What I’m Praying for This Rosh Hashanah

“May the year, and its curses, come to an end.” This terse Talmudic statement (meant to explain why the Torah readings of rebuke are read before Rosh Hashanah), represents a sentiment we all feel about the coming New Year. We hope to put last year’s calamities behind us, and look forward to a better future.

One of the curses of the past year was homelessness. In addition to Hurricane Katrina’s terrible death toll, there is also a continuing crisis of nearly a million people who are homeless. In Darfur, hundreds of thousand of refugees have fled an ongoing genocide. And, in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, perhaps as many as 5 million people were left homeless. These horrific events require serious action from each and every one of us. We must figure out how to remedy last year’s curses.

In particular, homelessness is a curse Jews are familiar with. We call it exile. Exile is not an archaic historical occurrence; it is part of our current events. In the last half century alone Jews have had to take flight multiple times. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Holocaust survivors, my mother left Europe to a start a new life in a safe place, the United States. More recently, Jews have fled the Soviet Union, Syria, and Ethiopia as well as other locales. (I recently met a Jew who had to leave Venezuela to flee the Chavez regime). Exile is a large part of Jewish history.

There is a debate among theologians and historians about meaning of exile. To some, exile is a black hole in history: it is an unwholesome state, and the years spent in exile are historically meaningless. Redemption is the only part of Jewish history that really matters.

Others thinkers take a different view. To them, exile is the iron furnace in which Jewish identity has been forged. They understand that exile is a crisis; but they recognize that the challenges of exile have helped Jews cultivate a gritty resilience as well as a profound sense of social justice. Their understanding of exile is based on the belief that every crisis contains the potential for renewal and transformation.

The connection between crisis and renewal is one of the messages of the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading. Immediately after the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, we are told about the birth of Rebecca, Isaac’s future wife. The Midrash explains that this reference indicates that the Akeidah crisis provoked a serious personal transformation. Isaac had nearly died at the Akeidah. While Isaac stood under the knife, he became aware that he was a thirty seven year old man who had neglected marriage and family. He resolved to immediately find a bride, who later turns out to be Rebecca. The crisis of the Akeidah reminds Isaac that he must grab a hold of life, and that he can no longer be the diffident bachelor, slowly awaiting the right woman.

The message of these last few verses of the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading is this: the New Year is not merely a fresh beginning, a time to forget the past year’s curses and crises. Rather, it is a time to reflect on how to use past crises to teach us the lessons of future renewal. Indeed, the Chassidic Rebbe Sefat Emet compares all suffering to birthpangs; within the very suffering, there is the possibility of rebirth and renewal.

While an awareness of the productive side of crisis is extremely useful, my message is not directed at the people of Asia or Darfur or New Orleans. For these victims, right now is the time for action, not reflection; and what they need are homes, not sermons. Rather, my message is directed at another homeless crisis, one that specifically affects the Jewish people: the disengagement from Gaza.

Politics aside, the disengagement was traumatic. The withdrawal included negative images most frequently associated with exile; families were forced out of their homes, and the synagogues left behind were defaced and destroyed. It is impossible not to feel a profound sense of sadness for the 9,000 newly homeless people.

These emotional scenes, mixed together with nasty political debates and the ever increasing divide between secular and religious, is potentially disastrous. This is Israel's “homeless” crisis, for in the aftermath of the Gaza evacuations, we now have a country divided between orange and blue, religious and secular.

The question the Jewish world has to ask itself is this: Will we use the Gaza crisis as a springboard to renewal? Or is Gaza the first stage of a Jewish civil war?

One of the great lessons of exile is the importance of Jewish unity. In exile, Jews recognized that were best off pulling together despite their differences. What the Gaza crisis has taught us is that this lesson becomes even more important now, when we are back home in Israel. A country without a sense of unity is bound to fall apart.

This Rosh Hashanah, I’m praying that we will be able to move past last year’ s curses and crises. In particular, I am praying that we, the Jewish people, will remember the importance of unity. And after the traumas of the past year, all of us, orange and blue, left and right, religious and secular, will find a way to renew our bonds.

Shanah Tovah!

What God Wants Us to Learn From Katrina

The images of suffering are overwhelming. Watching TV coverage of Hurricane Katrina, you can feel the anguish of the victims of this awful disaster. An unpredictable confluence of circumstances brought about a “perfect storm” that killed thousands, injured scores of others, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. It is a true human catastrophe.

As unpredictable as this hurricane may have been, the human reactions to it are all too predictable. Immediately, there is finger pointing. On the political front, President Bush is blamed for a variety of failures ranging from a slow response to the disaster to having caused the global warming which lead to the hurricane. Religious authorities with agendas of their own come to speak in God’s name and blame the catastrophe on their opponents. A group called Repentance America said it was God’s retribution for New Orleans being a “sin city”. Repentance America did not issue any explanation why somehow, the hurricane managed to miss Las Vegas. On the internet, a popular Israeli Rabbi is sure that this catastrophe is retribution for American support for the disengagement from Gaza. As proof, he notes that the hurricane hit Condoleeza Rice's home state of Louisiana. (Actually, she's from Alabama; but why let facts cloud the issue!) I found this opinion curious; the sobbing woman I watched on CNN who lost her daughter and was searching for her missing sons didn’t strike me as a supporter of the disengagement. An of course, radical Islam couldn’t miss this opportunity to dump on America either. A high-ranking Kuwaiti official, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, who is director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center, said: “It is almost certain that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American empire.” This confident explanation was issued by Al-Mlaifi a day after hundreds of Muslims in a religious procession were stampeded to death in Iraq.

These finger pointing explanations are not only deeply flawed, they are also deeply insensitive. The Talmud says that anyone who gives a grieving person an “interpretation” explaining that the victim’s sins caused his own suffering has violated the prohibition of verbal abuse. Many Jewish philosophers wrestle with the question of theodicy (why bad things happen to good people), and some explanations consider man’s culpability. However, what is misunderstood is that their explorations are meant to defend God’s goodness, not to torment victims of suffering by blaming them for the crime.

In fact, even the entire project of defending God’s goodness is suspect. First of all, God does not need a defense attorney; He can make a case for himself. And God continues to make a case for himself in every sunrise, every leaf, every breath we take. Furthermore, any explanation we can offer will seem meaningless to sufferers. Those who are suffering feel their pain on a personal, existential level, and fancy, abstract explanations will in no way alleviate their pain.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik offers a very different view of a Jewish response to suffering. He says the “why” question, why bad things happen to good people, is unfathomable. It’s like trying to appreciate the beauty of a tapestry from the reverse side; you simply cannot make out an intelligible design. Any exploration of the “why” question is simply a dead end. Even worse, any answer offered will imply that we should passively accept our fate and assume that God did everything for the best. Soloveitchik points out that on the contrary, Judaism actually refuses to make peace with death and tragedy. When someone dies, Halacha requires that we mourn bitterly and tear our clothes. This is because Judaism demands that we be enraged by tragedy.

To Solovietchik, the real question that has to be asked is the “how” question: How do I respond to tragedy? We do not know why the world contains unexplained evil; however, we can endeavor to make the world a better place. Our obligation in the face of a catastrophe is to act: to comfort and aid those who have suffered, and to use human ingenuity to prevent future catastrophes. The only Jewish response to tragedy is tikkun olam, rebuilding the world.

The tikkun olam response to this tragedy is to join hands rather than point fingers. The most important lesson of any large scale disaster is the commonality of all human beings; we have all have the same vulnerabilities and the same aspirations. Most importantly, we are all created in the same image of God. It is up to us to learn how to live together as brothers and sisters, and help each other with their burdens.

I am hopeful that besides the noisy figerpointers, most people will respond properly to this catastrophe. In the past, I have witnessed how disasters have the unique ability to unite anyone, even antagonists, in a common cause. Last January, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists gathered together in my Montreal synagogue for a service on behalf of the victims of the Asian tsunami. Representatives of the warring Sinhalese and Tamil communities both attended, and a representative of the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, thanked the Jewish community for their efforts on behalf of the disaster victims. People who normally do not talk to each other joined together in common cause. And just today, students at Montreal’s Hebrew Academy, moved by the news reports they have heard, have began mobilizing fundraising and letter writing campaigns for people they have never met, the victims of Katrina.

I am too uncomfortable to issue prophetic statements. But if I have to guess what God wants in the wake of Katrina, it is a recognition that every human being shares God’s image, and that every person, whether they live in Indonesia or New Orleans or Kuwait or Israel, should learn how to join hands rather than point fingers.


here's a link to it in JPost:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1125831261300&p=1006953079865

Rosh Hashanah: Rage Against the Status Quo

Right now, even as you read this article, you are asleep. You are not unique; most of us are lulled to sleep by a constant barrage of daily drudgery. We become thoughtless creatures of habit and allow the status quo to muffle our aspirations. Even idealists can lose focus, and become fixated on chasing mindless trivialities. We need to wake up.

According to Maimonides, the shofar’s call on Rosh Hashanah is a sacred alarm clock, a call to stop slipping into the status quo. The shofar wakes us up, and demands that we reexamine our routines. It reminds us to battle against the status quo.

Considering how stifling the status quo can be, it’s no surprise that greatness is found in those who can break away from their past. Jewish literature is filled with examples of great men who defy the status quo. Abraham walks away from his country, his birthplace, and his family’s home, in order to follow his destiny. His journey leads him to become the father of the Jewish people. Ruth, a Moabite woman, leaves home out of love and loyalty to her mother in law Naomi. Her grace and kindness find her a new home among the Jewish people, and her story is included in the Bible as the paradigm of true compassion. Rabbi Akiva, an ignorant, middle aged farmer, decides that with enough diligence, even he can succeed at Torah studies. This bold decision will lead him to become the greatest Rabbi of his time. These heroes achieve greatness by breaking away from the status quo.

Most of us will not become heroes like Abraham or Ruth or Akiva. But, we need not live in unending mediocrity. We too can rise up against the status quo.

Any new challenge that you undertake is a rebellion against status quo. Any time you stand up for your ideals is a rebellion against the status quo. Any time you give more, volunteer more, care more, you have rebelled against the status quo. Any personal transformation is a rebellion against the status quo.

I know someone who quit smoking. Why? Because one day, observing his kids playing, he realized he probably wouldn’t have the same joy watching his grandchildren playing. He immediately quit cold turkey. Something woke him up, and he could no longer stomach the status quo.

Dylan Thomas, in his poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, insists that we refuse to accept the infirmities of old age, and demands that we “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Truth be told, all of us, (of any age), begin to decline the moment we become prisoners of habit. Too many of us fail to consider new perspectives and new beginnings. That is why, as the shofar sounds, we must wake up, and rage against the status quo.

Extreme Makeover, Soul Edition

I haven’t had plastic surgery…yet. I have managed to hold out, despite a barrage of television shows promising salvation by the scalpel.

Actually, I have no difficulty with plastic surgery. An improved physical appearance can improve one’s job prospects and possibility of marriage. Cosmetic surgery is simply another example of human ingenuity enhancing quality of life.

However, society’s fascination with plastic surgery is exaggerated. The aforementioned TV programs breathlessly tout plastic surgery as a vehicle for personal redemption. Attractiveness is seen as being next to Godliness. Aspirations of the soul, such as identity and meaning, are now accomplished with liposuction. Unfortunately, this is absurd: plastic surgery is by definition skin deep.

Now I’m not naïve: I realize you won’t see a TV show that features Rabbis performing advanced Torah implants or prayer lifts or charity peels anytime soon. But that’s a shame, because our souls can get just as torn and worn as our bodies. Harsh years in the dog eat dog workplace, coupled with excess consumption, can erode the most spirited youthful idealism. Cynicism and the pursuit of comfort can transform former idealists into sarcastic, brandy sipping, golf playing sellouts.

So how do former idealists get their souls back? With an extreme makeover for the soul.

Soul makeovers come in many different varieties. Sometimes you need to go on the road. Comfortable environments can lead to spiritual decay; you need to leave home in order to challenge your soul again. Find an appropriate spiritual retreat, and break away from the daily grind.

Sometimes you need to just do it. We all say we want to spend more time with family, volunteer more, and study more. But, on any given night, it’s too hard because we’re tired/had a rough day at work/need to take care of some errands. And all of our great goals end up sliding away, one night at a time. So just do it!

Sometimes, you need to go home. There is an amazing amount of spiritual insight in our own backyard. Yet we ignore own treasures, simply to search for fool’s gold. It is at times astonishing to me that some Jews, with the oldest and most influential religious tradition in the world, still run after every bizarre new fad. The best place for a soul makeover is right at home.

A member of our synagogue, Larry, traveled with me on a trip to Israel. It was his first visit, and he was overwhelmed by what he experienced. The history, religion and culture transformed his entire outlook on life. At the end of the trip, he said:

“Before coming to Israel, I was of the Jewish faith. Now, I’ve become a Jew” .

This is what a spiritual makeover is all about. You just do it, break away from the old grind, and return home. At the end, you finish with your life transformed, and even.....ith a more beautiful soul.

Excellence is not Perfect

Excellence is the MBA’s mantra. It is the adjective most frequently used in describing thriving businesses. A search of Amazon.com’s website will show that no less than 4,693 books, most of them business related, have the word excellence in their title. This is quite understandable, because excellence in business can make the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

You don’t have to be a businessman to understand the importance of excellence. Everybody wants to be excellent at something. One of the great themes of both philosophy and theology is that true happiness is found only in the excellence of the soul. Indeed, the Bible makes clear that God’s creation of the earth is one of excellence, repeating seven times in the first chapter that the creation "is good" or "very good". Excellence and perfection seem to be the divine blueprint.

Remarkably, perfection fails. The first time a human aspires to what "is good", she eats forbidden fruit. This inauspicious beginning to human history foreshadows a lengthy narrative of human failure. In fact, the aspiration for perfection is often the very thing that leads to failure.

Perfectionist standards can often be destructive. Perfection at work comes with a price. The workaholic may excel at his job, but will not have the time to enjoy the fruits of success. Achieving perfection at home is just as costly. For the Martha Stewart wannabe, entertaining and decorating is a daunting task. Every brioche must have panache; every custard must be a gastronomic masterpiece. Unfortunately, the culinary tour de force arrives with high blood pressure and a nervous breakdown. Ironically, perfection in one realm often brings about imperfection in another realm, as if to remind us that humans were programmed to fail.

Actually, human error is an actuarial fact, an ever present reality of everybody’s lives. One can only trust machines to be perfectly accurate. Any human attempt to replicate the rigid efficiency of machines is bound to be a cold and unhappy fiasco. Aspiring for absolute perfection is both quixotic and frustrating.

Where human excellence is found is in the creative use of failure. Imperfection may be flawed in many ways, but it is the perfect environment for human growth. Indeed, what is most meaningful about life is the daily drama of our struggles with imperfection. Those who can find useful lessons in past failures have found the perfect way to master an imperfect world.

The Midrash states that teshuva, repentance, the religious response to failure and sin, was part of the world’s blueprint. What this suggests is that inadequacy is inevitable, and true human excellence is finding a positive use for failure. Or, to paraphrase the well known cliche about lemons and lemonade, "when life hands you failure, make teshuva".

In life, any hope for perfection is itself imperfect. True excellence is finding a way to transform failure and make spiritual lemonade.

I’ve Seen it All Before, But...

When I began my career as a Rabbi, experience was an issue. At one point, a prominent synagogue in New York refused to consider my application due to inexperience. For years, I have heard the remark "you’re the Rabbi? But you’re so young!". (By the way, I’m finally past that stage, a clear sign of middle age setting in). For a Rabbi, experience and age are assets, enabling him to somewhat resemble the visage of a "true" Rabbi (i.e., someone who looks Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments).

Yet, after nearly 15 years in the rabbinate, having finally conquered the disabilities of youth and inexperience, I have encountered a new problem: too much experience.

I first encountered it at a funeral. An elderly woman had passed away, and I was wrapping up my preparatory meeting with her daughter. As I was leaving, I put on my rabbinic face of earnest concern, and told her in a soothing tone how sorry I was about her loss. Unfortunately, this woman worked as a secretary for a pulpit Rabbi, and had seen this spiel many a time before at her own office. She immediately turned to me and said: "come on Rabbi! You’ve seen this all before, haven’t you?".

It was then I realized I had too much experience.

With experience, the lessons of humiliating mistakes and proud triumphs get seared into your memory and become second nature. Unfortunately, at the same time, experience burns out emotional nerve endings. Whether it’s weddings or funerals or Bar Mitzvas, when you do something over and over again, it’s just another routine. Emotions that flow automatically at wedding and funeral number one are much harder to access at number one hundred or number two hundred. I imagine that even Liz Taylor found it hard to get very excited about her ninth wedding.

It is tempting to replace the lost excitement with a bored cynicism. Having done it all before, seasoned veterans proudly adopt a world weary, casual attitude to life’s peak moments. Getting excited is for neophytes, for people too inexperienced to know better. When you’ve seen it all, life’s just reruns, n’est ce pas?

Frankly, I can’t stand cynicism. To me, cynicism is merely a disguise for emotional impotence. As I searched for a way to remain emotionally engaged in my work, I came across a useful bit of Talmudic wisdom on coping with the dulling nature of routine.

Boredom during prayer during prayer is a common problem. Yes, prayer is a spiritual peak moment when one is in direct contact with the divine. However, constantly praying three times daily can transform pristine prayer into a pure monotony. To prevent this from happening, the Talmud recommends three responses. First, one must always come with an appropriate attitude. Never approach prayer with an attitude of annoyance, muttering to yourself "Oh no; I have to pray again!!". Second, always pray with appropriate words, words of humility and sensitivity. And finally, try to find a new insight to add to each day’s prayers.

This is an exceptional piece of advice. The difference between rote prayers and real prayers is attitude, focus and creativity. The same prayer can continue to inspire, even if you repeat it a thousand times a year.

This Talmudic insight is useful in countering the numbing effects of any repetition. First of all, you have to refuse to treat peak moments casually. A wedding can never be "just another wedding", and a funeral is never something that "threw your schedule off". Never treat another person’s peak moment as your own burden.

In addition, language is key. Even if you’ve been to 500 shiva houses, that doesn’t mean that now it’s simply a place to shmooze, tell jokes, and talk about your golf game. Humble words pave the way for a sincere connection.

And finally, find something new. Often when I am preparing for a funeral, someone describes their mother as a "typical Jewish mother". They even assume their mother’s story is boring, telling me "I’m sure a lot of people say this about their mothers". Yet despite the disclaimer, I search for how this woman was unusual, what part of her biography made her different. We all know how wonderful the ideal Jewish mother can be; but isn’t it nice to hear about the little acts of kindness that made this specific woman unique?

Yes, I’ve seen it all before. Even so, this rerun still matters. As long as each Jewish mother has a different recipe for chicken soup, as long as each young couple has their own "story" about how they met, I pledge to keep my focus, and refuse to allow remarkable peak moments to become a dreary routine.

Choices

We live in a world of choice. Everywhere we turn we are assaulted by a multitude of choices. For the discriminating grocery shopper, an endless array of salad dressings, breakfast cereals and toilet paper awaits. On TV, there are hundreds of cable channels to entertain us. Or try painting your house; you’d be amazed how many shades of white there actually are. Even the banal act of ordering a coffee can become an overwhelming decision. Was that a grande decaf skim latte, or a venti soy chai?

However, these are ersatz choices. Yes, we often expend a great deal of energy on these minor decisions . That’s because we live in a culture of consumerism, surrounded by billions of dollars of advertising designed to convince us that meaningless minutiae matter. And while it’s nice to have the option, in reality it makes no difference at all if you paint your house in “winter white” or “white dove”.

There is a popular belief in free will, based on our own perceptions of freedom of choice. However, many philosophers argue that in reality, there is no free will. To prove this, they note how most people’s lives are extremely predictable, and their actions never stray far from the routine. While we might imagine we have the free will to choose a particular flavor of ice cream, in the end, whether you pick vanilla or chocolate, you will still be the same old person. And for the most part, people don’t change all that much.

Real choices change lives. If there is free will, (and it is a fundamental Jewish belief), it isn’t about petty, meaningless decisions. We encounter free will in the real choices in life: Will I break those old bad habits, or remain mired in mediocrity? Will I transform, or will I remain the same as I was, is, and always will be?

We can make real choices all the time. Dozens of times each day, we decide whether we will transcend the mediocre and act with genuine character. Even small gestures like stopping to shake a hand can be real choices, a small step on the road to personal growth.

Unfortunately, we are so bogged down by a multitude of phony, ersatz choices, that we often overlook the real choices we have to make. We worry about the best; the best handbag, the best watch, the best power tie. What about the best character?

In the documentary 9-11 ,which is about firehouse near Ground Zero, the producers ask one of the firefighters why he chose his career. He answered:

“I wanted to be able to wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror, and say I’m doing something with my life”.

The next time you shop for paint, think about that fireman. And while it’s nice to have a kaleidoscope of colors to choose from, remember that “mocha brown” is not a real choice.

A real choice is when you decide to actually do something with your life.