Before Shabbat

Thirty years ago I was home from work, watching tv. It was around 1000am Tulsa time and I wanted to see the space shuttle Challenger take off. First of all, I am an inveterate manned space travel fan. I followed NASA’s work from the Mercury program and then to Gemini, then Apollo and then the to space shuttles. Outer space just gets to me, and I only wish I’d had the right chops to go.Second, I was hooked on the first teacher in space. I thought Christa McAuliffe was a remarkable woman. She was smart, charismatic, and a superb teacher. I imagined how wonderful it would be to watch her teach thousands, maybe millions, of kids about science live from space. Third, there was Judith Resnik, the first Jewish astronaut. I was so taken by this brilliant electrical engineer, a daughter of Holocaust survivors with real drive. What a remarkable woman to talk about in Sunday School with the kids. I also kind of liked the fact that she applied to be an astronaut on a whim. She had just gone through a divorce and was Essentially in a bit of a funk. Someone said that she should become an astronaut. So she thought, why not give it a shot – and they liked her. Resnik had already gone into space, but I was still cheering for her.

I will admit that I was subsequently really saddened to learn that Resnik hated the “first Jew in space” appellation. Despite a very Jewish upbringing including all nine yards of Hebrew School and a Bat Mitzvah, Resnik said that she wasn’t Jewish. But by me, she was Jewish, no matter how much she may have protested. I just wish I could’ve learned where her rejection came from.

I watched tv as the crew walked toward the shuttle. I loved that both McAuliffe and Resnik had Farah Fawcett hairdos. They were just so springy and young and so promising. I cheered them by calling out the mid80s version of “You go, girl!” As I watched them the camera cut to the VIP bleachers where the astronaut families and invited guests of NASA were waiting for the launch. It was so cold that morning in Florida; in fact, there were record lows. The spectators were all wearing parkas and thick winter coats.  This weather anomaly in Florida would end up being one of the factors in the accident about to occur.

Th camera spent an inordinate amount of time on McAuliffe’s parents in the VIP area. They were An attractive older couple, so excited to ba a part of the day. I imagined how profoundly thrilled they were to see their daughter bravely making history.

At the launch, the rocket surged upward so beautifully in a scene that gets me every time. It still amazes me that humans figured out how to leave Earth in my lifetime, breaking the bonds of gravity with enormous power and energy. But then, 73 seconds later, without warning, the entire rocket broke apart. We watched in utter horror as everything went wrong. We watched Christie’s parents cope with the shocking loss of their daughter. We realized, later, that the unusually cold morning made the o-rings, the gaskets between the rocket stages, stiff and less flexible which in turn allowed jet fuel to spray over the stages below causing the flame up. We also learned later that people knew it was potentially dangerous to launch in the cold, but engineers were afraid to admit that there might be a problem. And then we learned that the astronauts, those brave men and women, didn’t instantly die in the air, but likely survived until their crew cabin hit the water at over 200 miles an hour.

Thirty years ago is a long time. I had so many dreams that day, and so many of them were dashed. So much was lost due to human error and worse, hubris. But I still give thanks for the crew of the Challenger and what they meant to me. I still feel beholden to them and their bravery. I just want to believe that we can still dream as a nation, to do great things together.

My grandson, Caleb, is facing a new world. For his first 2 1/2 years,  he’s pretty much lived an ideal Garden of Eden existence. As an only child, he got all the attention and the presents and the lunch and the love. Everything was fresh and immediate with minimally delayed gratification. But now, there is a new baby on board. Of course, he still gets lots of love and attention. But sometimes he has to wait. Sometimes her needs come before his. Caleb doesn’t like it.

I don’t blame him for his anger and a short fuse. As a fellow first born, we share a common experience of displacement. Just when we were enjoying our most favored child status, someone came along and broke our bubble. And it’s worth stating the obvious here: the change is permanent.

It used to be that one of the chief roles of religion was to offer a sense of unchanging permanence. No matter how much the world warped and woofed, the church, or the synagogue, or the mosque would provide a kind of immutable home base. This is religion’s conservatizing power: to stay the course.

Of course, there is a problem with the of immutability of religion. Technology pushes the envelope on where we can go and what we can say and hear. New ideas emerge as contact with other cultures increases. Artists begin to experiment with new forms and possibilities. Science questions long-held assumptions about the Universe and its origins. And suddenly religion becomes the ally of those who would like to freeze time in all regards. “Give me that old time religion!” becomes the rallying cry of those who feel assailed by the changing world. “This isn’t the way we used to do it!” becomes a warning to the curious and adventurous.

Reform Jews hold onto certain key Jewish teachings. We believe in social justice. We believe in living an open and ethical life. We believe that we are in the world to serve God by caring for others and ourselves. We tell our unique Jewish stories about servitude and liberation and redemption.  While we don’t believe that we are chosen as in superior to others, we do believe that as Jews we have a unique role to play in the world. We believe in learning. We believe that human knowledge evolves and that we evolve. So we utterly reject the hurtful words in Torah about homosexuality among other topics.

There is much in traditional Judaism that we postmodern Reform Jews reject. We do not feel tied to the past but rather liberated from it and its darkest misconceptions about God and humanity, about the roles of women and nonJews, about the vastness of human knowledge. We feel ennobled by ancient teachings that provide us with a sense of self and with a sense of community that create a context for who we are and what we do.

Maybe this is why Torah always sets up the older sibling to lose out to the younger one (Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Aaron and Moses and on and on..). Maybe the first born represents a more fragile person, less able to change and cope with the vicissitudes of living. As a first born, I don’t subscribe to the notion that we are slow to change. At least, not always…

Everything must change. Reform Jews understand that to be a fundamental truth even when it means doing things differently: Hebrew, women rabbis, interfaith involvement, contemporary music, gender-free language, concepts of God, and so much more. Our core values are the rudder that helps us to stay upright even as we plow ahead.

My grandson is having a tough time of it right now. Large-Scale change is hard. But as his life evolves he will find sources of strength and sustenance to bolster his own evolving circumstances. I hope one source will be the life-affirming resilience of Judaism. It’s been good for me… and I hope for you, too.

I’ve been listening to some of Martin Luther King’s speeches as a way of getting into the spirit of observing this weekend’s holiday.  My God! What an extraordinary orator. The intensity of his rhetoric and the depth of his faith created a kind of energy that to this day continues to inspire me and so many others.

I wonder: if MLK had been born a generation later than he was, what kind of impact would he have? In a world of fumfering, inarticulate politicians, would MLK be appreciated? Or would he be derided as unrealistic or too vague? Would his speeches be deemed too much dream, too little substance?

The Jewish people are very comfortable with dreams and dreamers. Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven and the angels going up and coming down inspires us every time with thoughts of timelessness and the proximity of the sacred. Joseph’s interpretations of the Pharoah’s dreams changed his life and altered the destiny of the Jewish people.

Tachlis, the Yiddish word for “the bottom line,” is a crucial component in a successful society. But without the dream, without the vision, all we have is the quotidian, the humdrum of daily life without much in the way of excitement or more importantly, inspiration.

Inspiration comes from the Latin that means to take air into one’s lungs. I get it. Without inspiration, we die. And if we consider that biological truth and then parse its metaphorical strength it makes a lot of sense. Without inspiration, without a particular someone or something that moves us, our souls grow dark.

A collective dream can inspire us to do amazing things; it can motivate us to change the world. Theodor Herzl had a dream about a Jewish state. It was utterly crazy, but he never abandoned it. Herzl’s dream inspired Jews who were desperate to find a raison d’etre, a new sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.

MLK had a dream, too. His was a dream of justice and equality. His dream was about America as a beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world as well as for its citizens. He dreamt about racism fading away into love and the acknowledgement that we are all created in God’s image.

MLK was a dreamer who also believed in tachlis. His legacy to keep dreaming and to keep working remains a powerful message. MLK inspired us: he breathed life and vitality into a torn, lost nation. We best honor MLK’s memory by renewing our commitment to his legacy.

My family moved to Middletown, CT when I was in 3^rd grade. We had been living in Cromwell, a small town 15 minutes away from the metropolis of Middletown. It’s hard for me to remember who I was then. And there’s no one left who knew me well at that stage of my childhood. I think I was a vaguely depressed first born kid.  I had few friends in Cromwell and no cousins to help socialize me. I read a lot. I teased my sisters. I tried to avoid my father.

We moved into a new housing development and were among the first on the dead end street. The street lights were not yet fully functional so that nights could get dark. I mean very dark. On one such night in early spring I walked outside to the back yard to take out the garbage (I think taking out the garbage has been “my job” since 6).

Like I said, I don’t remember who I was then, more than 50 years ago, but I think I was lonely. And I had nowhere to go. There was a chaise lounge set up near the trash cans, so I sat down on it. The back support was set very low, so when I looked up it was like a planetarium.

In the night, in my solitude, on a black canvas, hung an astonishing vista of stars and planets. I sat there, stunned. You might assume in such a situation I would feel even worse, one little kid in a new school, isolated by demographics and religion, looking at the vastness of the Universe. I did not feel dwarfed by the heavens above.

I looked up and experienced genuine exultation! My God! I am connected to the infinite Universe! Sitting on this cheap little chaise lounge next to the garbage cans in my backyard I am part of the cosmos. And if the light I see now is from a star that’s been dead for a million years, then what light might I emit long after my body is gone? If the air I’m breathing contains stardust – yes, literally star dust – from the Big Bang, then what of my dust?

My mom called me back into the house, breaking my reverie. I could’ve been there for 5 minutes – or 2 hours. I don’t remember that part. But I do remember that night. I don’t know who I was then, but I do know that when I walked back into the house, I felt different. I knew that I wasn’t trapped, that there was a way out. When I grew up and saw the motto, “ Per aspera ad astra” – from hardships to the stars – I knew just what it meant.

We are all connected to something so much bigger and grander than our small individual souls. We link to others souls and other places over time and space, from the origins of the Universe to its closing moments, and perhaps even beyond that. The urge to explore the Heavens comes from that truth, which is that, in a way, Pluto is as much our home as this Earth upon which we stand.

This is why we send satellites to study the moons of Saturn, the surface of a comet, the planet of Mars, why we listen to radio waves from all over the Universe – not to explore alien worlds, but to get to know our home that much better.

Of course, it’s a lot to imagine that these truths might be shared by all humans. So many people imagine anyone and anything outside their own arbitrarily drawn circle of color or privilege or social status as alien. I think God is in all of this, that God IS all of this. You may not feel that – and in truth, it doesn’t matter. Just keep looking up and out, towards hope and love and the infinite possibilities in all of us.

Shabbat Shalom

rebhayim

It’s odd celebrating Hanukkah in a quiet, empty nest of a home. There’s no clambering for gifts, no rushing to multiple events at multiple locations. No one is getting positioned in front of a favorite menorah for lighting rights.  There aren’t a multitude of gifts on the dining room table. There are no clumps of wrapping paper from the previous nights’ festivities floating around the house. We’ve only made one night’s worth of latkes, so the house does not have that usual redolence from the magic mix of oil, onions and potatoes. And this year, for the first time in over 3 decades, Liza did not decorate the house with the multitude of Hanukkah zibben-zachen: no streamers, folding paper menorahs, little Maccabees, and so forth.

This empty nest feeling did cause a bit of the blues to enter into the Hanukkah blessings. But it was also an epiphany of sorts. If being Jewish is experienced primarily as the responsibility of passing it down to the kids, and the kids are gone, then isn’t the job done?  Why engage in behaviors mostly deemed pediatric? No wonder so many Jews leave their temple after years of belonging! It becomes largely irrelevant to day to day, week to week, month to month life.

The holidays weren’t “invented” for children only. I know, I know: I’ve heard the “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” theory of Jewish holidays. And yes, it’s a pretty accurate superficial gloss. And we do simplify them, reduce them to a sweet, savory sauce. But they are so much more. They are complex expressions of gratitude and longing and fear and courage.

An empty nest doesn’t have to be devoid of spirituality and community. It can be a place of connection and engagement. This is the challenge of 21^st-century Jewish life: to embrace the various dimensions of Judaism and Jewish life as mature adults, to care about choosing Judaism for ourselves and not for our children. There really is more to it than dreidels and toy Torahs.

A temple thrives when every generation feels engaged. A temple thrives when folks find in it a means by which to navigate a harsh and often hostile world. And if the Jewish tradition gives us anything, it’s instruction on how to have faith and even flourish in a world that has not exactly rolled our the red carpet for us.

Whether your nest is full, or whether it’s empty, we need you as a part of the community. Your input. Your presence. Your passion. You!

Bring your light to your temple. The more light, the brighter, the warmer the flame. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful. That’s an adult Hanukkah message.

Into how many more pieces can an already broken heart break? How many more times will we awaken to the news of innocent souls being slaughtered? How many more times will we get into bed, agitated by profound injustice and unspeakable loss, and lay awake endlessly reviewing the horrors of a story we cannot get out of our heads?

This week ends and we are so close to the chasm. The carnage of Paris continues to haunt us. But we mustn’t forget Boko Haram, who murdered 32 people the other day in Northern Nigeria.  In the perverse universe of destruction, Boko Haram has killed more people (6,644) in terror attacks during 2014 than any other group. Another group of killers attacked in Mali this morning where the death toll is now in the 20s…

And then we get word of the killings in Israel. And one of the five murdered is Ezra Schwartz, a Jewish kid from Sharon, a Maimonides grad, and a longtime Camp Yavneh attendee. The sadness we feel for all victims of senseless violence is suddenly weighed down by an immediacy of intimacy. Maybe you didn’t know him, but someone you know did. You look at his photo and realize that maybe you saw him somewhere. Or you know someone to whom he was related. It becomes personal.

The sense of powerlessness through all of these killings is overwhelming. How does one stop a nihilistic movement of people who don’t value life? How do we even talk to them, reason with them, when clearly they have no interest in dialogue?

I don’t pretend to know how to tackle these issues, nor do I expect anyone else really knows what to do right now. But here are a few things that do make sense to me.

1. Learn about these groups and their ideologies. The more I understand, the less I end up overwhelmed by these forces beyond my control. I know I can’t prevent terrorism, but knowing the players keeps me from feeling clueless and ignorant about my world.
2. Do not use these incidents as a reason to disparage all Moslems. It’s tempting to label every Moslem as a terrorist or sympathetic to terrorism. But it’s just not like that. Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Qaida and others may use religious terminology, but a) they are each very different and b) they aren’t religious movements. They are about vengeance and hate and greed. They are about the basest human drive that seeks to destroy for the sake of destruction, the drive to show one’s power through terrifying people, raping girls and women, kidnapping, murdering, blowing up ancient temples and statues — essentially the opposite of human decency. They may call out Allah’s name when committing a crime, but that truly has nothing to do with the nature and beliefs of the vast majority of Moslems.
3. Do not lash out at refugees. I know we’re all feeling impotent in the wake of all of these acts of terror. But we mustn’t respond by lashing out at this defenseless whipping boy. Suggesting that in the midst of the madness in Syria that refugees are bad guys because one ONE! Of the terrorists used the crush of Syrians fleeing for their lives to infiltrate France is pathetic. To further suggest all Moslems wear identification badges is indecent. Yes, prudence is necessary when vetting refugees. And we will continue to be prudent. But to block refugees from any country due to being Moslems is a shanda.
4. As horrendous as this recent round of terrorism in Israel may be, it would be foolhardy to conflate it with ISIS. To confuse the two is to create even more obstacles for any kind of resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
5. Don’t give up. It is tempting to run for cover and pray that the world will just go by and leave us alone. But it doesn’t work that way. More than ever, this is one small planet – Ezra’s death underscores that point. All of send our condolences to Ezra’s bereaved family.
6. And don’t give in to what is called in Hebrew sinat chinam, which is the denial of another’s right to exist, the belief that he or she contributes nothing valuable to this earth. That attitude is an affront not only to the other person but also to God in whose image this person is created.

Antoine Leiris lost his wife and mother of their 17-month-old son in the Paris attack. As such he has the right to scream and rant and we have the obligation to listen. But he did not rant. He wrote a piece in response to his deep loss which appears below, to which I can only say “Amen.”

“On Friday evening you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hatred.

So no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. You want it, but to respond to hatred with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that made you what you are.

You would like me to be scared, for me to look at my fellow citizens with a suspicious eye, for me to sacrifice my liberty for my security. You have lost. The player still plays.

I saw her this morning. At last, after nights and days of waiting. She was as beautiful as when she left on Friday evening, as beautiful as when I fell head over heels in love with her more than 12 years ago.

Of course I am devastated with grief, I grant you this small victory, but it will be short-lived.

I know she will be with us every day and we will find each other in the heaven for free souls to which you will never have access.

Us two, my son and I, we will be stronger than every army in the world. I cannot waste any more time on you as I must go back to [my son] who has just woken from his sleep.

He is only just 17 months old, he is going to eat his snack just like every other day, then we are going to play like every other day and all his life this little boy will be happy and free.

Because you will never have his hatred either.”

I spent my childhood surrounded by Christmas. Christmas lights, Christmas trees, Christmas ornaments, and Christmas music. Every store I entered. Every supermarket. Every restaurant.

Everyone who saw me wished me a Merry Christmas. “What are you doing for Christmas?” “Have you been naughty or nice?” “ Is Santa coming to visit you?”

In school, we had the requisite Christmas trees and red and green and Christmas concerts. There were no other Jewish kids in my school from kindergarten through 4^th grades. Just me.

Being the only Jewish kid around at Christmas time was a painful and lonely experience that never got easier. I tried not to get too gloomy. I sang all the Christmas songs, carefully mouthing the name of Jesus rather than singing his name aloud.

I was a stranger in a strange land. That’s what it felt like every Christmas of my childhood. The whole scene didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t feel quite safe enough to say so. Of course, being the son of a Holocaust survivor did not exactly help me adjust to the situation. I was raised in a Christian country.

I’m not asking for sympathy or reparations. The fact that I am Jewish and the majority of Americans are not is simply a fact of demography. But I did sometimes wonder: did it have to be so ubiquitous, so over-the-top? Was there not someplace besides the synagogue where I could find some relief, some recognition that I was different?

It is so laughable to hear Americans claim that Christmas and thus Christianity are under siege in our country. The red cup I get at Starbucks that has no ornaments or trees on it is the smallest acknowledgement that there are others in this country that don’t accept Jesus as the Christ.That maybe to say “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas” is, in fact, a more American gesture because it is more inclusive.

Each and every American has the right to be accepted for who and what they are. The disabled have the right to expect that they will be able to get to a bathroom and find a stall that can accommodate a wheelchair. Minorities have the right to get a job even if their skin color is not white, even if they speak with an accent. Gays and lesbians have the right to get married. We who are different than the majority just want to be treated with dignity and sensitivity.

Being inclusive is not the end of Christianity. Starbucks and their red cup is not an attack on Christmas ( by the way, on YouTube there is a clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD9Fd2wtX20&ab_channel=ctownlegend  from a guy ranting about how unChristian Starbucks is; his name is Joshua Feuerstein…? That’s got to be an interesting story). Being inclusive is just the right thing to do. It is the open arms of acceptance, which is the true theme of the holiday season.