Before Shabbat

For most of my life, I assumed that everybody wanted to be like somebody else. There were people, called role models, whom we were directed to emulate. How often have older siblings heard the charge, “Behave! You’re a role model for your little brother and sister!” How many adults have purchased sports jerseys for their children hoping that the athlete in the original shirt might inspire their kids? And, unfortunately, more than a few of us may have heard, “Why can’t you be like [fill in the blank]?”, from a teacher or parent.

It never occurred to me that the idea of a role model was anything other than good and even constructive.  Until I started reading Martin Buber’s collection of essays called, The Way of Man.  He shares this short tale: Rabbi Bunam (1765–1827), a beloved Hasidic master, once said, “I would never want to trade places with Abraham! What good would it do God if Abraham became like Bunam and Bunam became like Abraham? Rather than have this happen, I think I will try to be a little more myself.” Buber then writes ” … Here we have a doctrine based on the fact that humans, by their nature, are diverse and differ one from another. Accordingly it teaches that people must not be regarded as alike. Every person has access to God but for each individual the way is different. It is precisely the diversity of human beings and in the diversity of their natures and individual inclinations that we find the great potential for the human species…. Many years ago, when several students of a deceased rabbi came to study with the Seer of Lublin, a great rabbi and teacher, they were surprised to see that his customs differed from those of their former teacher. The Seer exclaimed, “What sort of God would have only one way in which to be served!”” And then he writes, “One can go wrong only by paying attention to how far another has come and then attempting to imitate the other.”

What a liberating notion Buber reveals to us here. Trying to be like someone actually defeats the primary purpose of our lives, which is to self-actualize into the mensch that we are. When we attempt to walk in someone else’s footsteps, we leave no imprint of our own.

Sometimes in jazz, a young musician will try to replicate a great master’s sound, down to the nuances of every solo. Every note, every breath, every syncopated beat is captured. But while copying the sounds of a master is a technical feat, it certainly is not the young person’s solo. It is not until that budding musician steps up and creates their own distinct sound that we can see their real virtuosity.

We don’t need role models, that is, people to emulate. We need good teachers, people who can give us tools with which to shape our own creations. It’s not a professional athlete’s job to be a role model. Their job is to win games. Period. Kids into sports can learn how pros do what they do without investing in their personal habits or gestures. I can study great writers without wanting to dress how they dress or go to school where they went to school.

Humans are as different as snowflakes. We not only have our own unique fingerprints and DNA. We also have each of us our own soul. Each of us has our own path, our own way. It’s true that it’s much easier to be like someone else; it keeps us from being too vulnerable. But there is no one else to be like, because there is no one else like you. Telling someone to be a role model is a losing game. Challenge someone, and challenge yourself! to be a great teacher. And the first step to being a great teacher is to teach from your own truth, your own path.  As Rabbi Bunam said, “Try to become a little more yourself.”

There were some bright and shining moments for the Reform movement this past week in Israel. Here’s one: a few hundred Reform rabbis, men and women, went to the newly established area by the Western Wall for “mixed praying”; i.e., a spot that is officially designated for men and women to pray together. It’s hard to explain how it felt as we rabbis stood together with folks from Women of the Wall, the organization that has never given up on the belief that the Wall belongs to every Jew, not just the ultra-Orthodox.  These women have been spit on, pelted with rocks, insulted, and arrested for disorderly conduct, because they dared to come to the Wall to pray while they wore their talleisim and carried a Torah.

I imagined that there should have been a hundred shofars blasting out notes of liberation and celebration into the Jerusalem morning. To finally be recognized as an equal presence at the Wall is so meaningful. Of course, it’s not exactly there in the front area of the Wall, the place so famous in so many photos; it’s over to the side and back out of eyeshot from the large courtyard. But we’ve arrived.

Another moment: we were invited to the Israeli parliament, where 15 different Knesset members came and spoke to hundreds of Reform rabbis at a special session of a Knesset committee on immigrant absorption. And almost all of their speeches brought messages of cooperation and tolerance. What a feeling of recognition and respect!

Earlier in the week, a Reform delegation spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of his cabinet to thank them for their support. The leaders told Netanyahu the Reform movement was globally committed to supporting Israel but expected the Israeli government to advance the values of pluralism, religious freedom, and equality. http://goo.gl/aHgP3Z

But this newfound sense of connection and cooperation was short-lived. I suppose in my naivete I forgot just how important it is to the Israeli government that the Reform movement be treated with full parity – not.

Just today, Religious Services Minister David Azoulay refused to sign the new regulations that will officially establish that egalitarian prayer space I mentioned above. His remarks – which were published in media outlets, including the ultra-Orthodox website Kikar Hashabbat – confirmed his unwillingness to cooperate. “Our next generation will neither forgive nor forget if we do not tell the truth and that we can say, ‘My hands did not spill this blood,’” a reference to biblical laws governing murder.

You may ask, “What do laws of murder in the Torah have to do with Reform men and women praying together?” I have no idea, either. But his opposition could not be any more emphatic than this. Which means this wondrous moment when we prayed together at the Wall may not be soon repeated because the space will not be legally designated for that purpose.

But wait, there’s more.  Rabbi David Yosef, a prominent member of the Council of Sages’ decried giving Reform Jews an inch of space at the Wall. “Reform is a collaboration with idolatry. Reform are idolaters – simply and literally… I do not know why we ignore this today… The Reform are the biggest fighters against Zionism. They do not believe in the coming of the messiah. For generations they erased any mention of Zion and Jerusalem in their prayer books…. We will not rest and we will fight for it, and you will see that with God’s help we will win, they will not get the Kotel! The Kotel is a holy place, it is ours.”

Reform Jews still have so many opponents blocking our way to equal treatment in Israel. It is an ongoing struggle that we don’t seem to know how to win. As long as there are ultra-Orthodox Jews with political power at the highest levels of government, we will be beaten back every time. The Prime Minister, in the end, will give the Ultra-Orthodox what they want.

We will keep pushing for a pluralistic Israel even as we see the concept being pilloried and defamed. We will keep bringing groups to Israel, trying to explain the inequities that seem too easily embraced. Of course, we are still committed to Israel.  But this marriage between Israel and American Jewry has ended up not being so cozy or comfortable.

Shabbat Shalom

rebhayim

Theodor Herzl, one of the most surprisingly prescient men who ever lived, called the land of Israel the Altneuland: the Old New Land. What a perfect name for this amazing, beautiful nation! Look on the right. There’s a start up incubator with 15 offices producing radical ideas that will change the world. Look on the left and across the street: an 11th century Crusader castle. Everywhere one looks there are signs of this curious co-existence between the past vs the future.

This fundamental struggle seems to find its way into every conceivable conversation about politics or cultural shifts or power or religion, and so forth. I suppose most international conflicts these days have something to do with the values of the past colliding with the forces that seek to limit, change, or utterly extirpate them. It’s just that in Israel the dialectic sometimes seem so big.

Today our Israel group set out for the Hula Valley. This is the remarkable area that was once swampy land filled with malarial mosquitos. In a huge reclamation effort in the 30s, the swamp was drained, thus opening the Hula valley to more agriculture. unfortunately, messing with the water level caused some very negative effects on the ecology years later. Chemicals were running off Hula Valley fields into the Sea of Galilee.Peat bogs were catching on fire underground.

So what did they do about it? The JNF took advantage of some heavy flooding in the Hula Valley in the 90s and kept flooding the land, a sort of “forward into the past” motif.

The result, sans mosquitoes, created an old new land, something the same but different. One unintended consequence was that migrating birds on their way from Europe and Asia to Africa began stopping for a rest in this new, shallow clean water — and stopping to snack on local farmers’ produce. So now a spectacle appears every winter in the Hula Valley. About 100,000 cranes arrive between December and February and are fed about 2 tons of corn a day to keep them happily fed. And today, we saw them.

I’m not sure the kids were all that captivated by the scene. Most people don’t care about the scenery or the view or the spectacles of nature until they’re pretty far into adulthood. But it sure captured my attention… This endless scene of majestic birds resting here, changing their centuries old migration patterns. Old new things. New old things. Happening every day.

I feel drawn to Israel, like a bird making the rounds. Again. There’s something about taking the pulse of the nation, about getting a sense of how people are feeling. It’s landing at Ben Gurion Airport and looking at the building expansion out the window which appears to be double the current structure. It’s the lush green fields indicating good rains this winter. It’s the prosperity. It’s the anxiety. It’s watching our children begin to appreciate that this place belongs to them in a complicated symbolic sense. Israel is for the birds that keep coming back.

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