More on the Evolution of the Conservative Movement

Apparently, this was a conversation that needed opening. My last post bemoaned the lack of energy in the mainstream Conservative synagogue. A number of friends and colleagues have kindly shared this post with a number of discussion lists, and I've read the responses with a great deal of interest. Rather than email each commentator personally, I think it would be more efficient to post here and let the cybersharing begin.

Not surprisingly (we're Jews, after all), there was a plethora of issues raised. Some were upset that I focused on music, that there's more to religion than music (true). Others focused on spirituality, and still others were upset I had invoked Mordecai Kaplan and wondered where Heschel was in all this. I guess the first thing I need to say, then, is that the post was a sermon, not a thesis. It was never my intention to give a multi-session course in the history of the movement, its greatest thinkers, and its theological roots. Further, I don’t pretend to have the wisdom to declare thus and such are the ills to be fixed and like magic, our movement will be revitalized. What is wrong with Conservative Judaism is far too broad a topic to be addressed in one blog, or one thread on a discussion list. Are most of our membership not practicing Conservative Jews? Undoubtedly. Is music the answer? Of course not. Those are simple questions and easy answers.

Since my original remarks came out of a rabbinical convention, and since we Conservative rabbis like to pretend that we are the leaders of our communities, it might be thought that if rabbis design the right kind of service (whatever that may be), people will respond. I did say that we need to be ready to respond to what the people are saying they want, that it’s not a rabbi thing, it’s a Jew in the pew thing. But it’s far more complicated than that.

The responses I received that expressed discomfort with music, clapping, dancing…all that new stuff in the service were not from people who just wanted their grandfather’s synagogue. They were serious people who wanted the spirituality that comes from losing oneself in the tefilah, and music for them gets in the way. Guess what: it often does for me as well. We don’t always necessarily need a niggun. We don’t always necessarily need to sing something. If I have learned anything from my study of spirituality in Jewish worship, it’s that there are many paths to immersion in prayer, and music is only one.

I think it was Carl Jung who posited several opposing personalities – the feeling versus the thinking; the intuitive versus the sensory. There are those who come to God by intellectual pursuits – study, the regular recitation of prayer. There are those who come to God by ecstatic prayer – music and dance. And if we want to go outside the sanctuary, there are those who find God in soup kitchens or in building a sukkah. My frustration isn’t with those whose path is different from mine. Frankly, even when I am leading the tefilot in my synagogue, there are times I would like to stand still and just be, but the exigencies of time push me on to finish the page on behalf of my community. The spirituality of silence is a powerful thing and demands to be sought.

No, my frustration isn’t with those who would prefer to avoid the intrusion of music. My frustration is with those who are not ready to work at all, who come in, put on a tallit, open the book, look to see what page we’re on, and simply pick up where the community is, with no warm up and often no understanding of what they are reading. They are the ones, in the language of the classic joke, who came not to speak to God but to speak to Goldstein. They demand nothing of the synagogue service but complain the service is too long. They are the ones who have directed our communities for a generation by and large, and they are the ones from whom the indie minyanaires are fleeing. I think that independent minyan is less about music and more about experimentation. Leaving the comfort zone of the institutional synagogue and trying on new things, tossing things against a wall and seeing what sticks.

What do I want for our movement? I want our members to want more, to demand more. I want them to line up for adult education – serious text study, Hebrew, the opportunity to confront contemporary issues. I want them to demand to learn how to enter the siddur. There seems to be the misperception that if rabbis only spoke about what Conservative Judaism is, the people will get excited and respond positively. We have. It hasn’t worked. We need more than the ability to articulate a message. We need open ears and willing hearts.

A few weeks ago, we read in Torah that Moses and seventy elders met at the Tent of Meeting, and God came down in a cloud to speak to them. Eldad and Meydad, who had remained in the camp, spoke ecstatically just as Moses and the elders were doing. A boy ran to Moses to alert him, and Joshua urged Moses to restrain them. Moses, however, said, “Would that all the people were prophets!”

Would that all the people wanted a meaningful role in synagogue leadership, to join with their rabbi and cantor to create the kind of community that would facilitate individual growth, and that they then took advantage of the opportunities they had created.. Would that the membership dreamed about a synagogue that was a reflection of the best in the tradition and the best of the future, and then worked to make that dream a reality. Rabbis can’t do it alone. Someone once made the distinction between rabbis and “real Jews” – meaning Jewish professionals versus the Jew in the pew. My dream for the Conservative synagogue of the 21^st century is the evolution of the synagogue into a vibrant, exciting place, where the line between rabbis and real Jews is blurred, where membership means more than a seat for Kol Nidre – it’s identification with a living, growing, changing organism.

The Change Conservative Judaism Needs

What a joy to be back in New Jersey, where I spent eight wonderful years with my community in Colonia. As I look out at the faces in this room, I can truly say that I am home. And I’m delighted to share some reflections on this week’s Rabbinical Assembly international convention, held this year at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan.
The last morning of the convention, I sat in a session on mystical aspects of prayer and found myself actually “getting” the connection between kabalah (which I’ve never pretended to understand) and normative Jewish prayer – and there’s a lot to be learned there. More important, though, was the very fact of a session on kabalah and prayer at the Rabbinical Assembly. Thirty years ago, this would never have been so. Neither would alternative minyanim that featured meditation.
I met with colleagues who, like me, are on the road again, and in this bleak economy we commiserated and worried about our future. Synagogues are merging, associate positions are disappearing, and colleagues with kids in college are scared. New rabbis are being minted – will they have a place to go? New cantors are being invested – are they being prepared for a movement that no longer expects a Presence on the bima, performing for them, but rather a song leader?
History was made this year, as Rabbi Julie Schoenfeld was installed as our organization’s first female executive vice president, and Rabbi Gilah Dror was installed as our first female international president – first woman, first Israeli-born as well.
But I suspect that the issue that most attendees will take away with them – us – is the challenge by Rabbi David Wolpe, the first night of the convention. We need to re-understand, re-invent our movement. We need to be less hazy. We need to be able to put what we believe on a bumper sticker.
I must tell you that most of the speakers that followed him this week expressed discomfort with that notion. And in truth, you can’t summarize anything as complicated as Conservative Judaism in 5 words. That’s not fair to our product. But frankly, I think one of the issues we had with Rabbi Wolpe’s mandate is that in order to sell a product, you need to understand the product. Until we figure out what we stand for, we can’t sell it to the world. We may love it, but until we can define it (and perhaps by defining, limit it), we shouldn’t be worried about a bumper sticker.
Because we really do have a lot of work to do, and it’s not about defining Conservative Judaism. Defining is about what is. Conservative Judaism is about fluidity, adjustment to modernity while remaining true to our Torah roots, and as modernity changes, so must we. What was true about our movement 50 years ago is no longer true. Our synagogues look different. Our leadership looks different. And clearly even our professional conventions look different. Our task is to figure out not what defines us but how we are propelled, how we develop, how we think about change. And for that we need to look to one of our movement’s greats, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.
Kaplan, whose thinking informed generations of Conservative rabbis, is credited with founding the Reconstructionist movement. He saw all of Jewish practice not as commanded by God but as having arisen from the people, and what the people have sanctified remains. Women have lit candles for centuries, so women continue to light candles. Musical instruments were used in the Temple but not in synagogues, but the people have dictated that musical instruments would be nice to have in our services, and so in some congregations, guitars and drums are making appearances. If you look around the movement today, some Conservative congregations still do not include the ritual participation of women. Others are served by women rabbis. Some have instrumental music. Others do not. Some permit pot luck Friday night dinners. Others do not. So indeed, how can we define Conservative Judaism, given the fact that I, as an ordained rabbi and member in good standing of the Rabbinical Assembly, would be refused an aliyah at congregations served by some of my colleagues, similarly educated and similarly affiliated? We used to talk about tradition and change. I don’t think anyone knows what that means any more.
I think worrying about our movement’s definition is less important than imagining how our synagogues will look in 5 years. What will the services look like? And that’s not the job of the rabbi and cantor. That’s the job, in good Reconstructionist practice, of the people. There’s an old bumper sticker that proclaims, “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.” So where are the people leading?
We need only look around at the upsurge in independent minyanim that have sprouted up over the last 40 years, beginning with Havurat Shalom in Massachusetts and spreading across the country. The havurah/indie movement began when our kids graduated from Camp Ramah and USY and Pilgrimage and Solomon Schechter schools and wanted more than our cathedral synagogues were offering, so they started their own sacred spaces. That continues to happen today. I ran into a former student on Thursday, now married, living on the Upper West Side, and attending Hadar, one of the most exciting indie minyanim in the country. But she acknowledges that she and her husband will no doubt leave when they have children and want a more diverse community. I was delighted to see that she was aware that kids deserve to see older people in their minyan, people saying kaddish, the elderly…kids need to be able to look around and see people not like Abba and Ima. Indie minyanim seem to be the undergraduate world for today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. The question is, where will they choose to go for graduate school? To mix metaphors, where will they go when they’re ready to take off their training wheels? That’s the challenge of the Conservative synagogue in the 21st century.
What might these young people want? Certainly, more participation, more empowerment, more ownership of the community. But what else they might want will take us back to convention and the opening night concert. The headliner was Neshama Carlebach, but the real hit of the night was her backup group, the Green Pastures Black Baptist Choir. Holy moly, did they rock the room! If you have ever attended a service at a Black Baptist church, or any Pentecostal church, or invited a choir to your community for an interfaith service, I don’t have to say another word. The music they sang was Carlebach music, but they made it their own, and did they ever do it well.
But here’s what happened. By the end of the second number, there were two people standing and clapping along. One was a Black woman who’d come with the choir. You’re looking at the other one. Not only did I stand because I simply couldn’t stay in my seat, I thought that maybe if one person stood, others would follow. Not so much. Now, by the end of the evening, most of us were standing, clapping, some even dancing around the room. They got us going, but it wasn’t easy. We seemed determined to be an audience. No one bothered mentioning that we were supposed to be part of the performance. Because after all, as someone once observed, when it comes to praising God, it’s not about performer/audience. We’re all performers. God is the audience.
I’ve spent a good deal of time reflecting on my experience at convention, on the resistance of my colleagues to get off their chairs and get into the music, and it’s occurred to me that we Jews just don’t feel comfortable doing this stuff. Back in Temple times, we brought our sacrifices to the priests, the Levites did the music, and we watched. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the hasidim danced while the misnagdim sat in their yeshivas in Vilna and scowled. For the most part, we are not happy moving and clapping and, as our Christian friends would say, letting the Spirit flow through us.
That is a problem. I have a Presbyterian friend who regularly observes that his people are the frozen chosen. I am very fearful that our Conservative community will end up that way as well. The midrash tells us that God created six other worlds before creating this one, and what made this one special is that it includes people – us. Why? Because before this world, God had only the angels, and they praised God daily, but that was their job, and since angels have no free will, of course that’s what they did. And God was bored. So God created people, and I suspect God hasn’t been bored since.
But maybe not. When was the last time you noticed something God did? Like blooming flowers, or a sunset, or your baby? When was the last time you experienced what Heschel called radical amazement? What did you do about it? Say, “That’s so nice”? Feel really good inside?
I think what our communities lack today is real excitement. On Friday nights we sing a psalm that ends yis’m’hu hashamayim v’tageyl ha’aretz. Think about those words. The heavens and the earth will rejoice. What does rejoicing look like? Then think about the melody Conservative congregations use all over the country. Yes, there’s a hand-clap. But sorry, it wouldn’t even wake up the heavens and the earth, much less lead them to rejoice.
We have been raised by generation upon generation of Jewish tradition to be observers, audiences, people who sit back and let others do for us. Our young people will not accept that any more, and when they walk into a room where the music is nice – but only nice – they may sit for the morning, but they won’t be back.
The future of our movement rests more in the change than in the tradition. Those who come from the youth-oriented arms of our movement already take tradition seriously. Those who speak about the mind and those who speak about the soul must come together at the same table. It’s time we stopped accepting what is, as “good enough” and allowed the finger of God to touch our souls, to become truly alive, to be not afraid to stand up and put our hands together when music moves us. It’s not just about the music. It’s about our response to it. Vanessa Ochs, writing in Inventing Jewish Ritual, observes:

When an innovation felt especially uncomfortable to me, the feeling was visceral, almost like disgust, something I couldn’t always think away... But I discovered that I could modulate my response to innovations. I could remind myself that my unfamiliarity was not sufficient to disqualify the potential blessings of a new practice. We have all learned to overcome multiple gut responses to unfamiliarity. Who isn’t terrified on the first day of school? But still we press forward and walk into the classroom. I noticed that ritual practices clearly borrowed from other cultures made me feel especially uncomfortable. I realized I could either choose to resist the practices or I could give them a chance. I could consider the plausibility of their fit and evaluate their spiritual power in light of any ruptures they might impose. I could train myself to notice my hesitancy in the face of a new ritual and contemplate it. Then I could let go: I could watch, wait, and perhaps, eventually, accept.

What Ochs says about new ritual we can say as well about the music of excitement. We deserve to be excited about being Jewish and about coming together on Shabbat to thank God for our many gifts. We deserve it and God deserves it. Let me close with a poem by Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin.

Oblations
Praise Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me.
Curse Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me.
Praise me or curse Me,
And I will know that you love Me.
Sing out My graces, says God.
Raise your fist against Me, and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise, says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God,
If you sit entrenched in I don't give a hang, says God.
If you look at the stars and yawn;
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.

Holy Shekels

Have you ever heard of a holy shekel? Of course you know that “shekel” is the currency of Israel. It was also the currency of ancient Israel, and when the Torah speaks of the donations to be brought to the maintenance of the tabernacle in the desert, it speaks of “shekel hakodesh,” essentially holy shekels. The obvious question comes: what’s a holy shekel?

The 19^th century commentator Menahem Tziyon has an answer. He asks how many shekels we have given to holy purposes. “Your true worth is not the money that you possess,” he writes. “One’s abiding value is only the shekels that he gave to holy purposes, because, about all else, who knows what the future will bring - even whether or not the money will remain yours.”

I wonder how many people today can say they have holy shekels in their wallets, money they have earmarked to holy purposes. Two news items this week make me wonder whether the notion of holy shekel should be revisited, because it has clearly lost its power today.

First, I learned about Homeboy Industries. This is the nation’s largest gang intervention program, run by Father Greg Boyle in Los Angeles. It serves – or served – some twelve thousand clients a year, 8 thousand gang members from 700 different gangs. It offers hope where hope is an alien term. It runs – or ran - five businesses where enemy/ rival gang members worked side by side with each other (Homeboy Bakery, Homegirl Cafe, Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy/Homegirl Merchandise and Homeboy Maintenance). Many thousands of gang members have been trained during two decades of operation. It got its start in Boyle Heights, but now serves all of Los Angeles County. This is a program that our city desperately needs. It is doing amazing work saving young men and women and giving them skills and a place to work. It continues to be a drop-in place for young people looking to leave their gang lives behind them.

And it’s in trouble. The faltering economy has caused funds that support Homeboy Industries to dry up, and last week Father Greg told his staff that if they want to come back tomorrow, they should know it would be strictly as volunteers. The money is gone. The shops that Homeboy runs are still viable – they are even doing well, so Father Greg is hopeful that those businesses will be self-sustaining.

I had heard Father Greg interviewed before, so the news of Homeboy’s imminent demise was terribly distressing. I felt as though I’d lost a friend, as indeed every Angeleno has. But then came the second news item.

Apparently Lisa Marie Presley was upset. She thought there weren’t enough candles and flowers at the crypt where ex husband Michael Jackson was buried. A local fellow heard the distress call and spent several thousand dollars to plant sunflowers, purportedly Jackson’s favorite flower, at the crypt.

Several thousand dollars to plant sunflowers at the burial site of a singer, when young people in danger are losing their way out of the gang life. Something is very wrong here.

Since returning to Los Angeles, I have remarked repeatedly while driving down the 405 that I have never seen so many Beemers and Jags and Bentleys. There is so much wealth in this city. And yet Homeboy Industries is going under. People spend thousands of dollars to plant flowers at the grave of a singer because his ex wife thinks there isn’t enough tribute going on, but kids at risk are losing their life line.

Something is really wrong here.

Los Angeles: How many holy shekels are in your wallet?

All Those Curses Can Really Teach Us Something

This is a difficult pair of parshiyot. If I were to look for readings for a Shabbat that featured young school children, I’d choose any of a half-dozen readings that would yield a really fun conversation with our students. However, we don’t pick and choose our readings. They are when they are, and so we find ourselves tonight considering readings that contain one of the most difficult passages of Torah to read. I might have avoided them because tomorrow morning we’ll be looking at other passages of Torah, but in truth, there is a lot to be learned from the passage dealing with the blessings and curses that are the rewards and punishments intended for Israel depending on whether the Israelites follow the mitzvot God gave them, and by extension, us.
Let’s look at some of the text. If we follow God’s laws, we will have rain at the appropriate time (and by implication just the right amount). Our crops will be plentiful and there will be no hunger. The land will be at peace. God will dwell among us and we will no longer be enslaved. This is a beautiful vision.
But – if we don’t bother paying attention to what God has taught us? There will never be peace in our land. Our skies will be like iron and the earth like copper. We will work hard at trying to grow crops but we will not succeed. We will never know peace and we will be dispersed among the nations, vulnerable to expulsion and prejudice.
Pretty ugly.
Today, most of us no longer believe that droughts and crop failure has to do with punishment from God. Most of us look at the world through the eyes of science and try to figure out how to make the crops grow in dry years, how to feed the world’s hungry when there seems to be no food in some countries and lots of food in others. But I think that if we think about the blessings and curses in Torah not as rewards and punishments but as logical consequences, we might learn something very important.
My teacher, Rabbi Daniel Gordis, taught that all the Torah that we read that warns us about good things happening if we follow God’s laws and bad things happening if we don’t is really very modern. If I tell you to put the milk back in the fridge or it will spoil, and then there will be no cold milk to drink with your Oreos, and then you leave the milk out and it goes sour, is that a punishment? Or just the real consequence of leaving milk out of the fridge too long?
God has given us a beautiful world. God wants us to take care of the world, and if we care for it properly, it will nourish us. If we are careless, we will damage the world and then we will suffer.
I’m thinking particularly about this subject this week because of the oil spill that’s spreading over the Gulf of Mexico. I’m looking at the fragile eco-system in the delta of the Mississippi in Louisiana. And I’m remembering the catastrophic oil spill in Alaska 21 years ago when the Exxon Valdez split apart. And I’m reacting with horror when I learn that the oil from that spill is still there, on the beaches of Prince William Sound. In that event, a record-breaker until now, thousands of animals died immediately; the best estimates include 100,000 to as many as 250,000 seabirds, nearly 3000 sea otters, a dozen river otters, 300 harbor seals, nearly 250 bald eagles, and 22 orcas, as well as the destruction of billions of salmon and herring eggs. Some scientists estimate that some shoreline Arctic habitats may take up to 30 years to recover.
And now it’s happening again. When people believe they can do whatever they want in order to have something they believe they must have, when we look at the world as a kind of toy store where we can just go in and pick what we want and never have to worry about the consequences, when we think we can take from the earth without thinking of it as theft, we get into trouble. And the world gets into trouble.
There’s a beautiful midrash in which God and Adam are looking around at Eden and marveling at how beautiful it is. God cautions Adam: “I have made many worlds before this one, but in this one I have placed you to tend it. Take care not to destroy it, because if you do, I will not make another.”
Talmidim, the world is in our hands. We have an obligation to take care of it, not to abuse it. We have an obligation to look at the world as though we are only a part of it, not better than it. When we forget that, we get into trouble, and birds and fish die and sand and rocks remain covered with oil for years and years.
The following prayer was written by Rabbi Danielle Upbin and Rabbi David Weizman of Clearwater FL. I’ll be sharing it again tomorrow morning during our Torah service.

"Ribono shel Olam, Master of the Universe, עֹשֶׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ אֶת־הַיָּם וְאֶת־כָּל־אֲשֶׁר־בָּם – Maker of the heavens and earth, the seas and all they contain:

"Grant protection and sheltering peace to the myriads of living creatures who make their watery home in the Gulf of Mexico. Shield them from the slick, suffocating forces of the oil geyser. Guard every turtle and every fish, every crawling creature and every swimming creature. Protect each and every organism from microbe to mammal. The Psalmist wrote:

מָה־רַבּוּ מַעֲשֶׂיךָ ה' כֻּלָּם בְּחָכְמָה עָשִׂיתָ מָלְאָה הָאָרֶץ קִנְיָנֶךָ: זֶה הַיָּם גָּדוֹל וּרְחַב יָדָיִם, שָׁם רֶמֶשׂ וְאֵין מִסְפָּר חַיּוֹת קְטַנּוֹת עִם־גְּדֹלוֹת

"How varied are Your works, Adonai! In wisdom have You made them all. The earth is filled with Your creatures.Here is the great, vast sea, teeming with numberless living things, large and small. [The Psalmist goes on:] All these creatures look to You.

"May we cease from obscuring Your countenance with our contaminants.

"הַבּוֹרֵא - Creator of the Universe, grant us the ability to act responsibly with Your planet. To till and to tend it, to guard it and guide it, to preserve it and to ensure that there is a healthy earth for us and for the next generation to enjoy. Awake in us the spirit of stewardship, to use our resources wisely, to create sustainable energy solutions, and to love and live deeply in harmony with all of Your creation. We are but sojourners on this planet, as we read in Your Torah: כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ כִּי־גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי - The earth is Mine, says God, and you are but strangers resident with Me.

"Each Shabbat, as we recall Your covenant, may we be strengthed as partners in creation, never to destroy the earth. May we return from our environmental transgressions and set our path straight for a cleaner, clearer and healthier planet."

Seeing and Believing

There’s a famous Yiddish expression that loosely translates to “It’s tough to be a Jew.” You can expand that any way you like, depending on where you are, in history and in geography. For me, one of the toughest things to struggle with (besides the kosher thing and the Shabbat thing, and oh yeah Passover is coming) is the lack of physicality in our worship system. Millennia ago, we had a central place of worship, and serving God meant bringing the right kind of sacrifice. While we didn’t see God, we could watch the priest slaughter the animal, watch the smoke go up from the altar…we had a place to go to and something to see.

Today, not so much. The great gift we gave the world, the notion of one, invisible, unknowable God, sometimes works against us. We have to work harder to get into the prayer mode. We don’t have an image to focus on, or prayer beads to run through our fingers (although tzitzit often do the trick). We have to look inward, find the place inside that is seeking God, turn on our inner ear to hear God’s voice, all the while without having a visual focus. We do it, but it ain’t easy.

And the problem with believing what we can’t see isn’t new. It goes back to the dawn of our people, in the wilderness of Sinai, while Moses was on the mountain communing with God and the Israelites demanded that Aaron build them a god.

They would have been OK (I guess) with Moses there. Moses was the focal point, the place toward which they could turn. Yes, there was a pillar of smoke and fire, but the pillar didn’t talk. They needed their leader, and in his absence they felt rudderless and abandoned. They needed something to look at, so they commissioned a god.

The late Rabbi David S. Lieb of San Pedro, California, wrote about the calf and idolatry, and he expanded his thinking to include sacred space. Rabbi Lieb wrote: “If sacred space is indeed a response to our need to have a focus for our worship, we may need to have that place much closer at hand than the top of Mount Sinai or Friday night services at Temple Sinai. We may need to have sanctuary at home, in the office, in the car, at the all, or wherever…” The challenge, then, is to learn how to carve sacred space wherever you are. How do you do that?

It has been observed that since the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem, and the subsequent wanderings of our people, we have had a portable religion. We pack up our books and our candle sticks and our tallit and tefilin and we move on. No bulky, unwieldy altars to shlep around. That’s the good news, I guess. If we have to be ready to move, we have managed to adapt to that reality of our history. But we still have no on-going focal point. How do we evoke the nearness of God? (I remember hearing an observation a while ago about the phenomenon of the cathedral synagogue – huge, with a ceiling that can barely be seen from the lowest seats. “Remember the shtiebl of the shtetl?” the person asked. “The ceiling was very low. Synagogues couldn’t be built higher than the churches around them. The rooms were small. And you felt God near you. Now you go into huge synagogues that accommodate lots of people, but the ceiling is far away. And so, too, often is the sense of God’s presence.” While I know there are many who find comfort in very large sanctuaries, more people, I would guess, who are looking for an intimate prayer experience, look for a smaller space.)

We need something to focus on. That’s why I’m a big believer in mental photographs. The next time you are somewhere where you are overwhelmed by the presence of God, remember where you are, what’s around you, how the air feels, how the vegetation smells or who the people are near you. Then bring up that photograph next time you have trouble preparing for prayer.

The Rabbis recount that the most pious of them often spent an hour preparing for prayer. How? Recitation of psalms, making a separation between the mundane outside the synagogue and the pursuit of the sacred inside its walls. The psalms were the mantras of our tradition. Today, it’s unreasonable to expect to spend a full hour preparing for a service. But how often do we stop and prepare ourselves? How often do we even set out expectations for the prayer experience beyond “It’s morning, I need to say shaharit”? Prayer isn’t for God, it’s for us. And meaningful prayer takes work. My next blog will consider mantras from the liturgy that can be used either to prepare for prayer or on their own. But for now, let’s consider mental photographs.

On my first visit to Israel, I was privileged to witness the ordination of the first graduates of the Conservative seminary in Israel. The ordination took place at the amphitheater at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. As I sat in the audience, I looked out over the city of Jerusalem, and as the sun set, the buildings turned from gold to pink, and the lights began going on, both in homes and in the sky as the stars came out, and I decided I’d never seen such a beautiful sight in my life. Today, when I turn to face Jerusalem as I begin to pray, if I’m having trouble concentrating, I think, essentially, “Where am I facing? What’s there?” And I see that city begin to glow as the darkness settled around her, and the words come freely.

Do you like to hike? Surf? Are there places you’ve been that have taken your breath away? Bring those memories out. We don’t need a location as long as we can access our memories. It even occurs to me that while I can say some parts of the services by rote, there’s a comfort to holding a siddur.

The Kotzker Rebbe asked once, “Where is God?” and answered “Where we let God in.” If that is true, and if Isaiah’s statement is true, that the whole world is filled with God’s glory, then we don’t need to come to a synagogue to worship. We don’t need to shop around to say shaharit. We come to a synagogue to find community. We can find God anywhere. We just need to know how to look.

Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5770 - Letting Go, Moving On

I’m still relatively new to this community, and there’s still a lot about me that most of you don’t know. But you must know by now that the center of my life are my eight – at last count – grandchildren. Those of you who were here at my installation in August met the two little gems of the Los Angeles branch of the Cohen family – the other six are in Denver. My oldest turned eight in March, and had others warned me, nine years ago, of the feelings of wonder, overwhelming love and a sense of the miraculous I would feel when I held my first grandchild, I would have dismissed them. Me? Silly Old Grandmother with Pictures in Purse? Hardly.

You won’t be surprised when I tell you that I’m shameless. I’ve ceased stopping strangers and flashing my pictures at them, asking them to be honest - have they ever seen such beautiful children? But Fay will tell you that I schlepped my laptop to her desk a couple of weeks ago to show her the picture of the Denver Cohens on my wallpaper. Still shameless.

One of the amazing parts of bubby-hood is the pleasure that can be derived just from watching my little ones blossom. I spent my hours as a young mother running after my own children, and while I know there were moments when I just watched them sleep and wondered at their perfection, I can enjoy far more of those moments watching my little ones explore their world, scamper around the house, and investigate the mysteries of hidden things - boxes, bags, packages, purses. And while the task of exploring containers has now fallen to the boys in the family, I’d like to share with you an incident that happened when my oldest was barely a year old.

Aria has always been an inquisitive little girl. I remember watching her standing at her uncle Scott’s coffee table that Passover, examining each of the pieces in his chess set. While we decided to wait a bit before starting her in on the rudiments of the game, we watched to see what she would do with the pieces. She picked each one up in turn, examined it carefully, and then when she was done, she lowered her hand and tossed it off behind her onto the floor. Then, on to the next piece, that would be examined and tossed behind her to join the first one. Her indulgent uncle watched her with a smile. The carpet was soft and she wasn’t far enough off the floor to do them any damage.

At the risk of sounding like Robert Fulghum, everything we need to know about life we can learn from a toddler.

Very little children have a great deal to learn. Their worlds are so wide, there is so much to experience, that they grasp onto each new discovery, but then set it aside when they are satisfied. They don’t cling to very much. A blanket for sleep, a well-worn stuffed animal or doll...very little becomes irreplaceable to a toddler. If they know they are loved, they feel secure taking on, then discarding, each new experience.

We forget that skill as we grow. We forget what it means to let go, to move on. We cling to things and to experiences long after they can help us.

At this time of year, we are taught that we cannot stand before God on Yom Kippur to seek forgiveness from God if we have failed to seek forgiveness from one another. So it’s not too early to begin thinking today about the forgiveness we need to seek, and also the forgiveness we may be asked to give.

Certainly, there are problems inherent in the t’shuvah process. Recognizing we’ve done something wrong is only half the challenge. While there are those who will always blame someone else or otherwise refuse to take responsibility for their behavior, most of us, deep in our hearts, know when we’ve wronged another person. We think about the words we spoke impulsively, or the words we should have spoken but didn’t. We think about the things we did, or neglected to do. And we are truly sorry. Recognizing the wrong isn’t the problem. The problem is admitting our failing to the person we’ve wronged. It takes a lot of courage, a lot of humility to approach another and say, “I realize I’ve done this or not done that, and I am truly sorry.”

Once a friend or family member has acknowledged the error of their ways, we have an obligation - an obligation – to accept that apology. We are not permitted to hold a grudge. Like a toddler inspecting a knight or a bishop, we are meant to pick up the anger and the hurt and set it aside in the place forgotten toys go.

Of course, all this presumes that our friend or family member not only has the courage to confront their behavior but also acknowledges it to us. Suppose that person is, shall we say, clueless. Suppose the hurt was a sin of omission, or a word carelessly spoken but nonetheless hurtful. Our friend doesn’t know. Our brother or cousin or uncle doesn’t realize. What then?

Some years ago, someone asked me whether a wronged person should call the person who hurt them. My first reaction was to say no, but later I remembered an incident from many years ago.
I had a friend who had hurt me deeply. My friend’s life had become very complicated, and somehow I got lost in the shuffle. It happens. But my friend’s family was relocating to another part of the country, and as the day for the move neared, I realized that we would probably never see one another again, and the last memory I would have would be of great pain. I was angry and I was hurt. But we had both invested a great deal in the friendship, and it felt very funny that our last encounter would have been one so fraught with pain. What to do?

I could have carried that pain around with me. Maybe at some point it would have eased. Time does that. But then I considered the situation from another perspective. I stepped back from the hurt and thought about my place in the tradition. What does it mean to be created in God’s image? What does it mean to be God-like? If we turn to God every year, actually, every day, and say, “We have sinned, please forgive us,” who was I to turn my back on someone who had hurt me?

I called my friend. I pointed out that we would soon be separated by many miles, and as things stood, there was anger and hurt between us and that felt very bad. We needed to talk. And we did. We met and talked for some time before saying farewell. And while we have lost the immediacy we once enjoyed, I have been able to move on without the anger and hurt and pain I might have carried with me all these years. I let them go.

So what should I have told my congregant all those years ago? Yes, we should call the person who has hurt us. Tell them we need to talk. Then tell them they have caused us pain, and watch the ball bounce back into their court. The alternative? We continue to cling to pain, clutching it, dragging it with us, and refusing to put it down.

Then there’s an even more difficult situation. Let’s suppose we can’t speak to the person. Perhaps the person who hurt us has died or otherwise cut off relations with us. Or perhaps we do tell the person they have hurt us, and they simply don’t care. Or claim it’s not really their fault. The pain is compounded and continues to grow.

Let me share the words of that eminent theologian, Dr. Phil, who writes in Life Strategies: “People who carry around the burden of anger invariably say they do so because they could never get emotional closure on the treatment they got at the hands of that other person. They tell me that they hold on to the emotion (anger, disappointment, revenge) because the person who did this to them is not sorry, and may not even admit or understand that he or she has done such terrible things. ‘I can’t forgive, because they aren’t sorry and they don’t deserve or even want my forgiveness.’ If that’s the standard, there are many people in this world who, clearly, will never be entitled to forgiveness.

“Ultimately, and this may be extremely difficult for you to accept, forgiveness of those who have transgressed against you, or those you love, is not about them. It is about you. Forgiveness is about doing whatever it takes to preserve the power to create your own emotional state. It is about being able to say, ‘You cannot hurt me and then control me, even in your absence, by turning my heart cold and changing who I am and what I value. I am the one who makes those choices. You cannot choose for me how I feel, and I will not give you that power.’”

Put another way, my colleague Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the story of preaching just this kind of sermon one Rosh Hashanah, urging people to forgive those who have hurt them. Did he really mean forgive? Did he mean we should say that what was done to us was OK, understandable, forgivable? Of course not. What he meant was to put the hurt behind us. In the sense of forgiving a loan, we set the debt aside and move on. The story goes that after the sermon, a congregant came to him, furious. She had gone through a particularly difficult divorce some 10 years earlier. The rabbi knew how difficult things had been for her. She demanded to know how she could possibly forgive her former husband for all he had done to her. “You missed my point,” Rabbi Kushner told his congregant. ”It’s been 10 years. Your husband has moved on. He doesn’t even live in the same state. He has a new life. You’re holding onto your anger like a hot coal, and all you have to show for the past 10 years is a burnt hand.”

Then there is the story of Cheree Johnson. She’s a woman who was infected with HIV by her husband and undoubtedly had so many kinds of angry in her heart. But how did she resolve her anger? “Forgiveness is letting go of all hopes of ever changing the past.” No burnt hand. No pain locked in her heart. The past will not change, but how we expend our energy, in anger or in surviving, is our choice.

How many of us are holding on to anger or hurt or deep pain? How many of us have vowed never to forgive? And who is being punished?

There is an even more troubling aspect to our inability to forgive others. How can we stand before the throne of heaven and ask forgiveness for all we have done or failed to do in the year just passed if we are unable to forgive others? I have often told my children, when they become frustrated by the behavior of others, that the only person whose behavior we can control is our own. And the corollary is that the only contrition we are responsible for is our own.

It’s about letting go, putting away the hurt, the anger, the feelings which have ironically become too familiar to dispel. Perhaps the metaphor should be not the setting aside of toys but the cleaning out of a closet. Take the clothes that are only taking up space, pack them up, and send them on, to the trash or the recycle bins. Take the anger and the pain and send it on, put it in a box and throw it away.

Has someone called to ask your forgiveness? Has someone refused to acknowledge their culpability? Has someone left your life with unresolved issues? What would God expect of you? Would God expect you to be less forgiving than God?

We are often told that children are closer to God. Perhaps in their ability to pick up new things, examine them, and then set them aside, children mimic the God-like ability to examine the human heart, recognize the flaws, then focus on the potential for good.

What are you holding on to? Isn’t it time to let it fall onto the carpet?

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5770 - The Holy Society

If I were to ask you what Torah is all about, you might answer in one of a number of ways. It’s about the beginnings of the Jewish people, you might say. Or it’s a book of laws and obligations. You might even say it’s about God and God’s relationship to us as a people.

I would argue that the Torah is a blueprint for a society that God wants us to build here on earth, a holy society that is characterized by a number of features. As we move through our study of Torah in the weeks and months to come, I will try to direct your attention to the elements of the readings that provide us clues as to what the holy society would look like.
It will not surprise you, I don’t think, to learn that the Holy Society envisioned by Torah is a society that cares for its most vulnerable. “Care for the ger, yatom, v’almanah, the stranger, the orphan and the widow” is a leitmotif that runs through four of the five books of Torah. In modern parlance, we have learned that a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable: variously, its children, its aged, its poor. That standard of judgment is found first in our own sacred text, and it is a standard that continues to be valid as we consider the world in which we live. How do we know when a society is functioning? When everyone is safe, not just our own family or our own neighborhood, but everyone. When there are no tent cities springing up in Central Park when it rains, when there are no Dumpster divers behind the restaurants on La Cienega Boulevard, when everyone’s children, even those who look nothing like ours, are cared for and protected. We don’t have to be reminded to care for those we love. Those who live miles from us, or just behind the wall next door but whose names we do not know – they also deserve our concern and our energy. Remember, says Moses repeatedly, remember how it felt to be a stranger, an unknown, a member of a shadow people in Egypt.

We Jews have gotten the reputation in this country of always being in the liberal camp politically. I don’t think we ever thought about liberal versus conservative when we thought about our voting options. Rather, we thought about what it means to speak out for those without a voice, what it means in America to care for the stranger, the widow and the orphan. I would like to think it was not a political or a social or an economic choice as much as it was a religious choice. I would like to think that.

The danger of having arrived in America – having Arrived – is that we take on the values of the society in which we live, and sometimes that means leaving Jewish values behind. Sometimes we worry so much about what we have accumulated or celebrate how far we as a people have come in this country that we begin to take off the Jewish cloak and put on the American one.

Sometimes that’s not a terrible thing, but when it comes to our concern for the vulnerable of this country, it can be a very bad thing. When we stop worrying about the stranger and the widow and the orphan, we lose the lesson God intended us to learn in our enslavement. Our time in Egypt wasn’t just so that we might have a wonderful meal every year in the spring. Our time in Egypt was meant to sensitize us to others who are now where we once were. If we have become inured to the suffering around us, we have stopped thinking as Jews. And that would be a very bad thing.

We have had so many opportunities in this country’s history to behave as Jews. We were overrepresented in the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. We are probably still overrepresented in the American Civil Liberties Union, and in many social action organizations around the country. And today we have the opportunity to speak out again, as Jews, on an issue that is as important as any to which we have addressed our energies in the three centuries that we have been in this country.

Many years ago, the Rabbinical Assembly organized its first Washington Lobby Day. We were invited to come to the nation’s capital and engage in a number of meetings, including small meetings with our senators and members of Congress. I’m a gosh-and-golly patriot when it comes to our capital, so I spent a good deal of my time gazing around at the beautiful buildings of the Federal Mall, my jaw hanging down, goose bumps marching up and down my arms. I love this country and I love its capital. Being there to speak to my elected representatives as an American and a Jew was thrilling. I even have a picture somewhere shaking hands with Joe Lieberman, who was my senator during the two years I lived in Connecticut.

During a program on that Lobby Day, I learned that only about 1% of the American people take the time to write to Congress. Now, with a population of 300 million, that’s still a lot of postage stamps, but the percentage was surprising. The Christian right has absolutely no trouble writing to Washington and representing themselves as who they are, quoting scripture and explaining what Jesus would want their representatives to do. It’s their right and there’s nothing wrong with that. But Jews, I learned, write as members of a whole variety of organizations and may be identified as Jews by their last names – maybe –but they’re speaking not as Jews but as feminists or civil rights activists or any number of identities – just not as Jews. If Congress is interested in the religious viewpoint on a given subject, I learned, the only one they hear is the Christian viewpoint and they think that’s the only one out there.

In order to express our views to Congress as Jews, two things have to happen. First, we have to know what Judaism says about a given subject, and then we have to feel comfortable writing to Washington (or Sacramento for that matter) and identifying ourselves as Jews, explaining how our tradition looks at a given issue. In 2009, have we come far enough to dare write to a representative and tell him or her that the Jewish tradition holds a particular position on something? Our parents or grandparents might not have, but I don’t think writing to a representative as Sam Gold or Sarah Greenberg the Jew requires the courage it once did. And so we must come to admit that we would write if we knew what Judaism had to say about the issue. We’re ready to teach. We just have to learn first.

And that brings me back to the issue I want to address this morning, an issue that will define this decade as much as civil right defined the 50s and Viet Nam defined the 60s.

Today, some 45 million Americans have no health care. Another 25 million Americans are underinsured; perhaps they are covered for catastrophic care or hospital stays, but not for the tests that might have caught their conditions early on, or perhaps their deductible is so great that they never qualify for their coverage. This makes a total of approximately 70 million Americans. If America’s population is at around 300 million, that means that nearly one in four Americans cannot get sick or injured. One in four. That’s not a few. That’s not a tiny minority. That’s a quarter of the population of the richest country in the world, at risk because they can’t afford office visits and preventive tests to screen for potentially life threatening diseases.
They are people like some who are in this room, some in your neighborhood, young people, middle aged people, not ready for Social Security people, singles, families…the cross section of the uninsured and underinsured is a cross section of America. It is the greatest tragedy of our time. And yes, Judaism has something to say about it.

I will say at the outset that this will not be a political conversation. There are senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle in Washington who are grappling honestly and sincerely with this issue. There are others who simply won’t move. They don’t get it. They have been convinced, like a fellow I heard quoted on the radio last week, that “there’s nothing wrong with the health care system.” They will tell you that the way not to get into trouble with health care is to exercise and eat right and not smoke. Or they’ll just say, “Don’t be a wuss.”
Tell that to the family of the young woman with lupus, an auto-immune disease, who lost her job and couldn’t then get coverage because of her pre-existing condition. By the time her symptoms became critical and she was admitted through an emergency room, she was beyond hope and died six months later. “Lupus didn’t kill her,” her doctor is quoted as saying, “the health care system did.”

Tell that to the cancer patient – who never smoked – whose benefits ran out before his chemotherapy did.

Tell that to people who eat right and don’t smoke and exercise, but who fall and injure themselves and can’t get rehabilitative surgery and physical therapy. And see the diminishment of their quality of life.

Then there's the young woman, a college student, who developed cancer. She was covered by her parents' insurance because she was a full time student. Her doctor advised her to take a leave of absence to concentrate on her chemotherapy and her beating the cancer, but of course once she was no longer enrolled, she lost her medical coverage. Her mother split her time between caring for her daughter and lobbying in the state assembly to get the insurance laws changed. The good news is that she succeeded. The bad news is that it was too late for her daughter, who died at 22.

Eat right, exercise, and don't smoke. Eat your vegetables and you have nothing to worry about.
This approach is simplistic at best, and at worst, it blames the victim. Frankly, it's downright insulting.

In response, we can teach what Judaism has to say. To begin with, we know that piku’ah nefesh, saving a life, is a foundational principle of Judaism. The most observant Jew will break Shabbat in order to save the life of another. Someone mandated by their doctor to eat regularly is prohibited from fasting on Yom Kippur. We are to live by our mitzvot, not die for them.
We also know that to be created in God’s image means that we have been given a divine soul housed in a body given to us by our Creator, and we have an obligation to keep not only our soul but our body safe from danger. We are not permitted to live in a town without a physician. Accessibility to that physician is implicit – what would be the point of living in a town with a doctor if you can’t afford to see her?

So far, we might look to these principles and agree that we have an obligation to take care of ourselves. But we have insurance. Why should we be worried about others?

First of all, we’re Jews and worrying about others is what we do. We learn from Hillel in Mishna Avot al tifrosh min hatzibur, do not separate yourself from the community. As Americans in the 21st century, our community is beyond the four walls of this synagogue. Our community is Orange County, the state of California, the 50 states of our union. We take this teaching seriously every time we go into a voting booth. Some of us demonstrate that they take this seriously when they run for public office or sit on school boards or community councils. Caring for those without access to adequate health care is part of our obligation to be a part of the greater community.
Some of you may remember one of the final scenes in the film “Schindler’s List,” when Schindler is given a ring as a gift. Inside the ring is a quote from Mishna Sanhedrin: Whoever saves a single Jewish soul is credited as though he saved an entire world. Did you know that an alternative version exists in some volumes? The word Jewish is omitted, and the sentence reads, “Whoever saves a single soul is credited as though he saved an entire world.” Every time we act to save a life, whether as a medical professional, a supporting friend, a blood or organ donor, a mental health professional, a donor to a social service agency, or as someone who speaks up for the uninsured, we are saving not only that individual but those who depend on him or her. Future generations. (Think of the young lupus patient who died before she could marry and have children.) Family at home needing her presence and love. Every act of compassion affects not only the person in need but concentric rings of people in his life.

And then there is the passage in Deuteronomy about the body that is found in a field between two cities. The elders of both cities are called out to examine the body and to determine whether they recognize the person as someone who passed through their city. The presumption, of course, is that the person was in need of food and shelter and was sent on his way without help, to die of starvation or exposure in the field.

The Torah instructs the elders that if neither community recognizes the deceased, the elders of the city closer to where the body is found should bring a heifer to the site and slaughter it – literally break its neck. In ancient times, lacking someone to carry the guilt of the death of the individual, something had to be done to put things right cosmically. The elders are declaring that they do not bear guilt for this person because no one would have passed through their city and not had their basic needs met. Theirs is a city that understands the obligation to care for its strangers, its widows, its orphans.

I have not been here in Mission Viejo long enough to have taken the political pulse of my congregation. I might be preaching to the choir here. If not, I hope that I have been explicit: the Jewish approach to health care is neither Democrat nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative. We have an obligation to care for our bodies and as a community to offer health care to all who seek it. We have an obligation to provide health care whether it’s expensive or not, whether the care is for a month or the rest of the person’s life. It’s one way to identify a holy society – one where the welfare of all is as important as one’s own welfare.

But even if I have not needed to change anyone’s mind today, I still must encourage you to act. There are several bills before Congress, and to quote President Obama’s understatement last week, the details have yet to be worked out. Learn what the options are. Learn what each would mean. Study the issue in a cool, dispassionate way. Do not allow the shouting and demonstrations and hysteria to persuade you one way or the other. Make an informed decision. And then take pen to paper and write to Washington. Tell your representatives and Sens. Boxer and Feinstein what you think. Tell them what our tradition teaches. Teach them about the sanctity of the body and our obligation to care for it and how the lack of affordable health care is a clear impediment to fulfilling that obligation.

How will we recognize a holy society?

Let me quote you a verse of a song we probably all learned in grammar school – America the Beautiful.

O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.

I’ve always been a little put off by the image of alabaster cities – cold, hard, impenetrable. But I do love the notion of “undimmed by human tears.” It’s almost a messianic vision.

The promise of the future, of a holy society, is the promise of a place where no one is hungry, where no one is homeless, where no one is brutalized, where no child cries in fear or hunger or loneliness, where all are respected and cared for. That is the promise of America. And it’s the mandate of Torah.