Shabbat-O-Gram for December 27

Shabbat-O-Gram

Thank you to our TBE volunteers at Inspirica (here photographed with "Lander Claus") and Pacific House, who brought holiday cheer to so many last Tuesday night. It was, as always, a deeply inspiring and humbling opportunity to perform an important mitzvah. Thanks also to all who prepared food and donated time and other items for this important annual project.  Next year, I fully intend to sit on Steve Lander's lap, as long as all cameras are OFF!

A Look Back... A Look Ahead

As we stand on the cusp of a new secular year, this is an appropriate time to look back and look ahead.

Looking Ahead:

I'll be going solo this evening with the cantor away, but this year-end setting provides us with the perfect opportunity to take a sneak peak at a new Sabbath prayer book still in production.  This siddur is based on the very popular new High Holidays machzor that we began using a couple of weeks ago.  Curious to try this one out (and share reactions)? Come tonight at 7:30. 

Looking Back:

Many of us look back with great fondness at the years Rabbi Barb Moskow served our school and community.  I'm delighted that Barb will be delivering tomorrow mornings d'var Torah.  Join us for services, beginning at 9:30.

Meanwhile you can look back at last week's parsha packet  Moses and the Hero's Journey, which, along with some additional Legends of Moses' Childhood, enabled us to compare the stories of Moses with the journeys of ancient historical and mythological heroes from other cultures and faith traditions (including, appropriately, Christianity).

Looking Back:

Many of us look back with great fondness at the years Rabbi Barb Moskow served our school and congregation.  I'm delighted that Barb will be delivering tomorrow mornings d'var Torah.  Join us for services, beginning at 9:30.

Looking Ahead to the new week:  Our experiment in Doodle Minyans has passed with flying colors.  We've had minyans every day since the Minyan Maker went online.  But past performance is no guarantee of future results.  So sign up for the next few days here.

Looking Ahead to the New Year:

Check our upcoming bulletin and other announcements for a plethora of January events. Of special note is a showing of the film "Journey of the Universe" on Jan. 14, with guest speaker Teresa Eickel of Interreligious Eco-Justice Network.  It's one of the most inspirational spiritual films I've ever seen, and yet it hardly mentions religion at all. See more information here.  

Y.A.C at T.B.E: Jan. 10 @ 6:30 - a wine and cheese reception for young couples, the premier event for our new Young Adult Couples group.  If you know of a young couple in our area, (member, non member, child of a member, including interfaith couples, married, unmarried, straight, gay,) let us know so we can invite them personally.  As for age range - we'll let you determine that! Our goal is to be as inclusive as possible.

Also, we've got some great Shabbat programming coming up, including a new series of Learner's Services, where a key theme of contemporary Jewish life will be  wedded to both the portion of the week and a prayer from the liturgy: Shabbat Conversations: Parsha, Prayer and Purpose.  

Also, we'll continue the series "This American Jewish Life,"  with TBE congregants sharing perspectives on their life journeys.  These testimonies showcase the extraordinary stories our congregants have to tell.  At the next one, on Friday Jan. 10, we'll hear from a TBE young adult who has confronted the demons of addiction and recovery.

And the Israel trip information session has been rescheduled to Sunday Jan 5 at noon. Over 20 people have already registered!  You can preview the trip and book online here. Space is limited! 

Looking Back at 2013:

Below is an article of mine appearing in this week's Jewish Week's Year End Supplement.  To you and yours, a safe and happy secular new year!

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

It Was a Great Year.  Really.

By Joshua Hammerman

2013 was a very good year for the Jewish people - and an even better one for the Jewish Message.

Wait, what? How can I say this at the end of a year when the Pew report led pundits to declare that the sun is setting on American Jewry; a year featuring major organizational scandals involving sex abuse cover-ups, kickbacks, illicit affairs and, in the case of the Holocaust Claims Conference, $57 million taken out of the pockets of survivors?  A year when Israel and America were at loggerheads over a risky deal with Iran, when Ryan Braun was suspended for doping and Steven Spielberg failed to win the Oscar for "Lincoln?"  Fittingly, the Oscar for best song was won by Jewish director Sam Mendes' aptly named film, "Skyfall."

But the sky did not fall. 

American Jewry is in fact ascendant, and Israel, despite approaching a crucial crossroads with Iran, has never been in a superior geostrategic position, with the Arab world engulfed in internecine conflict.  And with vast untapped natural gas reserves off shore and water desalination in high gear, Israel's economic potential is soaring.

The most significant revelation of the Pew survey was not the increasing rate of assimilation or the attrition rate of all the movements (Orthodox included).  It's that almost every American Jew loves being Jewish.  We feel pretty - and we look it.  Now we can make fun our old neuroses (such as when Sarah Silverman suggested recently that Brandeis team mascot is a nose), knowing that Adam Levine is People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive and Esquire's Sexiest Woman is Scarlett Johansson.  Deep down, we like ourselves.  We look like Mila Kunis, pitch like Craig Breslow and win six Nobel Prizes in a single year.  In 2013, Woody Allen morphed into Stuart Smalley.

When 94% of U.S. Jews say they are proud to be Jewish, this is nothing short of miraculous, given the Chicken Little version of history that we've been force fed for generations. I can't think of another time in Jewish history where 94% would even have had the confidence to open the door for the pollster, much less admit openly that they are proud to be Jews.

A new kind of Jewish community is being forged, one less dependent on traditional boundaries and definitions.  A wider variety of behaviors has become normative and acceptable. Fewer are being left out of the big tent - including those who are non-observant, intermarried, gay, people of color or not halachically Jewish.  This is scary to many, but the train has left the station.  Not just here.  The reigning Miss Israel is of Ethiopian background, and the 2013 winner of Israel's version of "The Voice" was an Israeli Arab.  This is the year when the Women of the Wall finally broke through that glass Chuppah, and when Israeli women refused to sit in the back of the bus.  The Sharansky plan to create space for pluralistic, egalitarian prayer at the Kotel was yet another example that the Jewish message of inclusiveness, the mandate to love the stranger, is winning out.  

In the U.S., that message was embodied this year by Edie Windsor, her lawyer Roberta Kaplan and the three Jewish Supreme Court justices, who together overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and set the country on a new track where marriage equality has not only become imaginable, but inevitable.

The Chicken Littles will point to evidence that younger Jews are rejecting denominational labels (like young Americans of all religious backgrounds), and many are fleeing ritual, synagogue affiliation and organizational involvement.  Theirs is more of a Judaism-by-choice, a cafeteria Judaism where God and tradition are no longer the only items on the menu.

It's interesting that only 39% of Pew's "Jews by religion" claim that God even exists. But 42% of Jews who claim to be of "no religion" attend Passover Seders, and many attend High Holidays services - those occasions when the Jewish Message is most powerfully reinforced.  Something very tangible is keeping even the most assimilated Jews in the Jewish orbit at a time when ethnicity and nostalgia have lost their pull.  And for many whose ancestors long ago left the fold, something is pulling them back.

Pew indicated that the Holocaust has enduring power for American Jews.  But for Pew Jews, the lessons of the Shoah emphasize resilience, hope and loving the stranger, not fear, shame, hatred, revenge and despair.  Seventy years after Auschwitz, our mourning has dissolved into pure, constructive remembering.  We are moving on.  Pew painted a picture of a Jews who feel welcome in their neighborhoods and are unscarred by bias (fewer than half - 43% - feel that Jews face discrimination).  In fact, Pew Jews think several other groups face more bigotry than they do, including, wonder of wonders, Muslims.  

Amazingly, post Holocaust Jewry has never abandoned its basic human capacity for kindness, even as we continue to struggle with the God who allowed Auschwitz to happen, and who allowed 20 children to die in Newtown, hundreds of lives to be shattered in Boston and 1127 to die in a decrepit Bangladesh clothing factory and nearly 6000 in a Pacific typhoon.  So we struggle with God, but struggling with God has always been a central feature of the Jewish Message.

The defining battle taking place in the Jewish world right now is not between Orthodox and liberal, because the same struggle rages within each of the movements too.  It is the battle between justice and love, strictness and acceptance, between exclusivity and inclusivity, between keeping out and welcoming in.   In 2013, the pendulum tilted toward love.

In the Sh'ma's opening paragraph, the one that begins "You shall love," it states that "these words shall be on your heart." 

Why "on" your heart and not in it? 

The Kotzker rebbe responds:

"We should at least keep these words "on" our hearts, for everyone has a time when his heart opens, and if we have kept the words on our hearts, then they will be ready to fall in, in that short moment of openness."

In 2013, our hearts opened just slightly, just enough for that divine message, the one imploring us to love, to sink in.

We've officially entered the post-guilt, post victimhood era of American Judaism. 

It was a very good year.  

David Ortiz's Expletive: A Lesson From Leviticus (Jewish Week)

David Ortiz's Expletive: A Lesson From Leviticus

04/26/13

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

Special To The Jewish Week

At Fenway Park, with Bostonians celebrating the end of their excruciating, week-long siege, Red Sox slugger David Ortiz wrapped things up in one brief exclamation.  "This is our (bleeping) city!" he cried, and the crowd went wild, while in bars across America, millions of people turned to total strangers and asked, "Did he just SAY that?"

Well, I taped the event and yes he did.

ESPN managed to bleep it out.  But NESN was not so fortunate.  Neither were the radio broadcasts and all the five year old children at Fenway that day; but that probably doesn't matter, because their parents weren't exactly covering their kids' ears.  Everyone was just happy to be happy, and Ortiz' expletive apparently was the most emphatic way to express that.

I admit. I was too busy laughing through my tears to worry about the ballplayer's proclamation, moved as I was by the pregame tribute and the indefatigable nature of my hometown, and relieved that the bombers had been caught.

But now, it's time to question whether we have gone too far, to the point where every (bleeping) conversation is beginning to sound like a Nixon tape.

​Why do we need to swear so (bleeping) much?  Have we lost the ability to converse, to articulate emphasis without resorting to insulting people's sexual behavior, especially in regard to their mothers?

Simon Critchley wrote recently in the New York Times, "We know swear words are literally meaningless... Yet they carry a force that compels us."  Thousands of years ago, Leviticus said essentially the same thing.  In chapter 24, two Israelites are having a fight.  One had an Egyptian father, which may have been the cause of some resentment or friction between the two.  Who knows?  But the end result was that one of them blasphemed, and the punishment was determined to be stoning. 

​On the face of it, the whole thing seems absurd, like the scene right out of Monty Python.  Come to think of it, this WAS a scene from a Monty Python flick.  But the deeper message of this passage, and of the entire book of Leviticus, is that words matter.  Jewish tradition compares the one who gossips to a murderer.  The very next verse, in fact, deals with the laws of murder, making this comparison most explicit, not just for the idle gossiper, but specifically for the one who curses God.

​For what does it mean to curse God's name? If, as we read in Genesis, every human being is created in God's image, that divine part of us that is the essence of our humanity.  To insult God is to debase our own innate godliness, our human capacity for goodness and kindness.  

Sometimes curses can be a creative way of dealing with powerlessness.  We see that in the colorful Yiddish curses that have sprung up.  And Jews have had good reason to shake their fist at the heavens.  When Job's wife implores, "Curse God and die," Job has every reason to do just that - but he refuses to, recognizing that God's blessings and curses are intertwined.  In fact, the very word translated as "curse" in Job 2:9 is "barekh", which also means to bless.  Job refuses to render God one-dimensional, the source only of evil and not of life's blessings too.

That's what cursing does. It turns God into a stereotype.  Once "bleeping" becomes your only way of express passion, you are unable to communicate creatively, to probe the complexity of deeper feelings. 

Swearing takes the bedroom and turns it into the bathroom.  Rather than elevating the mundane experiences of everyday life, as the holiness code of Leviticus implores us to do, swearing does just the opposite.  It takes all that is sacred and holy and tosses it onto Job's ash heap.  All swearing is ultimately a form of blasphemy, a choice not for life but decay and stagnation.  To swear is to succumb to impulse rather than to rise above it.

​I confess.  I swear -- but only rarely.  So when I swear, you know I'm mad.  You can just ask my kids.  Sometimes we all lose control.  But when I encounter supposedly pious Jews with foul mouths, it makes me wonder how far their piety really extends.  If they are so abusive with language, so unable to control themselves from inflicting verbal blows on God, are they really able to control their gossip, their tempers, and even their physical abuse of others?  Can someone who has garbage constantly coming out of his mouth really be vigilant about the kashrut of the things that go into it?  Are people that needy of appearing cool? 

Everything that we hold sacred came into the world through divine speech.  And now we are losing the sanctity of speech. 

​I don't blame David Ortiz for this.  He didn't cause the problem  Even the FCC gave Ortiz a pass.  His passionate outburst did reflect how Bostonians felt after finally being released from the grip of the psychological - and real - pressure cooker of a horrible week.   

Studies show that our society hasn't gotten worse, at least since the Swearin' '70s, just that foul language has become less regulated since the days of George Carlin's pre-HBO "Seven Words you Can't Say on Television."   Nothing wrong with more freedom. What's wrong is, once the thrill of breaking one taboo is gone, it's all too easy to go on to the next one.

As our society rightly focuses its attention on our addiction to violence and guns, maybe we should spend a moment reflecting on that instant when that anger first gets out of control.  Long before the pressure cookers and semi automatic guns, long before the bloody video games, there is filthy, unchecked language.  Long before bullets, it is the words that wound. Creation began with words and social disintegration does too.

 ​In the Beginning, there were words -- and none of them began with an F.

The God Particle In All Of Us (Jewish Week)

The God Particle In All Of Us (Jewish Week) by Joshua Hammerman

On the night Hurricane Sandy roared in, as two giant trees sandwiched my house and pierced the garage roof, it felt like the world itself was crashing down.  We were seeing before our eyes an undoing of the primordial act of order.  In Genesis, a wind brought about a separation of earthly and heavenly waters, and then a separation of water from dry land.  But with Sandy, the waters of the deep appeared to be reclaiming that coastline and undoing that initial act of separation.

So now, we ask, what can nature do for an encore?  Shaken and unhinged, we have precisely a month to prepare for the next apocalyptic event: the Apocalypse itself – that is, if the Mayan calendar is to be believed.

According to an ancient Mayan prophecy, the world will come to an end on December 21.  On the plus side, we’ll squeeze in all eight days of Chanukah (sorry, no Christmas).   On the minus side, the world will cease to exist.

I did some exhaustive research on the Mayan Apocalypse – OK, I Googled it – and I discovered something very interesting.  The whole thing might just be a misunderstanding of the ancient Mayans’ intent.   According to Guatemalan author Carlos Barrios, the famous date of December 21, 2012 marks not the end of time as Hollywood would imagine it, but the beginning of a change in consciousness, when “a new socioeconomic order will arise in harmony with Mother Earth.”  There are a number of beliefs in regard to this December; all revolving around the winter solstice coinciding with the Earth’s being located at a point of particular balance, midway through the Milky Way. 

Other traditions also see this as a time of global spiritual transformation.  In India, over 15 million Hindus consider Guru Kalki Bhagavan to be the incarnation of the god Vishnu and believe that 2012 marks the end of the Kali Yuga, or degenerate age.

What we have with the Mayans, then, at least in some people’s estimation, are cycles of creation and destruction, but leading not to an ultimate apocalypse, but rather to a time of eternal peace and bliss – a better time, not an end time at all. 

It all sounds very, well, Jewish. 

Midrash Genesis Rabbah cites Rabbi Avahu’s claim that God created numerous universes prior to the creation of this one. Each time God created a universe, something went wrong and the experiment was discarded.  But when this one was created, God looked around and saw that it was Tov Me’od, very good.  This one was a keeper.  This one God could work with.

What a great Midrash.  It teaches that for the rabbis, not even God could determine in advance whether a given world would work out.  There were apocalypses aplenty.  But this world has not been destroyed.  Why?  Because people have demonstrated a capacity to grow and change; there is something in our makeup that keeps pushing us forward.

This past summer, scientists reveled in the discovery of the so-called “God particle.” In my layman’s understanding, this subatomic particle somehow takes mass and propels it into energy.  It drives everything forward, and in doing so, it enables existence to happen. Maybe this little particle, writ large, is that thing that pushes us to get up when we’ve fallen, like that panic button seniors wear – you remember the old radio ads, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

But we can!  We can get up. Even if we are physically unable to rise from the floor, there is something pushing us to live on. We’ve got the God particle.  And we’ve learned that not only is it in our DNA, it’s in our every atom.  There can always be a brighter future.  But only if we push that button and get up.

When we say Kaddish, we activate that God particle within us.  Yitgadal V’Yitkadash Shmay Rabbah.  We say it again and again and it lifts us, as we try to reestablish the reign of sanctity and order, to overcome the chaos of death.  We say it in the Amida – God is what lifts us – Somech noflim – and heals us – rofeh cholim – and releases us  - matir asurim. 

The God particle within us propels us to rise and it propels history to rise as well.  There is something magical about the human capacity for goodness and there are signs that it is winning out. 

Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed famously that the “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  But in Jewish tradition, justice is only half the battle.  For Jews, the arc of the moral universe must bend, at least as much, toward love.  As we approach the end of 2012, I believe that the arc is bending – slowly but surely – toward love.

The conventional wisdom is that religion has radicalized in the post modern world. True, there are those who seek to use religion as a lever to divide us rather than as a banner to unite us.  I know that the temptation among many people is to see the damage that has been done in God’s name and to flee all faith. 

But religion has a role to play – a very important role – in a world of upheaval.  As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently in Newsweek, “The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?”

The capacity for kindness is there.  We’ve seen it following Sandy.  The capacity for inclusiveness is there.  The capacity for love is there.  It is embedded in every strand of our DNA, in every atom of existence. There is something pushing life forward, beyond the destruction of Sandy and the specter of December 21.  It is the God particle, and it is in us all.

Bar Mitzvah Nation (Jewish Week)

 

Bar Mitzvah Nation

Joshua Hammerman

When we look back years from now, historians might decide that Sunday, April 25, 2004, was the proverbial tipping point when all of America became Jewish. On that evening, as Americans sat down to their nightly TV ritual, Krusty became bar mitzvah. For those who aren’t among the nearly 10 million who watch “The Simpsons,” Krusty, the rabbi’s kid turned clown, metaphorically represents the tragi-comic Jewish condition. In this episode Krusty, estranged from his traditionalist father (voiced by Jackie Mason), finally understands that one cannot be a Jew in name only. Seeking to earn his place among such Jewish luminaries as Sandy Koufax, Woody Allen and Lamb Chop, Krusty decides to take a hiatus from his show to do some serious grappling with traditional texts. My jaw dropped when I saw this. I’m more than a casual watcher of “The Simpsons” (principally because just about every bar mitzvah student is able to quote it chapter and verse), so when I tuned in I was expecting the same old shtick for Krusty’s bar mitzvah — an updated version of the excesses of “Goodbye Columbus.” It started out that way, but ended up with Krusty headed on a serious Jewish journey. The entire country seems to be on a Jewish journey these days. If you tired of Krusty on that Sunday evening in late April, you could have clicked onto Comedy Central’s “Bar Mitzvah Bash.” And several weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article titled “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Want a Bar Mitzvah,” detailing the growing trend of non-Jewish children begging their parents for big bar/bat mitzvah bashes of their own. When non-Jews can so casually assimilate what has long been the decisive generator of Jewish identity, it makes us wonder what sort of monster we’ve created. A successful monster, that’s what. Think about it. Mainstream America is now so completely comfortable with Judaism that it can dabble in overtly Jewish symbols without denying their Jewishness. These kids aren’t clamoring for mere “parties” but for bar mitzvahs. Without batting an eye, they are choosing to live within the framework of Jewish idiom. All we have to do is add content and stir. Certain Jewish values are already built into even the most secularized and over-the-top bar mitzvah: the love of family, for instance. But the hard work has already been done. From a marketing perspective, bar mitzvah is becoming the Coca-Cola of American adolescent initiation rites. The most amazing thing is happening: Non-Jews are teaching Jews how to be Jewish. It used to be that Hollywood was filled with Jews pretending to be non-Jews, lining up to change their names from Goldfish to Goldwyn and from Birnbaum to Burns. Now the entire non-Jewish branch of the entertainment industry is going gaga over kabbalah, which W magazine recently called “Hollywood’s trendiest spiritual movement since A.A.” I remain wary of the kind of hucksterism that threatens to sever kabbalah from its authentic Judaic roots (the Kabbalah Center purportedly sells those red-yarn bracelets for $26, a ripoff, even if Britney Spears did wear one on the cover of Entertainment magazine). But there is nothing inherently evil about being trendy. When Madonna proclaims, as she recently did, that she will no longer do concerts on Shabbat, something profound is happening here. The singer announced through her publicist that she would instead be attending services on Friday evenings. The Jewish establishment scoffs at these statements when we should be embracing them. I doubt we would take Madonna seriously even were she to shorten her name to Maidl, but we who have been preaching the merits of Shabbat all these years — to those few who will listen between the yawns — have quite a bit of chutzpah (a word you can now look up in your American Heritage Dictionary) to pooh-pooh the cultural earthquake that is going on around us. Hello, my name is Josh and I am a recovering pooh-pooher. I needed to make that confession because for years I’ve come down hard on the superficiality of American Judaism. It was the Titanic-themed bat mitzvah party in Pittsburgh with the iceberg centerpiece that threw me overboard. So it was natural for me to perceive the shallowness of those who pose with red thread. But I’ve grown more tolerant since then. Two months ago my eldest child, Ethan, made his Sinaitic climb to the bima, and as I watched his Jewish destiny begin to unfold I experienced for the first time as an adult the full power of the bar mitzvah rite. Even in America, especially in America, I know how powerful Judaism can be, which is why I take Madonna seriously. She may not be Jewish — yet — but increasingly she is living a Jewish life. She’s even doing a concert tour of Israel this fall, and the morale boost Israelis will feel will be as real as the mitzvah she is performing. Madonna has a long way to go, but at least she is headed in the right direction: east. I guess you don’t have to be Jewish to be a good Jew. Demi Moore, of all people, put it best: “I didn’t grow up Jewish, but I would say that I’ve been more exposed to the deeper meanings of particular rituals than any of my friends that did.” As we celebrate 350 years of Jewish presence on these shores, some strange things are happening. While Jews have been focusing all of our attention on “The Passion of the Christ,” some of our neighbors have become mighty passionate about Judaism. New forms of Jewish expression are attracting Americans in droves. As they say in Hollywood, “They like us! They really like us!” Maybe Krusty’s bar mitzvah can mark a turning point for us, too. n Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is spiritual leader of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Conn., and author of “thelordismyshepherd.com: Seeking God in Cyberspace.” To contact him or sign up for his weekly “Shabbat-O-Gram,” go to rabbi@tbe.org.