Leave Them Laughing

“We are jesters…”

BT Ta’anit 22a

“Oppressed people tend to be witty,” Saul Bellow once wrote. It seems counterintuitive but true. While many Jews today might struggle with identifying ten Jewish biblical figures outside those in movies, it would be effortless for most of us to come up with the name of ten Jewish comedians. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning describes the way a group of his comrades tasked each other with making jokes about the food they were served in their concentration camp. If you can laugh about it, the pain cannot touch you as much. If you can laugh in misery, perhaps one day you will be able to laugh in freedom.

The Jewish appreciation and penchant for humor did not develop in the last century. For millennia, there have been funny men and women dotting the pages of the Bible and the Talmud. Clever witticisms and insults are a regular feature of rabbinic dialogue. But there is one Talmudic passage that stands out, however, for the value it places on laughter. In BT Ta’anit [22a], a tractate that discusses, of all things, the ritual of fasting, we find a remarkable story, cited here in the Koren English translation:

Rabbi Beroka Hoza’a was often found in the market of Bei Lefet, and Elijah the prophet would often appear to him. He said to him, “Is there anyone in this market worthy of the World-to-Come? He said to him: No. In the meantime, he [the rabbi] saw a man wearing black shoes who did not place the sky-blue thread on his garment [tzitzit]. He [Elijah] said to him: That man is worthy of the World-to-Come. He ran after him and said to him: “What is your occupation?” He said to him: “Go away now but come back tomorrow. The next day, he said to him, “What is your occupation?”

We take a pause from the Talmudic text for a moment of explanation. Bei Lefet was a large commercial center where much business was conducted. The man wearing black shoes and no ritual fringes was apparently not Jewish as Jews had the custom of wearing shoes with white straps (who knew?). The rabbi in our tale found it hard to believe that Elijah would identify such a one as worthy of the elusive World-to-Come. This is prime spiritual real estate and not every one is worthy. The man finally identified himself as a prison guard who placed himself between male and female sinners so they would not come to sin, and he risked his life to save vulnerable females. He was indeed Jewish but dressed in this fashion so that he could find out information that may impact his people and report it. Obviously the rabbi was impressed that someone who looked one way on the outside could have the capacity for so much goodness on the inside. In the midst of this discussion, the Talmud continues…

In the meantime, two brothers came [to the market]. He [Elijah] said to him [the rabbi]: “These two also have a share in the World-to-Come.” He went over to the men and said to them: “What is your occupation?” They said to him: “We are jesters, and we cheer up the depressed. Alternatively, when we see two people who have a quarrel between them, we strive to make peace.”

Three people in the marketplace were deserving of life in the hereafter, and this designation was a result of what they did at work. One got in for caring about the dignity of those often discarded and ignored by society to the point of sacrificing his own life to achieve this protection. And the other two were far from this noble perch. Instead, they were jesters. They made people happy, so happy that in the midst of an argument, they created peace. It sounds so simple, but a whole-hearted devotion to making other people happy as a profession, as an occupation, is not easy at all.

I had studied this passage last year and had heard it before, but I never really understood it until I attended the funeral of Evan Levy, of blessed memory, last week. You see Evan was a special little boy of four who, in the past year-and-a-half, endured 7 surgeries, 5 of them on his brain. His father cited this piece of Talmud in describing Evan’s “evan”escence, his energy, his monkey-like pranks and the way he had of walking into a room and lighting up the space. Even at his young age, Evan had a gift for making people happy. His mother mentioned a pre-school teacher who said that if Evan was not in school, the day was boring. A close friend spoke and said that when the family announced that Evan died, she texted the fire department, police department, sanitation department and ice cream truck man. You see, these people were Evan’s close friends. He regularly rode up and down his neighborhood in the ice cream truck. In her eulogy, this devoted friend read the condolence note that the ice cream truck man wrote. He described Evan as an angel. Evan’s father closed his remarks by saying that now it’s God’s turn to play with Evan and how lucky God is to do so.

Evan’s loss is tragic. His funeral was profoundly painful. But it was also deeply uplifting. Gone is a pint-size hero, but the legacy he left is out-sized. He taught thousands of adults the lesson the Talmud tried to teach two thousand years ago. Be a jester. Bring cheer to those who are sad. Make peace in the face of a quarrel.

We’re here for such a short time. Let’s spend more time laughing.

May Evan’s memory be for a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom

2015: The Jewish Year in Review

“Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

— Psalms 90:12

Many of us will be happy to say goodbye to 2015, with its haunting terrorist attacks, strange presidential debates and wacky climate changes. And as a people, here's what we fought over in 2015: a divisive Iran nuclear deal, which GOP candidate Jewish Republicans can get behind and the release of Jonathan Pollard. The terrible attacks against Jews in Copenhagen and a Jewish supermarket in Paris had us talking about whether Jews should stay in Europe.

We stop our bickering to mourn the loss of some special Jews in 2015 like Theodore Bickel, who played Tevye the milkman in "Fiddler on the Roof" more times than any other actor. That play is making a Broadway come-back to excellent reviews. We lost Leonard Nimoy, whom comedian Dave Barry said will be beamed up for the last time and the larger-than-life physician/writer Oliver Sacks. A professor called the Kierkegaard of Orthodox Jews, Michael Wyschogrod, passed away, as did theologian Rabbi Dr. Byron Sherwin. Turning eastward, we lost a towering rabbinic figure with the death of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, head of one of the most prestigious yeshivot in Israel and Yehuda Avner, who began his aliya digging the latrines at Kibbutz Lavi and went on to become a speechwriter and advisor for many Israel prime ministers. 

In July, Nicholas Winton (born Wertheimer) died. He organized a rescue operation to bring 669 children - most Jews - from Czechoslovakia to Great Britain before WWII. This miracle was not public knowledge until 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook about it in the attic. That year, he was invited to be a member of the audience of a BBC television show "That's Life", where, unknown to him, his gift of life was described and that scrapbook was displayed. The show's hostess asked if anyone in the audience had been saved by Winton. More than two dozen people next to Winton stood up and clapped. He was knighted for his services to humanity.

In the non-celebrity, tragic category, we lost Rochelle Shoretz to cancer at 42. Rochelle was the founder of Shoresh, a support and educational network for Jewish women with breast cancer. Faigy and Sara Mayer, two young ex-Hasidic women unable to find rest and happiness, took their own lives, forcing introspection on what religious commitment looks like. Seven children in the Sasoon family died in a Shabbat fire in their home in Brooklyn, prompting another important conversation on fire safety in observant Jewish neighborhoods. As of this writing, there were 23 victims of terror in Israel, including the recent death of Ezra Schwartz from Boston on November 19th and the deaths of Eitam and Naama Henkin on October 1st.
 
Moving from argument to grief to pride, in the prize category, this past year's awardees for the Presidential Medal of Freedom is flush with our people: violinist and conductor Itzchak Perlman, Steven Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim and Barbara Streisand were acknowledged for their contributions to American arts and culture. It is the highest civilian award in the United States. It seems - and I hate to say it - that there were no Jews on the Nobel Prize roster, and we haven't won in the world peace category since 1995 so we are long overdo. Nation, go make some peace.
 
I consoled myself with this fun fact learned in 2015: The Israeli town of Rishon Le-Ziyon has a street named for the 160 plus Jewish Noble laureates: Tayelet Hatnei Pras Nobel or Nobel Laureates Boulevard/Promenade. Who gets to live there, I wonder? That's prime real estate. In 2015, the University of Salzburg announced that Konrad Lorenz, a zoologist who received the 1973 Nobel Prize in physiology, was stripped of his honorary doctorate, 26 years after his death, for his embrace of Nazism. And I don't want to brag, but in August of 2015, Israel officially became 8th on the list of countries to host the most Nobel Prize winners, and Technion University in Haifa has been associated with more Nobel prize winners than either Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge (If you've heard of them). I'm just saying...
 
But before we get all full of ourselves, we also had some bad Jews this year. Ehud Olmert, former prime minister of Israel and its first prime minister to be incarcerated, was handed a reduced jail sentence this past week. Joining him behind bars is Jared Fogle, the Subway Guy, whose weight loss helped him become a spokesperson for the restaurant chain until he was arrested for child pornography. He won't be eating subs for at least 15 years. But enough of bad news or bad Jews...
 

• In 2015, aliya hit a record high for the past twelve years with over 30,000 immigrants moving there from across the globe.
• Those involved in daily Talmud study hit the 1,000th page and are inching towards the mid-point in the seven and a half year cycle.
• And Adam Sandler has a new Chanuka song.

A number of exciting book titles were released either by Jews or about Jews, like Kerri Steinberg's Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience and Bewilderments by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Several anthologies came out about or including the writings of Saul Bellow, including The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 by Zachary Leader and Israel Zamir wrote a memoir called Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer. We closed the year with a remarkable achievement. Herman Wouk just published Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year Old Author to mark his 100th birthday. Mazal tov - 'til 120!
 
We close 2015 with this thought from Psalms: "Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." Let's learn from some of the mistakes of 2015 and do better in the year ahead. We need that heart of wisdom, and the world needs it too.
 
Shana tova and Shabbat Shalom

The Hineni Moment

“Here I am. Send me.”

— Isaiah 6:8

Many of us know the old joke: Why is it when I talk to God it’s called prayer, but when God talks to me, it’s called schizophrenia? We are rightfully suspect when someone makes the claim that he or she has been spoken to by God. But as we close this secular year of 2015 at the same time we close the book of Genesis, we look back at the fifty chapters and can’t help noticing that God speaks to many of our biblical leaders at times of vulnerability and struggle. God tasks them with the job of transformation, both of self and nation, and God waits for a response. And the response is often Hineni: I am fully present in this moment in time and poised to take on my assignment.

The Hebrew word “hineni” is translated in many different ways. It suggests one’s presence in a situation, particularly one freighted with tension and responsibility. Abraham said it when God asked him to bind Isaac and once again in response to his son. Jacob answered the call of an angel after he had a dream about his livestock and God called him back to the land of Israel where he could dream of higher things. Joseph said it when Jacob asked him to see how his brothers were fairing. Moving beyond Genesis, Moses said it at the burning bush. Samuel said it when God stood over him, waiting for Samuel to eclipse his mentor in leadership. Isaiah said it when God was searching for a leader and volunteered himself with the beautiful words above: “Here I am. Send me.” It’s as if in that one word, Isaiah and those before him were saying, “I am ready to do great things.”

Hineni connotes a readiness and acceptance of a mission or task that often portends danger. It does not appear as often as one might suspect it would in the Hebrew Bible. It appears in three readings that frame the High Holiday liturgy, a time when being present is particularly consequential and important. Sometimes it’s a call that God gives to a human being when no one else is present, as in Genesis 22:1 or Exodus 3:4. But it doesn’t only have to be God calling. Sometimes it is the response of a human being to the call of an angel or messenger, as in Genesis 22:11or 31:11. Sometimes it’s said in response to a parent as in Genesis 27:1 or 37:18. Sometimes, as in the book of Esther, one human being - in this case Mordechai to Esther - calls out to another to grow in leadership and influence.

We tend to focus on the response to a call rather the request itself. But the Bible invites us to invite. In other words, if you want to get someone to do something, you have to ask. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. It’s also who you ask and how. When you recruit someone to a task, you want to use his or her name to make the argument for uniqueness. It is no coincidence that in several call texts, God or an angel doubles the name: Abraham, Abraham. Moses, Moses, Samuel, Samuel - as if to say, it’s you and only you. And the call needs to be specific to a task so that when the magic word Hineni is said, it is said with full recognition of the momentousness and consequences of what lies ahead. And a call has to be just that: a call. It’s the singling out of someone for something special, a selection. It’s the power of invitation. The act of calling itself is the message behind a powerful midrash:

The rabbis said: You find that when God gave the Torah to Moses, He gave it to him after ‘calling.’ How do we know this? Since it is said, "And the Lord called Moses to the top of the mount; and Moses went up’" (Exodus 19:20). Also Moses our teacher, when he came to repeat the Torah to Israel, said to them: "Just as I received the Torah with ‘calling’ so too will I hand it over to God’s children with ‘calling.’ "From where do we know this? From what is written in the context: “And Moses called to all of Israel and said to them...” [Midrash Rabba, Deuteronomy 7:8]

When you are called to a hineni moment, you begin to understand the importance of the invitation and then should be able to create those moments for others. Because God called Moses, Moses understood that when he gave our people the commandments, he also needed to call us. The formality of the invitation serves as a validation that a big and wide possibility has been put before us. We must choose our answer carefully.

As we say goodbye to the pages of Genesis for now, we are left with an enduring question. What is our hineni moment? What should we be doing of great purpose in this coming year, and how will we answer? Perhaps we too will have the courage and the spiritual audacity to say, as Isaiah did long ago: Here I am. Send me.

Shabbat Shalom

Losing a Leader

“Upon whom is there for us to rely? Only upon our Father in heaven.”

— BT Sotah 49b.

As we put a close to 2015 and reflect on the year that has passed, we also create closure around iconic figures who died this year: Yogi Berra, Oliver Sacks, E.L. Doctorow, B.B. King, Robin Williams, John Nash, and Leonard Nemoy. In their respective fields, they each became known for a certain type of skill, intelligence, voice and idiosyncratic, beloved way of viewing the world. It's not hard to make a jump from the death of any of these figures to the closure, in some way, of the talent that each respectively represents. Will sports, literature, music, comedy, or medicine ever be the same? Yes and no.
 
Thinking about the loss of a leader and the loss of that leader's gifts, brings us to a fascinating passage of the Talmud. This past week we closed another tractate of Talmud [BT Sota 49b] and moved to a new volume. The last page closed with the sense of closure generally, recording what was lost when a number of famous sages died and a retrospective on what was lost when the Second Temple was destroyed.
 

When Rabbi Meir died, those who related parables ceased.

When Ben Azzai died, the diligent ones ceased.

When Ben Zoma died, interpreters ceased.

When Rabbi Akiva died, the honor of the Torah ceased.

When Rabbi Yosi died, the pious were no more.

When Yohanan ben Zakai died, the glory of wisdom ceased.

When Raban Gamliel the Elder died, the honor of the Torah ceased as did purity and asceticism.

When Rabbi Yishmael ben Pazi died, the honor of the priesthood ceased.

When Rabbi Yehuda the Prince died, humility and fear of sin ceased.

 
As the Talmudic text continues and discusses the destruction of the Second Temple, despair overtakes the language. It's not only that certain intellectual and spiritual losses were sustained when these individuals passed away, when they died it seemed that all they represented died with them. And when the text turns its focus on the Temple - the building at the heart of our ancient lives - and it lay in ruination, people bowed their heads down in shame, this passage tells us, and arrived at a conclusion: "Upon whom is there for us to rely?" the voice of the narrator asks, "Only upon our Father in heaven."
 
If we rely too heavily on mortals, we ignore our own mortality, the Talmud seems to suggest. People die, even famous people die. Even scholars, whose wisdom ages with them, die. Become too attached to them and you will experience a loss that is more intense than letting go of their person - you will have to let go of hope itself. If wisdom ceases, Torah ceases and interpretation ceases then the scholarly world itself dies. We understand these lines as the highest form of praise, and yet there seems to be something intensely un-Jewish about them.
 
It is then that two voices perk up and appear in our debate.
 
Rabbi Yosef challenged the despair: "Do not teach that humility ceased. There is one who is still humble: me." Rabbi Nahman challenged the one who taught this mishna: "Do not teach that fear of sin ceased. There is still one who feared sin: me."
 
When I first read this, I laughed. It sounded like a variation of the statement, "You won't find anyone more modest than I am," which undermines the very quality of humility. But in reading it again and thinking about its deeper meaning, it's not hard to understand why this is a perfect rebuttal of the pathos that can overtake us when we think we have lost the greatest generation. When that happens, we have to take stock of what the loss means and what the loss forces us to become.
 
We must each take responsibility to replace those who came before us and who represented something extraordinary to us and society at large. We can't foist that upon someone else. We have to stand up and recover from the pain and realize that all continues. We must evolve and replace that which we have lost. We can't bring back people who have died, but sometimes with their deaths, they become the most incredible teachers and mentors for the next generation. That generation is us.

Giving Tuesday

“Anyone to whom a painful incident has happened must announce it publicly so that the public will pray for mercy on his behalf.
”

— BT Sotah 32b

Wait a minute, it's not Thursday. Why are you getting Weekly Jewish Wisdom today? Because it's Giving Tuesday, and we can't miss this opportunity to think about giving today in a Jewish way. We don't miss an opportunity to give because of an obscure statement in the Talmud that surfaced in last week's daily Talmud study cycle. If anyone has suffered, he or she has an obligation to announce it so that others can pray on his or her behalf.

This is an outgrowth of a law from Leviticus 13:45 that involves a leper announcing his presence among other people. We might think the leper tells others he is approaching with a clapper or a cry to keep people away because of contagion. This may be a medical reality, but the Talmud has an existential reality in mind. When someone announces pain, our responsibility is to come to his or her aid. There cannot be a pronouncement without a response. It is not the Jewish way.

Later on, the Talmud - in its discussion of prayers that can be recited in any language versus those that must be said in Hebrew - concludes that, "When it comes to praying for divine mercy, one may pray in any language one desires," [BT Sota 33a]. People need opportunities to pray for others and to pray for themselves. There is no shame in making oneself vulnerable. The recognition of others and the recognition of our own vulnerabilities is the key to our humanity.

In his seminal article, "The Community," Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik asked, "How is the community formed? The answer is simple: two lonely individuals create a community in the manner that God created the world. What was God's instrument of creation? The word." For Rabbi Soloveitchik, words are the building blocks of community; they are the cement that holds us together. "To recognize a person means to affirm that he is irreplaceable. To hurt a person means to tell him that he is expendable, that there is no need for him." Recognizing a person is taking that person in totally, hearing that person's needs, triumphs, pain. That is why Rabbi Soloveitchik believed that all prayer is in the plural; prayer is an act of recognition of the other.

"The prayer community, it is self-evident, must at the same time be a charity-community, as well. It is not enough to feel the pain of many, nor is it sufficient to pray...We give, we pray for all because we are sensitive to pain; we try to help..." The word is a recognition of the other; the word turns into prayer and prayer turns into action.

If the Talmud tells us to make a public announcement about pain or need to inspire help, then Giving Tuesday is an opportunity to respond publicly and collectively to that pain and share some amazing generosity to inspire us to turn words into action.

“David Weissman has been working on behalf of this charity for decades. For hours a day he turns gasoline into love.”

So here's something that inspired me. My husband and I were in an Uber this week and talked to the driver about his experience, his hours and the change in the industry that is happening as a result of Uber. He said he retired and started driving for a charity he really cares about. Twenty percent of his earnings goes to the company, 20% to gas and car maintenance and the remaining 60% goes to charity. What charity, we wondered, was the lucky beneficiary of all this driving time? The Israel Sports Center for the Disabled, a pioneer in sports rehabilitation. For over 50 years, the center has helped thousands: those born with disabilities and those who have been injured in military or terrorist incidents. David Weissman, our driver, has been working on behalf of this charity for decades. For hours a day he turns gasoline into love.

If you're thinking about where to give today - no matter the amount - think about David behind the wheel so that kids and adults in wheelchairs can feel empowered and make a donation to the Israel Sports Center for the Disabled in David's honor. Click here.

Today's the day. Turn someone else's cry into a prayer, a word into a deed, and a deed into an act of redemption.

An early Shabbat Shalom to you all.

White Friday

“One who increase possessions increases worry
”

— Hillel

Last week I suggested to readers that to combat some of the baseless hatred of the Friday before - when the Paris terrorist attacks happened - they engage in random acts of kindness. Many reported back on acts small and large that helped lift them above the despair of what seems an ever intolerant and violent society. One tutored an Afghan war veteran in physics and calculus to help him complete his pre-med requirements. One made a bank teller feel good by wishing her well on her recent marriage. Some of you said that you were studying to honor the memory of Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year old American who was murdered last week while studying in Israel for his gap year.

Another 18 year old Israeli, Naftali Litman, and his father Yaakov, were also killed in a terrorist attack last week. The family was driving to a Shabbat celebration before the wedding of Naftali’s sister, Sara, to be held later that week. Despite the heavy and tragic losses, the Litman family went ahead with the wedding and invited the entire State of Israel to participate. Sara and Ariel, her fiancé, responded to tragedy by lifting everyone else up to share in their joy.  Last Friday, one reader contributed to a fund in their honor, which has currently raisedover $21,000 from complete strangers in what, could be argued, is a wedding gift registry held up by a thousand kindnesses.

That takes us to this coming Friday. What will you be doing tomorrow?

The Friday after Thanksgiving has been named Black Friday to put merchants in the black by pumping up pre-holiday sales. Some stores have started opening on Thanksgiving itself so that football game viewing ends with door-buster spending. Thank goodness, some chains have reacted to this consumer fever with a backlash. REI, the outdoor equipment supplier, will close all of its 143 stores not only on Thanksgiving but on the Friday afterward and is paying all of its 12,000 employees so that they can have a day outdoors with their families. Forty-nine state parks in Northern California are offering free admission to encourage people to spend the day in nature, not in the mall.

But not everyone will be so high-minded. Many will hunt outdoors for parking spaces and then hunt indoors for bargains. They will lose sleep to save a few bucks on new technology or new clothing. They will bring home their packages and have to find a place for them. They will buy gifts that may get returned. They will buy things they never needed in the first place and they will ignore the famous statement from Ethics of the Fathers 2:8: “One who increase possessions increases worry.”

Why, you may ask, will more material possessions generate more anxiety? Because, in the words of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, in his commentary on Ethics of the Fathers, these things seem "desirable to many but can have an adverse effect on those who possess them." The ancient Sage behind the quote, Hillel, pushed back by also enumerating “things” that, when increased, only bring more joy and wisdom: “The more Torah, the more life; the more study, the more wisdom; the more counsel, the more understanding, the more devotion to duty, the more peace.” On this, Rabbi Hirsch writes: “The more the Torah will be acquired in theory and observed in practice, the more will human existence become life in the true, genuine sense of the word.”

“If what you already have doesn’t make you happy, then how will having more of it make you happier?”

If you want to acquire anything that brings about a better state of humanity, here is what Hillel recommends you buy at the mall: a good name and words of Torah. If you acquire a good name, Hillel states, that is the best acquisition you can own.

Many years ago, I saw a sign in the elevator at work, “If what you already have doesn’t make you happy, then how will having more of it make you happier?” Black Friday does not exist to help you. It’s there to help store owners and jolt the economy. Do something for yourself instead. Reconsider tomorrow from a Jewish point of view. You might join with REI and make it Green Friday and then, when you come back from your hike, you might want to turn Black Friday into White Friday, a day pure and free of consumerism, a day that ends with a white tablecloth and a Shabbat meal and the white light of candlesticks. And if you are going shopping, shop for some food that enables you to host a neighbor or a person in need of some company. If you can’t begin the day with rest, kindness and serenity, at least end it that way.

Shabbat Shalom

Everywhere

“God is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

— Psalms 34:18

Last Shabbat morning, we woke to shattering news on the other side of the world. It was the kind of news that triggers instant denial. It can't be. Not again. Denial morphed into incredulity which morphed into pain and a sense of profound loss and then, at least for me, the pain turned to anger at the senselessness of it all. What happens when nowhere is safe anymore, when anyone you pass on the street may want your life in a place you've gone to relax and enjoy a night out? What happens to our shared commitment to humanity when it seems like the threads holding us together are unraveling?

Last Shabbat morning, a joyous bar mitzva celebration was punctured by the bad news. A board member stood up and thanked the congregation. He had arrived that morning sad and forlorn; he spoke of his heavy heart. At the end of the morning - through the joy of celebration and collective prayer - he said he was leaving a little lighter. It was not all better or even mostly better. Just a little better. The rabbi got up and recited a poem that traveled in cyberspace after the attacks in Paris. It was written by the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire and articulates the global tensions of the moment. My daughter sent it to me after Shabbat. The rabbi of her synagogue also read it to the congregation.

later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere

In our fragmented world, there are few experiences which transcend time and place. We never want fear and terror to be one of them. When we think of everywhere, we want to think of kindness, goodness, charity, God, humanity, compassion, and grace traveling everywhere on the atlas this one torn person holds on his lap. But there are too many terrible experiences that are on the map of everywhere: sorrow, suffering, grief, abuse, violence. And it makes me think of a verse from Psalms: "You keep count of my wanderings and put my tears in your bottle and into your book" (56:9).

Have you ever tried to capture your tears in a bottle? I think I must have in my more dramatic teenage years. When you experience angst, especially because of another person, it's hard to hold back the impulse to collect your tears and mail them off to the person responsible, as a warning or a criticism or a plea for help. In this verse we speak of God paying careful watch when we are lost and struggling. We don't have to put our tears in a bottle. God does that for us and keeps track in some metaphysical book of what happens to us. "God is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit," we read above. Near means close by in our heartache. It does not mean God saves us from pain but rather, stands by us in tragedy. Sometimes the tragedy is that we naively believe that life is all about happiness and not about negotiating suffering with dignity and fighting injustice constantly.

The God of the first psalm is not an Actor but an Observer and an Accountant, Watcher and Listener. The God of the second is a Partner and Friend. These are more passive roles because we must be the main actors on this world stage. We cannot afford to be observers and accountants. There is too much work to do. Where there is suffering, we must seek justice and extend kindness. Let's each commit to one small kindness this coming Friday to offset last Friday's cruelty. Please share yours with me. I need it. 

Where is suffering? Everywhere. 

Where is love? Everywhere.

Shabbat Shalom

The Truth Behind Lying

I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot of the past week pondering Ben Carson's lies about his background. It's fascinating. Here is a very accomplished pediatric surgeon running for president -arguably the most public job in the world - who fudges the truth about his alleged acceptance to West Point. He was offered a scholarship even though they don't give out scholarships. He also described himself as a violent youth who attempted murder and wielded a hammer to his mother. What's this all about? If you were going to lie, as a Talmudic principle goes, you would have told a "better" lie. You wouldn't make yourself out to be worse than assumed. And if you were going to tell a lie, wouldn't you do it about an arena where fact-checking wouldn't be so easy and the lies so outlandish?

It seems I am not the only one who is intrigued by this conundrum. The New York Timesrecently carried an article - "Candidates Stick to the Script, If Not the Truth" - to show the recklessness of any number of Republican and Democratic candidates who lie about simple facts that can easily be researched. "Today," the article contended, "it seems, truth is in the eyes of the beholder - and any assertion can be elevated and amplified if yelled loudly enough."  Instead of sheepishly backing down when caught in a gotcha moment, candidates in the new normal attack media outlets and strongly deny discrepancies in stories. Oy.

I've always taken the direct and unambiguous Leviticus approach to the truth: "Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another" (19:22). Lying is an act of stealing; you are literally stealing a reputation or creating an impression that does not belong to you. You are stealing the trust of someone else. Don't do it. The truth always seemed to me to be immutable; there is no wiggle room when a commandment is presented this way. But as I've aged, I've come to understand that this black and white way to think about the truth is grey matter for many. That's why I love the quote from Psalms above. If you hate lies then chances are you will love the law that prohibits them. You will not be a rule breaker because you see clear lines where others see a blur.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely in The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves helped me understand society in a better, more nuanced, if not more depressing way. He cites a locksmith who claims that one percent of people would never steal. One percent would always steal, "And the rest will be honest as long as the conditions are right - but if they are tempted enough, they'll be dishonest too. Locks won't protect you from the thieves, who can get in your house if they really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock." Oy. Again.

Make conditions hard enough, and most of us will set goodness as our default position. But if you make wrongdoing easy enough, the temptation will get larger and may become insurmountable with time. As Ariely concludes later, "Essentially, we cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals." 

If we cheat to the degree that we can get away with it while still protecting our self-image, then what are we to make of the lying going on in the presidential campaign? I take a page out of the Proverbs playbook: "Arrogant lips are unsuited to a fool, how much worse are lying lips in a ruler!" (17:7) If you're not wise, then what do you have to boast about? And if you're a leader who lies, you're even worse than a fool.

"We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions," Ariely claims. "Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We're storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better." 

We will see how voters feel about liars. I know how I feel about them. Honesty should be a bi-partisan issue. God, Proverbs reminds us,  hates lying lips "but delights in those who are honest" (12:22). In the biggest campaign - namely, our lives - truth is a more compelling slogan.

Shabbat Shalom

The Eyes Have It

“Anyone who places his eyes on that which is not his is not given what he desires, and that which he had is taken from him.”

— Talmud Sotah 9b

Out of sight, out of mind. Within our sights, within our minds. Self-discipline isn’t that simple, but it may not be as hard as we think. If we remove the visual temptation that gets in the way of a personal goal, we may be liberating ourselves to do better and be better.

Mark Twain once said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Not only do we depend on our eyes, our eyes can mislead us by pulling us in directions we really don’t want to go. Perhaps this explains the Talmudic saying: “The evil inclination controls only that which a person’s eye sees” [BT Sota 8a]. The failure to focus or the failure to turn away our gaze can cause deep emotional scarring. And it can create discipline fatigue. Roy Baumeister and John Tierney claim in their book, Willpower, that people spend about a quarter of their waking hours resisting desire - at least four hours per day.” That’s exhausting. Just reading it makes me want to take a nap.

One way to free ourselves of this tiring mess is to remove temptations that are visual from our line of sight. When we put temptation within our visual realm or don’t avoid it, it changes our focus, releases our imagination and then may alter even the best of intentions.

Many Jewish sacred texts focus on the problem of focus, namely what we look at may easily become what we do. Sight leads to action or inaction, depending on the circumstance. We can watch something gruesome that creates fear within us and possibly paralysis. We can look at food that we shouldn’t be eating or any physical object of desire - including people - and then become overwhelmed with temptation. We can look away from suffering and become emotionally hardened to the plight of others. What we look at or fail to look shapes us.

This may explain why our central prayer, the Shema, suggests rituals that shape our visual path. Tefillin is to be worn between the eyes so that it serves as a moral visor and a mezuza is to grace our doorposts: “You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.” Tzitzit are worn to give the wearer something to look at to avoidimmoral distraction,“...and you will not follow after your heart and after your eyes by which you go astray - so that you may remember and fulfill all My commandments and be holy to your God.”

Shaping our visual path helps us stick with good habits. Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit,describes habit as a three-step loop. “First there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: The Habit Loop.” The habit loop starts with a cue, usually visual. Remove the visual temptation, change the habit.

In their book Switch - on creating and sustaining change -Dan and Chip Heath advise us not to view change as scaling a tall mountain ahead of us but by eliminating the obstacles so change looks more like a downhill slide. Part of that is removing the visual obstructions that provide temptations or push us off-course: “Tweaking the environment is about making the right behavior a little easier and the wrong behaviors a little harder. It’s that simple.” For anyone trying to make a change, it never feels that simple, but there is something wonderfully liberating about the clarity of forming better habits.  Make sure it’s hard to access what won’t be good for you and make good habits increasingly easier, not only through repetition, but through recognition and rewards.

This takes us back to the powerful quote above. When we set our eyes on what we cannot have, we endanger losing what we do have. Our jealousy or desire gets in the way of a sense of blessing for our own abundance.  Best to look only at what we have and be grateful.

Shabbat Shalom

Grit

Angela Duckworth is an American psychologist and winner of a MacArthur Fellowship. In a highly viewed TED talk, Duckworth defines grit as a combination of perseverance and passion for long-term goals. We might also think of it as a form of bravery or courage to face what is difficult: a difficult conversation, a difficult decision, a difficult challenge.

Grit has become a popular word that is foundational to success and has made its way into the language of education. You want a kid with grit in your classroom. You want to teach grit so that kids learn how to pick themselves up and develop the resilience to face a life that can be, at times, punctuated with disappointment. It's not about getting a bad grade that limits your love of subject or capacity to do well in a class. It's about getting that bad grade and then opening the book again and again. You may never develop subject mastery, but you will gain something more important: determination. It will serve you as one of your best life-skills.

"What matters most in a child's development," according to author Paul Tough in How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, "is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence." Tough continues elsewhere, "Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after about age eight. But executive functions and the ability to handle stress and manage strong emotions can be improved, sometimes dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood." 

There are many anecdotes about celebrities and writers and athletes who fail and fail again and then get up and get up again. They give us hope and inspiration, even though they may also frustrate us because they force us to question our own attitudes to failure. Do we have what it takes to fall down and stand up and will this attitude to rejection help us eventually reach success or just mire us in depression and a sense of personal failure?

Tucked in the book of Proverbs, a master text of wisdom, we find a small pearl. "A righteous person can fall down seven times but rises again..." The verse is speaking not about a star or a larger-than-life-personality but someone known for personal piety. In the arena of spirituality, people can also fall multiple times. Those who aspire to goodness, to righteousness, to kindness, to softness, to holiness, to intimacy with God may have the best of intentions and still fail and possibly fail spectacularly because they set the bar very high.

The modern Israeli compendium of interpretation, Olam Ha-Tanakh, sees this verse as following he generally optimistic strand in the book of Proverbs that supports the eventual rewarding of the righteous. Piety does not always provide immediate spiritual gratification. With ascent comes descent, often multiple times. But know that reward will come in the end, and God will be near, echoing a verse from Psalms: "If God delights in a person, he will make his steps firm. Even if he stumbles, he will not fall, for the Lord will hold him up by the hand" (37:23-24).

The text uses seven as the number of times this righteous person trips up. Seven is a number we usually think of in the framework of holiness. It is a number representing perfection and completion. Could this verse be suggesting that there is something almost holy about resilience and the willingness to fail and fail well? Faith involves grit. Mastery over the self involves grit. Doing good and doing right involves grit.

Maybe if we realize that the things that matter most require vigilance and resilience, we will come to see the act of falling as an educational blessing. Maybe we'll even come to love the fact that we can stumble and get up again. Actor Daniel Day-Lewis seems to feel that: "I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot."

Shabbat Shalom

Race and Restlessness

“What we need is restlessness, a constant awareness of the monstrosity of injustice.”

— Rabbi A.J Heschel

It's hard to think of others when our own people are under siege and yet, there is a universe of struggle going on right now about which we cannot be willfully blind. Migrants and refugees wander across Europe seeking temporary homes and facing the bleak reality that a future of uncertainty may be their only certainty right now. And on top of it all, winter is coming, which makes all homelessness colder, harder and harsher.

When we look internally at the troubles in this country, it is easy to get distracted by presidential campaigns and debates and not look beyond to the deep problems of gun control, race and financial and social inequalities that have plagued this country in recent years. 

We have just opened the book of Genesis in the Torah cycle, and the first eleven chapters of the book that we covered this past two weeks signal a message that must be internalized. The story of humankind in its broadest sense dominates our sacred text. We were born into a much larger community than our own. Our universal story precedes our particularistic story. We must be the stewards of the planet, caring and nurturing the expansive garden we were put into in our primordial story. We are partners in a holy covenant but have perhaps forgotten our part of the deal.

Specifically, in the Torah reading of Noah, we encounter this boat-builder's descendants and a curious story that has been interpreted in ways that has been deforming and devastating. In these large stories of world-building and destruction, we find a small and intimate account of Noah falling asleep drunk and naked in his tent. His grandson Canaan finds him in the tent and reports it gleefully to his brothers. His brothers take the high road and cover their father, making sure not to turn in his direction when doing so. "When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said, 'Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.' He also said, 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave,'" [9:24-27].

The curse of Canaan was read in ancient midrashim as possibly referring to those of African descent. It was taken more literally in some Christian circles as a defense of slavery as a biblical mandate, suggesting that this brutal behavior was encoded into the way human hierarchies must always be. And we have not yet, thousands of years later, fully rid ourselves of this plague.

In 1963, at the opening address at the National Conference on Religion and Race, Rabbi A.J. Heschel told the audience that racism is "an eye disease, a cancer of the soul." Later, this essay was collected in an anthology called The Insecurity of Freedom: the essay is entitled "Religion and Race." Here are his words:

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God's beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a child: to torture his child? How can we hear the word "race" and feel no self-reproach?

Decades later, we encounter Ta-Nahisi Coates' heartbreaking letter to his 15-year old son about being black in America - Between the World and Me. It's painful reading. Coates tries to update the letter James Baldwin wrote to his 15-year old nephew. Following this "tradition," I have written a letter on being white and Jewish to my 14-year-old daughter on race in America and our Jewish responsibility for all of humanity straight from Genesis. It seems at times if for every step forward on matters of race in America, we take long steps back.

 It's time to restore a very delicate equilibrium that has gone awry. We may never get back to the Garden of Eden, but in a broken world, we still need to aspire to the wholeness we once had. 

Shabbat Shalom

Blue and White Not Red

“Great sages would kiss the borders of the land, kiss its stones and roll in its dust because it states in Psalms (102:15) : “Behold, your servants hold her stones dear and cherish her dust.””

— Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, Laws of Kings, 5:10

These past weeks have been ones of anxiety and terror in Israel. The phrase that seems to pop up most in newspaper accounts is that, once again, violence in Israel is "heating up," an understatement when it comes to the brutality of the details. Some people see the signs as a rehash of past Intifadas, and the war weary know only too well where this all may lead. But something significant has changed, and it's important to name it. Whereas in the past, American Jews could be counted on to defend Israel, particularly in a time of vulnerability, today the answer is more likely to be "It's complicated."

Loyalty is actually not that complicated.

You can be a loyal friend of Israel and still find Israel's politics or policies troubling. Like a friend in need, you sometimes must put aside differences when your friend is in pain because you understand that this is what is demanded of a friendship: intimacy and support in a time of crisis.

I was recently teaching a group of Israelis and Americans who serve on college campuses as Israel educators. Campuses today are often a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment. These educators reported that some executive directors of Hillels don't want to do any Israel programs for fear of protests. I've spoken to rabbis who balk at defending Israel from the pulpit. Mostly they don't bring it up. Where the mention of Israel used to bring pride, now the very word in some circles is a source of embarrassment or discomfort.

The quote above from Maimonides expresses the unambiguous love that the sages of the Talmud had for Israel. Even the dirt felt special because it was Jewish dirt. And it raises a question for those who question their feelings about Israel. What if there were no Israel? While most of us cannot remember a world without Israel, some do. It is not a fact we can take for granted in a country that was recognized on the world stage only in 1948. It makes all of us ask ourselves: what would be the most serious consequence of not having the State of Israel in the future?

Before the State, Theodor Herzl predicted that the very presence of Israel would magnify and uplift the world: "The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind." It's a rosy and aspirational picture but not far from reality when you consider the technical, spiritual, medical and cultural gifts Israel has given the world.

And we need not turn to Herzl alone. John F. Kennedy said that, "Israel was not created in order to disappear. Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy, and it honors the sword of freedom." 

So what would the Middle East look like if there were no Israel? What would our Jewish Diaspora community do were there no refuge in times of despair? Think of the fate of Jews from Yemen and Syria, Russia and Ethiopia, France and the Ukraine - to name but a few. They found a friend in Israel when they could no longer live in comfort or safety where they were. Israel does not say to Jews in need worldwide, "It's complicated." Instead, the message is "Welcome Home."

It's time for us to think about what loyalty means, even a complicated loyalty - if that's what it must be for some. It must fundamentally involve our love, our allegiance, our pride, our support and our willingness to put aside differences when the country is in pain. Blue, white and red cannot forever be the colors of a flag stained in blood.

Shabbat Shalom

Race and Restlessness

“What we need is restlessness, a constant awareness of the monstrosity of injustice.”

Rabbi A.J. Heschel

In 1963, at the opening address at the National Conference on Religion and Race. Rabbi A.J. Heschel told the audience that racism is “an eye disease, a cancer of the soul.”

Rabbi A.J. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom  in his essay, “Religion and Race.” Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a child: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self-reproach?

Religious Violence

“Do not envy a man of violence, and do not choose any of his ways.”

— Proverbs 3:31

One recent morning, I opened up the newspaper and tried an experiment. I looked at the headlines trying to determine how many articles described violence in the name of religion. It was frightening. I imagine that were I to continue this practice each morning, every day would yield a fresh crop. That particular morning, a small piece in the middle of the A section caught my attention. A Baptist pastor in Bangladesh, who was leading a discussion about religion in his home, was stabbed by three men invited to the conversation. This was their second discussion about Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, and it ended in blood. The pastor's wife and daughter cried out "Save us. Save us," as the men fled on a motorcycle. The pastor survived. What pained me most was the mangled premise of the get-together: you can invite people to your home to discuss faith in an environment of safety, diversity and respect. Not in all parts of the world.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, has just published and eloquent treatise on how and why we must confront religious violence called Not in God's Name. He opens with a discussion of why religious ideologies have garnered so much strength of late in the shadow of the Enlightenment and rampant secularism:

"Science, technology, the free market and the liberal democratic state have enabled us to reach unprecedented achievements in knowledge, freedom, life expectancy and affluence...But they do not and cannot answer the three questions every reflective individual will ask at some time in his or her life: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning."

Religion fills in the meaning gap, but this return has not been gentle or kind to the other in the minds of many. Rabbi Sacks continues: "Instead it is a religion at its most adversarial and aggressive, prepared to do battle with the enemies of the Lord, bring the apocalypse, end the reign of decadence and win the final victory for God, truth and submission to the divine will." It's a formula fueled by intolerant passion, and it is not going away.

Rabbi Sacks describes this fuel as "altruistic evil," evil committed for a sacred cause or in the name of high ideals. He spends the next chapters describing the rise of altruistic evil, how it does damage to the integrity of faith commitments and how we have to re-interpret sacred texts radically so that religion can be restored to its aim of peace, love and justice. It is not religion that is violent but misguided human beings who put an overlay of violence on religion and compromise its holiness and its capacity to bring meaning and community into the lives of ordinary human beings. I invite you to read the book yourself because a failure to frame this phenomenon leaves us unprepared for some of the most challenging and pernicious global problems of our time.

Let's turn to the verse from Proverbs above - "Do not envy a person of violence, and do not choose any of his ways" - is simple and unequivocal. Do not become a person who envies violence. Why would anyone envy violence? Yet we are drawn to passionate, charismatic people who shun ambivalence and seem to walk in the world with confidence and certainty. That is why the context in which this verse appears is particularly important. Proverbs 3 opens with a reminder to a child not to forget God's teachings that will bestow life and well-being. "Do not be wise in your own eyes," states verse seven. Instead, "fear the Lord and shun evil. It will be a cure for your body, a tonic for your bones." This is actually the same chapter where we find the famous verse in our liturgy: "Her ways are pleasant, and all her paths are peaceful. She is a tree of live to those who grasp her, and whoever holds on to her is happy."

For religion to do its most meaningful work, all of its paths must lead to peace. It has to be a tree of life, not a sword that leads to untimely and useless deaths. All those who care passionately about faith have to re-commit to passionate moderation. "No soul was ever saved by hate," Rabbi Sacks argues. "We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God's love does not work that way."

Shabbat Shalom

A Fly in the Ointment

“Dead flies turn the perfumer’s ointment fetid and putrid; a little folly outweighs great wisdom.”

— Ecclesiastes 10:1

If it's Sukkot, it must be time for a little dip into Ecclesiastes, that great biblical book of wisdom and contradiction. On the Shabbat of Sukkot, we read this book in synagogue, not sure if we should absorb its cynicism, feel undone by its doom or rejoice at its profundity. Maybe all three form our reaction.

Every year, I like to take a verse from the book and study it in depth. Today's verse opens chapter ten on the odd note of a perfumer's ointment. The verse has an important context. In the closing chapters of Ecclesiastes, we find a repeated contrast between intelligence and foolishness. The fool makes poor decisions. Even good decisions go south in the hands of a fool. And the fool is great at advertising his idiocy: "A fool's mind is also wanting when he travels, and he lets everybody know he is a fool" (10:3).

We understand why a fool is in particular danger when he or she travels. In a place where one may not know the language, the culture or the behaviors of the residents, the opportunities for mistake making - even for the wise - are heightened. The fool, because of an impetuous nature, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity; the traveling fool is a walking billboard for errors of judgment. Later in the chapter, the fool's lack of preparation for the trip becomes his undoing: "A fool's exertions tire him out, for he doesn't know how to get to a town" (10:15). With no map, no GPS, no help from an information center or a person on the street, the fool spends hours trying to find where to go, but it's hopeless.

A fool isn't merely someone with a low IQ. We use the term fool to describe a person who is rash and thoughtless, a cretin, a dullard who says things he or she shouldn't or steps into situations to be avoided by anyone with wit and wisdom. This may explain why chapter ten elaborates on situations that prove perilous for the fool: "He who digs a pit will fall into it; he who breaches a stone fence will be bitten by a snake. He who quarries stones will be hurt by them; he who splits wood will be harmed by it" (10:8-9). In the course of manual labor, people need to dig holes and cut down trees but since this is dangerous work, the wise person will do as much as possible to create safe conditions. The fool won't.

"The fool's lips are his undoing" (10:12), we read. The fool is not careful with what he says and thus, brings trouble upon himself and others. "His talk begins as silliness and ends as disastrous madness. Yet the fool talks and talks!" (10:13-14). You watch the fool put his foot into his mouth and instead of taking it out, he pushes that foot further in until it seems permanently stuck.

What does this have to do with a perfumer's ointment? Perfume, particularly in the ancient world, was laborious to make and very costly to purchase. It was the time-consuming work of experts who concocted compounds, fixatives and solvents so that a wonderful smell available in nature could be bottled and then linger. We have perfumes from very ancient civilizations, dating back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The word perfume is from the Latin "to smoke through," indicating part of the process of transforming a smell into a salve.

Perfume, until relatively recently, was most commonly used to mask bad body odors since people bathed infrequently. If you have a dead fly in your perfume, your expensive oil will begin to smell bad - even if it's a very tiny dead fly, thus undermining the purpose for your perfume in the first place. You can't take away a bad smell with another bad smell and hope that a good smell will result. If you have something that could potentially help you, but you don't take very good care of it, it won't serve its purpose and may even act counter to its stated purpose. The writer Douglas Adams once said, "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"A little folly outweighs great wisdom." In the shadow of Yom Kippur and this season of change, it's important to consider the silly, stupid and often small ways we get in the way of our own success. The good news is that if the problem is as small as a fly, we should be able to muster the wisdom to overcome our own foolishness.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Sukkot

Don't be Cheap

“This is my God, and I will glorify him.”

— Exodus 14:2

In a recent article, “Why We Don’t Like Cheap Things,” philosopher Alain de Botton argues that we overspend to satisfy deep urges for status and recognition. De Botton is one of the founders of the School of Life, and in this article he examines what he calls the “curious overlap between love and economics.” He begins with the rise and decline of pineapples. They were once considered a rare treasure, a fruit difficult to obtain even among the aristocracy. We find images of pineapples ornamenting homes and buildings, being gifted in oil paintings and served at elegant affairs. But then something happened. With more efficiency in production and transportation, the pineapple went way down in value and, therefore, in popularity. It’s strange because the taste of pineapple (ostensibly the reason that people like this fruit) stays the same no matter the price.

De Botton writes: “...when we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full. Yet as its price in the market falls, passion has a habit of fading away. Naturally, if the object has no merit to begin with, a high price won’t be able to do anything for it; but if it has real virtue and yet a low price, then it is in severe danger of falling into grievous neglect.” The poor neglected pineapple.

One of my first thoughts on reading this article is wondering about his religious/ethnic identity. I figured he was not Jewish because, let’s face it, we love a bargain. Not only do we love cheap things, we love to tell you what we paid for them. Although de Botton is a self-proclaimed atheist, his mother is Jewish. Go figure.

Bargain seeking, however, is not only or always a behavior of the cheap. It is arguably a behavior of the smart. Why pay more for the same item or something similar. Retail versus wholesale? For us, wholesale trumps every time. Exception: spending money on rituals. The Talmud understands the verse above to be a statement about the importance of aesthetics in mitzva observance. What does it mean to glorify God? “I will be beautiful before Him in mitzvot” [BT Nazir 2b].

What is the decorative flourish that accessorizes a meaningful life? Good deeds. Intimacy with God. Treating other human beings with respect and dignity. It lies in taking the time and money to beautify the mitzvot we do. The Talmud continues: “I will make before Him a beautiful sukka, a beautiful lulav, beautiful ritual fringes. I will write before Him a beautiful Torah scroll, and I will wrap it in beautiful silk cloths.”

Maimonides takes this passage a step further and helps us understand what this means. A Torah scroll should be written correctly and elegantly, as should the text in tefillin. If you have a choice between etrogim - the citron taken on Sukkot - take the more beautiful one, as long as it does not exceed the other in cost by more than one-third [Shulkhan Arukh, OH 32:4, 656:1]. This ruling helps us understand how to prioritize when it comes to the value of the aesthetic in mitzvot. You don’t have to buy the cheapest ritual object or the most expensive but you should aim for your personal best and that best has a metric - add on one third of the cost of something you would normally spend on an item.

The Talmud understood that making what is called in the world of fund-raising “a quality gift” helps us value what we do. We value our spiritual lives when we make investments and braid beauty together with sanctity. We feel better about the world when we stand before God clothed in wisdom, justice and beauty.

This season, how beautiful are your mitzvot?

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Sukkot

For the Sin of...

“And for the sin which we have committed before You intentionally or unintentionally...”

— Traditional Holiday Prayer Book

In advance of Yom Kippur, I was doing a quick skim of the prayer book to prepare myself mentally for the stress of confession. When you glance at the list you notice that many confessions involve speech, sight and intention. There are also many that capture the things we do wrong even when we are confused or don’t intend any hurt. We have to take responsibility for these wrongdoings as well because no matter the intention, there is also an action. Here are a few to illustrate:

For the sin which we have committed before You under duress or willingly.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by hard-heartedness.

For the sin which we have committed before You inadvertently.

And for the sin which we have committed before You knowingly or unknowingly.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart.

At the end of this list, we also mention the sacrifices we would have brought for these offenses had we still had a Temple. “And for the sins for which we are obligated to bring a guilt-offering for a certain or doubtful wrongdoing.” One way we repented for intentional and unintentional sins in the days of old was through sacrifice. As we enter the sacred holiday season and reflect on ancient practices, we turn to the odd practice of the scapegoat, offered by the High Priest in the Temple, to rid ourselves collectively of sin. 

In traditional prayer books, we travel through the Yom Kippur rite almost as an omniscient narrator, tracing the priest’s steps and trying to imagine his trepidation as he offered this gift, hoped for our atonement, and was ready to pay the price with his life if his sacrifices on our behalf failed to achieve a clean slate.

The priest initially offered a bull on behalf of himself and his family. If he was not worthy, we did not want him acting as our messenger. We needed to know that he was spiritually pure and prepared when we sent him off on this holiest of days to represent us. The high priest then took two male goats. According to rabbinic elaboration of this ritual, the goats had to be exactly the same, virtually indistinguishable. In the wilderness, the priest brought them to the entrance of our portable sanctuary and cast lots. One goat would be offered as a sin offering on behalf of the entire community.

The other - the seir le’azazel - the scapegoat, was sent off into the wilderness. According to some Hebrew scholars, azazel means to remove entirely. It was to be accompanied by any human being out into the vast expanse of nowhere. In the Bible, it seems like it wanders off and away. In the Talmud, it must be led to a cliff and meet its death - not led by any escort but by another priest. As I wrote in my book Return: Daily Inspiration for the Days of Awe, “Although in talmudic interpretations the goat met its death, in the biblical text the goat was merely shunted to an inaccessible region, a stunning metaphor for the abandonment of sin. We cannot kill the past; we can only hope that it travels to an inaccessible place where it no longer tempts, marks, or harms us.”

To me, the two goats symbolize fate, randomness and closure. The two goats were exactly the same. The two goats both died but in different ways. The two goats symbolically express different forms of contrition. Sometimes we make an offering, and sometimes we hope that what we’ve done wrong will just go away. Take away our sins that we may live and enjoy the freedom to become anew. The lot that is cast expresses the randomness of our fate on any given year. We intend many of our wrongdoings. Others we didn’t mean, but we hurt people and our intimacy with God suffers anyway. Some wrongs can be righted. Others - like the goat that wandered - leave a residual mess.

We use a lot of animals this season to take sin “away:” the fish in the ritual of tashlich, the chicken that is swung as a substitute for us, the goat that is offered on the altar, the goat that is sent off that carries our sins. All of it is not a substitute for repentance but serves instead as an inspiration and a mirror to self and community. Whether it actually accomplishes this is hard to say. Dwight Eisenhower once said, “The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” We know that all too well.

In a few days we will stand with humility on Yom Kippur. We will face our wrongs and commit to right them. We will take responsibility for the intentional and unintentional ways we walk in the world and hope we can be as generous in granting true forgiveness as we are in asking for it. We will seek closure but understand that sometimes we have to wander in the wilderness for a while.

Shana Tova and Shabbat Shalom

Puncture Your Heart

How’s your heart? I ask not as a cardiologist but as a seeker who always feels trepidation this season. In the Hafiz poem, “That Believe in Gravity,” Hafiz writes [translated by Daniel Ladinsky]:

The wind and I could come by and carry

you the last part of your journey, if you became light enough,

by just letting go of a few more things you

are clinging to…that still believe in

gravity.

What are you holding on to you that you need to let go of so that this season of self-awareness and improvement can do its job? It’s OK if it gets a little ugly and messy inside because we believe that even when the gates of prayer are closing, the gate of tears is always open.

On Rosh Hashana we re-coronate God as the King of Kings and see ourselves as peons in the vast, wondrous landscape of the world. Humility creates vulnerability. On Yom Kippur, we face God with a mountain of personal and collective transgressions. We allow our inner demons to surface so that we can make a personal reckoning and commit to change. Repentance creates vulnerability. On Sukkot, we build small, impermanent houses and dwell there, casting aside our material comforts to live in the shadow of God’s protection. Impermanence creates vulnerability.

If you are having trouble getting to a vulnerable state this season, you need turn no further than Psalm 27, the one we are mandated to read in the morning and evening from Elul to Shmini Atzeret. King David models for us what it means to live in a state of constant vulnerability: “My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, Lord, I will seek. Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your servant away in anger; you have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, O God my Savior. Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me” (27:8-10). Nothing can make a person more vulnerable than being abandoned by one’s parents and yet, only from this place of complete loss and existential angst can King David achieve the intimacy with God he is seeking.

Our vulnerabilities bring us to faith because they wipe away the veneer of independence, self-reliance and confidence that we use to walk comfortably in a world that demands them. In a verse we read this season in the Torah cycle, we are reminded that we will only truly come to live intimately with God and others when we articulate our vulnerability: “The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live” (Devarim 30:6). To circumcise the heart is to make a small hole in it, a hole big enough to let in the pain.

We reiterate this in a teaching of a Hasidic master: “After the shofar blowing was completed, the Baal Shem Tov said ‘In a king's palace there are hundreds of rooms, and on the door of each room there is a different lock that requires a special key to open it.  But there is a master key which can open all the locks.  That is a broken heart.  When a person sincerely breaks his heart before God, his prayers can enter through all the gates and into all the rooms of God's celestial palace’"  [Or Yesharim].

Native American writer and theologian Vine Deloria once wrote, “Religion is for people who are afraid of hell; spirituality is for people who have been there.”  This season, don’t move away from your pain. Move through it. Use it to achieve closeness with God and others. Make a hole in your heart because that is where true blessing lies.

And if you can’t get yourself to a place of vulnerability now, don’t worry. The gate of tears never closes.

Shabbat Shalom and Shannah Tovah

Stay, Don't Stray

““Whoever has the possibility of rebuking [sinners] and fails to do so is considered responsible for that sin, for he had the opportunity to rebuke the [sinners].”
”

— Maimonides, Laws of Character, 6:7.

"I wish I had never seen that list," was the way a woman shared a difficult moral dilemma with me. She was referring to a list of married people who had signed on to the website Ashley Madison searching for affairs. When the site was hacked, names spilled out into public view. Circulating among her peer group, was not the name of one but the name of two husbands of friends in her circle. What should she do?

Before I had the chance to respond, she wrote back saying that she could not sit quietly knowing that a close friend's husband was on the list. She had a troubling job in front of her, one that many of us might not approach with her bravery. "I grappled with reaching out to her directly but decided I would first let him know that our community was aware that he was on this list, and it was just a matter of time before his wife found out.  I just spoke with him, and it was very tough and awkward."

The husband sounded surprised that the list was making the rounds and shared that registering was more of a curiosity than anything else. Yet this courageous woman who outed him to himself concluded that he must have been very curious because he had registered repeatedly over a year. He did commit to speak to his wife. With a lot of people in the know, he could not escape the pressure of the goldfish bowl approach.

"I wish I had never seen that list" is an understandable response and yet had she not seen the list, she may not have taken the first big step in helping a couple salvage a marriage. Others perhaps saw the same list, experienced shock but held back. I have taught many people who confessed that a friend or colleague was involved in an extra-marital affair, and they did nothing.

The medieval scholar Maimonides writes cogently of the need to serve as a moral insurance policy for each other. "It is a mitzva for a person who sees that his fellow Jew has sinned or is following an improper path [to attempt] to correct his behavior and to inform him that he is causing himself a loss by his evil deeds as [Leviticus 19:17] states: 'You shall surely admonish your friend.' He advises that this needs to take place privately and softly with the assurance that this needs to be done for his or her own good. Maimonides even advocates very harsh critique if the person refuses to listen. In situations of addiction, immorality and potentially life-threatening behavior, sometimes a harsh approach is the only one that will get through. Maimonides concludes this law with the quote above: "Whoever has the possibility of rebuking [sinners] and fails to do so is considered responsible for that sin, for he had the opportunity to rebuke the [sinners]."

Many years ago at a retreat, I was teaching this law in an entirely different context, and a young woman asked to speak with me after class. She confided that a close friend had shared with her that she had begun an affair with a married man. This woman was married herself and had two young children. The woman who approached me was concerned that if she had a strained conversation with the friend about how wrong her behavior was, she would lose an old, close friend. I listened carefully, appreciating the emotional difficulty of her situation. I asked her one question, "What's more important, her marriage or your friendship?" She continued to discuss the friendship, and I asked her the same question again because we both knew the answer.

With all of the moralizing that goes on in our community, adultery is still the "quiet" transgression many are afraid to address outright. But it is the most fundamental breach and betrayal of the fabric of family, integrity and trust - the very foundations of our faith, as we read in Hosea, "I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in unfailing love and compassion." Our relationship with God and with the person we marry must be one of righteousness and justice, love and compassion.

Ashley Madison's motto is "Life is short. Have an affair." Our motto: "Life is short. Commit to a life of trust and meaning."

Life is too short to hurt the people we care about. Be brave. Protect the sanctity of the relationships that matter. Be a good friend. And if you are the one contemplating an affair or in the midst of a relationship that will break your partner's heart, it's the season of repentance and forgiveness. It may not be too late to save the most important relationship of your life.

Shabbat Shalom

Raise Your Right Hand

“The Lord has sworn by his right hand.”

— Isaiah 62:8

If you haven't been in a courtroom, you've watched the scene dozens of times on television and in the movies. A judge calls the court to order and says to the person on the stand: "Please raise your right hand to take the oath" as a symbolic way of assuring that the expert witness, defendant or plaintiff is telling the truth. It is a statement of personal integrity that should ideally heighten the reverence for the law. Jewish writing on the subject often stresses what book the left hand is resting on rather than the significance of the right hand being raised.

Fun fact: According to NW Sidebar, a website for Washington DC's lawyers and legal community, the raising of the right hand is attributed to 17th century London criminal courts. Judges could choose from a wide range of punishments when determining the fate of a criminal. The problem was that without a proper system of records to understand a criminal's background, assessing a punishment - certainly one as severe as the death penalty - was itself a possible blurring of justice. To resolve this dilemma, some judges created an alternate moral problem. They branded criminals. 

Sadly, it sounds just like what it is. As a leniency, a "T" may have been scorched onto a criminal's skin for theft, an "F" for a felony and an "M" for murder. In other words, if you weren't guilty of a capital crime, your body became your criminal record, specifically on the thumb of your right hand. Branding on the cheek, which used to be a practice, meant that a criminal's record was open for all to see, often preventing a rehabilitated criminal from getting work. The thumb was a more sheltered place on the body. The next time you appeared in court, you were asked to raise your right hand to see if you had committed any previous crimes when you took an oath and if you were granted a leniency in an earlier case.

Thank goodness for computers.

This thesis is entirely credible until you read that as early as the Talmud - about 2,000 years ago - people took oaths with their right hands because this practice was mentioned in the Bible. "Isn't 'right' an expression of an oath?" [BT Nazir 3b]. The Talmud then continues and asks what the connection is between the right hand and an oath and cites a verse from the book of Daniel: "When he lifted up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and swore by Him that lives forever" [12:7]. The right hand is associated with taking an oath from this verse.

The Talmud then rejects this view and says that the right hand itself is an oath and cites yet a different proof-text from the book of Isaiah: "The Lord has sworn by His right hand" [62:8]. The Talmud also permits the use of the left hand for the taking of an oath. In other words, the critical act is the raising of the hand rather than the specific hand, according to a number of medieval commentators. 

Historically, however, the right hand was always associated in the Bible and in many ancient cultures with strength because it was usually the preferred arm for use in military maneuvers. God's strength is often referred to as coming from the right hand or arm. When Jacob places his right hand on his second grandson Ephraim (Genesis 48:14), he shows him preferential treatment as the strong one of Joseph's sons and the natural one to inherit leadership. The right side was also regarded as a position of honor; the High Priest in the Temple always turned to the right first when encircling the altar. 

This, no doubt, was a problem for lefties, who were often trained to become righties because left-handedness was associated with being weaker and even evil in some folkloric literature. My grandfather was left-handed but forced to write with his right hand to address this bias.

Perhaps the practice of swearing in court with the right hand predates 17th century England by more than a dozen centuries. If the right hand was associated with strength, leadership and honesty then swearing with the right hand was a way one announced personal commitment to the truth to those in the courtroom. And perhaps it was also a reminder to act justly before speaking to ensure that one's words matched the might of one's right hand.

Shabbat Shalom