Before Shabbat

The first time one comes to Israel, the star is the country itself. The vastness of the wilderness terrain. The extraordinary wonders of a huge crater gouged into the south of Israel by moving tectonic plates, an extinct ocean and rushing rivers. The clear, fresh waters of the Ein Gedi spring which is less than 10 miles from the Dead Sea, the saltiest water in the lowest point on earth. The Western Wall. Funky, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. The astonishingly gorgeous Bahai Gardens in Haifa.

Of course the list goes on and on; I could count out another ten sites in a second. On the 4th or fifth visit, however, the the scenery begins to fade out and the encounters with the people emerge. Their stories, their opinions, their worldview, are unique and prodigious.

I regularly thank my best Hebrew teacher, Mr Max Kleiman, of blessed memory, who taught me how to read and speak the language. Because of him and all of my subsequent Hebrew instructors, I can actually engage on an intimate level with the people of this country, most of whom are chomping at the bit to share their opinions, some before even being asked.

I took a cab to dinner two nights ago and the driver wanted to know where I was from. He immediately yelled, “What are you Americans doing? What kind of a meshugganeh president did you choose? America will be like Italy with Berlusconi!” On the way back to the hotel another driver wanted to shake my hand. “Thank God, America finally has a president who loves Israel.” When I sheepishly mentioned that I did not vote for him, he couldn’t believe it. “I should make you pay me twice! Once for the fare, once for Obama!”

That’s the way it is here. Everything is turned up to high volume. Every comment inspires a reaction: sometimes a slap on the back and a “Kol hakavod!” (“Right on, man!”); sometimes a look of horror and a  “Hishtagata?!” (Have you lost your mind?”).

It’s Isabela, our waitress in a fabulous hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the Tel Aviv Carmel Market. I order lunch and she looks at me apologetically. “Please can you speak in English? I don’t know Hebrew.” It turns out that she’s from Barcelona and just beginning to go to an Ulpan for basic Hebrew instruction. She is adorable and hapless…

There’s league night at the bowling alley in Haifa, to which we take our kids and their Israeli high school counterparts. Many of the teams are composed of men in their late 50s and 60s. I imagine their lives and the number of times they may have been ordered to enter combat. And just as I pluck up the courage to ask them some kind of a leading question about the complexity of life in Israel, they look over at me and the kids, and… immediately ask the woman at the desk to put up a mechitza — yes, a curtained barrier between us and the abutting league lane.

I can’t help but respond. “Ad k’dei kach?” (“Seriously?”) “Ken adoni. Ad k’dei kach!” (“Heck ya I’m serious.”) He comes over later to explain that bowling is like dancing and everyone takes a turn and so forth. At this point I’m wishing I wasn’t so fluent… And I’m brushing up against the issue of boundaries that is such a hot issue in a little country, whether in a bowling alley in Haifa or the Green Line between Israel and the occupied territories. Never has the memory of the simple act of  drawing a line between siblings in the back seat of a car taken on such depth and emotion.

There’s Omar and Yosef, 2 Arab brothers who own  a store inside the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. I’ve been there before and they greet me like a long lost brother, immediately ordering coffee and tea. They invite the kids in and treat them with a full display of hospitality and salesmanship. The brave kids do the bartering game, and Omar graciously barters back. It’s all in fun. We spend almost two hours with them as they regale us with stories of their store and their lives. Meanwhile our Israeli guide sits apart, scowling. I ask him what’s wrong. “These Arabs are just using you. As soon as you walk away they’ll laugh at you and how they ripped you off.” I’m surprised by his animosity. He doesn’t know these men or their store. But he’s already so sure he understands them and their story.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe these men are as cold and cynical as he suggests they are. Only, I am not a fool. I know the difference between sarcastic glad-handing, and the genuine pleasure of humans connecting. The kids come up to me. “Rabbi. Are these guys Arabs?” “Of course! This is the Arab Market!” “They’re so nice! We didn’t know that Arabs would be nice.” To achieve this sentiment, it was worth every shekel spent.

I have a hundred more examples, a thousand. Joyful encounters. Puzzling encounters. Maybe it’s like this when you go back to the same place time after time. But in my heart of hearts, I doubt it. This IS my place. I may not live here, but my DNA connects me. These are my people: the new immigrant from Spain, our Moslem bus driver, the kibbutznik who filled a paper cup with organic manure to prove it didn’t smell, the bowler and his mechitza… all mine.

We’re leaving tomorrow night and I’m excited to get home. But I will truly miss this sprawling 24/7/365 drama played out with such heart and intensity. I can’t wait to come home again.

I’m not sure the first time I heard that there was a serious conflict between science and religion. But I do remember one day in 5^th grade when our rabbi mentioned the subject in Hebrew School. “The challenge is to keep your faith strong while you are studying evolution.”

It has never felt spiritually or intellectually challenging to believe passionately in both science and faith. The notion that science and religion are somehow diametrically opposed does not make any sense to me.  Pursuing truth occurs on all different planes of being.

The beauty of our tradition is that it does not demand that we silently swallow large doses of dogma. We’re supposed to ask questions. We’re supposed to challenge the status quo. Torah commentary begins with questions. We read our Bible stories as kids, but too often we don’t build the bridge from tales and myth to Jewish belief and practice. We don’t develop a sophisticated understanding of how to read Torah as adults. By age five we hear that Eve came from Adam’s rib; by age eight we know there’s no way that’s true. But we haven’t explicitly said to our 4^th graders and our older students, “The Torah is mythos, stories we’ve told to our generations about the world and our ancestors and God.” Of course the book of Genesis isn’t scientific fact. It’s not meant to be fact! It’s all about imagery and metaphor and poetry. It’s about an idealized world and an idealized God still in development in the eyes of our earliest Jewish ancestors. A story doesn’t need to be true to be real…

The 207^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth is coming up on Sunday, Feb. 12. And I plan to celebrate by proclaiming his genius and his theological wrestling. Nothing about Darwin threatens Judaism. We live in a world of hard science and deep soulful spirituality. We need both to understand the world.

Science and religion are human endeavors to face the mysterious Universe in which we live. That essential question, “Why am I here?” can be answered by science and religion without contradiction or conflict. Both can be used to shed light on the unknown. Both can become weapons of intolerance and hatred.

The choice is ours: to honor our traditions and to honor the truest trajectory of science, or to scoff and belittle one at the expense of the other. We need Genesis and Darwin, cosmology and kabbalah, evolution and the Eternal.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin. Shabbat Shalom.

rebhayim

A long time ago, Amos said in the book that bears his name in the Bible, “I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet. I’m a goat herder, and I grow sycamore figs.”  As for me, the same might be said: I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet. I don’t know what’s in store for our nation and its many diverse citizens and residents as our 45^th president assumes office today.

The new president wasn’t my preferred candidate, but he’s the man. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. This makes him my president. His picture will soon be in Federal buildings. When I fly I’ll see his picture at Logan. When we need to mourn or celebrate as Americans, President Trump will be the face of our nation.

I can moan and express a good deal of anguish over this. Actually, I have moaned over this. A lot. But it clearly does me no good, other than to acknowledge how hard this period in American life has been for me and many others.  My experience with all of this is akin to being a steel ball in a pinball machine, bouncing off of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of dealing with loss: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.

Of course, I know that some of you are very happy about today, and I’m glad you feel so confident. I don’t know if I can ever arrive at your place of being so certain about the future under this new president. But I don’t want to get stuck in anger. I don’t want to be like those last Japanese soldiers who kept fighting the Allies long after the war was lost. Is that acceptance? I think more aptly, its resignation.

I’m not a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I don’t raise figs or goats. I’m a Reform rabbi, a part of a movement that has existed for close to 200 years. I’m responsible for lifting up the central tenets of our tradition, which includes being acutely attuned to the values of social justice. Healing the sick and clothing the naked are not just words spoken in our daily liturgy. They are integral values, part of an obligation that we, as Jews, take with the utmost seriousness: to not stand idly by while our neighbor suffers.

The poor and the dispossessed of this country must be able to look to others, including the American Jewish community, for support and succor. We Jews have lived through some of the darkest moments of human history. We know all about vulnerability and sorrow. We know what it feels like to fear that the world is indifferent to our plight. We were slaves to Pharaoh, strangers in a strange land.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I do know what must never happen. That’s what I will be dedicated to, regardless of the person or the party in the White House.

Shabbat Shalom,

rebhayim

On Rosh Hashanah, I talked at length about questions. Specifically, I discussed that we stop asking them. The world goes by at a blistering speed, and we watch it all blur by. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to focus on what it is we’re seeing, but by the time our eyes adjust, it’s all in the rearview mirror.

While there isn’t any sign of a change in the rapid pace of our lives, we can do something – several things – to offset the whirlwind. That is, we can live more mindfully. Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, instead of letting your life pass you by, you live in the moment and awaken to experience.There are so many means to that end. Yoga is a great practice for quieting the pace of one’s life. Meditation is another spiritual practice that can profoundly assist in feeling more centered.

Another way to achieve a measure of mindfulness is to ask questions. Not yes or no questions. Not what restaurant to go to, or where the best Chinese food is in Newton. I’m talking about substantive questions that force you to stop and ponder, questions that make you pull over and get out of the fast lane.

This essential value of asking questions is attested to in a story about the Nobel laureate in physics, Isador Rabi. His dear friend, Arthur Sackler, an American psychiatrist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, once asked his friend, ‘Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?” Rabi’s answer? ”My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: Nu? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions -made me become a scientist!”

I told that story on Rosh Hashanah, and I love it. It reminds me that the value of inquiry is priceless. It challenges me to frontload more on the question side. As Rabi attests, questions made him more mindful, more inwardly focused.

What follows here are some questions for you to ask over the next week or two. Pose them at the dinner table. Bring them up on the long ride to Sunday River. Ask anyone to join you: kids, partner, work people, parents: just ask questions!

1. What is something you would love to learn more about? Why?
2. What is a skill you do not possess, but wish that you did?
3. Who were three great teachers in your life?
4. What is the last book you read, from cover to cover? If you can’t remember, why don’t you read more?
5. What’s the next book you plan to read?

Enjoy pondering these questions. Ask them and watch what happens! If you’d like to engage with me over these questions, by all means, email me and we can dialog in virtual time.

One last thing. If you like this format, share some of your questions; I’ll share them with the congregation.

rebhayim

I have very few memories of Thanksgiving as a child. Passover has so many memories attached to it: from my grandmother’s house and later, apartment, in Pittsburgh. A long table, lots of noise, the smell of chicken soup and brisket, sweating bodies of relatives I did not really know: that I remember

But I don’t have an inventory of Thanksgiving images. This is likely due to a variety of unpleasant realities that formed my childhood. I won’t go into those details. Suffice to say that I wasn’t a happy camper.

We can have terrible childhood experiences, moments that scar us, physically and psychically, for life. Images we see, sounds we hear, smells, and so forth, can set off a round of anxiety and discomfort that can shut us down. This is a classic description of PTSD.

It can take a lifetime to uncoil from bad PTSD, hours and hours of therapy that is usually grueling beyond imagination. It ain’t easy. Despite the quixotic claims of modern neuroscience, there is no cure for trauma. Once it enters the body, it stays there forever, initiating a complex chemical chain of events that changes not only the physiology of the victims but also the physiology of their offspring. One cannot, as war correspondent Michael Herr testifies in “Dispatches,” simply “run the film backwards out of consciousness.” Trauma is our special legacy as sentient beings… The best we can do is work to contain the pain, draw a line around it, name it, domesticate it, and try to transform what lies on the other side of the line into a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the mechanics of loss that might be put to use for future generations.

The lack of Thanksgiving cheer in my childhood has not robbed from me the possibility of a terrific celebration in the present. Whatever did and did not happen then does not interfere with what I have now. I love Thanksgiving now! I prepare a spread of delectables, a 20lb turkey, and all the traditional and not-so-traditional fixings. I create a songbook filled with all sorts of traditional American melodies and we sing! I used to recite Alice’s Restaurant, but I was told that I was hogging the spotlight. Moi?

Being able to unabashedly embrace Thanksgiving serves to remind me that we can break on through to the other side. Perseverance, looking into the future and believing we will somehow get there, is what they call grit. Without it we can’t draw the lines around the pain.

I am so grateful on this Thanksgiving for a warm and loving family and friends who shower me with love and joy and laughter. I am so grateful for the men and women with whom I work, selfless and inspiring people who devote themselves to the Jewish people. And I am so grateful for my congregation, my large and beloved ‘other’ family. You inspire me every day. There’s a lot going on out there. It’s good to know that we provide a place where the door is always open and the light is always on. Thank God for all of you.