Thursday, December 30, 2021

In This Moment, Dec. 30: Is Covid finally nearing the end (and other messages of hope); Va-era and Voting

 


In This Moment
A special thank you to all helped in our annual Christmas Eve assistance at local homeless shelters, and a very special thanks to Amy Temple for once again coordinating the effort. Amy reports that TBE provided meals, drinks, gifts, desserts to over 200 people at three different shelters on Christmas Eve. Well over 60 TBE families were involved. Although our efforts were noted in local media, this is for us a pure mitzvah, done not to assist in marketing our brand, but in order to repair the world. That is the spirit behind the many community service and social justice projects that we are involved in, from feeding the hungry and homeless, to welcoming refugees, to combating hate. Why do we do this? As Amy noted, "It is to provide for people in our community that need a hand during difficult times. It is to perform tzedakah. It is to remind ourselves what is important in life and to make sure we keep perspective on things which is not always easy to do in Fairfield County." To all who helped, thank you for setting such a wonderful example and shining a light for us all. Next year, may we be Covid free and ready to resume all our Christmas Eve volunteer activities.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy 2022!
These past few weeks, Covid hasn't been the only thing that has been spiking. Readership of the Shabbat-O-Gram has been too, to record levels. This despite holiday travel and lots of end-of-year email solicitations filling our in-boxes. For me this means that people are hungry for hopeful and meaningful messages, and they're looking to connect. The work of a congregation like ours is more relevant than ever.

Once again, our Shabbat evening and morning services will both be on Zoom only. Find the link in our Shabbat Announcements. In honor of New Years Eve, come aboard with something festive - an outfit, balloons, or a background showing New Years Eve (or Day) somewhere in the world. Or how about bringing your New Year's prayers for the world, or sharing your resolutions. I know that many will have to forego their planned celebrations, so let's celebrate together at services. Rabbi Ginsburg will deliver the d'var Torah on Shabbat morning and Leo Mahler will join me as guest musician on Friday night.

As we head into January, we're going to constantly revisit Covid protocols, but for the next couple of weeks at least, services will continue to be exclusively online.

A reminder that due to the spread of the Omicron variant, community clergy will no longer be able to visit congregants at Stamford Hospital until this surge is under control. If you would like one of the chaplains to visit, please contact the main hospital phone number at 203-276-1000 and ask to speak to the on call chaplain.  Please also contact me at rabbi@tbe.org so that I might call patients and include them in our daily healing prayers. No one should be going through illness alone.

I think we need a new TBE Club, the "Wiped-out-by-Covid-club." Well, we have one - it's called services. We come together to kvetch and kvell every day at 1 (or at 7 PM and 10 AM on Shabbat), but I'm also more than happy to set up a one-on-one conversation (on Zoom or phone for now). Email me at rabbi@tbe.org to schedule.

Is Covid finally nearing the end?
I find the website Israel 21c to provide lots of feel-good news. So now experts are suggesting that Omicron may be Covid's last act before it finally flames out. “Usually, viruses that are very aggressive are not very infectious, and viruses that are very infectious are not very aggressive,” said Tzvika Granot, who heads a developmental biology and cancer research lab at Hebrew University. Signs are indeed pointing in that direction. Meanwhile, Israeli scientists are turning their attention to other things as well, like discovering the mechanism that causes nerve destruction in ALS and in their spare time, growing affordable cultivated steak.


Licorice Pizza's Homage to Jewish Beauty and The Forward's Homage to Cohen's "Hallelujah."

Here are some interesting reads to spice up your New Year's weekend.


  • The Jewish Way to Make New Year's Resolutions" (MyJewishLearning). Ancient Jewish wisdom offers some sage advice for helping us attain our goals. A Jewish life, anchored in the rhythms of the year, can help us set benchmarks and assess our progress. While the Gregorian calendar marks only one new year’s, the Jewish calendar marks four such occasions. The flow of the year is literally built on the tides of renewal.

  • CLJS Update on AbortionThe Commission on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative movement came out with an important statement this week, responding to the grave concerns over the future of abortion rights in America. They state that in Jewish law, "neither viability nor a woman's right to choose is the basis of Jewish law on abortion, although they play a role only indirectly; what matters in Jewish law is the woman's life and health, both physical and mental."



  • The global appeal of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" - The 50th anniversary of this classic song gave rise to a moving tribute on CBS's Sunday Morning. The composer (not John Denver) comes from from Massachusetts, not West Virginia, but the message about yearning for home is universal, and the song's impact has been global. West Virginia Univ. asst. professor Sarah Morris explains, "One of the things that I've been thinking about is a Welsh concept called hiraeth – this deep longing for someplace that you can't quite name, that's home but maybe more. It's maybe a place that you've never been, or the home that you've only dreamed of. It's this deep pull toward place." What Jew cannot relate to that? It's something to think about as we make a hasty (though partial) retreat back into our homes for safety or to quarantine or recover from Covid. But can we go home again? Thomas Wolfe didn't think so, when he wrote: You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of ‘the artist’ and the all-sufficiency of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love,’ back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

I don't know whether or not we can go home again, but either way, we can never stop yearning for it.


  • Check out "How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses." According to the piece, Cohen had second thoughts about the song’s biblical references, But for all of his tinkering, he ended his live versions like this: “Even though it all went wrong/I’ll stand before the lord of song/with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” “It’s a rather joyous song,” Cohen said, and, he argued often, a secular one, the article asserts. He wanted to push the words of praise back to Earth, “to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion.” But in his final interview, with David Remnick of the New Yorker in 2016, at age 81 and a few months from his death, his comments had everything to do with religion:

“One of the great themes of Kabbalistic thought is the thrust of Jewish activity, is the repair of God,” Cohen said. “God, in creating the world, dispersed itself. The creation is a catastrophe. There are pieces of him or her or it that are everywhere. And the specific task of the Jew is to repair the face of God. The prayers are to remind God that it was once a harmonious unity.” But now it is not. God is broken; Creation is broken; humanity is broken. There's so much to fix. And that's why this song resonates everywhere. The Forward article contains a number of versions. For Jews (Including this lovely Hebrew version sung by Israeli soldiers), Christians and green ogres, secular and religious alike.

This song is now recited at countless memorial services AND weddings - and bar mitzvahs too. Oh yes, and the occasional Lecha Dodi on Friday nights. It's everywhere, and that is itself a statement of the ultimate Unity that we we seek to forge. A world where weddings and funerals are two sides of the same experience, where broken appearances mask a deep rooted healing. The healing is happening; it just can't be seen.

This shattered song makes us all feel less broken.
This is what voter suppression looks like
Check out this little quiz on the left. It's based on this week's Torah portion of Va-era, which picks up the Exodus narrative from last week's portion. Now. imagine that TBE wants to be sure that you are up to the task of full TBE citizenship before granting you the right to vote. In order to pass - and vote - you have to get ALL of these questions correct. Tell you what - I'm going to give you a huge advantage by making this an open-book test. You can find the portion hereNow, click on the questions to the left to see them more clearly - or click here. Remember, you need to get them all correct. And you have ten minutes to do it. Once you've finished that, check the rest of the pdf to find actual literacy tests given during the Jim Crow era, and see if you would have been able to qualify to vote back then, depending, of course, on your pigmentation. These tests aren't just difficult, they are impossible.

With each question from these actual tests, it becomes clearer and clearer just how cynical and diabolical these voter suppression tactics were. They are no less diabolical now. Click here to find 61 current examples of voter suppression. And the enemies of democracy have gotten more bold since this list was compiled. Here is a recent summary, compiled by the ACLU; and here's the Brennan Center for Justice's roundup of new voter suppression laws that have been enacted or are in the works.

I mentioned last week that I proudly signed on to a letter endorsed by 800 faith leaders asking the political leadership to prioritize voting rights this coming year. "Faith has always powered civil rights movements, from the 1960s to today," Arndrea Waters King said in a statement from Deliver for Voting Rights about the letter. "Now — as always — the faith community is standing up and making it clear: We simply will not stop until voting rights become a reality,” she added. See the faith leaders' letter here (signatures are alphabetical by first name).

The fact that we have slid back to Jim Crow-like tactics is outrageous enough. That these repressive initiatives are being fueled by a Big Lie compounds the sin. Those who cherish our fragile democracy will need to roll up our sleeves as we enter 2022. There is much work ahead of us.

As for the Va-era literacy test, you can find the answers here. If you got them all correct, Mazal Tov! Get ready for BoBeshallach and Yitro, coming soon to a boarded up polling station near you.

Two Songs of Hope
Remember how much we looked forward to turning the page from 2020? As we end 2021, the year that was supposed to be better than 2020 - we're saying the same thing. "Good Riddance Day" was marked this week. But rather than harping on the negative, let's end on a note of hope. Here's David Broza's hit Yihye Tov ("It Will Be Good"), written during the hopeful days of Anwar Sadat and Camp David; it's one of the classic Hebrew songs of all time. And next to it is Amanda Gorman's brand new poem, New Day's Lyric, just released yesterday and uploaded to YouTube only a few hours ago - and just in the nick of time. Read the one while listening to the other; and then reverse them. You'll be doubly vaccinated, and boosted, with hope.
David Broza - YiHye Tov (Things will Get Better) live City Winery, NYC דייויד ברוזה - יהיה טוב
It will be better (יהיה טוב)

I look out of the window
and it makes me very sad,
spring has left
who knows when it will return.
the clown has become a king
the prophet has become a clown
and I have forgotten the way
but I am still here
 
And it will be better
it will be better, yes
though I break down sometimes
but tonight
oh, tonight,
I will stay with you.
 
Children wear wings
and fly off to the army
and after two years
they return without an answer.
People live under stress
looking for a reason to breathe
and between hatred and murder
they talk about peace.
 
And all will be better...
 
Up there in the sky
clouds are learning how to fly
and I look up
and see a hijacked airplane.
 
The government and the generals
divide the land,
into "theirs" and "ours"
when will we see the end?
Here comes the prince of Egypt
oh how I rejoiced for him
there are pyramids in (our) eyes
and peace in his pipe
and we said let's complete (it)
and we'll live as brothers
and he then said (let's) advance,
just go out from the territories.
 
And all will be better...
 
I look out of my window
to see if all this is real
I look out of my window and muttered my prayer
more advocacy for wolf and lamb
the leopard shall lay down with the goat
But in the meantime you keep
by the palm of your hand
 
And all will be better...
 
I look out of my window
maybe a new day will come

Amanda Gorman - New Day's Lyrics. A Spoken Word Poem
“New Day’s Lyric”

May this be the day
We come together.
Mourning, we come to mend,
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered, we come to better.
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.

This hope is our door, our portal.
Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it,
To leave the known and take the first steps.
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.

What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,
Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,
Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;
Those moments we missed
Are now these moments we make,
The moments we meet,
And our hearts, once all together beaten,
Now all together beat.

Come, look up with kindness yet,
For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.

We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric,
In our hearts, we hear it:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
Be bold, sang Time this year,
Be bold, sang Time,
For when you honor yesterday,
Tomorrow ye will find.
Know what we’ve fought
Need not be forgot nor for none.
It defines us, binds us as one,
Come over, join this day just begun.
For wherever we come together,
We will forever overcome.
Have a Shabbat Shalom, and a Happy, Healthy and Hopeful New Year.

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman
Temple Beth El
350 Roxbury Road
Stamford, Connecticut 06902
203-322-6901 | www.tbe.org
  
A Conservative, Inclusive, Spiritual Community

Thursday, December 23, 2021

In This Moment: Dec 23: Reasons to be Hopeful. Really. Moses, Jesus, and Frodo; Handeling the Messiah; Shabbatica Exotica

 


In This Moment
A special thank you to all who are helping in our annual Christmas Eve assistance at local homeless shelters. Above, a screen shot from the Homeless Persons Memorial Interfaith program, which we hosted on Tuesday. See the video on our website. And while you are on our archived livestream page, you can watch last Friday night's service, which included a stirring presentation by a young Palestinian student who is working with Jerusalem PeaceBuilders. You can also click here for an audio recording of the service. Listen for the story of how he baked hallah for his family in Gaza!


Shabbat Shalom!
For the next two weeks, Friday evening services will be on Zoom only. Find the link in our Shabbat Announcements. Rather than wallowing in our current Omicron spike or the fact that all the kosher Chinese restaurants are closed for the Sabbath, we're going to make this a Shabbatica Exotica! Let's see who can sign in from the most exotic location! If it's a real place, station your laptop near a window so we can see (not that we wouldn't believe you)! Or you could bring us on a Zoom journey with an exotic virtual background. Either way, we all could use an escape. Dress is casual, and ugly sweaters are welcome. Click here to see an album of the remote virtual locations I've Zoomed from over the past two years, Oh, the places we've (not) been!

Still, reality bites, and I've been informed just this morning that due to the spread of the Omicron variant, community clergy will no longer be able to visit congregants at Stamford Hospital until this surge is under control. If you would like one of the chaplains to visit, please contact the main hospital phone number at 203-276-1000 and ask to speak to the on call chaplain.  Please also contact me at rabbi@tbe.org so that I might call patients and include them in our daily healing prayers. No one should be going through illness alone.

Moses, Jesus...and Frodo

This week presents an interesting confluence. We begin the book of Exodus and the story of Moses, arguably Judaism's greatest hero. While often downplayed in our tradition (he's barely mentioned in the Passover Haggadah, for instance), Moses plays a dominant role in the last four books of the Torah, also known as the Five Books of You-Know-Who. Yet precious little is revealed about him. The first two thirds of his life are covered in a single chapter, in this week's portion of Shemot. The midrash fills in the blanks, however, and there's a lot to say about this hero and his journey.
In many ways, Moses's life trajectory matches other epic heroes of ancient and modern lore, like Jesus, another key figure for many this weekend, and, since the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy celebrated its 20th anniversary this week, let's add Frodo to the mix. Oh yes, and Harry Potter is having a 20th anniversary too.

All of them fit neatly into Joseph Campbell's archetypal hero narrative. We'll discuss this with a special focus on Moses on Shabbat morning. Click on the Parsha Packet to the right to check some ancient and modern sources, including Campbell's concepts. And click here to look at a collection of traditional midrashic stories about Moses, reprinted from Louis Ginzberg's classic collection, which now appears in its entirety online, "Legends of the Jews." It's fascinating to see the stories that never made it into the Torah, pages and pages of them. Despite a concerted effort to downplay his role, Moses never ceases to excite the Jewish imagination. Is he our Ulysses? Our Luke Skywalker? Or simply a little unlikely hero from the Shire, seeking his ring?

See below a photo from my 2013 visit to Hobbiton, New Zealand

Hallelujah! A Jewish Guide to the Messiah!
If you find the topic of the messiah and messianism too hot to Handel at this time of year, fear not! Simply download my comprehensive guide to all things Jewishly messianianic. I originally prepared it for a day-long Advent retreat I led for Christian clergy a few years ago, one of the most fascinating experiences in interfaith dialogue that I've ever experienced. And incidentally, aside from his famed "Messiah," Handel also wrote oratorios about Queen EstherDeborah and Judas Maccabeuswhich, as you can see here, is perfect for Jewish choirs and even has its own Hallelujah chorus.

Reasons to Be Hopeful. Really.

Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.

Omicron threw us all for a loop this week. It become the most dominant variant so speedily, and with so many breakthrough infections, which shut down Broadway shows and SNL in a blink. Everyone had to recalculate vacation plans and testing kits were hard to come by. But by week's end there was reason to believe that this flash fire of a variant might be more of a flash in the pan, if initial indications out of South Africa prove true.

But as if Omicron wasn't enough, there were plenty of other news stories to jar us this past week. The one about the third graders in Washington DC forced to reenact the Holocaust really took the cake for me. The more I read, the more I thought that last week's SNL hadn't been cancelled after all. The story seemed like pure parody - warped parody at that. How is it possible in 2021 for third graders - third graders?? - to be instructed to pretend they are on a train to a death camp, to portray Hitler, to imagine themselves in a gas chamber? (click on the article below to expand it)
It really hasn't been a great week, to say the least. So let's cultivate hope, and there are so many reasons for hope right now. So many. All we have to do is look for them, and we don't have to look far.

  • The ADL, whose very existence is all about alarming us, does just that by presenting its Top Ten Heartbreaking Moments of Hate for 2021 (guess what's #1, and on what date in January it occurred). And for good reason, they dubbed last weekend a "Weekend of Hate." But right on the front page of their website, the ADL also presents 2021's Top Ten Moments of Inspiration and Hope. And there were plenty of big, inspirational moments to choose from in 2021: A $26 million verdict against the white supremacists responsible for Charlottesville; the launch of a $1.1 billion foundation to help prevent Anti-Asian hate crimes; and meaningful legal victories against racially motivated violence – just to name a few.

  • Read Yair Rosenberg's profile of Israel's Prime Minister in waiting, Yair Lapid. No matter what your political views, you'll come away hopeful, cheering that this year, Israel took a giant leap in the direction of preserving democracy and forging a better society - setting an example to the rest of the word, including the US, as to how it can be done. Lapid shepherded a new government into existence, against all odds, and it was able to stabilize itself by passing a budget, against all odds, and marginalize the extremists who would have been sitting in the cabinet had his gambit not succeeded. Lapid, considered a lightweight for so long, may have saved Israel's democracy - and through the sheer force of his example, may have helped to save ours as well. He frames the struggle perfectly. It's not left vs. right or hawk vs dove, just as here it's not Democrat vs. Republican. It's extremism vs. democracy. The diverse coalition that forms the current Israeli government is designed to get very little done, and that's frustrating for everyone. But in stabilizing the democracy and working toward greater dignity for Israel's Arab minority, (you have to read the article to fully appreciate what he has done to even bring greater equality to Israeli society), Lapid has done more than enough.

  • Meanwhile here in America, I am proud to be putting Jonathan Sacks' definition of hope to work, by being one of over 800 leaders joining Martin Luther King III in a letter to President Biden and the Senate to prioritize voting rights in 2022. See the letterSacks wrote, Hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better. No Jew – knowing what we do of the past, of hatred, bloodshed, persecution in the name of God, suppression of human rights in the name of freedom – can be an optimist. But Jews have never given up hope.
  • A necrology is a counterintuitive place to seek hope, but take a look at the profiles of 18 noteworthy Jews who died in 2021. If ever you wondered whether any person can make a difference, scroll down past Sheldon Adelson and Ed Asner to Flory Jagoda, who wrote “Ocho Kandelikas,” and preserved Sephardic culture while simultaneously adding to it. So many of these lives can only bring us a sense of hope that people can change things for the better.

  • And finally...
Flory Jagoda "Ocho Kandelikas"
On the front page of an Israeli newspaper this week, you can see this photo of a car sinking into a huge sinkhole in the wake of a mega-storm that hit the entire country. So why is this hopeful? Because the caption is just perfect for a country that brings Judaism to life every moment of every day. It's a play on words from the first chapter of Genesis, with a nod to the 37th. Two biblical allusions in one headline! Actually, three. The Hebrew states, "Va-yehi Bor!" Which means, "And there was a sinkhole!" But in the Bible, "bor" means "pit," or "cistern," often a place with lots of water (fitting here), and also is a reminder of the pit where Joseph was entrapped by his brothers (also called a "bor"), though presumably not while sitting in his car. And here's the extra play on words. The headline rhymes with "Vayehi Or," "And there was light," the Universe's response to the first divine words uttered in the Torah, "Y'hi Or," "Let there be light!" The wordplay is clearly intentional. Any Israeli with a minimal elementary school education would get the reference immediately. The proof of that is that the newspaper used the headline in the first place. Israelis know their Bible. For everyone but the owner of that car, this classic wordplay is a touchstone linking a meteorological calamity to the our most sacred text and to our sacred language. If ever there was a reason to learn some Hebrew, it's so that we all can be in on this joke, so that we all might literally be speaking the same language, and on the same page.

This wordplay is precisely what can give us hope at a time like this. Yes the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble (another biblical wordplay, via George and Ira Gershwin, on Isaiah 54:10), but despite it all, there are things that are even more enduring than our landscape, which as we can see, is sinking. The eternal message of our sacred scriptures is more lasting, as well as our eternal connection to the land of Israel, to our fellow Jews and peace seekers everywhere, and our unshakable, hope-driven commitment to the future of humanity. For despite it all, God is telling us, by way of an unlucky car sinking in stormy Tel Aviv, our love is here to stay.

Have a Merry Shabbat, a Hopeful New Year...

...and to all a guten nacht! (click to find out about an obscure Jewish Christmas custom)


Rabbi Joshua Hammerman
Temple Beth El
350 Roxbury Road
Stamford, Connecticut 06902
203-322-6901 | www.tbe.org
  
A Conservative, Inclusive, Spiritual Community