” which I mentioned last night, the author describes how his beloved life-long rabbi, Albert Lewis, knew that he was dying and prepared a tape that was played at his funeral.  The sanctuary was filled, but the pulpit was left empty.  The tape was brief.  The rabbi answered the two questions he had been asked most in his life: “Do you believe in God?” He said that he did.  The other: whether there is life after death.  On this he said, “The answer here too is yes, there is something.  But friends, I’m sorry. Now that I know, I can’t tell you.” And the place broke up laughing.

In his last lecture – his final High Holidays sermon, Rabbi Lewis did not offer a list of his accomplishments.  Rather he asked forgiveness for not saving more marriages, not visiting more homebound, not easing the pain of parents who has just lost a child – for not having done more – with every breathing minute allotted to us.

A rabbi had three students,

And posed them a question:

“If you had one hour remaining in your lifetime,

What would you do in that one hour?”

The first one read and studied, then answered the question:

“I would spend that hour studying the Torah.”

The second one closed his eyes, then answered the question:

“I would spend that hour in the ecstasy of prayer.”

The third one looked at the rabbi, then answered the question:

“I would spend that hour loving my family.”

The rabbi looked at his students, stroked his beard, and smiled;

“Each of you has given a deep and holy answer.”

But the students turned to the rabbi and asked him the question:

“What would you do, in your last hour?”

“Me? I would spend that hour, doing what I’d been doing.

Doing what I’d been doing, for all of life is sacred.”

The rabbi looked at the students, stroked his beard and smiled:

“Doing what I had been doing, for all of life is sacred.”

Don’t sweat the small stuff – but LOVE the small stuff; for God is in the details.

——————–

Do you ever have those moments when, suddenly, you say to yourself, “God, I’m happy.  I didn’t realize it, but I’m really happy right now.”

Usually happiness is a product of memory or anticipation.  Rarely do we actually feel it in the moment.  Our memories of happy events are typically distorted by what novelist Michael Chabon calls “the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past.”   And often the anticipation of an upcoming event gets so blown out of proportion that the experience itself becomes anti-climactic.

But those moments when you catch yourself and say, “Gee, I’m happy right now.  This is good.”  Those are rare.  And they rarely occur in front of the Trevi fountain or on top of Everest.  They typically occur when least expected.  For writer Tim Kreider, writing in a New York Times blog, he realized he was happy while driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio.  But try as he might, he could not recapture that feeling artificially.  And so he made this observation.

“I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect…  In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.”

So what is real happiness?  Kreider replied:

“It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living.”

 I like that notion.  If a mitzvah is the song that expresses the wonder, we’re missing the point if we assume that the song is always about doing the right thing.  Hearing the shofar isn’t inherently ethical – but it sure does wake us up!  It’s simply singing the song of life, joyfully, consciously, fully engaged.  The path of mitzvah is the path of being fully alive.

So I had one of those “wow” moments not long ago, one of those times when I looked around and said, “My God, I’m happy.”  And it took place in one of those most dramatic of moments, one that the disengaged might consider completely mundane and boring.  Dinner.

We were sitting around the table, a week after Dan got home from camp and a week before Ethan was to leave for college.  This was one of those moments when we were all together, something that we took for granted for 18 years, but never again could we take it for granted.  Now the planets would have to be aligned.  But there we were.  All together.  And I looked around and said to myself, like God on the 6^th day, “This is good.  This is VERY good.”

And yes, there was a wisp of teariness for what was to come – any real happiness has that, but that was not a moment for grieving, but for celebration.

Yom Kippur is a day of joy.  It is Rosh Hashanah that is called the Day of Judgment.   Yom Kippur is the day of cleansing.  In ancient times, on Yom Kippur afternoon, the women went dancing in the fields and the men would court them, seeking wives.  Why such a celebration of life?  Because they knew that at that moment they had shed the illusions of the past and could look forward.  The temple ritual had already occurred.  The high priest had gone into the holy of holies.  The goat had been sent out into the wilderness.  The word had been uttered – titharu – “forgiven.”  And so it was time to celebrate.  They had held their breath and now they could exhale.  They had looked at mortality in the mirror – and it was good.

So last week, we tried something at home.  Ethan Skyped us on the computer (for those uninitiated – think Jetsons on the phone) at about dinner time and we placed the laptop at his place at the table.  So there were the four of us, having dinner together again.  He could see us and we could see him.  We could ask what happened in his classes today – and, for all you whose kids aren’t in college yet: a revelation – he didn’t say “nothing,” as kids usually do.

And I felt it again.  That fleeting moment.  Even  “nothing” would have been music to my ears.  This was the music of normalcy.  The music of life.  The music of connection.  The song that expresses wonder.  It was a moment of Happiness, technologically assisted, to be sure.  Another Tweet from On High.

Last night I started out with that wise comment from one of our kids, about Ted Kennedy: “He lived until he died.” 

The power of mitzvah can help us to do exactly that.  To live right up until the moment we die.  Each and every moment of each and every day.  That can happen for all of us – but only if we decide that this year, this year, we’re not gonna leave mitzvah at the door.

Look at the pamphlet we’ve distributed and sign up for one of our committees.  Do something to keep the ball rolling.  

The power of mitzvah goes far beyond a good deed.  It’s about connection and coming together.  It has something to do with obligation, a covenant sealed at Sinai and affirmed daily by Jews everywhere, even at Auschwitz.  Mitzvah calls on us to bring justice to the public arena and to bring about greater pride and understanding about what is truly good about Judaism.

And a mitzvah is an act of life affirmation that plants a seed of immortality.

A mitzvah makes a single moment echo unto eternity. 

A mitzvah is God’s Tweet and our song. 

A song expressing wonder.

And so, as we prepare to move forward into the future and from this elongated moment, climaxed by tonight’’s shofar blast heard round-the-world, let us pledge, in 5770, to Bring Mitzvah Back.

Mitzvah Initiative: Congregants’ Stories

I asked congregants to send me examples of the role mitzvah has played in their lives during this holiday season.  Here are some of the moving responses I’ve received.  Since it’s not so much the “who” as the “what,” they are posted anonymously.  Send me yours!

A close friend of mine became seriously ill recently-his second go-around with a difficult cancer.  He’s just returned home from the hospital following surgery and will need time to heal. I am coordinating over 20 families who will be bringing meals to this family’s home for at least the next month. Each day, new emails fill my box with more of their friends who want to help.  My friend’s wife and I have talked about how it takes a certain kind of strength to accept a mitzvah from others, to give people the opportunity to give. In a terrible situation, so many people rise without ego to help.   It reinforces for me what I have known all along and worked to instill in my children–that mitzvah must be woven into the fabric of our lives-it’s just what we do. A kind word to a stranger, a meal for a family in crisis or any selfless act that makes the world a better place is holy. 

In response to your sermon…  I thought that Temple Beth El would be a good place to start using   Fair Trade certified products, such as Coffee and Tea.  We perhaps could educate the congregants about Fair Trade products and then perhaps expand it to other Jewish Organizations in Stamford.  Please let me know what you think of this idea.  Wishing you and your family a very Happy and Healthy New Year.

 

There is nothing better than a “serendipity or unplanned” mitzvah.  After the Hoffman lecture (which was inspiring),  leaving the Temple and heading for our car (parked legally, near the entrance sign) we could not help but notice an elderly couple walking slowly toward Roxbury Rd.  We asked if they needed a ride and of course, they did not want to impose.   

We insisted and after a very short ride brought them to their car.  They thanked us approximately 10 times in 10 seconds.  I was thrilled to catch up briefly (they have family in Israel).  Knowing that they did not have to walk on the dark road was all the thanks needed. 

Sometimes we have to think about doing a mitzvah and other times it is just staring us in the face…saying come and do. 

BTW, thanks to your prompting, the first thing we did upon leaving Beth El after hearing your sermon on Mitvos, was drive straight to Long Ridge of Stamford Nursing Home, to visit a paralyzed patient (we knew). We found him still there, but moved up to the 3rd floor. We wished him & his wife a Happy & Healthy New Year, too.

Rosh Hashanah Sermons 5770

Rosh Hashanah Sermons by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5770

“A Signature Mitzvah”

OK – set your watches. I’ve got a tough job – I’ve got four sermons over the next ten days – a couple of hours to recharge your Jewish batteries for another year, to convince you that it matters to be a Jew, to live by Jewish values and to raise Jewish families; to believe that Judaism gives us something that can touch us profoundly, that speaks to that which is most human about each of us and to help us believe that change is possible.

All of that.  Four sermons. 

Without boring you, even for a minute.

Without your taking out your cell phones and texting and Twittering. Without a single yawn.  And today, without benefit of a single shofar blast.  You in the 17^th row!  I saw that yawn!

All of that – and this year, I’m ratcheting up this challenge even more: I’m going to try to get you to see the Jewish path in a new way.

I want to bring mitzvah back!  - I want to be the Justin Timberlake of rabbis.

I want to make mitzvah sexy. 

It won’t be easy.  For one thing, as we’ve been told over and over again, this is not a good year for bold initiatives.  People are not feeling very hopeful.  Hope was last year’s poster.  Right now we are in a state of crisis.

The economy fell off a cliff right around last Rosh Hashanah, and only now are there some glimmering signs of an eventual recovery, though it would be hard to convince those who have lost jobs of that, or people who face foreclosure, or those who can’t afford school or can’t get loans for a small business.

As if that weren’t bad enough, our faith has been shattered by scandals involving lots of money.  Politicians?  Just about every major politician in Israel is under suspicion of something, and meanwhile back here we’ve have rabbis arrested for selling kidneys and handbags on the black market.  Most sickening of course was the Madoff affair, which caused tremendous suffering for people of all backgrounds, but had a particularly devastating impact on Jews and philanthropy.   I’ll have more to say about that on Yom Kippur.

Let’s see…what else.  Speaking of sickening, how about a pandemic?  An unkosher one at that?  How about Iran getting perilously close to the bomb and imploding internally. And how about a war in Gaza that made it a little safer to go outside in Sderot but brought Israel no closer to peace and security. 

Everything is a crisis: the economy, health care, the climate; and for Jews, we’re in the midst of an identity crisis.  We’ve got parenting crises.  We’ve got midlife crises, which has led perfectly normal governors to do crazy things like run off to Argentina.  Tell me about midlife crisis!  I just sent my first kid off to college two weeks ago.  Ethan’s reading Torah there today. 

It just occurred to me. 

He’s not here!   What do I do now?

Everything is in crisis: And to top it all, Paula Abdul is leaving “American Idol.” 

So as I dive into these sermons, the degree of difficulty is very high. 

Pray for me.

———-

So every ten years the monks in this monastery are allowed to break their silence to speak two words.  Ten years go by and it’s one monk’s first chance.  He thinks for several seconds before saying, “Food bad.”

Ten years later, he says “Bed hard.”

It’s the big day, a decade later. He gives the head monk a long stare and says, “I quit.”

“I’m not surprised,” the head monk says, “You’ve been complaining ever since you got here.”

Why this was voted the best joke in America by Reader’s Digest I’ll never know – but if it had to win, this was the year for it to win.  For if ever there was a time to complain, this year is it!

I recently read that the Chinese character for Crisis does not mean opportunity (as has been claimed by every motivational speaker this side of Confucius).  However, if you rearrange the letters of the Hebrew root word for crisis, tzara: tzadi – resh – hey, the plural of which is tzarot, or the more familiar Yiddish tzuris, you get the word tzohar, which means threshold or radiance.  And the word “tzarei,” which means balm.  B-A-L-M.  So from tzuris, we Jews get healing, we get radiance, we get to cross the threshold of new possibility. 

And we get this without the help of the Chinese. 

And how do we get to that state of radiance and Confucian calm?  A little minor surgery to the word Tzara will do the trick.  The middle letter, a resh, is all hunched over, like a guy whose just been punched in the gut, who can’t bear to see what’s up ahead, bearing the burden of life’s hard knocks. 

Well it’s time to straighten up, to hold your head up high, to spit in the face of despair, to look at crisis right in the eye and to overcome it. 

And if you straighten out that resh, what you are left with is the straightest of all Hebrew letters, the vav, stretching to the sky.

And that leaves us with the root word Tziva – from which we get… MITZVAH.

So our task today?  Let’s move beyond the mentality of crisis. Tzara, to a mentality of Mitzvah.

Do I believe that that could save the world?

Well, at the very least, it can set us out in the right direction.

Kurt Andersen, bestselling author and radio host, suggested that the international nature of our current economic meltdown has its upside – and presents us with a chance for us to, as he put it, “reset.”  He calls this “A spectacular moment of global consciousness, this generation’s version of the Apollo astronauts’ 1968 photograph of the earth from the moon, an unforgettable reminder that all 6.7 billion of us, from Reykjavik to Sacramento, Vladivostok to Athens, Wall Street to Tiananmen, are together, deeply and inextricably interdependent.”

And perhaps that is true.  We’re all united because we’re all broke!

Maybe out of the cauldron of the current crises we will emerge a kinder, more helpful society, one more aware of our interdependence. 

The jury is still out on that one – as people in extremis can go either way.  Some will choose to withdraw and close themselves off.  No doubt that the combination of a tough economy and Swine Flu scare kept some people at home today.  But you are all here.  And we are all more aware than ever of that which binds all God’s creatures together.

By the way, did you know that Swine Flu is mentioned in the Talmud?  I kid you not.

The Talmud tells us that when Rav Yehudah was informed of a deadly plague affecting the pigs, he decreed a fast.  Now Yehudah didn’t think that the disease would harm kosher farm animals.  Pigs are different from cows and other kosher animals, he said, because their digestive tracts are similar to those of humans (Ta’anit 21b).

He didn’t know what he was talking about but… Think about it.  At that point, there was no sure sign that the disease would impact the human population.  He was fasting for the pigs! 

He also saw their connection to people.  He understood that, in the end, we are all one.  Even with pigs!

And that’s what we celebrate today.  A unity that transcends all crises.  We’ve even put the shofars away today to lay bare those things peculiar to Shabbat – a day where all of us come together.  People, all people – even servants are included in the 4^th commandment – and animals too.  Even pigs.  The Shabbat is for everyone. 

Kurt Andersen feels we are entering a new cycle of community mindedness, aided by the rapid pace of globalization, the technological revolution and the worldwide concern for climate change.  In his book “Reset,” he traces 15 such cycles in US history, as the pendulum continually swings from “an unfettered zeal for the individual to a rediscovery of the common good.”

And indeed, we have seen a swing back in the direction of altruism.   “Teach for America,” a program that sends college grads into America’s poorest school districts for two years, received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008, including one out every nine Ivy League seniors!  True, it’s a reflection of the lack of jobs, but these kids are looking to give back.  We haven’t seen anything like this since the early days of the Peace Corps.

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “But it rhymes.”  And it is rhyming now.  But not back to the ‘60s as Andersen claims.    For today, on this Rosh Hashanah, we have just entered – the ‘70s.  The 5770s.   For as we now reset social priorities, we have a wonderful chance as well, to reset our clocks – to Jewish time and Jewish values (without, God willing, bringing back disco).

If ever there was a chance for us to look again at our lives and where all things Jewish might fit in, this is it.  If there were ever a chance to re-explore the meaning of mitzvah, this is it. 

If ever there was a chance to take Torah out of that closet where we have been storing it, and open it up to speak to our lives and the life of our community, THIS IS IT.

So what’s a mitzvah?  A good deed?  A commandment?  

Yes and yes, but it’s more.  Much more. 

If we are going to push the reset button and reboot our Jewish souls, we need to rediscover this primal Jewish concept as if for the first time.  And for many of us, it will be the first time.  

To be a Jew is to reside in the world of mitzvah.  That’s what bar mitzvah means.  A Jew at age 13 is to be called one who has mastered the art of world repair – that’s why our 13 year olds are always out there doing so many incredible things to change the world. 

A mitzvah is a very human act, but with a cosmic result, one that reverberates throughout the entire universe.  But while mitzvot are ordained from on high, many perform them for reasons that are most mundane. 

Some light candles because their parents did. 

Some go to services because they get to schmooze with their best friends.

Some send clothes to Goodwill because their closet is so stuffed that the door won’t close.  

There are many shadings to mitzvah, and we’ll be covering a few of them on these high holidays.  And then, as part of JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s mitzvah initiative, we, along with several dozen other Conservative congregations, will be conducting a 14-session seminar that will bring us together to learn and discuss, in a non judgmental atmosphere, with openness and honesty.  This seminar is a very exciting venture.  It will help us to redefine what it means to be a Jew in this age.  And it will help us to reset and redefine the concept of mitzvah for ourselves, our congregation, our movement and the world.

Mitzvot are, above all, opportunities to open ourselves up to a life of greater meaning and purpose.  To make the most of our God given talents.  But not in isolation.     For the path of mitzvah is the path of bonding.

Some derive the word mitzvah from the Hebrew expression “tzavta,” which means connection.  Through simple acts, we bond together what is divine with what is so utterly human and we connect to people everywhere.

Mitzvot are the mountain peaks where heaven and earth meet, where the mundane becomes sacred, where the religiously blind become spiritually aware. 

In this green era, the mitzvah is a cheap source of renewable Jewish energy.  And how do we energize?  By taking on more.  By stockpiling our mitzvot.  But each of us must also specialize.

The Ishbitzer Rebbe looked at the Sh’ma and asked what does it mean to “love the Lord your God with all you heart, with all your soul and with all your might?”  Everyone has a particular mitzvah, he proclaimed. By fulfilling it, that person achieves the world to come – this mitzvah and its fulfillment become the essence of that person’s whole existence.

So what’s your mitzvah?  Everyone has a signature mitzvah, a mitzvah that defines us. 

I teach children – therefore I am.

I feed the hungry, therefore I am. 

I take people to Israel, therefore I am. 

That mitzvah becomes our immortality.  Our legacy.  Our footprint in the sand.  It is, to quote one of  this summer’s celebrated heroes, Julia Child, when talking about cooking, “what I dooo.”

There is a midrash that when a person is asked in the world to come, “What was your work?” and they answer, “I fed the hungry,” that person will be told, “This is the gate of the Lord, enter into it, you who have fed the hungry….  The same goes for those who reply that they raised orphans, performed acts of tzedakkah, clothed the naked and embraced acts of lovingkindness (Midrash Psalms 118:17).”

So what will you say when you reach paradise?  What will your descendants be saying about you?  What do you dooo?”

Once you discover your signature mitzvah, the key is to take that mitzvah, to live it with all your soul and all your might – and to share it. 

Think about it: There are, according to Maimonides’ count, 613 mitzvot in the Torah and we have nearly three times that many people here today.  By my calculations, then, if each of us were to take on one mitzvah on behalf of the community, then all together, we would make up three complete Jews! 

Well, in fact some of the 613 mitzvot are no longer in play and others are only meant to be observed in Israel – but the main thing is that most of us actually might want to do MORE than one.  We do many mitzvot, after all, and often without knowing it.

But let’s each of us begin with one.  Everyone start with one. 

And if we bring that one to this community it will bind us as one.

And if we project our mitzvah out from this sanctuary out into the world, its positive impact will have all of us behind it.  They say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… but what happens here impacts the world. 

So what will your mitzvah be?

 To attend morning minyan? To make Beth El greener?  To read Torah or to tutor?  Or maybe to coordinate letter writing for Israel or to help with our Sukkah or Purim carnival.  Maybe it’s to run a support group for those who struggle with addiction. 

This year, Beth El has responded so supportively to the needs of those out of work that job networking has become our collective signature mitzvah.  Michael Arons has been moving mountains to make this happen, but our neighbors have been thanking us simply because we belong to Beth El. 

Call it Mitzvah by association.  

There are a number of mitzvah heroes here.  This one is helping with job networking, and that one is helping with the food drive.  This one is paying anonymously for a famous scholar to teach a series on prayer, and that one visits people in the hospital.  We’ve got Beth El mitzvah-makers all over the world.  This one is teaching Adon Olam to a bunch of schoolchildren in India that one is serving up vitamins to Ethiopian kids in Netanya.  And we’ve had congregants volunteer countless hours to realize the dream of the renewed social hall and lobby we are enjoying today. 

The UJC has created a Mitzvah Heroes website and has been asking people to vote among a number of nominees, for people like Anne Heyman who is responsible for a youth village in Rwanda that cares for orphans.   And Sadie Mintz, a Hollywood resident since 1929, who has risen at 4 AM once a week to prepare for her early-morning volunteer shift in at the cancer ward of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

Think about it – if every person here took upon him or herself one mitzvah – one way to bring a little more love and holiness to our community and to the world and just did that, imagine what an impact that would make.

So what is your signature mitzvah?  What others can you bring into your life?  I asked board members that question and their responses are on our website.

As a rabbi, I consider myself somewhat of a general practitioner, but I’ve also got more than a few signature mitzvot.

One that I embrace is the one listed as #16 on Maimonides’ list of 613; it is a mitzvah for everyone to write a Torah for himself.  I see my own writing in that light, as an attempt to bring the Torah to life through the prism of my own experiences.  I also like #28, not to harm anyone in speech, though it’s hard and I often fall short.  And there’s #39, to care for animals, and the 150’s, which all deal with aspects of Kashrut.  And then there’s the 170’s, which all deal in business ethics.  I care about those. 

And I can’t forget #114, the mitzvah of making pilgrimage on festivals to the sacred soil of Israel.  I’ve come to see that as truly my signature mitzvah.   As you know, we are planning our next TBE trip, and we decided to postpone it from this December to next July in order to give more people this chance to go to Israel with our congregation family.  We’ve cut costs to the bone while still providing a five-star trip.  I implore you to talk about this over lunch today and consider this amazing opportunity. 

And one more signature mitzvah: #53.  Love the stranger.  The Torah repeatedly commands us to love the stranger, because we were strangers in Egypt.  Often, this refers to the Ger Tzedek – the convert.  And indeed, we make it our business here to welcome converts and to make the process of becoming a Jew by Choice one of tremendous spiritual growth.  But there is another type of stranger found in our sources – the Ger Toshav – the person who, while not taking on Judaism as a faith, has elected for whatever reason to reside in our midst, and who, often with a Jewish spouse, has chosen to participate in this grand experiment called Jewish destiny.  Maimonides could not imagine a world like ours, but the sentiment expressed in that mitzvah – to love the stranger – has made # 53 it one of Beth El’s signature mitzvot.

For those who are here today who are not Jewish, I embrace you warmly and unconditionally and invite you to share in this crucial work of world repair.  No strings attached.  We need all the help we can get!

So this is going to be our year of the mitzvah. 

And to start it off, I’d like to ask everyone here to do a mitzvah this week, between now and Yom Kippur, one that you have never done before.  And make it a challenging one. No cupcakes!  Anyone can put a few coins in a tzedakkah box.  How about lighting candles this Friday night?  If you do that already, how about separating milk and meat – for a day?  For a meal?  For a course?  I’d be happy to help explain it to you.    

OK, and if you can’t do that because you are blogging your way through Julia Child’s cookbook, how about taking an hour away from all that butter to study the Torah portion?   Or maybe visit a local hospital or nursing home and see people you don’t know.  Or, hey, I don’t know, if you’ve never come to shul on the second day of Rosh Hashanah – come here tomorrow to participate in the mitzvah of hearing the shofar – that’s number 132! 

Come to minyan and maybe try on tefillin – that’s #20.  If you’ve never built a sukkah, it’s not too late.  We’ll help! Or simply have a meal in our temple Sukkah; that’s mitzvah # 142.  And even easier, buy a lulav set – # 141. We’re really pushing this one this year, because it’s so much fun and we’ll have a huge lulav parade here on the second day of Sukkot, which falls on a Sunday.

If you return a lost item, you’re doing a mitzvah – # 276.  So if someone lent you something years ago and you just came across it, but you weren’t really sure what to do – return it!  If you have one of my books, for instance, I’m declaring an amnesty period until Yom Kippur.  No questions asked.

If you care for an animal, you’re doing a mitzvah.  So adopt a dog and name it mitzvah.  Throw a yarmulke on it and have a bark mitzvah….  If you’ve been carrying a grudge, end it. #32.   If you’ve been gossiping, stop it (28); if you are known for angry outbursts (and who isn’t these days!), cool it – #30.  If you’ve given tzedakkah, give more – #52.  If you’ve never performed a bris… …maybe hold off on that one… but it’s #17.   

Find a mitzvah, do it and do it on behalf of all of us.

Many of the 613 mitzvot are obscure, some have become obsolete, and others are downright objectionable.  But the act of struggling with mitzvah in itself connects us to our roots and to one another.  Maimonides wasn’t the last word on Torah, which is fortunately a living document. The mitzvah map is changing all the time. There are plenty to choose from, though.  So find one that means something to you.

Then just do it. This week. 

I know of one rabbi who asked his entire adult ed class to go home and light candles that Friday night.  The response was amazing. – sort of like the response we had last year when several congregants hosted others for Shabbat @ Home, something we’re planning to do again in a few months.

One student came back and said “My family laughed at me.”

Another said he went upstairs and lit them in the closet.  (I don’t recommend that).

And a third told the teacher, “I went home and lit candles last Friday night – and my husband cried.”

You know, it’s interesting that we always use the expression that we practice mitzvot.  We’re always practicing.  We never get it right! 

In Judaism, Practice never makes perfect.  But practice makes something much more important. 

Practice makes affect.  Practice makes purpose. Practice makes holiness.  Practice brings hope.  Practice brings bonding.  Practice brings people together.  Practice brings communities together.

Practice brings heaven and earth together.  So just do it!

But don’t do it for any reward, or mitzvah points, as we used to call them.  Think of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, who said, “Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge at you because you are a vegetarian.”  Kaplan had a decidedly secular term for mitzvot.  He called them folkways, but they were no less important to him, even without the notion of a personal God.  Whatever your beliefs about God, Kaplan understood that without ritual, there is no Jewish civilization. 

Do it out of love, love for a parent or grandparent, love for our children, love for the Jewish people, love for a Torah that has filled the world with holiness; to bring the world from tzarot to mitzvot, from pain to perfection; do it out of the conviction that there is something bigger than us, a power of love in the universe that we can tap into – and a Jewish message that is timeless and wonderful.

Do it to atone.  We now know from his just published memoirs that Senator Ted Kennedy was haunted by the death of Mary Jo Kopechne to his dying days.  He spent the last half of his life atoning for the first half of his life.  40 years of wandering in that personal wilderness. But he spent those last 40 years making the world better for all of us, and especially for the poor, the homeless and the sick. “Our sins don’t define the whole picture of who we are,” Kennedy said.  And that is true. 

But our mitzvot do. 

Kennedy’s father said it to him early on.  “You can have a serious life or a non-serious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won’t have much time for you.”

Teddy made the right choice.  And he wasn’t afraid to declare it to the world.  JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen says that the question of mitzvah here is not about theology, it is about our desire to be different, to stand out, to make the case that change is possible and to declare it to the world.

Don’t be afraid to declare it to the world! Kennedy was an unabashed liberal.  We should be unabashed Jews.

Because what we do matters.

Think of Robert Lappin.  This is the guy from Boston whose foundation funded a number of educational ventures, including the trips to Israel taken by our teens a few years ago.  His fund was totally wiped out by Madoff.  Completely.  It ceased to exist. 

So what did Robert Lappin do?  He reopened his foundation, and is using his own money to restore the retirement savings that his employees lost in the fraud.  Lappin is the anti-Madoff, the antidote to a civilization-gone-mad, the one who turned crisis into opportunity, into a threshold of radiance and balm.

Whenever we hear the world saying that Jews are crooks, think of Lappin, and think of all the mitzvah heroes you know.  Look around you.  In fact, all you’ll have to do is look in the mirror.  Think of a tradition that is our precious legacy, and a heritage of goodness that can take your breath away.  Think of mitzvot.  The ties that bond.

And think of how it’s possible to awaken to the rhythms of life and love, on this first day of the new decade, the 5770s, without benefit of a single shofar blast.  We have done it, and we can do it.

The recovery begins today, as we embark on this path of connection, the path of bonding. The path of tikkun olam. 

The Mitzvot are our stimulus package for the world.

Together, let us bring Mitzvah back.  

And together, we’ll continue this journey tomorrow.

 

 

Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5770

“The Mitzvah of Obligation”

By Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

Not long ago, I came across this moving story in an online magazine.

In the fall of 1943, after being captured by the Nazis in the Ukraine, my grandfather was sent to Auschwitz. At first, he was just one of many Soviet POWs held at the camp, but it was later discovered that he was Jewish, so he was removed from the Soviet soldiers and placed with the other European Jews. My grandfather never knew why he survived while others perished, but there was never a day that passed after liberation in 1945 that he thanked God for that gift of life.

My grandfather was able to get to England and then on to America to restart his life. He raised 5 children and later cherished his 22 grandchildren. He loved to work in his garden, even on the hottest of days. As a child, I always wondered why he wore long shirts even on those August days when it would easily be 100 degrees (even in the shade). When I was 9, I caught my grandfather shaving in the bathroom and that is when I saw it: His Camp Number – 58877241.

Not knowing any better, I asked him why he got such a “stupid tattoo”. He told me that he really didn’t want to get it and quickly tried to cover it with a towel. I followed him asking him, “Why don’t you get it removed then?” He stopped dead in the hallway and without turning around said “So I don’t forget.” We never discussed it again.

When he died last summer, I told myself that he was finally at peace. As I stood over his coffin with my wife, I reached down and took his arm in mine. I unbuttoned his sleeve and rolled it up. I looked at the number again – 58877241. My wife looked at me and asked “Why are you doing that?” All I could say was “So I don’t forget.” Right then I made my promise to him – Never again.

Now when I see the hate and bigotry, I know that this is how it began seven decades ago in Europe. It was too late, when people finally woke up, millions had been carted away in cattle cars to their deaths.

I don’t want to see that here or anywhere else. I do not want there to be cattle cars filled with people that these hate mongers scream out against.  This summer, my family and I will be traveling to Auschwitz, so my children understand what their grandfather went through. I want my daughter to know why I see him in her eyes. And then every time I look in her eyes I will see hope and love and not 58877241.

This coming April I’ll be making that same trip for the first time, visiting Auschwitz on the March of the Living, traveling with scores of teens and adults from our region and thousands from around the world.  It’s hard to call it a pilgrimage to a place of such darkness, but that’s exactly what it will be.  For while the commanding voice from Sinai binds us in love, it is the commanding voice of Auschwitz that compels us to remember, that compels the world to remember, in the face Ahmadinejad and his ilk.

Yesterday I noted how one way to define the term mitzvah is as “connection.”  Mitzvot help to create the ties that bond.  Today we need to go one step further.  Today we explore the very difficult topic of obligation.

A mitzvah is a commandment, after all, although we joke these days that what Moses brought down from Sinai were the “Ten Suggestions.”

But we aren’t really doing justice to the concept of mitzvah unless we at least struggle with the notion of obligation.  And that’s pretty hard to do these days, when many of our public figures have made a spectacle of shirking their obligations to the ones they love the most.  They’ve been caught up in so many sordid scandals that it makes us long for the simpler days of Watergate.  In the wake of the affairs involving Elliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Jim McGreevey and others, we can speculate that a reason we can’t put the Ten Commandments in political office buildings is that the posting of “Thou shalt not commit adultery” would constitute for politicians a hostile working environment.  It should be noted that I’m not in favor of placing the Ten Commandments in any public building, but I wouldn’t mind if people exercised a little more self control.

And then there is this summer’s #1 story this side of Michael Jackson, the saga of Jon and Kate.  Now I must confess that when I first heard about the show “Jon and Kate Plus 8” I thought it was about two Jewish kids celebrating the last night of Hanukkah.  But alas, Jon and Kate have gone their separate ways and their very public breakup has been a ratings bonanza for their show.  And who wouldn’t want to watch this train wreck where a bunch of five year old sextuplets and their sibling twins act with greater maturity than their parents.  When the show marked its 100^th episode last June, Kate was in awe of the accomplishment of holding the show together for so many years.  Holding a marriage together did not seem to matter nearly as much.  

Yes, infidelity seems to have become this year’s most fashionable pandemic.  One might say it’s just another strain of swine flu.  But it’s gotten bad enough that this past July, Time Magazine ran a cover story entitled, “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?” 

In that article, sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin claims that the face of the American family has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, with an dramatic increase in the pace of coupling and uncoupling, of marriage and divorce, creating “a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else.”

The essay states that this increasingly fragile construct depends less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness… “The intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault. It is buffeted by affairs and ennui, subject to the eternal American hope for greater happiness, for changing the hand you dealt yourself.”

And the essay concludes, “There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage.  It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.”

I want to make it clear that Judaism does not object to divorce.  In some cases it is absolutely necessary.  What I’m speaking about here is not about specific cases, but general trends.  And the trend is away from commitment in relationships and toward what the kids call “hooking up.”  The kids may call it that, but they aren’t the only ones doing it. 

Commitment has become a dirty word. 

Whatever happened to obligation?

The culture of hooking up has become so prevalent today, all the way down to middle schools, that even the kids are beginning to say, “enough.”  A backlash is developing.  Recently at Duke, a group of 250 students, mostly women, were asked whether they would like to bring back good old fashioned dating.  Four out of five raised their hands.  It seems that people are beginning to yearn for intimacy again, to be seen by the other not as an object but as a human being in the image of God. 

And we need to begin to discuss this plainly with our kids.   Yes, we all got so worked up last spring about the placement of that scandalous Advocate front page article about the Bat Mitzvah party gone wild in Norwalk.  And we had a right to.  It should not have been front page news.  But that’s precisely the problem.  It’s not news.  Everything described in that article is happening around us all the time, including the vandalism, and the hooking up in the bathroom.

I said then and I repeat now that we happen to have some amazing kids and teens here.  It’s not about that.  We have some amazing adults too.  But there is something corrosive and rotten about our culture that we need to help change, and that something rotten is the abandonment of obligation.

Caitlin Flanigan, who wrote the Time essay, told of her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, when she turned to her father at the dinner table and said, “It’s amazing, Dad — 50 years, and you never once had an affair. How do you account for that?”

He replied simply, “I can’t drive.”

Does it really come down to that?  The only thing that keeps people from betraying the ones they love is a lack of opportunity?  The only thing that comes between a person’s deepest commitments and falling off the cliff is simply not having the means to do it?

If that’s the case, I recommend that everyone here become a rabbi. 

No, seriously.   Yes I know, there is plenty of opportunity for clergy to abuse power in their relationships with parishioners, and God knows many have.  Or, I should say, some have.

But I would venture to say that most have not.  Part of the reason for that is that most people of the cloth are good, moral folk.  But another part of the reason is the cloth itself, whether it is worn on the collar or on top of one’s head.  I know that I am far from perfect, but as soon as I put on the yarmulke in the morning, I am reminded of my obligation to set an example, not of perfection, but of integrity.  And that means striving to be worthy of my title, my Torah, my God, and your trust – to be a living embodiment of menschlichlite.  Again, I fall way short of my own expectations; but my expectations are pretty high, and being a rabbi is part of the reason why.

So yes, unlike the writer’s father, I do drive, but my sense of responsibility keeps me from driving myself and my family off a cliff.  God willing it will continue to.  I also happen to love my family.  But I suspect many philanderers do too.  They just have the opportunity – things happen, they lose control, they forget a commandment or two, they take a business trip to Argentina and they blow it.

So being a rabbi has no doubt helped make me a better person.  I often ask myself, would I be as ethical if I didn’t know that the eyes of the entire community are on me?  Would I even come to shul every week?  Would I pray at our minyan nearly every morning?  Would I keep kosher?  Would I give as much to tzedakkah if it were not my job to set that example?  Would I study as much Torah?

And the answer?  To quote Tevya, “I’ll tell you. I don’t know.” 

I’d like to think I’d do all those things, but that’s partly because I’ve been doing all these things for so many years and have come to appreciate how they have enriched my life.  Morning minyan gives me a chance to collect myself before I start my day, to reorient myself to the task at hand, to separate the essential from the tangential.  Kashrut sensitizes me to what goes into my body and how I care for all of God’s creatures, great and small.  Tzedakkah and study help me to connect to the world around me and the wisdom of the generations. 

Had I never become a rabbi, it’s likely that I would sleep-in more on Saturdays, and maybe I would even have discovered what a weekend is.  I’d probably take the opportunity to check out Shabbat services in different places.  But I think I would crave the kind of friendship and warmth that exists here every Shabbat.

I know for sure that I would not be as loving, not as giving – and in the end not as happy. 

Of course, rabbis are no better than anyone else, in theory.  All of us are equally bound to the mitzvot.  And we all need a little external push sometimes to be better people.  For some it’s their title that motivates them, for others it might be the donor lists that appear in newsletters.  Sure it’s better to give anonymously, but the mitzvah is to give tzedakkah, in any form, and if public recognition motivates us to follow through on that commitment, well, I can think of far worse forms of peer pressure.

Let’s take a closer look at obligation.  When we think about it, it’s not really such a dirty word to us – we welcome obligation in much of our lives.  Our days are filled with commandments that we willingly embrace:

- Thou shalt put the cap back on the toothpaste tube.

- Thou shalt put the seat down.

- Thou shalt not accept a dinner invitation without checking with your spouse.

- Thou shalt let in the dog and take out the trash.

I bet you can think of dozens of these.  It would be a good exercise over lunch today.

In addition, we all have our rituals that we stick to, for lack of a better term, religiously.  These rituals guide the way we dress, the way we set the table and eat our food, the way we play or watch sports.  Did you know that when I turn down the sound on the TV, the Patriots almost always recover a fumble on the kickoff?  It’s a proven fact!

And we are always answering to the commands of others.  Maybe we light candles because our mothers told us too.  Maybe it was a father’s dying wish that we give to a certain charity.  When a baby cries in the middle of the night, that’s thunder from Sinai.  CARE FOR ME!  And we hop-to.  So obligation should not seen as such a dirty word. 

But if I were to stand up here and say, “Every member of Beth El is henceforth obligated to come to morning minyan once this month,” I suspect I’d have a few messages in my inbox tomorrow. 

As we explore the concept of mitzvah this year, we are obligated to ask ourselves what obligates us.    Ultimately, God may be part of the answer – certainly that is what tradition tells us – blessings include the phrase “Asher Kidshanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu” “who has made us holy through the commandments and has commanded us,” but “God” is the answer that is both easiest to give and most difficult to grasp. 

We are in fact commanded by a lot of things, including our own sense of right and wrong, including the roaring thunder from Sinai and the muffled cries from Auschwitz.   

Some feel obligated by the number 613 – and others by 58877241.

To be obligated is to be needed. In a very profound sense, it is to be loved. 

Just as the Holocaust survivor reached out to his grandchild. God reaches out to us, imploring us, “Love me.”  “V’ahavta.”  The mitzvot could only be given out of love.

 Our obligations to others are typically reciprocal, and they inspire others to feel a responsibility toward us.  I’d venture to guess that that’s why so many of us come back here, year after year.  So many other options exist, some a lot less costly, some online, but the one thing you can’t duplicate is the flesh and blood commitment of being one with a community – of seeing your neighbors that you’ve seen over the years, of seeing the kids growing up – and seeing them go off and then come home from college….

While three days of free services might be great entertainment, and may even provide a profound spiritual moment or two, you can’t shul-hop your way to a community, where people feel obligated toward one another.  That’s what brings us back together, year after year.  Obligation.  But a good obligation.  We are mutually invested in one another.  It matters who is next to us.  It matters that this place looks spiffy.  We take pride in this building as we fill it with activity.  That social hall, so lovingly restored, is where we’ll lift our kids and grandchildren or friends up on chairs and dance in circles together.  It’s where we’ll gather at sad times as well.  It’s where we’ll reinforce those bonds of community that make life worth living, that make being a Jew so rich in meaning that all our theological hang ups just disappear. 

It all makes sense when there is commitment. 

By the way, the obligation is not synonymous with obedience.  In Judaism it is just as often our obligation to disobey. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm reminds us that human history began with an act of disobedience and will likely be terminated by an act of obedience.  Sure enough, the Garden of Eden propelled us all into this marvelous experiment called humanity, which could well end with someone giving someone an order somewhere to push a button. 

Rabbi Harold Shulweis, in his new book on conscience, notes that the Hebrew word for compass is matzpen and the word for conscience is matzpun – both words come from the word tzafun, which as we might recall from the Passover Seder, means hidden.  But we’re talking about something even more significant than the afikoman here.  Shulweis says, “Homiletically, conscience may be understood as the hidden inner compass that guides our lives and must be searched for and recovered repeatedly.  At no time more than our own is this need to retrieve the shards of broken conscience more urgent.”

The Iranian people have proven that this year.

So again, we confront obligation, even if when that obligation requires that we disobey, to hear the higher call of conscience.

In today’s Torah reading, Abraham and Isaac may have shirked their obligation to disobey.  But what is clear from the story, no matter how you read it, was that were willing to give all for the sake of what they perceived as the divine imperative.  The symbol of the shofar comes from that story specifically in order to remind us of the need to respond to our life’s summons, to be willing to give up everything, even life itself, in order to fulfill our obligations.

How many of us would do that?

So what are our Jewish obligations? 

When Deuteronomy cries out, “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” the word justice (tzedek) is repeated twice to teach us that the obligation rests both on the individual and on society.  One may not say, “Let the courts worry about justice while I remain silent.”  The obligation is on us all.

The Talmud (Kiddushin 29a) states that every parent is obligated to teach a child three things: Torah, a trade and, some add, how to swim. 

I love the way one educator put it to me recently.  What goes on at home is education, what happens at school is schooling.  School gives the reading, writing and ‘rythmatic – or in the case of Jewish studies, the three “rs” are, I suppose, Rituals, Rosh Hashanah and Rugelach.  But what are we obligated to teach at home?  Values.  Faith. Commitment.  Unconditional love.  And basic survival skills. 

Teach your child a trade, the Talmud tells us.  And if that fails, make sure your congregation provides career networking services, and that your government provides unemployment insurance.  It’s a partnership.

Health care is as well.  Maimonides made a list of the ten most important services that a city needs to offer its residents (Mishna Torah Hilchot De’ot 4:23).  Health care was number 1 – and that was nine centuries ago; it is most definitely number 1 today.  Our tradition teaches that human life is of infinite value and we affirm the dignity of each human being.  When up to 46 million in this country have no health insurance, that is an intolerable statistic for a society steeped in these values.

There are lots of obligations here.  Doctors have an obligation to heal and we have an obligation to pay them.  We have an obligation to comfort the sick and visit them.  We also have an obligation to prevent illness where possible.

We have an obligation to help the poor:

Rabbi Naftali of Ropchitz was known for his persistence.

One day, he remained in the synagogue an entire morning, praying that the rich would give more of their money to the poor.

When he returned home, his wife asked him, “Were you successful with your prayer?”

Rabbi Naftali answered with a smile, “I am half-way there!”

His wife looked puzzled.

“Oh, yes” he assured her. “The poor have agreed to accept!”

Maimonides tells us that we must give to the poor all that he is lacking…clothing, food, a horse on which to ride.   One thing is suspiciously missing in his list: what about a roof over his head, a house?  Housing was not considered in these halachic sources as an aspect of poverty relief.   Why?  Because the assumption Maimonides made was that everyone already HAS housing.  Imagine!  Even the poor had a place to live.  It was inconceivable that they wouldn’t.  And not just the Jewish poor.

The Talmud teaches (Gittin 61a) “We sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead, for the sake of peace.

These are the mitzvot of obligation.

This past summer, much was made of the term “empathy.”  Our new Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor was accused of allowing empathy to cloud judgment.

But Abraham Joshua Heschel argued that the power of the great prophets came from their ability to empathize – and not merely with firefighters in New Haven, but with God.  As Heschel saw it, when human beings suffer, God suffers.  He wrote:

“Perhaps it is in sympathy, that the ultimate meaning, worth, and dignity of religion may be found.”

As Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote recently,”  “For (the prophets)…, the commandments are not simply demands for ritual behavior that will please God….they are useless unless they sharpen our awareness of the condition of the world, increase access to the divine pathos and engage us in working toward the biblical vision of a redeemed world.”

The Torah calls for a system of justice where rich and poor are treated with equal degrees of empathy, yet we also are taught not to stand idly by the blood of our neighbor and to love our neighbor as ourselves, to love the stranger and to care for the orphan and the widow.  These are not mere feelings, these are obligations.  These are mitzvot. 

Is a mitzvah to love.  The liberal – conservative divide tends to focus on the role of government; but all agree that it is society’s role to care for the needy, to provide housing, food, health care and clothing.  That we need to take care of our earth and protect the basic rights of human beings.  And in order to do that – we need two things: we need to care… and we need to feel obligated, even when we don’t care. 

A.M. Rosenthal was no liberal – but the Times columnist got it spot on when he wrote back in 1964 about a night in Queens when a woman was murdered and 38 bystanders ignored her screams.

Are the people who turned away that one night in Queens, each in a separate decision, any more immoral or indecent or cowardly because there happened to be thirty eight, than if there were just one of them? Does God judge by the individual or by head count?

And what if we hear the scream but cannot see the screamer?

Suppose the screamer is not downstairs but around the corner. Surely somebody else is closer, so we don’t have to run out, do we?  What is the accepted distance for hearing but not moving — two flights down, five, one block, two blocks, three?

How far away do you have to be to forgive yourself for not doing whatever is in your power to do: stop doing business with the torturer, or just speak up for them, write a letter, join a human rights group, go to church and pray for the rescue of the persecuted and the damnation of the persecutors, give money, do something. Three stories up, a thousand miles, ten thousand miles, from here to Austin Street, or from here to the gulags or the dungeons for political and religious prisoners anywhere? How far is silence from a place of safety acceptable without detesting yourself as we detest the 38?

How far indeed?  The boundaries of obligation are infinite, even as our human limitations make us so inadequate to the task.  We’ll never succeed.  If this is the day of judgment, and it is, then we, like Abraham before us, have failed miserably.  We deserve whatever fate awaits those who fail. 

But instead, our tradition offers another path.  The possibility of change, of return, of another chance, a new beginning.  The possibility of forgiveness.  That is the reason that these High Holidays give us to not fear seeing ourselves as covenanted beings.  Not to fear commitment to a grander scheme.  We know that we will fail.  We always do.  But then, we always get to try again.  We may not fulfill all 613 this coming year.  But it will not be for lack of trying.

It is time to reverse the erosion of obligation.  It is time to return the phrase “I must” to our vocabulary.  It is time to take stock of our commitments.  It is time for our word to matter, for a promise to be a promise.  It is time to be covenanted again, to hear the still small voice of “thou shalt and thou shalt not,” to get beyond the hedonism and moral relativism of this screwed up hook-up world.

I’m OK and You’re OK?  Well, God’s OK too.  Doing good is OK.  Not hurting others is OK.  Attachment is OK.  Humility is OK.  Empathy is OK.  Love is OK. 

Mitzvah is OK.  Asher Kidshanu b’Mitzvotav V’tzivanu is OK.  Commitment is OK.

When we come up to this ark we are signing on to our side of the deal.  When we raise the Kiddush cup we are bearing witness to the compact.  When we say AMEN, we are saying Amen to a promise.  When we become bar and bat mitzvah we are recognizing that we are not merely adult human beings, we are human beings who have taken on obligations.  When we marry under a huppah we are joining with a partner in a covenantal quest, sealed by a ring.  When we have a baby boy, we literally cut a deal with God, and figuratively with a girl.  And when we die, we bequeath that precious legacy to our descendents, we hand them the message and the number, whether it be 613 or 58877241 – and the quest continues.

So now I send you out into the world with the shofar’s blast – and let this blast be a call to commitment.  We have painted the term mitzvah with shadings of connection and obligation.  Go out now and discover your signature mitzvot. 

There is so much work to do.

Signature Mitzvot of the TBE Board of Trustees

SIGNATURE MITZVOT OF THE TBE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

With theme of Mitzvah being a prime focus of our activities this year, I asked the Board of Trustees to share some of their “signature mitzvot.”  The results are below.  If you would like to see a full list of the 613 Mitzvot, click here.

When you are asked in the world to come, “What was your work?” and you answer, “I fed the hungry,” you will be told, “This is the gate of the Lord, enter into it, you who have fed the hungry…The same goes for those who raised orphans, performed acts of tzedakah, clothed the naked and embraced acts of loving-kindness (Midrash Psalms 118:17).

What is your “work?”  What is your signature mitzvah?  What do you want to be the first thing mentioned in your eulogy (aside from “loving parent, spouse, friend, etc.”)?

•  I have spent more than 40 years committed to involvement in Jewish and Secular community service.  My parents and grandparents were my role models.
•  A decent human being who really cared for his fellow man through acts of kindness.
•  Opening the Temple and facilitating morning minyan so people can say Kaddish.  Overseeing Beth El Cemetery.
•  Pillar of personal support for anybody needing an ear, a shoulder, encouragement, focus and/or ideas about a better way and a better life.
•  That I was a good person.  That I was a good mother.  That I loved my friends and family above all else.
•  A wonder and supportive friend and confidant.
•  Help when help is needed.
•  My wife and I have a pool party each year inviting widows who do not get out much.  In addition we invite them for breakfast.  You cannot believe the wonderful feeling these people have being included and not forgotten.
•  VP membership for Stamford Chapter Hadassah.  Greeter for High Holy Days.  JFS Ambassador from Temple Beth El.  JFS yearly dinner committee and auction.  Hadassah calendar committee.  Hostess 2^nd Passover seder for everyone.  Shalom Stamford Beth El representative.
•  My signature mitzvah was tutoring a young, physically and mentally challenged woman to become a Bat Mitzvah at Temple Beth El.  Thank you, Rabbi Hammerman, for giving me this opportunity.
•  I have volunteered in my community within my children’s schools and Temple Beth El, all the way to international work for Israel and Hadassah Hospital outreach programs.  What I have found as my greatest reward is seeing all ages, each generation, finding a way to come along and help.
• Volunteer reading tutor for first graders in the Stamford  public schools.

Maimonides’ List of 613 Mitzvot

This year, we’ll be focusing on the ancient but misunderstood concept of mitzvah.  We’ll grapple with it, rediscover it and even redefine it.   Here is a link to the 613 mitzvot delineated by Maimonides, divided by category.  Keep in mind that this list is not exhaustive, as the Torah is a living document.  Not all are meant to be observed in this age, and many are reserved for observance in Israel.  Some appear outdated and problematic and indeed some have been reinterpreted over time.  But this list provides a nice guide as to the depth of the traditional connection between sacred deed and sacred text.  All of these 613 are derived, in some manner, from verses in the Torah.  You can find the list, along with explanatory links,  here.

Rosh Hashanah Message

“As clay in the hands of the potter…so are we in Your hand.”

This 12^th century poetic composition, based on Jeremiah 18: 3-6 and included in the Yom Kippur liturgy, perfectly encapsulates how so many feel right now, whatever our theological inclinations.  I was also thinking of this verse in the context of this week’s passing of the actor Patrick Swayze, and one of the scenes for which he was best known, where his ghostly essence stands behind his loved one at a potter’s wheel.  

The relationship between an artist and her work of art is one of great intimacy, nurturing and healing, as we strive, through that relationship, to overcome natural flaws and aim toward perfection.  Our divine potential is reached only when the raw material of life is somehow molded, through love, through touch.  The material is malleable.  We haven’t hardened yet, but we all seek that love to guide us, to mold us, so that we’ll become the people we so want to be.

At times as vulnerable as these, we’re all looking to be held.  Most often, we experience that loving touch of God through the hand of another human being.  We are so limited, and the future seems so uncertain.  Only that love can help us to overcome our mortality and our frailties.  Only that love can heal us. 

We are in Your hand this week as the new year begins.  “Your” hand – means everyone who extends a hand, everyone who reaches out one to the other (with or without Purell).  “Your hand,” means filling bags of food for Person to Person, since the need is greater than ever.  It means standing up against Iranian oppression at the UN next week.  And it means praying all together here, or wherever you will happen to be. 

To our college students and others who will not be here, you are in our hearts. To all those who will be with us, we’ll be the richer for it.  At times as uncertain as these, all hands need to be on deck.

And that includes Your hands – God’s hands.

L’shanah tova u’metukah.

PS – This week’s O-Gram is up at http://joshuahammerman.blogspot.com/

Including

Beyond Apples and Honey – Rosh Hashanah at Home

Some Rosh Hashanah reflections by Ronnie Fein:  Crimson Red Pomegranates

No Kissing the Rabbi!

And an interesting story from the Jewish Week on cybershuls on the holidays.

Beyond Apples and Honey – Rosh Hashanah at Home

A congregant asked me for some ideas as to how to make the Rosh Hashanah meal more meaningful. It’s true that the meal tends to get short shrift on this holiday, at least in comparison to Passover, Sukkot, Thanksgiving and other more home-based celebrations. it tends to be overshadowed by what takes place in the synagogue, which is considered the center of the action on the Days of Awe.  More…

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