What the Seder is all about

As I was preparing to spend “this year in Jerusalem,” I came across this great post about what the Pesach Seder is all about.  Enjoy and Chag Pesach Sameach!

Pesach in Israel

“Israel is a personal challenge, a personal religious issue.  It is a call to every on e of us as an individual, a call which one cannot answer vicariously . . . The ultimate meaning of the State of Israel must be seen in terms of the vision of the prophets: the redemption of all . . . The religious duty of the Jew is to participate in the process of continuous redemption, in seeing that justice prevails over power, that awareness of God penetrates human understanding.”–Abraham Joshua Heschel

Chol HaMoed Pesach will be my first time back in Israel since the fall semester of 2005 while I was in my fourth year of rabbinical school.  I miss being in the Land deeply, and yet I don’t know if being there for the Confirmation Class trip will satisfy my longing.  I’ve never been to Israel on a nine day whirlwind tour.  I know that tours of this kind can be powerful and even life transforming for the kids, but I feel inadequate in presenting Israel as I see it, as in the words of Heschel–especially during Pesach.

Chag Purim Sameach

The world is often (usually?) chaos.  Like in the Book of Esther, things often turn out well, but they often do not.  Like in the Megillah, we don’t explicitly see God in the random occurrences that sometimes seem farcical.  But yet, on Purim we celebrate . . . because God is there in the chaos.  God was there in the interactions between Esther and Mordechai, and in the sacrifice that both of them made. 

The world is chaotic, so sometimes we just have to party.

Chag Purim Sameach!

(W)Rapping about Tefillin

This is an amazingly ridiculous video about the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs World Wide Wrap.  Thanks to Jewschool for the link.  I have my own thoughts about Tefillin that I published in HUC’s student journal a few years ago:

T’fillin Shel Yisrael (some ramblings on phylacteries)

            In Memory of Yisroel ben Yekusiel Yitzhok

 

“Can a Reform rabbi wrap t’fillin?” my grandpa asked me while we were eating lunch after my college graduation.  I had just been accepted to HUC.  He never quite got Reform Judaism.

“Sure, a Reform rabbi can wrap t’fillin.  It’s just that most probably don’t,” I answered.

“Do you have a set?”

“No.”

“Then take some of the money I’m going to give you for graduation and buy a set of t’fillin.”

“Sure,” I replied without thinking that much.  Why shouldn’t I have a set of t’fillin?

My grandpa was an active Orthodox Jew.  Not fervent, but active.  Shabbat was Shabbat, but if the Cardinals were playing on Saturday, the TV would be on.  He walked to shul (in his dialect of Yiddish it was pronounced “sheel”) on Shabbat until he got too old, so then he drove and parked in the parking lot of the strip mall next to the synagogue.  To him, Judaism was the traditions like t’fillin.  He could understand that the Torah may have been written by humans, but he did not understand why Reform Jews, for the most part, didn’t wrap t’fillin.

As soon as I returned to my parents’ house in St. Louis for the summer after college graduation and before the HUC year in Israel, I went online to research t’fillin.  I felt I found a good set for a decent price, and I sent away for it.  When they arrived (with a mezuzah scroll thrown in for free) I rushed up to my bedroom to try them out like a child with a new toy.  I thought I knew what I was doing because I downloaded instructions from a website.  T’fillin were harder than I guessed they would be.  Those seven wraps around the arm didn’t seem to want to stay on.  When I thought about it, it was weird.  Only crazies bind themselves in leather.  But, I kept with it and practiced everyday.

I practiced in my room because I was a little embarrassed.  I thought my mom, who had left Orthodoxy, would find out.  It’s as if I was doing something illicit.  She did find out, but she didn’t care.  My room became my own little synagogue where I wrapped t’fillin and practiced the prayers.

In Jerusalem I was worried that I would stand out as a t’fillin wrapper, but it turned out that several of my classmates were in the same club.  I never asked them why they wrapped.  I told myself that I did it because of a challenge from my grandpa.  I soon realized that it wasn’t because my grandpa challenged me to wrap t’fillin, but I wrapped because I loved my grandpa.  I didn’t have to prove my Judaism to him.  If I didn’t wrap t’fillin I could still be a good Jew.  I kept wrapping because this was something that was meaningful to my grandpa.  Who decided for me that t’fillin couldn’t be meaningful for Reform Jews?  Wrapping t’fillin was binding us together.

Yisroel ben Yekusiel Yitzhok (Irvin Alper) died on Hashanah Rabba of 5765.  I asked if I could have his t’fillin.  He told me once that they were his uncle’s before they were his.  He didn’t know who gave them to his uncle.  When I took them out of their bag they smelled like Grandpa Irv’s cologne.  The knot of the t’fillin shel yad was tied in the Hassidic tradition.  Irv wasn’t a Hasid.  Maybe his uncle was? 

I now wear my grandpa’s t’fillin in my room in my apartment.  (I use my internet set at school.)  They now smell more like me.  Someday I will give them to my grandson or granddaughter (something he probably couldn’t fathom).  Maybe the t’fillin will bind them to me, Yekutiel Yitzhak, as they bound me to Yisrael ben Yekusiel Yitzhok.            

MLK and the Talmud

The good people at Hillel have created a great resource to study Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” as a page of Talmud.  Check it out here and let the Torah of his words enlighten your hearts/minds on this weekend.

Before Dr. King spoke on that August day in 1963, Rabbi Joachin Prinz gave this inspirational speech.  Prinz was a refugee of Nazi Germany and a prominent rabbi in Newark, NJ. 

Both these speeches, sadly, still need to be heeded today. 

If you will be at M’kor Shalom this Erev Shabbat, I hope the music inspires you to action.

Shabbat Shalom

A Prayer for Times of War

A Prayer for Times of War

By Rabbi Yehoram Mazor of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism

 

May the Everlasting who blessed our ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah bless all the soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces and all those who are protecting our people. May the Source of Blessing protect them and free them from all trouble and anxiety, and may all they do be blessed. May God send safety and redemption to all our soldiers in captivity.

May the Eternal have mercy on them and bring them from darkness to light and from enslavement to salvation, give them strength and save them. May the Eternal listen to all the prayers of our people.

Merciful God, may Your compassion be with us, and remember Your covenant with Abraham. May you spread the covering of Your peace over the descendants of Ishmael, son of Hagar, and over the descendants of Isaac, son of Sarah, and may it be fulfilled that they shall hammer their swords into spades and their spear into ploughshare. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation and they shall learn war no more. And each shall sit under their vines and their fig trees and none shall disturb them.

And let us say: Amen

Chanukah vs. Hanukkah

It’s always a great mystery.  How do we transliterate this Hebrew word into Latin letters without some one pronouncing the first letter like the “ch” in “church” or the “h” in “hay is for horses”?  And how do we get people to pronounce our Hebrew letter “Het” at the beginning of the word without sounding like they are coughing up phlegm?  Here is a great song about the conundrum by the band the Leevees.

Chag Chanukah Sameach or Hag Hanukkah Sameah to everybody!

“Jewish” Genetics

As we delve into the stories of the brothers whose descendants became the Twelve Tribes of Israel these next few weeks in our Torah portions, I have been thinking a lot about the idea of Jews as a family linked by genetics.  

Many of us have breceived email listing the numbers of Jewish Nobel Prize winners or all of the innovative inventions developed in Israel.  I think that these emails are trying  to imply that Jews are smarter than everyone else, and if you are Jewish, if you have Jewish blood, you therefore are smarter.

When we define being a Jew strictly by genetics, we can easily verge on “racial superiority.”  While it is true that most Jews (or at least Ashkenazi Jews) are related to each other genetically, what make one worthy of being called a “Jew” is one who enters into the Jewish people’s 3000 year old covenant.  (We can argue about what that means later.)  When we define Jewishness with “pure blood” theories, we marginalized the righteous converts of every generation, and this is against Jewish tradition.  King David was a descendant of the convert Ruth. 

Here are some other great blog posts on this topic.  They are from two of my favorite sites South Jerusalem and nextbook.

Shabbat Shalom.

Vayeshev

This Shabbat we are reading the most important parashah in the Torah, Vayeshev (Gen. 37:1-40:23).  This is a pretty lofty statement, I know.  But, think about it.  If Joseph’s brothers did not push him into a pit and sell him into slavery he would not have ended up in Egypt.  He would not have become number two to Pharaoh.  He would not have invited his brothers and father to come dwell with him in Egypt during the famine. 

If Jacob’s children did not go down into Egypt, their decedents would not have been enslaved by a Pharaoh that “did not know Joseph.”  If the Israelites were not enslaved, they would not have been miraculously redeemed from Egypt by God with an outstretched arm.  And, if they were not redeemed by God from Egypt, the children of Israel would never have wandered to Sinai to receive the Torah.  So, you see that our whole sacred story depended on Joseph being pushed into that pit.

Not only is this the most important parashah of all the parshiot in the Torah, this parashah has the most important character in all of the Torah.  This character, though, doesn’t even have a name.  Let me read to you from chapter 37:12-17 in Genesis:

“One time, when his brothers had gone to pasture their father’s flock at Shechem, Israel said to Joseph, ‘Your bothers are pasturing at Shechem.  Come, I will send you to them.’  He answered, ‘I am ready.’  And he said to him, ‘Go and see how your brothers are and how the flocks are faring, and bring me back word’ . . . When [Joseph] reached Shechem, (here comes the most important character) a man came upon him wandering in the fields.  The man asked him, ‘What are you looking for?’  He answered, ‘I am looking for my brothers.  Could you tell me where they are pasturing?’  The man said, ‘They have gone from here, for I heard them said: Let us go to Dotan.’  So Joseph followed his brothers and found them at Dotan.”

So there you have it.  The most important character in the Torah.  Without him inquiring of Joseph about what he was looking for, Joseph would have never found his brothers.  We don’t know his name.  The Torah only calls him in Hebrew, Ish—a man.  Who was he?  A Midrash says that he was a messenger of God sent there to make sure that our people’s holy destiny was played out.

I would like to give a kind of Hassidic interpretation to this.  The man, ha-ish, was God, for every human, every ish, is part of the oneness in the world that is God.  We are told in the first parashah of the Torah, Bereishit, that humans are created in the image of God.  To the mystics, this means that we are all together part of the greater whole that is God.  This is written about beautifully in a poem by Abraham Joshua Heschel.  The poem in Yiddish is called “Ich und Du,” “I and You.”  It is part of a collection that he wrote in his youth in Warsaw called “HaShem M’forash: Mentch.”  “The Ineffable Name of God: Man.”  “Mentch” in Yiddish and German means the same as the non-name of our important character—Ish, a man, a human. 

Here is Morton M. Leifman’s tanslation of Heschel’s poem:

I and You

Transmissions flow from your heart to Mine,

trading, twining my pain with yours.

Am I not–you?  Are you not–I?

 

My nerves are clustered with Yours.

Your dreams have met with mine.

Are we not onie in the bodies of millions?

 

Often I glimpse Myself in everyone’s form, 

hear My own speech–a distant, quiet voice–in people’s

     weeping,

as if under millions of masks My face would lie hidden.

 

I live in Me and in you.

Through your lips goes a word from Me to Me,

from your eyes drips a tear–its source in Me.

 

When a need pains You, alarm me!

When You miss a human bein 

tear open my door!

You live in Yourself, You live in me. 

 

The person we just happen to run into on the street for directions is an image of God (or to be radical like Heschel, is God), and those directions, like in the Joseph story, make history.  History is made, and God is encountered, in our everyday interactions.

A Meaning of Chanukah

Trying to find the meaning of Chanukah is impossible.  There are many.  I wrote about a few  in the December issue of “The Source.”   Here is a great new way to see Chanukah in the Forward written by one of my favorite writers of Jewish spirituality, Jay Michaelson. 

Enjoy and Shabbat Shalom.