Before Shabbat

When you get to a certain age, you begin to translate ‘in the future,’ for ‘after I’m gone.’ That fact, in and of itself, is not so depressing. If I’ve learned anything as a congregational rabbi for 35 years, it’s the truth of mortality, that all things must pass.

Christians considered mortality a grievous punishment and some Jews as well, dealt out by a very angry God who said, “Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” But of course that’s exactly what they do – break the only rule God gives them. Which is how human mortality comes into the world.

I’m kind of glad that in the Adam and Eve story, they did what humans do. They were curious and daring, and not subservient. True they lose the gift of immortality. But in all honesty, would you want to live forever? I wouldn’t want that.

While death and dying are often heartbreaking and tragic, the fact of our mortality spurs us to push harder, to reach higher, and to experience the intensity and sweetness that life has to offer. What would life be like without death? The obvious answer would be: there would be nothing left to call ‘life,’ since life can only exist in conjunction with death… Given that we would be immortal, which might be something different than being either dead or alive, how would we then come to value our ‘lives’? Would we still be able to appreciate the beauty of things? Would we even be capable of experiencing emotions in any sense? After all: how happy or sad would we feel if we would come to experience an event that we had experienced an infinite number of times already? Wouldn’t that downgrade the relative value of each moment of – let’s say – sadness? And wouldn’t immortality change how we would appreciate anything beautiful or moving?

I would’ve loved to live at a time when people will leave this planet and colonize distant worlds. I hope I get to own a driverless car. I would’ve liked to see the cure for cancer. I’d always hoped to see Israel arrive at a just peace with the Palestinian people. I fear these are all things not on the near horizon of my life. Even if I get to live to age 100, I don’t think I will see these things.

The Jewish response to this lament is not to get all sad and morose. Rather, it’s to say, “My progeny will see these things, and that has to be good enough for me.” And it is – most of the time. Sure, I occasionally feel some envy over what hasn’t yet arrived. But that’s beside the point. Life and love and learning and art and music and service and joy are the things that drive me to do what I do, and then to share them with others, to truly get the most out of this life.

A moment of gratitude then, for my life. And a moment of gratitude for your life, too. I get to share my life with yours: in print, in a blog, or up close and personal.  To study together, laugh and cry together, travel together, to embrace, shake a hand, acknowledge we share the most precious gift. Of course, there’s so much I will never know or experience. In the meantime, thank God for this moment in time, a moment to give thanks.

Shabbat Shalom

rebhayim

I didn’t have time to meet with him while he was in town to prepare for his move. But, I told him that the following night was Purim, and he was cordially invited to join us. He graciously accepted and told me how much he looked forward to our meeting. I think I warned him about what it could be like: people in costume, maybe some whiskey being consumed, noisy Jews…

Bill was and probably still is, right out of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon. He is quiet, dignified, and self-effacing. Nothing in Minnesota could possibly prepare him for what he witnessed. I didn’t fully realize the import of my invitation until he walked in. I saw fear and concern in his eyes. A lapsed Lutheran, a sect not known for parties, Bill looked at a room filled kids and adults in costumes, including a couple of drag queens and a convincing Angel of Death. I’m sure he wondered, “Are these Jews? Will I have to do this, too, walking around in some relatively embarrassing adult costume? Making noise?? Lots of noise???” As Garrison Keillor would tell you, Lutherans are not famous for making lots of noise.

I felt bad for him. It reminded me of the time my mother of blessed memory invited her beau, Sid, to meet her children. We were a motley crew in those days, nothing a bachelor in his 50s would dare get too close to. At the end of a raucous dinner, Sid confided to my mother, “Shirley, I don’t know if I can do this.” My mom said, “I get it. But you don’t get me without them. It’s a package deal.”

Sid walked away. For about a week, as I recall (my sisters will no doubt fill in more details after they read this…). However, my mom was irresistible. Her children? Not so much. But as she said, it was a package deal. They got married and lived a very loving life together.

Bill and I tried to have a serious conversation that night (after I removed my Carnac the Great Crown). But we were endlessly interrupted, like Tom Cruise’s Princeton interview in Risky Business. “It’s not usually like this,” I said, not really apologizing so much as reassuring. “It’s a package deal.”

Under our veneer of civility, we Jews have a real passion for singing and shouting and dancing. We love strong flavors. We love laughter. As a people with a deep and enduring culture, we can’t get enough of life. We welcome yin and yang. The yetzer tov and the yetzer   ha-ra — the good impulse and the evil impulse.We mourn with compassion, and we celebrate with gusto. We try not to hold too much back. We’re all in.

Celebrating Purim, this crazy antinomian Jewish holiday that never uses God’s name reminds us to lighten up and cheer for fairy tales and happy endings. Bill went through with it and became Jewish. He’s endured great hardships in his life since that moment, and I pray his decision to become a part of the Jewish family helped him get by with a little more joy than oy. It’s a package deal.

Shabbat Shalom and Hag Purim Sameach!

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This current period in America is not pre-Holocaust Germany. Rising antisemitism today in America is not the antisemitism of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. History does not repeat itself.

However, it would be foolish of us not to pay close attention to recent incidents of antisemitism. Incidents in Newton, whether swastikas in a school or bomb threats to our own Leventhal-Sidman JCC, cemetery desecrations in St Louis and Philadelphia or other crimes, must be taken seriously.

These demeaning, regressive, transgressive acts are all part of a larger movement of frustrated men and women who feel cut off and misunderstood and need to blame someone.  What happens when these folks see people succeeding in a world in which they cannot keep up? What do people do when they believe the world owes them a living? How do they achieve revenge?  They seek to define the “other”: the foreigner, the non-Christian, and the true cause of their dilemma, the real reason they cannot get ahead.

It is a familiar toxic response of the disenfranchised that is tangled in the roots of Western civilization. It is a noxious weed that appears whenever there is a rise in diverse populations mixing and working and playing and living and loving together. It is Jim Crow. It is the Nuremberg Laws. It is anti-immigrant legislation.

But this is not history repeating itself. Because we are not who our ancestors were. We learn from the past. We see what happened and how things succeeded and how they failed. We take note and we analyze options. We know that wishing it away is foolish. We know that trusting the fact that things have been worse but we weathered the storm is frighteningly short-sighted.

History is not some quantifiable thing that moves like a glacier or a missile or an asteroid. It is a dark, inchoate mass that sits there in the rearview mirror as we drive forward. We learn from the past by sifting through the mess and finding relevant bits and pieces that may explain how we got to where we are. We may find pathways that can lead us back to stories of those who have come before. The lives of others can help us in our choices. The experiences of others can guide us to live more thoughtfully.

We are not a helpless community living at the whim of others. The American Jewish community today is profoundly strong. We are leaders in every major arena of American life (except maybe hockey…). Very importantly, there are 30 Jews in Congress, 28 Democrats and two Republicans. They make up 8% of the Senate versus 5% of the House. And don’t forget, Jews are less than 2% of the American population.

We have options. We have a voice. We want to know: Why don’t we know yet who’s responsible for the cemetery desecrations? Why haven’t we gotten anywhere discovering who these hateful callers to JCCs are?

I’m not sure when the term, “Never again”, was connected to the Holocaust and Jewish life. It’s always meant to me that never will we make the same choices. Never again will we wait. Every JCC in America is connected to us. Every synagogue is a part of us. Our dead are buried in every Jewish cemetery. There is no them here.

And, as if I have to write this, there is no “us” and “them”. We are the Indian engineers who were shot and killed. We are the people who cannot find safety in America because of their faith or their nation of origin. We are the undocumented workers who keep this nation on the tracks, who live in fear of being run out of this country. Jews know better than most that there is no “other”. There are only us. It’s up to us to stand tall and remain vigilant and vocal. It’s up to us to take the lessons of history and teach the world what it means to oppose hatred and ignorance.

Shabbat Shalom,

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We are finite and small and limited. Einstein redefined time and space and gravity, but give him two knitting needles and some yarn, and he’s helpless. Give Joe Lovano a tenor sax, and he will shock you with his dynamic virtuosity. Ask him to define an aggadic Midrash, and he will ask you to hum a few bars…

In other words, we know only the most infinitesimal bit about the world. When I do the New York Times Saturday crossword – which I can NEVER complete without my wife – I am acutely aware of this truism. No matter how many things I Google, there are a thousand more unknowns that fly past me at the speed of light, and all I can do is bravely smile and wonder how I didn’t know what just blew by me.

From time to time I learn something that I didn’t even know I didn’t know, something really big and life altering. For instance, I recently learned that there were no standardized times or time zones anywhere in the world until the late 1800s. The increasingly large, complex and rich railroads demanded some sort of synchronization so that when it was 10 am at Penn Station, it was 10 am at South Station.

My understanding of time dramatically changed when I learned about the establishment of time zones. A few new facts and the world looks different. Amazing…

Below is a piece from an article in last December’s Scientific American. I reprint it here for you to read because it is so mind-blowing. Once you read it, you’ll never be the same…

Imagine visiting a far distant galaxy and addressing a postcard to your loved ones back home. You might begin with your house on your street in your hometown, somewhere on Earth, the third planet from our sun. From there the address could list the sun’s location in the Orion Spur, a segment of a spiral arm in the Milky Way’s suburbs, followed by the Milky Way’s residence in the Local Group, a gathering of more than 50 nearby galaxies spanning some seven million light-years of space. The Local Group, in turn, exists at the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster, a 50-million-light-year-distant cluster of more than 1,000 galaxies that is itself a small part of the Local Supercluster, a collection of hundreds of galaxy groups sprawled across more than 100 million light-years. Such superclusters are believed to be the biggest components of the universe’s largest-scale structures, forming great filaments and sheets of galaxies surrounding voids where scarcely any galaxies exist at all.

Until recently, the Local Supercluster would have marked the end of your cosmic address. Beyond this scale, it was thought, further directions would become meaningless as the boundary between the crisp, supercluster-laced structure of galactic sheets and voids gave way to a homogeneous realm of the universe with no larger discernible features. But in 2014 one of us (Tully) led a team that discovered we are part of a structure so immense that it shattered this view. The Local Supercluster, it turns out, is but one lobe of a much larger supercluster, a collection of 100,000 large galaxies stretching across 400 million light-years. The team that discovered this gargantuan supercluster named it Laniakea-Hawaiian for “immeasurable heaven”-in honor of the early Polynesians who navigated the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean by the stars. The Milky Way sits far from Laniakea’s center, in its outermost hinterlands.

Laniakea is more than just a new line on our cosmic address. By studying the architecture and dynamics of this immense structure, we can learn more about the universe’s past and future. Charting its constituent galaxies and how they behave can help us better understand how galaxies form and grow while telling us more about the nature of dark matter-the invisible substance that astronomers believe accounts for about 80 percent of the stuff in the universe.

Does this blow your mind?? Read the phrases like “galactic sheets,” or “great filaments,” or read that the Universe is 80 percent dark matter. What? Laniakea? A collection of 100,000 galaxies “stretching across 400 million light years”?

Why do I get so excited about this stuff? It illustrates that we live in an extraordinary place. The sheer size of Laniakea dwarfs anything I can imagine. That we can find ourselves even in the middle of this gigantic system is remarkable.

We are a part of something so vast, so beyond comprehension. And we didn’t even know it! I am so thankful to have learned this, to have my home recontextualized to include the utter vastness of space.

In an uneasy time of constriction and anxiety, I hope this story will provide you with some spiritually uplifting language and images. It’s thrilling to still feel awe and wonder.

Shabbat Shalom.

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