Kol Nidre Sermon 5771 "Bearing Witness"

Kol Nidre 5771
Bearing Witness
By Joshua Hammerman

Hear the audio of the sermon here:

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Can you say Kaddish for a shoe?

I found myself asking that question a few weeks ago when I heard the sad news that a fire had destroyed some shoes.

Now normally, losing a few shoes in a fire is not such big news, but these weren’t just any shoes. These were the shoes warehoused in a barracks at Majdanek, a thousand of them, destroyed by a flash fire believed to be accidental.

Majdanek, the infamous death camp on the outskirts of Lublin, called by a New York Times war reporter “the most terrible place on earth,” is the one camp that has remained virtually unchanged since the day of its liberation. The Nazis didn’t have time to destroy the evidence because the Soviet Army swooped in so quickly. And of all the exhibits there, the barracks filled with shoes leaves the most indelible impression. Now the shoes and their rightful owners have been reunited on high. Having been there last April, I felt a very personal, deep sense of loss when I heard about the fire last month.

Can you say Kaddish for a shoe?

I’m thinking of one shoe in particular, one that grabbed my attention. It was red, a child’s shoe - tiny. All the rest were dusty and grey, but this one retained its color, as if to call attention to the innocence of the children and the uniqueness of every victim.

Primo Levi has stated that in the Camps, death began with the shoes. As feet began to throb from infection from days and days of marching and the pain from the sores that became fatally infected, the shoes became instruments of torture. But now the shoes play a different role entirely.

The Yiddish poet Moshe Shulstein writes:

I saw a mountain
Higher than Mt. Blanc
And more Holy that the Mountain of Sinai
On this world this mountain stood.
such a mountain I saw—Jewish shoes in Majdanek….

Hear! Hear the march.
Hear the shuffle of shoes left behind—that which remained.
From small, from large, from each and every one.
Make ways for the rows—for the pairs—For the generations—for the years.
The shoe army—it moves and moves.

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers,
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of stuff and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire. We shoes—that used to go strolling in the market
Or with the bride and groom to the chuppah
We shoes from simple Jews, from butchers and carpenters,
From crocheted booties of babies just beginning to walk …

Unceasingly we go. We tramp.
The hangman never had a chance to snatch us into his
Sack of loot—now we go to him.
Let everyone hear the steps which flow as tears.
The steps that measure out the judgment.

Columnist Michael Berenbaum adds, “The shoes of Majdanek are rotting. They smell. The rot and the smell tell us of the distance that stands between that time and our time. They bear witness to the erosion of time, which we do not want to couple with the erosion of memory.”

The shoes bear witness.

Well, a thousand of those shoes are now no more. But these shoes are not the last witnesses.

For now we must stand in their shoes.

When you look in a Torah scroll at the verse containing the Sh’ma, one thing becomes immediately clear, even to a person who does not read Hebrew. Two letters are larger than the rest, the final letters of the word Sh’ma and Echad – the ayin and the daled.

No one really knows why this is. One possibility is to make sure not to mispronounce those two words. The daled at the end of Echad, for instance, can easily be misread as a resh, which would change the word from echad to acher, from the word “one” to “another.” “Hear O Israel, Adonai Elohenu is another deity entirely,” sort of distorts the meaning.

But commentators have also speculated that the reason for the two enlarged letters has something to do with the word that you get when you put the ayin and daled together. And that is the word “ed,” “witness.” There is something about the Sh’ma that calls on each of us to bear witness.

But bear witness to what? And how? And why?

That’s what I’d like to talk about this evening, having recited the Sh’ma all together only a few moments ago. We said it all together, but each of us bore witness to it individually.
Notice that unlike a blessing, there is no place to say “AMEN” after the Sh’ma. Typically, it’s enough to hear the cantor say a blessing and all we have to do is acknowledge it by saying “Amen.” And in that way we have fulfilled the responsibility of saying that prayer. Not so with the Sh’ma. Each of us must actively recite it, usually in full voice, so that we can hear ourselves affirm divine unity, each of us bearing witness to it on our own.

There is a response to the Sh’ma. But it’s not AMEN. It’s that verse that was recited in the days of the temple when the people heard the High Priest pronounce that most sacred of names, on the holiest moment of the year, on Yom Kippur, in the most mysterious place, the Holy of Holies. “Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va’ed - Blessed be the Name of the One whose glorious sovereignty is forever and ever.” Traditionally this verse is recited silently after that first line of the Sh’ma.

Except on Yom Kippur.

This is the day when we can feel the awe, this is the one day when we are close enough to the source of all life and meaning, that we can sense, even if only for an instant, the clarity of our mission – our place in the scheme of things. So we can say OMG! to what we have seen.
It’s more than an AMEN. Amen is what bystanders say. Amen is the polite applause after a chamber concert. Amen is the nod of agreement after a sermon or the broad smile after a bar mitzvah speech. Amen is a letter to the editor, or clicking “likes this” on Facebook. Amen is what spectators do.

The Sh’ma is for witnesses.

In saying the Sh’ma, we are walking in the steps of all those who said it before us or who will after us. Our kids or grandkids at bedtime. Jacob’s children at their father’s bedside – assuring their dad, whose name was Israel, “Sh’ma Yisra’el - Listen, Dad, Israel, your God and our God, they’re one and the same. We’ll carry on.”

And when we say the Sh’ma we are bearing witness to martyrs, who from Roman times onward, had these sacred words on their lips while meeting their demise. Rabbi Akiva and the others in the first century, to the martyrs of the first Crusade in 1096, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, the massacres of Polish Jewry in 1648, the Czarist pogroms and the Holocaust.

Rabbi Akiva was sentenced to death for studying Torah. The Romans tortured him by scraping off his flesh with a giant comb. As he was being tortured, Akiva recited the Sh’ma , and his students asked how he could praise God while in such pain?" Rabbi Akiva replied: "All my life, I strived to love God with all my soul. Now that I have the opportunity to fulfill it, I do so with joy!" With his dying breath, he sanctified God's name by crying out the words of Sh’ma.
So when we say the Sh’ma we aren’t just remembering them. We’re bearing witness to their suffering and their triumphs. We’re saying, for all to hear, that their story has become our story.

I know that it’s a downer to talk about martyrdom and such. I mentioned last week how important it is to place less emphasis on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in conveying a more positive sense of being Jewish to the next generation. I have always been a true believer in “Jewish and Joyish.”

But having gone to Poland for the first time this year, I came to a greater understanding of what it means to be a witness.

I documented the trip with thousands of photographs and nightly blogs, because I wanted, the greatest degree possible, to bring all of you along with me, so that you could get a sampling of what we were experiencing. A few of them, including one featuring the shoes, are scrolling right now on our TV screen in the lobby. The confluence of events that took place that week, the death of the Polish president, placed an added significance on this journey – as our group wasn’t simply learning history, we were making history. Instead of simply visiting the graveyards of our people, we were making a shiva call to a nation – a nation that had to a great extent sat silently while we were butchered (though with notable exceptions). And we were representing all of the Jewish people, and certainly American Jewry, since the March of the Living is big news over there, and in Israel.

But this sermon actually germinated last fall, on a much shorter journey, when about 70 of us went to the 92nd St Y to hear Elie Wiesel. He met with our group separately before the presentation, and in particular, spent time with Andrew Schwartz, who had chosen Wiesel’s foundation as his bar mitzvah project. During a special question and answer session for our group, I asked Wiesel what I should say to Andrew in my charge to him at his Bar Mitzvah. Wiesel responded immediately: Tell him that anyone who hears the story of a witness himself becomes a witness.

In a stirring speech given at the White House in 1999, Wiesel said, “Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.

Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know -- that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.”

We bear witness with our eyes.

On the March of the Living, our group not only heard the story of Judy Altmann, a survivor, returning to the camps for the first time, we lived her story. We were with her as she discovered for the first time where her sister most likely perished, and she brought a group of our teens to the barracks where she was imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau. One teen, Kayla Berman, “adopted” Judy’s story, to carry that story with her once she is no longer with us. Kayla’s promise epitomizes what it means to be a Jewish witness, merging the ayin of Sh’ma and the daled of Echad. An ayin comes from the Hebrew word “eye,” and daled from the word delet, door. That teen will become Judy’s eyes and will open the door for a new generation to bear witness to her story.

For Jews, that’s a true witness protection program – but we need to bear witness to more than just the horrors of the Holocaust.

I had the honor of hearing Representative John Lewis speak this year. Ethan invited me up to hear him on campus and I jumped at the opportunity. He was very powerful, talking to a group of college students about the need to be involved, to bear witness. Lewis was one of ten speakers at Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. He is the last surviving speaker. There was urgency in his voice that mirrored Wiesel’s. We have now become witnesses, I thought, as he described vividly the bridge in Selma, the barking dogs and the police, Sherriff Clarke keeping them from crossing the bridge, fending them off with them with a gun in one hand and a cattle prod in the other, and the deaths of the three in Mississippi, among them two Jews. The shared suffering of the Civil Rights era rang out to me when Lewis concluded his lecture by saying, “We may have come over in different ships, but now we’re all in the same boat.”

And so, the Sh’ma reminds us that we are all now edim witnesses, and not merely to tragedy, but also to the majesty of the cosmos, to the miracle of life, to the eternal lessons of our Jewish experience and to the unity of all humanity.

Theologian Art Green asks, why does the Sh’ma say “Adonai Eloheynu,” Adonai OUR God?
Adonai, he states, was what was there before each of us came into existence. Adonai becomes Eloheynu - OUR God - for the brief instant that our lives flash across the screen. But then we let it go, and it is Adonai, once again, endless being. Our individual existences are merely the blink of an eye – but we are linked to an eternal life force, and we are eternal witnesses to its power, and to the role that our people have played in the unfolding of the divine drama.

Just think about that – Sh’ma Yisrael….Adonai-Eloheynu-Adonai…echad. Each of us is living in that one narrow window of time, that brief, fleeting moment of Eloheynu, shoehorned in between the two Adonais – the eternities that preceded our birth and that will follow. For this brief moment, we inherit the mantle of being a witness to all that has come before, all of that becomes ours, all that sanctity becomes Eloheynu, Our God. What are we going to do with that gift.
Yes, much of our Jewish experience has been painful but that has given us the unique ability to feel others’ pain because we ourselves have felt it. We have the responsibility to love the stranger, as the Torah instructs us more than 30 times, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. We have that certain instinct, radar to detect prejudice, an instinct that few others have.

We can bear witness to all suffering. Because we have felt that pain.

A perfect example of that was last summer, when the Supreme Court welcomed its third sitting Jewish justice, Elena Kagan. Nice Jewish girl. Earned her street cred as a 12 year old in the Upper West Side by having a run-in with her rabbi and as result became Lincoln Square Synagogue’s first bat mitzvah. For many, the most revealing moment in the confirmation hearings came when Senator Lindsey Graham asked where Kagan had been on Christmas Day of 2009. His purpose was simply to find out her views on the failed terror attack on an airliner that occurred that day. But in asking that question, he unknowingly pushed that button that we all know so well, the button of the witness, and that radar kicked in, and she responded in the perfect Jewish manner – not to up the ante with defensiveness, but to diffuse a volatile situation with humor.

She said, "Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant”

I have no way of knowing what the senator was thinking, but I know exactly what Elena Kagan was thinking, which is exactly what I would have thought, and many of you, and exactly what Woody Allen thought in Annie Hall when he got upset every time someone asked him “D’Jew want to go out to eat?” She poked fun at a question that was insensitive, though probably not deliberately so, and her joke pointed to a coping mechanism that has been employed by Jews and other non Christians to deal with feelings of being outsiders on December 25. Brilliant.

Neurotic, but brilliant!

Being a witness has its burdens, and one is, I suppose, neurosis. Kagan had no reason to be defensive in that hearing. She had just been nominated to the Supreme Court! As a Jew and as a woman, that is truly remarkable.

But still, she is a witness. And her response to that question, along with many others, indicated that she takes that role seriously. Even when we are at the pinnacle of power, we must remember that WE were slaves. Not our ancestors. US. For a Jew there is no such thing as history. There is only an ever evolving present, a story that we are writing even as it unfolds before us.

We are the authors, we are the main characters and we are the storytellers. That is what it means to bear witness.

In Israel you really can sense the timelessness of the Jewish story and what it means to be witnesses to it. That’s what I love about being there; every moment connects you to history. We are living witnesses.

Last summer our group was headed north and the bus driver decided to veer from the straight and narrow and take an alternative route to our destination. (The bus driver was a pain in the neck, but that’s another story). So we were meandering through the Jezreel valley and passed right alongside Mount Tabor, a steep hill that sticks out of the otherwise flat farmland. You might recall that this is the place where in the book of Judges, Deborah defeated the Canaanite King Sisera when, after a sudden downpour, all his chariots slid down the mountain in the mud.
So just as we were passing this sacred, storied site, a sign on the road stated plainly and without a hint of irony, “Slippery when wet.”

I’m sure it is slippery when wet. It was for Sisera, 3,000 years ago. We know! We read the book! And that sign, in the same language as the original story, bears witness to that fact, and links all of us something that happened long before we were born. But the past doesn’t come alive through the sign itself. It comes alive through our reading the sign. We are the eyes and the doorway, the ayin and the daled, the AYD, making the story of Deborah spring to life.

Bearing witness goes beyond being part of key moments in world history. It means to take those experiences and channel them into wisdom. If you take the word AYD and reverse the ayin and the daled, you get “DA,” to understand.

Israel is the only place on earth where McDonalds, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken are kosher. So whose secret recipe is it? Colonel Sanders meets Tante Sarah. Suddenly our act of eating a piece of chicken raises awareness of the sanctity of life and the moral obligation to limit the pain of living creatures, reminding us of our kinship with all of God’s creations. Not bad for a bucket of chicken. With each crunch of Kosher KFC we are bearing witness to a deeper understanding of what it means to live a holy life.

Sorry for mentioning food.

Lifting a filled goblet of wine was a form of giving testimony in the ancient world. In saying Kiddush, we’re doing just that, testifying to God’s role in nature and history.

Or the child who brings matzah to school during Passover, bearing witness and sharing wisdom (and usually most of the matzah).

How fitting that on this, the holiest night of the year, the Kol Nidre is a legal formula that literally bears witness to our human frailty. It is recited in the setting of a trial, which is why we remove the Torahs from the ark. But the words are by far the least significant ingredient here. It is all about the haunting melody.

A famous Hasidic story tells of an illiterate young farm boy who attends services for the first time one Kol Nidre eve. He was so moved by the chant that he took out his shepherd’s whistle and began to blow, to pray in the only manner that he knew. The congregation was furious and began to remove him from the room, when the Baal Shem Tov informed them that it is only because of that primal call of the shepherd’s earnest prayer that all the congregation’s prayers had been received in heaven.

Our task is to discern the call of our age, to respond, to dig beneath what Art Green calls the “complex, civilizing masks of language,” to lead ourselves to that primal scream that goes beyond words, the kind of unfiltered, pure message that one heard in the shofar’s call or in a wordless niggun, something that can penetrate deeper, a place more ancient, deeper within us than words can reach.

We need to respond to that call of the Sh’ma: Listen – Listen to that call; listen to that primal whistle. Listen to the Oneness that hides beneath all apparent divisions. Listen to heart beat – to the heart beating next to you – to a thousand heart beats, a cacophony of hearts beating, voices raised and souls reaching upward, yearning for the Oneness.

It is our responsibility to bear witness to the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. And it is our responsibility, as a people who stands in Covenant, to open ourselves up to the flow of divine love and to bring light and blessing to the lives of others. That is what it means to bear witness.

In our day, we also must bear witness to the dangers that surround us. Having seen firsthand in Poland the product of unconstrained hatred, it is our responsibility as Jews to alert the world to the similar dangers percolating in Iran. The world’s resolve has stiffened of late, but it too soon to know if sanctions will be enough. If not, we will need to make lots of noise. All of us will. In fact, all of us need to make noise now.

When I led services in the synagogues of Poland, it was almost as if the dead were calling out to me. Europe is filled with dead synagogues. Beautiful, restored but still dead. Back in the 1930s, the chief rabbi of Krakow, who preached precisely where I was standing, was firmly convinced that Polish Jewry was ascendant. “There… the Jewish people came into its own,” wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Poland of that era. “It did not live like a guest in somebody else’s home, who must constantly keep in mind the ways and customs of the host. There Jews lived without reservation and without disguise, outside their homes no less than within them.”
The Jews of Palestine were small in number, American Jews were too assimilated and Soviet Jewry was being crushed by the Communists. But Poland is where the best and brightest studied Torah in glittering yeshivot, where three million Jews lived a vibrant life, separate from but unbothered by their neighbors. Poland was the great meeting place of Hasidic fervor of Galicia, the Talmudic expertise of Lithuania and the western scholarship of German Jewry. It all came together in Poland, arguably the most vibrant Jewish community in all of history.

The Jews of Poland must have thought it would last forever.

So as I stood there in front of our group at the Tempel Synagogue, a large ornate structure tucked between the narrow little alleyways of the Kaszimierz, the Jewish quarter with no Jews, I speculated out loud with the teens what it meant to be a witness. I asked them to realize that, just as in their synagogues back home, the pews they were sitting in once belonged to someone sat in that same place, every Shabbat, every Rosh Hashanah and every Yom Kippur. In the fall of 1942, the place was full on Yom Kippur. And the next year, they were all gone, following the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March of 1943, a scene emblazoned in our consciousness by Steven Spielberg in the movie “Schindler’s List.” That horrible scene witnessed by Schindler on horseback from the top of the hill, when amidst the tumult the camera focuses our attention on a single victim, a little girl.

And what we remember most about the girl is her shoe. Her red shoe.

And I asked the teens to think of that one individual while we said the mourner’s kaddish. The person who sat in that pew. And then we danced. We danced to the melody created by Shlomo Carlebach in memory of those victims. The Krakower Niggun. And at that moment we became living witnesses. Witnesses don’t sit on their butts and listen passively while succumbing to a spiritual numbness. Spectators do that. Witnesses pray with intensity. Witnesses sing with fervor. Witnesses perform acts of selflessness and courage. Witnesses stand arm in arm with those who marched at the bridge in Selma and with those who suffered Egyptian slavery.

Witnesses side in the mud on Mount Tavor and lift a Torah at the Western Wall. Witnesses cry with the parents of Gilad Schalit and scream to Congress about the nukes in Iran.

But most of all, witnesses dance.

So we danced, and the walls of the Tempel Synagogue came alive. Then days later, we danced again at the synagogue in Lancot, also dead and lovingly restored, and our voices echoed so loud that a Polish woman came in off the street asking how we could be singing so loud when her whole country was in morning. “We’re not singing,” she was told by Judy Altmann. “We are praying.” To be a witness is not to recall history. It is to live history. On that day, we made history.

Shlomo Carlebach’s Krakower niggun begins with a vision, one that Reb Shlomo had as he sat in the pews of Krakow synagogue, of the Jews of the city boarding the trains, their belongings and loved ones snatched from them. The darkness of the ovens – suddenly gave way in his vision to a bright light. And the victims: instead of being limp corpses, they were dancing in joy.

I have that same vision now, about the 1,000 shoes of Maidanek. The victims are no longer barefoot. Their sores have healed. The infections have gone away. The shoes don’t even smell anymore. They fit perfectly. And somewhere, a little girl, like Cinderella, tries on her long lost red slipper and smiles and jumps for joy.

Now we must be their eyes. Their aynayim. And we must stand in their shoes, their ragged, dusty shoes, the shoes of Maidanek, and dance their dance. We stand in the shoes of Akiva too, and Mordechai Anilevitch and Yitzchak Rabin. And we stand in their place – all who came before us! We are their eyes and we stand in their shoes – we are their witnesses – and we will open the door, the delet, to their future, and our own.

The shoes of Majdanek will lie dormant no more.

Dershowitz and J - Street's Ben Ami: Round Two

Time to begin prepping for the upcoming conversation we'll be hosting on Oct 7, featuring Alan Dershowitz and J-Street's Jeremy Ben Ami.

The two have already debated once, at the 92nd St Y, and this summer had a heated exchange in writing. See from JTA:

Op-Ed: J Street’s McCarthyism
By Alan Dershowitz · July 21, 2010
Alan Dershowitz says that J Street is showing its colors by falsely implying that he opposes a Palestinian state and supports settlements. Read more »

and the response...


Op-Ed: Making the case for ‘Yes’
By Jeremy Ben-Ami · July 25, 2010 Alan Dershowitz-style advocacy cements his position as part of the “Chorus of No” that is working hard to frighten American policymakers and politicians from speaking out on Middle East issues, the head of J Street writes in response to a Dershowitz Op-Ed.. Read more »

If you are planning on being here on Oct. 7, and who isn't, get here early!

And The Word Shall Go Forth From Tel Aviv

And The Word Shall Go Forth From Tel Aviv

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Joshua Hammerman
Special To The Jewish Week

I spent a few weeks in Israel this summer and couldn’t help but notice a fascinating trend developing, one that might help those of us back here to overcome our uneasiness about Jerusalem, with its fundamentalist leanings and shady politics.

It occurred to me that maybe we’ve been mistaken in looking exclusively toward Jerusalem for moral guidance and spiritual inspiration. Granted, our Eternal Capital is as beautiful as ever, despite the blight caused by uncontrolled growth — in particular the corruption-plagued Holyland project, an urban stain that has turned a majestic hillside into the Tower of Babel.

So when I had a few extra days to spend in the country, I opted for Tel Aviv, a city with zero holy sites and that a century ago was just a bunch of sand dunes. For all its grime and flatness, though, this quintessentially secular city has some sacred lessons to share. Holiness can happen even in a place where Habima is a theater and not a pulpit. While the Torah may still come from Zion, a woman holding one in parts of Jerusalem will be subject to arrest.

(for more on the Women of the Wall being banned from sounding a shofar as well, see Echoes of a Shofar, 80 years later – The official Women of the Wall website )

Not so in Tel Aviv.

It seems that even the ultra-Orthodox agree that Israel’s commercial mecca is gaining some serious spiritual street cred. Recently the highway between Israel’s two central cities was plastered with signs featuring a photo of a black bearded man declaring that the messiah is from, of all places, Tel Aviv. According to the “Mystical Paths” blog, the photo portrays the 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shalom Dov Bear of Lubavitch, who died around 1920, and the sign’s purpose is to draw attention to the apocalyptic expectations that have become rampant in Israel. According to this theory, Tel Aviv is mentioned to heighten curiosity even more.

While some are awaiting apocalypse, others are simply looking for a quiet evening by the seashore, and that’s where I found the Torah that emanates from Tel Aviv. For the past few years, the reconfigured Tel Aviv port has become a cool hotspot for young couples and families, and now, each Friday in the summer, an outdoor Kabbalat Shabbat service, of all things, has become a huge hit in this bastion of secularism. Along with many hundreds of others, I attended one of the services, which are coordinated by Beit Tefila Israeli, a pluralistic, non-denominational group that seeks to meld Tel Aviv’s creative spirit with ancient Jewish traditions. Its prayer book does just that, interspersing the traditional prayers with selections by Bialik, Heschel, Naomi Shemer and a number of other Jewish and particularly Israeli sources. The congregation wants its service to be considered an indigenous expression of modern Israeli culture, not an import from elsewhere, and it is most definitely succeeding.


North American visitors will recognize the influence of non-Orthodox centers of Jewish spirituality in the U.S., but it is reassuring to see such recognition happening in Israel, far from the back rooms of the Knesset, where politicians appear determined to ban all expressions of Judaism save one. Almost everything about this Kabbalat service would have been prohibited near the Kotel: the mixed seating, the female prayer leaders, the many men in the congregation not wearing kippot (and the women who were), the exotic musical instruments, and the hints of Eastern spirituality combined with ballads of great Zionist poets.


As we turned to greet the Shabbat bride, with the setting sun splashing into the blue sea before us, I realized that we had been praying the entire service facing the water — in other words facing west, with our backs to Jerusalem. I smiled. Outdoors, it really was a no-brainer to face the soothing Mediterranean rather than the fast food restaurants across the way, or the juggler a few hundred yards down the pier. But this is also the best possible response to the Rotem Bill on conversion — not to shun all of Israel, but turn away from the sickness of Jerusalem’s corrupted, forbidding, vindictive brand of Judaism and seek better models elsewhere. The view from Tel Aviv that Shabbat was simply delightful.

The congregation’s siddur states: “My God — here we have no Wall, only the sea. But since you seem to be everywhere, you must be here, too. … And maybe I was created so that from within me you can see the world you created with new eyes.”

Jerusalemites are beginning to take their cultural cues from their neighbor to the west. The most popular spot in town is now the upscale, very Tel Avivian outdoor mall in the Mamila quarter, right outside Jaffa Gate. Who could have imagined that Jerusalemites would flock to Hilfiger, Prada and the Gap? And in the hit Israeli TV series “S’rugim,” which portrays the lives of single modern Orthodox 30-somethings in Jerusalem, one of the most poignant scenes of the first season involved one character’s experience of an exhilarating Shabbat, not at the Kotel but on the beach in Tel Aviv.

Non-Orthodox forms of Jewish expression are thriving in Israel and places like Beit Tefilah Israeli are not going to fade away. It reminds us that throughout Jewish history, great religious innovation could take place only at a safe distance from the watchful eyes of the Jerusalem elites. Places like Yavne, Tiberias and Safed gave rise to the Judaism we know today, while Jerusalem corroded and crumbled under the weight of its own ossified hubris.

As we stand facing east over the coming days, toward all of Israel, recall that Torah is being renewed, with new eyes, in Tel Aviv.

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is spiritual leader of Temple Beth-El in Stamford, Conn.

Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5771: The Broomstick, the Bush and the Sh'ma

Rosh Hashanah 5771 Day Two
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman
"The Broomstick, the Bush and the Sh'ma"

PLAY FULL SERMON HERE

For other audio formats or if the above is not playing, click here

It was the iconic image of the past year, if not this entire generation, and the picture wasn’t pretty.

Day after day we gawked at it, staring into the murky oblivion as it seemed to mock us, to laugh at our helplessness. Day after day we turned on the news and that oil just kept on gushing. Our technological prowess was just good enough to get a color camera down to deepest fathoms of the Gulf, able to capture the image in stark details and living color. And yet we were technologically helpless to do anything to stop the flow from the Deepwater Horizon well.

The catastrophe has taken an enormous toll.

Day after day, government and industry experts offered suggestions, and everything failed. If it weren’t such an environmental and human disaster, it would have been funny - in the way Road Runner cartoons are funny. Or I Love Lucy at the conveyor belt of the chocolate factory. It was a train wreck that we couldn’t stop staring at, unfolding before us in slow motion, one drip at a time, one glob after another, one ruined beach after another. The most powerful nation on earth was rendered powerless to turn off a simple faucet!

Remember that scene in Fantasia where Mickey Mouse plays the Sorcerer’s Apprentice? That’s what I kept thinking about as the oil continued to gush. You know the tale, based on a poem by Goethe, where the apprentice gets tired of fetching water with a pail, so he enchants a broom to do the work for him.

(Kids – this is a broom. You might have seen it used as prop in “Wicked.” It’s what we used to use before the invention of the Dustbuster. Yes, it’s crazy, in the old days we never actually sucked up dirt, we simply rearranged it – in really nice neat piles).

So in the story, the brooms keep multiplying and things get out of control, the floor is soon filled with water, and the apprentice is powerless to stop it – fortunately, the sorcerer comes back at the last second and restores everything the way it was.

It seems like every culture has its own version of the sorcerer story, where hubris takes over and people who try to manipulate nature suddenly and quite literally, discover that they are in way over their heads. There’s Frankenstein and Prometheus, and for Jews, the Tower of Babel, and the Creation story. In an interesting twist, the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b) God plays the role of the Sorcerer and we are the apprentice, and sure enough, just as the Creation is completed, things get crazy and soon God is ready to destroy everything with a flood and begin again. In fact, the midrash posits that there were actually 10 aborted Creations before one finally took – ten worlds gone wild. But after the Flood and Noah, God gives humanity the covenant of the rainbow and promises never to destroy the world again.

Today is the birthday of the world. If only we could wipe the slate clean again. If only we could stop the wildfires in Moscow and the rains in Pakistan and volcanoes in Iceland and take all those tornados that have touched down in Fairfield County this year and put them back in Kansas, where they belong. If only we could gain a sense of control over our world again, our world and our lives.

Now this is not a sermon about environmentalism. I could give that sermon, but this year, with our new Finkelstein Mitzvah Garden, we’re letting our actions speak louder than words. Our garden fits right in to the earth-centered ethos we are nurturing here. Our new nursery school will be called “Shorashim,” which means roots. It’s a marvelous name with a multitude of meanings. But most of all, it emphasizes our love of nature.

And that has been our response to the chaos, the craziness. To a world that has gone out of control.

Crazy has become the norm. So you see, the fundamental problem we face is not simply that we are ruining the earth. That is merely a symptom. The problem is that we’ve allowed everything to spin out of control. Everything. If we want to get a handle on what we’re doing to the Gulf of Mexico, first we have to get a handle on the sorcerer’s broomstick. We need to get a grip.

You know that feeling, the loss of control. It happens nearly every day, but we notice it especially in extreme situations – when a relationship goes haywire, when a loved one dies, when we get sick, when we begin to forget where we left our glasses (spare pair). People have confronted the loss of control ever since the beginning of time– but now the scope has been magnified exponentially – it’s everywhere. This past summer, the United States became that person who staggers out of the doctor’s office with a tumor that no treatment could stop, the one drowning in debt with the marriage falling apart. This summer in the Gulf of Mexico, the US became the sorcerer’s apprentice.

We’ve lost the ability to focus. We are so bombarded with data, with information, with demands on our time, with phone calls and texts and emails and Facebook postings and Tweets – that, according to the New York Times, we aren’t just losing our bearings; we are literally losing our minds. One neuroscientist said of our multitasking, “We are asking (our brains) to do things (they) weren’t necessarily evolved to do.” And there are consequences.

When God appeared to Moses at the burning bush, the miracle was that Moses noticed that a miracle was happening at all. A burning bush that’s not consumed is a rather chintzy, two bit trick. But in order to notice that the bush wasn’t being consumed, Moses had to stare at for a good five minutes without being distracted. If that were happening now, Moses probably would have failed that test. In those brief five minutes he would likely have gotten a text from Miriam that she really liked her new Yoga class, a poke from Aaron asking him to read Torah at services this weekend, an emailed shopping list from Tzippora, a Google Alert that some rabbi was quoting his blog again, a Tweet from the Anti Defamation League about continued Egyptian mistreatment of Hebrew Slaves, which is great because at that moment his iPod is playing a remix of his favorite song, “Go Down Moses,” and then comes a reminder from his laptop to TiVo a Charlton Heston movie marathon. And then, maybe finally, God sends Moses a Tweet saying simply, “Hey! Dummy! Look over here! The bush! It’s still burning!”

And so it is. Did you ever have that sensation while you were in the middle of washing dishes that you forgot to mention something to someone – so you leave the dishes where they are and run to the computer and write the email, only in the middle of it someone pokes you on Facebook so you begin a conversation which then leads you to check a website for something, which leads you to something else and before you know it it’s 11 o clock and you’re tired and you go to sleep and the next morning your wife asks you why there are so many dirty dishes in the sink?

Has that ever happened to you?

Me neither.

Out – of – control.

We need to find a way to gain control of our lives again – for if each of us can do that, then maybe we’ll be able to slow things down for the rest of the world.

How do we do that? The Sh’ma tells us how.

It’s a three step process.

One – we have to learn how to focus; two - we need to take control of time, and three - we then have to assert control of our behavior.

Yesterday I spoke of how, when we feel powerless to confront a world so filled with hate, the most effective response is to love all the more. The same formula holds true with a world spinning out of control. The best solution is to assert control, through discipline. And since we can’t impose control on the rest of the world, we need to do it first on our own lives
So – three steps to the Sh’ma method.

Step one: focus.

In the Talmud, we hear that when the time for the Sh’ma arrived Rabbi Yehuda would cover his eyes, because he was engaged in other activities. The recitation of the Sh’ma was seen as a moment of deep inward turning and intense concentration. It remains a custom to cover our eyes today when reciting the Sh’ma.

There is no multitasking with the Sh’ma. This intense concentration is how we turn a set prayer, one recited at a set time, into something more purpose-filled.

Instead of multitasking, we do the opposite. Instead of doing many things at one time, the Sh’ma prescribes that we do the same thing over and over. For many of us, the word “routine” often implies “boring,” but the term actually comes from the word route – a path that we travel. Routine is an adventure along the beaten path, along the road MORE travelled.

V’shinantam l’vanecha, the Sh’ma says, “Teach your children and speak of these sacred words.”

But it doesn’t really say "teach.” V’shanantam means repeat. Don’t just teach this to your child once. Do it a second time. Repeat. Again and again. We have another word for repetition. Ritual. Daily prayer, weekly Sabbath, seasonal holidays, annual gatherings like this – that’s the Jewish way of dealing with the chaos. Discipline, repetition and focus.

Step two:

So how do we seize control over time? We do it from the moment we wake up. The Sh’ma is supposed to be recited when we lie down and when we rise up. The very first discussion among rabbis in the Talmud was about when to recite the morning Sh’ma. It came down to one of two things – either when it’s light enough to distinguish different colored threads of the tzitzit or for us to recognize the face of a casual acquaintance at a distance of about 6 feet. Maimonides fixed that time as being about 6 minutes before sunrise. The window for the morning Sh’ma extends for about three hours, for that is when, according to the sages, princes and kings would arise. Even royals were tied to the clock. Even they had to answer to a higher authority. Saying the Sh’ma at the right time was considered by our sages to be a more meritorious act even than the study of Torah.

But, you may ask, hasn’t technology liberated us from the tyranny of time? Isn’t it true that now we don’t have even to set appointments? After all, if we’re running late - which we always are - we can simply text the other person so that both of us can arrive late. Spontaneity has taken over as we’ve lost our ability to schedule. Time can be adjusted to suit our own particular needs. Dinner hour? Who’s kidding whom? When you work 24/7, you don’t dine, you graze. There is never a set time to eat anymore.

Jewish tradition has a perfect remedy from the ravages of time run amok. It’s called Shabbat.

This past summer, I spent a week on a body of water, half a world away from the Gulf of Mexico. As our boat glided along, the Aegean was pristine and calm. Not a Cyclops or Hydra in sight - or even a gushing oil rig. We left port on Friday afternoon and that evening, Mara and I spent some time on our balcony watching the full moon glisten over the placid waters, as we passed island after island. At one point we passed an island that appeared to be virtually uninhabited. I say virtually, because there were lights there. As we slowly passed, I was able to count them – about 50, all glistening like the stars above, flickering like Shabbat candles.

But something seemed strange about those lights. They were scattered all over the island, not concentrated in any one area that you could call a village. There were no patterns that resembled streetlights or roads. In fact, none of them were moving. Not one. No cars. Everything was peaceful and still. It looked like a scene out of Fiddler on the Roof.

Sabbath Prayer with Souvlaki.

Was this possible? Everyone else searches these ancient waters for the lost city of Atlantis, and here had I stumbled upon a Greek island full of observant Jews? Nothing was moving. I called it Shabbos Island. I’ll never meet the people who live there; I’ll never know whether they are shepherds or stockbrokers – but it doesn’t matter.

And all I heard was the whoosh of the boat gliding through the waves. But in the back of my mind I knew that this was an illusion, that the quiet of Shabbat is a needed rest-bit, but that in fact the Aegean is connected to the Mediterranean which is connected to the Atlantic which is connected to the Gulf of Mexico. It was an illusion, but it was an illusion that I needed.

Shabbat is the antidote to civilization. It is the best possible response to the craziness of time run amok.

At the port of Mykonos I was relieved to be greeted there by a white pelican, the mascot of the island, waddling about like he owns the place. It was a relief to see one not covered with black crude. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My world had been turned right side up! Is there such a term as turvy-topsy?

As lovely as the Aegean was, I wasn’t fooled. My thoughts just kept gravitating back to that image of the gushing oil just four seas away – knowing that it was still gushing mightily - and that terrifying feeling that we have lost control.

In her popular new book, “The Sabbath World,” Judith Shulovitz speaks of the difference between what she calls mechanical and mobile time. Mechanical time, the kind of time we lived in before we lost control of everything, was seen by many as shackles, enslaving us to its dictates.

But a chain can also be an anchor, and what we thought enslaved us was also grounding us. And we’ve lost that. We’ve lost the anchor. There is no such thing as a z’man kavua – a set time. Everything is immediate. Everything is “On Demand.” As Shulevitz notes, “We shop when it’s convenient, not when stores are open. We watch movies and television on DVDs and TiVo, not according to published schedules. We correspond via email and Twitter and Facebook in instant staccato bursts throughout the day…not when the mail is delivered.”

The schedule has been “softened,” as she calls it. “…we’re in charge of mobile time (and it connects us)…” she adds. “But being in perpetual contact can also make us feel as if time is in charge of us…. The Sabbath, by contrast demands of us a hard and tragic sense of beginnings and ends.”

Shulevitz’ makes a solid case of how the seventh day was the first great attempt on the part of human beings to take control of time, by creating a day, a randomly selected block of 25 hours – where we can anchor ourselves to the clock. Tonight, Shabbat begins at 6:55. We can begin our observance whenever we wish – our service begins at 6:30 - but the time for Shabbat’s start is fixed. Can you imagine texting God, saying “God? I’m running a little late. Can you hold that sunset for ten min?” It doesn’t happen that way.

So here’s the paradox. The only way we can assert control over time is to create a day where time asserts control over us. There has got to be something fixed in your life – something that you can’t change. Something like Shabbat. Something that, if you are late for it, you are simply late. Even when we are late, it gives us that comforting feeling to be grounded to a world that’s actually spinning normally on its axis. We are tethered to our lateness. Even if I miss the beginning of Shabbat, I know that Shabbat has begun. For a day, at least, the craziness stops.

And then finally, step three. Once we have begun to assert control over time, we need to employ discipline to assert control over our behavior.

How?

The second paragraph of the Sh’ma makes it clear that we have a tremendous degree of power, not only over how we behave, but how our behavior will impact the world around us. If we heed the commandments, rain will fall in its proper time and we will enjoy a bounty of grain, wine and oil. If not, things will spin out of control again and oil will gush into the Gulf of Mexico. We struggle with some of the implications of that paragraph, but its primary message is empowering. The Sh’ma is all about our power to control our destiny.

The Machzor picks up that message and hammers it home - “U’teshuva, U’tefila Utzedakkah Ma’avirin et Roa Hagezayra.” Repentance, prayer and tzedakkah avert the severe decree. We have the power. We have control! The rabbis understood that. In the Zohar it says that when a person judges himself, the heavenly court is not allowed to touch the case. God would throw the prosecuting angels out of the room. If we do our own soul searching, Heshbon ha-nefesh, the whole Book of Life thing is moot. This statement is both remarkable and radical. All we need is a little discipline and we can assure ourselves a purpose-filled life.

So how?

Here are some rabbinic guidelines to leading a more disciplined life.

The Peasetzna Rebbe set a time limit for each of his activities. Eating? Give it a half hour. Even Torah study had its limit. His entire day was scripted. He was obsessive.

Another rabbi carried a list of character traits with him at all times. Not many, just the few that he was trying to fix. You can’t do it all at once. So one week it might be anger. And he would write down, “Silence and speak in a low voice” and constantly make reference to that piece of paper all day.

Reb Shmelke of Nikolsburg wrote on his list the instruction to read the list three times a day, every day, without exceptions. Of course, if the instruction to read the list is on the list, you sort of don’t need it, since you’re reading the list anyway….

OK, It might seem a little over the top, but maybe we should try that. Make a list of three things you need to do to be a better you, and read it religiously three times each day.

The rabbis believed that if you practiced a certain behavior for 40 straight days, it would become natural and instinctive. They felt that if an angry person forced himself to be cheerful to everyone for that long, he would no longer be an angry person.

If you are naturally shy, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk said, “Pray real loud for 40 days, with vigorous movements of all your limbs.” You’ll notice a change. If you are lazy, force yourself to get ready in half the time each morning, dressing, washing up, going to the bathroom, going to synagogue – do it all with more energy. And you will change that character trait.

These Hasidic leaders said exercise is important too. Take walks, they said, but with a focus, a purpose, a discipline. Do it for the sake of heaven.

They understood that for some, forty days was too long a time to ask for a complete character transformation. So they said, one hour. Fix one hour when you live according to the Torah.

Just one hour. One hour each day. That’s all. The hour of living biblically. And sorry, it can’t be between 3 and 4 in the morning.

Think how much more purposeful our lives would be if every day, for an hour, we tried not to gossip. Several years ago I challenged you to do it for a week, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It was very powerful. Maybe it’s time to do that again. But maybe you already are pretty good at refraining from bad speech. So maybe for an hour, try not to lie – just speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Otherwise we fall into traps of embellishment and self deceit that have been the scourge of politicians, business leaders and former Cy Young award winners accused of taking steroids.

One hour. Just an hour of truth – it could be catching.

Or maybe, for an hour, do something especially charitable.

Here’s an exercise to suggest to the cheapest person you know. Have him withdraw a hundred dollars in singles and then give it all away. The trick is, you have to give it to a hundred different people or causes, one dollar at a time. In an hour.

Are you the impatient type? (If you are you are probably out in the lobby right now). Pick the hour-long period each day when you feel your patience is going to be most challenged. Maybe it’s when you first come to work in the morning, or when you get home after a long day. Or when you get behind the wheel and you’re running late or you are in the back of a long line at supermarket. Now, commit to being patient, just for that one hour. When your child comes at you as soon as you’ve come in the door and you finally sat in your chair, say, “Yes, sweetheart, I’d love to build the Empire State Building out of Legos with you, right now.” Grit your teeth and smile.

Is arrogance your issue? Do you always need to be the center of attention? Try sitting in the back of that classroom or meeting hall. For an hour, let someone else speak.

Please.

Recall the line from Pirke Avot in the Talmud: “Who is wise? The one who learns from every person.”

Are you the lazy type? Set the alarm for an hour earlier – to a really loud radio station that you hate - and force yourself to get up.

How about narcissism? That seems to be our biggest issue these days. How can we overcome it? How about covering the mirrors in your house. Just for an hour. Yes, it will make it look like a shiva house, but sometimes that’s not so bad either. Just, for one hour, don’t look at yourself!

How can we overcome prejudice? Go online. Seriously, go online and visit Mecca. Take a virtual journey to a place where they wouldn’t let you in. Women, go to the men’s section of the Western Wall. Go to the website of the Other and find out just how much like you the Other really is. Spend an hour in Haiti. I listened to radio Australia the other day, just to become better able to communicate with the cantor! You know, the accent is very close to a Boston accent – especially the “r”s. More often than not we discover that as different as we are we’re still the same.

These exercises are what our tradition calls Mussar practice, designed to release the light of holiness in our souls by enabling us to refine positive character traits. Next month, I’m going to be teaching a series of classes in Mussar at the JCC for our Bureau of Jewish Education. At each session, we’ll work on one trait, like humility, empathy or honesty. This will be a hands-on class. And you can get a head start.

So for this coming week, pick something to work on. And start with an hour a day. And then, like we did with the gossip project a decade ago, send me your suggestions for how you’ve used that hour to change something about your life. You can do this anonymously. I’ll be sharing the ideas on our website and yes, Twitter. I hope we can create a long list of suggestions to share.

What can we do to overcome arrogance or anger, envy or greed, slander or worry or fear? How can we better cultivate leadership and gratitude; awareness, modesty and love, simplicity, honesty, optimism, respect and awe?

Rabbi Israel Salanter, the patron saint of the 19th century Mussar movement said, “A pious Jew is not one who worries about his fellow human’s soul and his own stomach; a pious Jew worries about his own soul and his fellow’s stomach.”

It is time to focus on adding a modicum of discipline to our lives – If we can refine our souls, maybe there is hope for this chaotic world.

Rabbi Naomi Levy has just written a book called, “Hope Will Find You: My Search for Wisdom to Stop Waiting and Start Living.” It turns out that her inspiration came from her physically disabled daughter, Noa, whom doctors thought had a degenerative and perhaps fatal condition early in life, but who was able to overcome it. “Life is uncertain, life is unfair, life is chaotic, and God is in a fog,” she writes.” We grope blindly in the darkness for hope, but, with the courage, and confidence and faith to act, hope will find you.

One day, Noa, asked Naomi if she could have a rock climbing party for her twelfth birthday. Naomi was petrified, always so overprotective.

She said, “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea.” “But why?”

“It’s too expensive.”

But day after day Noa kept pushing for the rock climbing party. Eventually Naomi gave in.
On the day of the party Noa put on a climber’s harness, and to her mom’s amazement, she pushed with her legs and pulled with her arms and boldly made her way up the wall. It wasn’t easy, but she climbed and climbed. She was fearless, beaming with joy.

During the party there was a boy about Noa’s age who was too frightened to climb. His father was encouraging him, but he stood frozen in his place. His muscles were strong, but his fear was stronger still.

“That day,” Naomi continues,” my daughter taught me an invaluable lesson: our greatest disability is fear, our greatest strength is courage. In climbing, it is the smoothest surface that is the most treacherous. A rough rocky landscape is fertile ground for ascending. If you want to rise up don’t fear the bumps. Turn every stone into a step…

…As I looked around the gym that day I couldn’t help but wonder if the key to a meaningful life was embedded in that rock wall. The beckoning stones gave me my answer. The challenge in life is a

simple as this: Do I stare at the wall or do I climb?”

We have our answer. Climb.

When the most powerful nation on earth can’t plug a leak for three months, a 12 year old girl who can barely walk can still climb. When we are overwhelmed by gigabytes of data, bombarded with texts and 24/7 communications, we all have the authority to turn it off – maybe for an hour, maybe even for one weekly sublime, Sabbath day. When we feel powerless to change all those little nagging things that we hate about ourselves, we can climb out of that morass too.

We have control. Climb.

Climb up the ladder where the true power lies. The power of discipline.

The power embedded in the very words of the Sh’ma.

We’ll repeat those words until they are engraved upon our hearts; we’ll cover our eyes and focus on each one. We’ll recite them at a time assigned not by our whim, but by the rising sun. And we’ll write that list of character traits upon the doorposts of our homes and upon our gates.

Let those words carry us beyond the oil leaks, the crazy weather and the incessant noise that we have generated, to the peaceful bliss of Shabbos Island. And let us grab that sorcerer’s broomstick and toss it to the wind. And then we’ll turn, we’ll pause and we’ll notice.

The bush …. It still burns.

Amen

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5771: "Why Do They Hate Us?"

Rosh Hashanah First Day 5771
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman
Why Do They Hate Us?

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Why do they hate us?

It’s not a great question with which to begin a Rosh Hashanah sermon, but it’s one that can’t be avoided, given our experience, both historic and recent.

On a warm night in, just after I had escorted our Israel group to Ben Gurion airport and grabbed a cab back to Tel Aviv, as I was ready to sit back and enjoy that warm glow of the night sky over the promenade, and that feeling of satisfaction following another great trip, I flipped on the computer and saw a video called “Only Israel” that had gone viral on YouTube, 400,000 hits in less than two weeks, a song written by an Israeli girl from Efrat named Yedida Freilich. The song is a powerful, haunting indictment of the world for holding Israel to an unfair double standard following the flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza.

“Only Israel has no right to defend herself,” she sings. “Because the world cares nothing about Jewish blood.”

Why do they hate us?

That week, I also received an email from one of our TBE young adults telling me of her shocking experiences while attending the 2nd U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, a conference for every leftist social justice cause imaginable. She was struck by the overwhelming anti-Israel presence there.
“As early as the opening march,” she wrote, “I saw more kafiyas and Palestinian flags than I'd ever seen before. There were numerous workshops each day with titles such as "Unlearning Zionism: Unlearning Racism," “The Case Against the Jewish National Fund," "Understanding Israeli Apartheid," and the list goes on. The word “Zionist” was bandied about the way people used “Communist” in the 1950s. A session organized by a pro-Israel group was cancelled.”

“I've never encountered anti-Israel temperament on such a large scale,” she wrote…. “It’s not as if I thought the world was on our side. But, seeing and hearing these things in-person changed me forever.”

The numbers can be scary. A poll in the Boston Review last year, conducted just after the Madoff scandal, indicated that a fully 25% of the American people blames the Jews for the economic crisis. So we’re not just talking about the fringe here.

Why do they hate us?

The flotilla incident was terrible, but the response to it went far beyond what one might call “proportionate.” It became a sort of Rorschach test for venom and resentment. Once the facts came out, Israelis were united in defending the actions of soldiers under attack, and they were united in their belief that the world was out to get them, including, many felt, the American President.

Meanwhile, many American Jews were left with stomachs churning after the flotilla, feeling helpless to defend Israel blindly when we were seeing the Israeli Prime Minister exclaim that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, while the networks were showing us a very different story.

By the end of July, Netanyahu and Obama had made nice and things began to calm down, but while I was in Israel, make no mistake, their despair was palpable. Israelis feel totally secure on their streets. The economy is booming over there. The place is more beautiful than ever.
But Israelis can feel the world closing in: Denied the right of self defense by Goldstone, delegitimized by European intellectuals and on American college campuses, dehumanized by Iran and its proxies, rebuffed even by some of their American Jewish friends, and this week, misrepresented by Time Magazine’s mean spirited and just plain wrong cover story. The goal of Israel’s enemies is no longer to defeat Israel militarily but to delegitimize it in the eyes of nations. And it is working. The Prime Minister understands this, by the way, which is why he is highly motivated to strike a deal for peace.

Why do they hate us?

Why does the world not give a hoot about Gilad Shalit, who hasn’t even been seen by the Red Cross? Why is the world fiddling while Iran prepares its own Final Solution? Why are atrocities ignored in Darfur, Chechnya? Turkey? Afghanistan? Why is Israel the only one who has no right to defend itself?

Why? Why? Why?

When I was over there in July, the Israeli papers were filled with columns discussing that question. During these days leading up to the fast of Tisha B’Av, a time usually reserved for national rumination, there was plenty of that to go around. And then, thrown into the mix, there was the Rotem bill, designed to help hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants convert to Judaism, but which threatened to disenfranchise American Jewry by placing the power of defining Jewish status entirely in the hands of chief rabbinate. And all of this begged the question of why anyone would want to convert to a people that everyone hates.
In June, noted intellectual Peter Beinart raised a storm by accusing the American Jewish establishment of sacrificing its liberal values in favor of support for Israel at any price. A long-time supporter of Israel, Beinart spoke about a generational divide. The sense that the world is against us doesn’t resonate with younger American Jews, he said. In focus groups, young American Jews repeatedly used the word “they” rather than “us” in reference to Israel. In a poll, only 50 percent of young Jews said they would consider Israel’s destruction a personal tragedy.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post featured an interview with political guru Frank Luntz, who was in Israel to advise government officials on how they can improve their PR skills in talking to Americans. “American’s want to hear empathy,” he advised. “They want to know that you feel the pain of the people in Gaza.”

And it’s true. Americans have a strong historical affinity with refugees of all nations.
As long as they don’t move here.

Luntz spoke of a focus group he did with Harvard and MIT students. He only told them that he was going to ask them about the Middle East. There were 35 people in the room: 20 of them were non-Jewish, 15 were Jewish. And he didn’t tell anyone who was which.

“Got them all into the room,” he continues. “It was so crowded that we had kids sitting on the floor. But that added to the intensity. They felt like they were in a dorm room. And within 10 minutes, the non-Jews started with “the war crimes of Israel,” with “the Jewish lobby,” with “the Jews have a lot more power and influence…”

And guess what? Did the Jewish kids at the best schools in America, did they stand up for themselves? Did they challenge the assertions? They didn’t say (anything). And in that group was the leader of the Israeli caucus at Harvard. It took him 49 minutes of this before he responded.

Luntz later confronted the Jewish kids about their silence.

“And it all dawned on them: If they won’t say it to their classmates, whom they know, who will they stand up for Israel to? Two of the women in the group started to cry. I got the whole thing on tape. The guys are like, “Oh my God, I didn’t speak up, I can’t believe I let this happen.” And they’re all looking at each other with horrible embarrassment and guilt like you wouldn’t believe.”

Why do they hate us? Why do WE hate us?

OK – time to redefine the problem: The problem is NOT that everyone hates us. Jews have been hated for 3,000 years. And guess what! We’re still here! Get over it!

Things aren’t that bad anyway. There are many who love us. Hey, Chelsea Clinton married one of us. Amare Stoudemire signed with the Knicks and discovered his inner matza ball. Things aren’t so bad – but even if they were, the real important question is, how can we respond to all the hatred we see around us, much of it directed to people other than Jews, without losing our humanity?

The paranoia of feeling hated is threatening to take over our souls. THAT’S the real problem. And if that fear takes over our souls, if THAT is all there is to being Jewish, we will lose our kids, we will lose Israel and we will lose a whole lot more.

This conversation gets us into scary territory. Do we in fact take perverse pleasure in being demonized, because it allows us to demonize in return? Because it enables us to send out panicked emails, galvanize and raise money? Not that the dangers aren’t real – they most definitely are, but the greatest danger is that such negativity will turn off the next generation and sully a tradition that for 3,000 years has left a beautiful legacy of love.

Golda Meir used to say that we will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us."

Maybe peace will also come when WE love their children too.

That’s hard. No doubt it’s hard.

But it’s right and it’s the authentically Jewish response. For ours is a religion of Love. Ours is a God of Love.

We need to love their children not simply because showing empathy is a good political strategy – which it is – but because it is right, it is good, and it is the essence of our faith. What Israel did in setting up a model medical facility in Haiti after the earthquake was not simply good PR – although it was terrific PR – it was a gesture that came right out of the Jewish Values playbook. It was the essence of what a Jewish state should do – and we were proud, so proud of it. It was the right thing to do. Just as rescuing Ethiopian Jews, including many of dubious Jewish lineage – was and remains the right thing to do. Just as caring for African refugees and the children of foreign laborers is the right thing for a Jewish state to do.

There’s an argument in the Talmud between Rabbi Akiva and Shimon Ben Azzai, over which is the most basic principle of the Torah. Akiva says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He was a big fan of love. He LOVED love. He’s the guy who put the Song of Songs into the Bible, and his late-blooming romance with his wife Rachel is maybe the greatest Jewish love story of all time.
But Ben Azzai trumped him by saying, “No, even more important than ‘Love your Neighbor’ is the verse from Genesis that states, “On the day that God made human beings, they were made in the likeness of God, male and female God created them.”

Rabbi Arthur Green, whose new book “Radical Judaism” is must reading for any post-modern Jew – and we’ll be teaching it here this year – thinks Ben Azzai was on to something important. It’s not enough simply to love your neighbor. Anyone can love a neighbor. Azzai says that’s not enough! We have to love everyone. Not just the person who lives next door. Not just a fellow Jew. Every human being is in God’s image. True, some are harder to love than others. Some are nearly impossible.

And we all know who they are!

Some days you can love them, and some days you can’t. Even if you can’t love them, you have to treat them with dignity. We should reach out even to those whom it might be hard to love: the stranger, the indigent, the immigrant, the Muslim, the Pole, the Haitian, the Haredi Jew, the sinner, do-gooder, the office snitch, the teacher’s pet, the right wing activist, the left wing activist, the enemy, the former friend.

I know very little about God, except that God looks something like all of the above. All are created in God’s image. And we’ve got to love them all – but if we can’t love them, and God knows it’s not easy, we’ve got to treat them with respect.

As you know, I often like to focus on a particular prayer during these sermons, as a thread that will connect them all. This year we’ll look closely at the Sh’ma, our most important prayer and the prayer that commands us to love – V’ahavta – “You shall love the Lord your God.” So, one may ask, how can you command love?

Well, it’s not really a command, as professor Reuven Kimelman has pointed out. Read properly, “V’ahavta is a response. An instinctive reaction projecting love out into the world. Projecting back what we have received.”

In both the morning and evening liturgies, the Sh’ma is immediately preceded by a prayer about love. In the morning, that prayer is Ahava Rabbah – “A Great Love,” a transcendent love, an UNCONDITIONAL love. The word for love, “Ahava,” appears in various forms no fewer than six times in that single prayer, including the first, middle and last words. Love, love, love, love, love, love. Six times! Like a mantra.

We are loved by an unconditional love – a boundless love, as we say at night, Ahavat Olam. When you’ve been loved in that way, when the world has loved you in that way, the only way to respond is to give love in return.

You’ve undoubtedly heard that old bit of wisdom from Dorothy Law Nolte, “Children learn what they live”

If a child lives with encouragement,he learns confidence.

If a child lives with praise,he learns to appreciate.

If a child lives with security,he learns to have faith.

If a child lives with acceptance, and friendship,he learns to find love in the world.

This is a popularized version of Erik Erikson’s idea of basic trust. The psychologist conducted an enormous amount of research showing that children who have a secure attachment with loving, sensitive caregivers come to know a world that is predictable and reliable. The Sh’ma is saying that such a world is at the root of the Jewish concept of love. A loving parent is doing God’s work. A nurturing community becomes God’s place - which is, by the way, what Temple Beth El aspires to be, an ever-embracing community, from womb to tomb, a conduit of divine love, nurturing our temple family and then projecting it out into the world.

Well, our prayers seem to be telling us that we have lived in a child’s paradise. A world of freely given love, an unending flow of love. And all we have to do is recognize it – and return it. And return it with ALL our heart, which for the ancients meant with our intellect, and ALL our soul, our nefesh, which is life itself, and with all our might, all our physical and material capacity. Love the world as best you can, in any way that you can, because we’ve been loved.

We take that love and hurl it right back at ya’ God, right back at ya’ to the world. That’s what we are here to do as Jews. We are here to love. Not because we are commanded to – rather because, when we have been enveloped by so much love, it is natural to want to give love back.
V’Ahvata, then, to summarize, is not a command but a natural response to a lifetime of nurturing.

I will grant that it is often not easy to give love back for those who have felt very little love in our lives, either as children or adults. And that indeed is a tragedy.

But no matter how horrible your childhood, it could never match the historical experience of the Jewish people. If the children of Israel were really children, God would have been picked up by Child Protective Services long ago. And after what he did in today’s and tomorrow’s Torah portions, Abraham would be next in line.

And that is the crux of the problem once again. We want to love, but our experience has coarsened us. The heavenly Parent seems to have been AWOL while six million were butchered, and while terrorists were allowed to run amok on the buses of Jerusalem and the towers of Manhattan. It’s hard to love when we have not always felt the love. We’ve been burned more recently too, when so many are out of work, when people are suffering, when life savings have been lost. It is easy to succumb to fear. It happens all the time – to very good people.

And yet somehow, through all our travails, Jews have historically been able to transform sorrow into song. And that is because, despite it all, we’ve never forgotten how to love – we’ve never stopped feeling that Ahava Rabbah – that expansive love.

Last April as our Stamford Kulanu group arrived in Krakow on the March of the Living, we had every reason to remain suspicious of the Poles. With all that history of anti-Semitism, it’s hard to wipe the slate clean. I was astonished to see anti-Semitic figurines of Jews with moneybags for sale at the airport gift shop. But when the Polish president was killed in that tragic plane crash on the day after we arrived, suddenly we became the emissaries of the Jewish world at the Polish national shiva. Suddenly the fact that we were in Poland was not simply a coincidence of geography, but a summons to responsibility. And our responsibility was to love. We asked the hotel to secure for us 80 black ribbons, so that we could wear them on the March. We asked our Polish guide to teach us how to say I’m sorry, and we said it to every Pole we passed. The word we used was Solidarnosc – meaning “we feel Solidarity with you.”

But these are Poles…. They’re supposed to hate us. And we’re supposed to hate them. Aren’t we?

Two stories: First from the Zohar: A man traveling on a hot day grew weary and sat down to rest on a rock. A snake slipped toward him but a gust of wind came, snapped a branch from a tree and it killed the snake. When the man awoke and stepped away from the rock, the rock suddenly slipped off the cliff.

Rabbi Abba saw what had happened and asked, “What is your merit that you have been saved from death twice?”

The man answered, “I never fail to make peace with those who harm me. I become their friend and repay good for evil. And before I go to sleep, I forgive all who require forgiveness.

Rabbi Abba said, “You are greater than Joseph. He forgave his brothers, but you forgive strangers as well.”

And from the Talmud, tractate Ta’anit:

During a drought, Rabbi Eliezer prayed long for rain, but nothing happened. Rabbi Akiva offered a short prayer and the rains fell. A Voice from Heaven called out, “Not that Akiva is any better than Eliezer, but Eliezer carries a grudge against those who slight him, while Akiva forgets it and moves on.”

Sometimes it is better to have a short memory, as Akiba did. And sometimes it is not:

As our Polish guide, Ziggy, suddenly broke down in tears when he realized that he now had to speak of his leader in the past tense, I connected with him on a most human level. We can all recall the shock of first saying a loved one’s name in the past tense. I’ve sat in hundreds of homes and hospital rooms where that has happened. It usually takes a few days, or even weeks, as we switch back and forth.

And at that same moment I also remembered those wintry days in 1980 Gdansk, when Lech Walesa’s Solidarnosc party courageously broke the Soviet stranglehold of Eastern Europe, working in perfect synchronicity with Jewish refuseniks were corroding the Evil Empire from within.

And I remembered, March 26, 2000, when the Polish pope wrote a note at the Kotel and cried at Yad Vashem, and prayed for God's forgiveness for "the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer." Rabbi Michael Melchior described the moment as being “beyond history. Beyond memory.”

We have been loved by an unbounded love!

And I said to myself on that rainy, cold night in John Paul’s hometown of Krakow, “How could I possibly hate this man – and these people?” They’ve lost their future. Their leader – and a good percentage of their government. This is their 9/11, their November 22. And I embraced our guide in front of the entire group, and pledged solidarity with him.

This past summer, while vacationing on the Island of Rhodes, Mara and I visited the old synagogue there, now beautifully reconstructed – though only a few dozen Jews remain. The museum there tells an important story. In September 1943, as the German military commanders took control of Rhodes, British aerial bombings caused much damage in the Jewish quarter. The Jews wished to protect their Torahs, among them an 800 year old scroll. In secret, the Torahs were given to the Turkish Moslem leader, the grand mufti of Rhodes, who agreed to house them in, of all places, the pulpit of his mosque! The following July, the Jews of Rhodes were deported to Auschwitz. Of the 1676 that were deported, only 151 survived. After the war, the Torahs were returned to the few who came back.

But that’s not the end of the story. In 1971, the Grand Mufti confided to a long time Jewish friend, “One of the greatest moments of my life was when I was able to embrace the Torah, carry it and put it in the pulpit of the mosque – because we knew that no German would ever think that the Torahs were preserved in the pulpit of a mosque.”

After all, the Nazis based their world view on hatred of those who are different. They had perfected the art of turning good people into paranoid haters through the use of demagoguery, by transforming the Other into a subhuman life form, easy to destroy, like a roach. How could the Nazis, of all people, imagine a scenario so filled with the love of one’s neighbor? Theirs was a world of black and white, of us and them. It was beyond their capacity to imagine a Muslim leader actually helping Jews.

And that’s still not the end of the story. In 2004, a journalist interviewed the daughter of the grand mufti, expressing how much the Jewish community had appreciated her father’s gesture. She acknowledged the recognition and then stated, “I have Jewish blood.” Not quite sure what she was trying to explain, the journalist asked the translator what she meant by that. She replied, “My grandfather was Jewish, on my mother’s side.” That meant that the Grand Mufti’s father in law was Jewish. Who knew! I’d love to have been at THAT Seder.

Hearing a story like this, my question is no longer why they hate us, but why in the world would we hate them! We’ve been loved by an unbounded love.

70% of Albanians are Muslims. According to Yad Vashem sources there is no evidence of a single Albanian Jew being turned over to a Nazi. Norman Gershman, a Jew who researched this subject, adds that “In many cases, Jews were arrested or were refugees, and those (Albanians) living there would give them false passports and dress them in Islamic garb. In many cases, the Albanian rescuers never even knew their real names.”

V’ahavta – We will love. Not we MUST but we will. We will love because we’ve been loved. Even at times of enormous suffering, we’ve been touched by an Ahavah Rabbah. We will love because our God is a God of love, our Torah a Torah of love; every ounce of breath that comes from us is a breath that was given to us in love.

So two weeks ago, when our Interfaith Council held a vigil to show solidarity with our Muslim friends, how could I not attend? I know what it’s like to be part of a despised faith group, a group who, so it’s been said, has insidious designs to take over the world. A group that’s called shifty and rich and devilish. A group whose holy books are burned. There is only a short hop from the Protocols of Zion to some of the things we’ve seen written about Muslims over these past several weeks. So I went to the vigil and I spoke – and the next day I received a number of emails from local Muslims who had been there, thanking me profusely for my courage. I was embarrassed.

Since when is it courageous to stand up for decent people who are being vilified?
These aren’t terrorists. These are police officers and firefighters and bus drivers and Little League coaches. These are fellow Americans!

My friend and partner in dialogue Behjat Syed recently relocated to Houston, but he wrote me, on the day after that vigil:

Hello Josh,

I just wanted to drop a line and tell you how proud I am to have known you all these years. The vigil was very, very well received in the Muslim community not just in Stamford but many miles away it's being touted as an example of how a pluralistic society should function. I must say I miss you all. .I love and appreciate you; and there's nothing you can do about that !!! Also my personal warmest to all that come to Learning & Latte this year. Behjat

The situation in downtown Manhattan is a complicated one and I don’t presume to resolve that matter here. But I plead with us all. Let’s not allow the voices of intolerance to dominate the discussion. I don’t know Iman Rauf personally, but all I know of him tells me that he is precisely the person we want in this conversation.

I pray that loving hearts will prevail on all sides and that the Cordoba Center, wherever it is built, will become a beacon for moderation and hope, the one we have all needed for so long, and that the resolution to this matter be just the thing that will enable our still-grieving nation to at last begin to heal.

Reb Shlomo Carlebach said, “If we had two hearts like we have two arms and two legs, then one heart could be used for love and the other one for hate. Since I have but one heart, then I don’t have the luxury of hating anyone.”

This is the journey from the lower hey to the upper hey is the one we all need to take, the journey from receiving to giving, the journey to unconditional love. Let it begin now. Let us make the passage from Ahava Rabba to Ahavat Olam, from a great love, to the greatest love of all, the love of all with whom we share this earth.

It is easy to be cynical. It is easy to be suspicious. It is easy to throw up our arms and disengage.

It is easy to hate. But IF WE HATE – THE HATERS WILL HAVE WON. They will have turned us into them.

So why do they hate us?

All I know is this. 20,000 Albanian Muslims risked life and limb to save us. How many of us have done that for an Albanian Muslim?

No, they don’t all hate us. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter who hates us and why. All that matters is that we love. Why?

Because we have been loved.

V’ahavta! We WILL love.

Amen

Why is this Rosh Hashanah different from all others?

No, we're not adding the Four Questions to our liturgy, but as you walk into our building this week for services, you'll notice lots that is new, though it's important to note that most of what you'll see will be familiar. Same old rabbi up there, for one (although I'll be wearing a new white knitted yarmulke) and the liturgy is essentially unchanged. But since our eyes and ears tend to gravitate to that which is different, allow me to give you a sneak preview of what to expect:

1) Even before entering the building, you'll notice the freshly painted lines in our parking lot, plus speed bumps and new signs, all designed to make your first impression of TBE safer and more welcoming. In the back of the lot you'll see our new playground, a work in progress, and our new community garden, the Finkelstein Gan Mitzvah, which has produced a bountiful first harvest despite our hot, dry summer.

2) Parents with young children will enjoy meeting Ronnie Brockman, our new early childhood director, who is coordinating a special new family service that begins at 10:15. We'll still have our full assortment of children's programming at 11 as well.

3) As you take out your ticket to enter the building, notice that we are asking congregants to consider not only the importance of the monetary aspects of our High Holidays Campaign (and we do rely on your support!) but this year we are hoping for a commitment of time as well. Voluntarism is the foundation of any nurturing community and active congregation. We appreciate all your support.

4) Now, enter the lobby. The renovation is complete, and it is beautiful. You'll see some special touches, inspired by Bruce Feinberg z'l, in whose memory this lobby was restored. A TV screen will inform you of important upcoming events, obviating the need for lengthy announcements from the pulpit.

5) Pick up our new machzor and immediately you'll see and feel a difference. The cover is soft in texture and earth-toned in color. But it's what's inside that will really stand out. To date, 150,000 copies of the book have been sold and the reviews have been outstanding. The Wall Street Journal hailed it as "postdenominational," and a true reflection of the diversity and inclusiveness that can gather under Conservative Judaism's Big Tent. Some excerpts from that review appear at the bottom of this page.

6) A major goal of ours this year has been to simplify and streamline the service experience and to help people focus on exploring the new machzor. So it will not be necessary to bring added materials to your seat. The white sourcebook will be available (and by all means, continue to use it if you wish), but responsive readings will all come from the new machzor.

7) We're streamlining ark openings too. With a new "honors" system in place (people will be coming up to the bima at set times, rather than for specific openings), along with the new machzor, we have dramatically reduced the dreaded yo-yo effect, the constant standing and sitting and quick ark closings and re-openings. There will be times, for important prayers like "Unetane Tokef," when we'll be standing for longer periods, but overall we'll be standing less, especially later in the service. The effect will be, I hope, a service that will flow and feel less disjointed.

8) Oh, and did I mention that we have a new cantor? We are truly fortunate to have Cantor Mordecai here. Those who have experienced services over the past month know exactly what I am talking about. The music this week will be a synthesis of old favorites, featuring our fabulous choir, mixed in with some new touches. Some things may appear unusual (some of the younger kids have been surprised that you can have a male cantor) and a variety of musical styles will be employed. I'm anxious to hear your feedback afterwards, but for the next couple of days, all I want to hear are your voices - in song! Our new cantor is wonderful at engaging people and inviting us to sing along. His tunes are eminently singable. The next few days are about participation, not observation. It's all about being inspired to change our lives and to change the world.

So that's what will be different as we begin 5771. But many things will remain the same:

- The need for a food drive is as great as ever. Please take home a bag to fill.

- Marc Schneider will once again handle shofar and choir directing responsibilities. He is a true unsung hero of the High Holidays. As always, all shofar blowers are invited to join in the final blasts at the end of the service.

- And, as always, we remain as dependent on your patience and warmth as we deal with bus lines and other inconveniences, see old friends and meet new ones. We'll have lots of new people here this year. Please consider yourself a host, rather than a consumer. Everyone is a greeter! Introduce yourself to the stranger next to you. Show her the page (with a new book, this year, we'll all be equally lost - the playing field has been leveled). For those who can't remain in the sanctuary for any reason, the service will be piped into the lobby. I hope that people both in the lobby and sanctuary-social hall will be respectful and keep schmoozing to a minimum. If you want to talk (and I would hate to be considered an anti-schmoozer), I hear the weather is going to be nice. Feel free to step outside. But know that you just might be missing something amazing and unforgettable that will be happening inside....

I look forward to greeting you over the next few days, beginning tonight, when Rabbinic Pastor David Daniel Klipper will be delivering the d'var Torah. Also note that tonight, seating will be in the main sanctuary only - it's cozier that way.

My thanks to our excellent staff and dedicated volunteers, in particular our once-in-a-lifetime president, Eileen Rosner. Our congregation is doing amazing things and I hope you will catch the spirit of unity, optimism and joy that have become our hallmark as we enter our 90th year.

I pray that all of us find inspiration over the coming days to write ourselves into the Book of A-Life-that-Matters, and that we can all be up to the task of providing comfort to one another, especially to those who have suffered loss, illness or economic setback. I pray that 5771 will at last be a year of peace and security for Israel and around the world.

L'Shana Tova, a sweet, purpose-filled year, from my family and all of us at TBE!

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

PS - Sadly, Time magazine's cover story this week terribly distorted the situation in Israel. Some strong reaction has appeared in the Jewish press, including Media Watch: Time Says, 'Israel Doesn't Want Peace' and Daniel Gordis' strong response in the Commentary blog. I've read the Time cover story, "The Good Life And Its Dangers" and I agree with Gordis that the insinuation that Israelis would prefer money to peace is insane and borderline anti-Semitic, in the Fagin/Shylock mode. Israelis' apathy toward the current negotiation stems from their having had their hopes summarily doused by the post-Oslo terror attacks. Israelis know how to live for the day. And the mere fact that they have not abandoned their embattled homeland for greener pastures, but rather built it up into an economic heavyweight, testifies to their moral courage, resilience, and desire to build a better world for all.

Below are excerpts from the WSJ review of "Machzor Lev Shalem" and links to two other reviews:

Conservative 'Machzor' Tries for Accessibility and Inspiration, (JTA)
A Tale of Two Ma(c)hzors (New Voices - student magazine)
A Stirring New Prayer Book for the High Holidays Wall Street Journal

"The broad-based approach of the new prayer book-in which supplementary readings range from Hasidic sages to Gilda Radner, and from devout medieval Jewish Spanish poets to Israeli poet and professed atheist Yehuda Amichai-is in some ways reflective of this "post-denominational" style that blurs lines between the different movements.

The point is that regardless of the movement label you choose (or eschew), whether you're a synagogue regular or not, this prayer book is sophisticated and scholarly but entirely user-friendly at all levels. Prayers appear in the original Hebrew, for those who can read Hebrew, as well as transliteration in the Roman alphabet, for those who don't. For those who just want to know what those prayers mean, there are newly updated, more contemporary sounding, English translations.

Accompanying commentaries on each page help explicate the intent and origins of those prayers, many of which are hundreds of years, or more, old. The ritual blowing of the shofar (or ram's horn) is given additional contemporary resonance by a description of the distinctive short, staccato notes that are sounded as "broken," and the longer sustained notes as "whole," thus providing a metaphor for the spiritual quest of the High Holidays as a journey from brokenness to wholeness.

To further address modern-day concerns, new prayers are included for those unable to carry out the customary fast on Yom Kippur; for those in need of healing; and for their caregivers, too. To honor the role of women in Jewish tradition (and in contemporary egalitarian services), a liturgical poem was expanded to include mention of Biblical heroines as well as
heroes.

There is even a meditation for victims of abusive parents-it appears in the "Yizkhor" (memorial) service, under the title, "In Memory of a Parent Who Was Hurtful." As for issues of sexual orientation, the prayer book offers an alternate Torah reading to substitute for the traditional selection on the afternoon of Yom Kippur (Leviticus 18) about permitted and prohibited sexual unions. An additional commentary places the traditional passage in the historical and Biblical context and invites the reader to decide on his or her own interpretation.

Comprehensive and informative, traditional and contemporary, this full-hearted prayer book speaks eloquently to the mind and soul."

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Jenna Plotzky on Nitzavim-Vayelech

Shabbat Shalom!

At the beginning of my portion of Netzavim-Vayelech, Moses tells the people, “You who stand here today, all the people of Israel, even the stranger within your camp, from wood chopper to water drawer - all of you are here to enter the covenant of the Lord, which God is concluding with you this day.”

You may be wondering why it was that Moses mentioned, of all professions, wood choppers and water drawers. Commentators state that these two professions were used to represent all types of menial labor. The Torah was meant for them too – not just the people who have more glamorous jobs like my Mom. On this Labor Day Weekend, that’s an important thing to consider.

But maybe it was something else. Maybe Moses specifically wanted to appeal to wood choppers and water drawers because, oh, perhaps a tree had just fallen on his house during an enormous rainstorm?

I can relate to Moses, because that’s exactly what happened at my house last March.

People around here will not soon forget that storm, which on a Saturday night brought wind gusts of over 75 miles an hour and knocked down thousands of trees. I know of ten just on my block. Only one fell on my property, but, unfortunately, it fell right onto the house. It was a HUGE 120 plus year-old tree.

We were eating dinner at about 7 – it’s hard to say since the power had already gone out a few hours before. We were all in the family room when suddenly we heard a boom and then a couple of seconds later, another cracking sound. We held our breath and then realized we were in fact okay…..My mom and I ran upstairs with a flashlight and when entered my parents’ bedroom, the ceiling was split and the tree was inside. Suddenly it was raining in the room. My mom screamed, “There’s a tree in my house. Get it out of my house!” It was one of the scariest moments of my life.

Our fabulous neighbors, Anna and Larry, put up a giant tarp to catch the water as it came in and then funneled the water out the window. We then saw that while part of the tree was stuck in the roof, most of it had fallen onto the deck, crushing it.

So like Moses, what we needed that night was a woodchopper and water drawer.

In verse 19 of chapter 29, Moses is warning the people that future generations will look at the devastation of the land and wonder why so many bad things had happened to the Israelites and to their environment. The commentary in our Chumash suggests that they will ask, “How did those who lived before us permit themselves to despoil the earth, air and water, not leaving us a livable environment?”

It is very natural following a disaster to look around and wonder why it happened. On the night of the storm, we drove to the Hyatt and saw all the devastation in Stamford. The next morning we came back and it was pretty bad. All I could think about was how lucky we were to be alive and how much work we were going to have to do to get the place back into shape…along with the clean up and fixing, there was the decorating, figuring out the insurance, and all of this at a time when we supposed to be planning MY bat mitzvah, just a few months away.

I never saw this as a punishment or anything, the way Moses spoke of the disasters that would happen to the Israelites who did not follow the covenant. But with all the weird weather we’ve been having, it does make you wonder whether we need to be doing more to take care of the environment. There have been a few tornados around here this summer. And we never have tornados here!

We may not be able to control the weather, or where a tree is going to fall, but there is much we can do to protect the environment.

The good news is that just a few weeks ago, my house was finished, just in time for my bat mitzvah. We have a brand new deck, family room, bathroom, closet and bedroom. And, most importantly, we appreciate, more than ever before, being together as a family, and being in a place that we can call home.

There are many people far less fortunate than I am, some of whom will be helped by the money I am raising through my mitzvah project, “Candles for a Cause.” I have been selling candles and holders for the last 9 months and have almost reached my goal of raising $1,500 for Kids in Crisis. When I am done, this money will go towards feeding 20 kids meals for an entire week. I’m raising money to help them get back on their feet, with food and school supplies that are in these baskets on the bema.

Getting More Than You Paid For (Hammerman on Ethics)

See my latest Ethical Dilemma on the Jewish Week's site: Getting More Than You Paid For

Q. I just came from the store, having bought an mp3 player. When I opened it I noticed that they had given me a newer, enhanced model, not the one I had paid for. The store is about 25 miles away. To return it I would be spending as much on gas for the round trip as I would have spent had I purchased the newer model. What is the ethical thing to do?

A. Order online next time! That way you'll spend nothing on gas, preserving our scarce energy resources, and you'll feel less constrained about doing the right thing, which, BTW, would be to return the item. For the rest of the response, click here.

Imperfection: An Interpretation of Psalm 99

Imperfection

An Interpretation of Psalm 99

by Joshua Hammerman

“Adonai, You have answered them,
as the One who could bear their imperfections,
after exacting a penalty for what they did.”


God could bear the imperfections of Moses, Aaron, Jacob, Miriam and Samuel
So why can I not forgive my own?

For You it is all so simple
Sin, punishment, teshuvah, slate cleaned.
The never-ending cycle
Never ends in pain.
The pain comes and goes;
The guilt is gone,
Only to return with the next golden calf.
The pain is gone, the memory is short.
It’s so un-Jewish!

And so un-me!
I cannot forgive myself so easily;
For last week’s indiscretions.
Missing my child’s bedtime
Or missing a meeting;
Forgetting a call
Or making it.
Not hearing one cry,
Because I’m listening to another.
Or not listening hard enough to either.

You who suffers our insufferableness,
Grant me the ability to bear my own suffering.
Teach me, O paradigm of Perfection, how you stomach us
So that I may forgive myself
For not being You.

On Hurricanes and the Peace Process: An Interpretation of Psalm 29

The Storm Before the Calm

An Interpretation of Psalm 29

by Joshua Hammerman

“The Voice of the Eternal on the Waters, God in full glory thundering…
The Voice of Adonai smashing cedar forests on Mt. Lebanon…
Convulsing all the deer…stripping the forests…presiding over the cosmos…
Adonai’s force will be channeled to Israel, blessing God’s people Israel with peace.”


Amichai the poet wrote:
“Now in the storm before the calm
I can tell you what
In the calm before the storm I didn’t say
Because they would have heard us and discovered our hiding place.”

It is in the storm we hear the cosmic cry
Wind whipping, rain smashing, thunder blasting away
At our false sense of security.
And illusions of immortality.

There is no hope of hiding
From fear
From doubt
From ourselves.

Everything comes into question in the storm
And everything falls into place
We hold tight onto those few things we cherish the most
And those people
And God.

Jerusalem is built high in the mountains.
So when the plumes of clouds swell with rain
They plummet to within inches of the holy soil
The rain slashes the earth, violently decanting,
Splashing the shrines; the gravestones sink in the mud.

The entire force of the storm is concentrated there, going not one inch beyond Scopus
Into the arid wilderness.
In Jerusalem, the desert meets the sea.
There are no compromises.

But the storm does end.
The clouds depart quickly, and stay away for mouths.
Allowing hope to rise again.
And the illusion of calm,
Which swells and swells
Until the storm returns.

What do Jews Feel Guilty About?

David Ben Gurion said, "The Jews know hardly anything of a hell that might await them. Their hell is a personal dissatisfaction with themselves if they are mediocre."

What do YOU think? Let me know and I'll post some responses?

See also Seeking forgiveness on Selichot with help from the pros

Dershowitz and J-Street: Let the Dialogue Begin

On Oct. 7, TBE will host a conversation between Alan Dershowitz and J-Street's Jeremy Ben Ami. The buzz for this event is already enormous, so it's a good time to brush up on what the two have to say...

From the Jerusalem Post, this excellent piece by Dershowitz: Three myths about the peace process

See also - Distinguished Rabbinic Leaders Sign Letter in Support of J Street, Urgent US Leadership to Achieve Two States

Op-Ed: Let's recognize the sacred power of this time – for peace - Rabbi Charles Kroloff