Shavuot

There is an ancient tradition amongst our people where mark we events with reminders to bring them closely and mindfully to those times. Each holy day is an opportunity to recall experiences from our long past. We relive them through song, movement, food, ceremonies and hopeful prayers.

Thus, on Hanukkah we kindle tiny lights as a memorial to a festival of light. And during Purim and we revel in song and costume as we reenact an event millennia old. So too it is with Shavuot, often referred to as Pentecost.  The prefix, penta meaning fifty, refers to a cataclysmic event which affected on a single tribe of people but whose power reverberates throughout the generations.

Some seven weeks of seven days after witnessing the terrible and raw power at the Sea of Reeds, the faithful found themselves at the foot of a towering mountain, Sinai.

Convulsing as if in labor, the earth trembled beneath the feet of the Sons of Israel. The mountain shook and the skies belched fire and cracked open the heavens. Terrified, the people watched as their leader ascended the mountain to receive the word.

 Shavuot always comes on the 50^th day after the Exodus, as an eternal reminder of God’s gift to community. That one event so many millennia ago has irrevocably he changed the path of mankind. That revelation of the will of God set a new standard morality for all people.

Beginning with the 10 Ordinances and culminating in the Five Books of Law, a new yardstick of acceptable moral behavior was now in place. Mankind was no longer free to kill with impunity or create his or her own standard of good behavior but instead had to rely upon an independent code of justice.

Beginning the emergence of three stars in the heavens and lasting until late in the evening on the anniversary of that event Jews gather in homes and Synagogues to recall the day when Moses climbed Mount Sinai amidst the deafening roar above and below.

What's Real

Too few of us are willing to take the biggest risks of life. Safe, small but usually win out in the end. The sure things in life are little league baseball, work, even over time, cleaning, love, giving tzedaka, watching things --like TV going to movies and plays, eating out etc..

These activities are good. Most warm self. Some are wonderful. The one aspect they all have in common is that they are not concrete. They are of the genre that can be called “avoiding life.”  As one sage put it, “It is far easier to love the starving Ethiopian than own family.” We run from the concrete into the arms of the ephemeral for gratification.

They are distractions that remove us from the real fields of human life. Here is a great truth: the place where all the most important decisions are reached is around the kitchen table. Note that it is not sitting around the expensive in frilly divan. Not at the fancy-schmancy restaurant. Or on vacation in the Bahamas. They happen in the same place with the most angry confrontations occur. The kitchen.

In rabbinical school one of my teachers, a famous scholar and author, lamented, “Most people don’t go to Shull because they are afraid of really meeting God. They are frightened that may be during prayer God will actually appear and scare the dickens out of them. Worse, then they will have to do whatever God commands. They will be hopelessly trapped.”

I laughed.

I see now that what I took for a joke was more true than I was capable of understanding back then.  People are genuinely afraid of commitments which involve a deep emotional component. That is why falling in love is so easy -- and revered  in youth when there is little commitment but lots of palpitations -- and being in love is so trying. Being in love makes real emotional demands while falling in love is hedonistic far less dangerous.

So it is with three-day-a-year religion, dance classes, yoga and horticulture.

The biggest risks in life are the ones most richly rewarded. True, the feeling of wonder that accompanies the first shoots of life in the garden and the great pride comes with graduation are lovely. Far greater than these, though, is the knowledge that your children will carry on after you; that they will continue to live Jewishly; they will be moral.  Or a lasting love, one where we have worked and invested our core self. There are a few of these kinds of risks. We only have three or four of them. But they are without peer in power and meaning.

Part of risk taking means drawing lines. Saying “yes” or “no” to looting, lewdness, lying, allowing our children to inter-date or a living to Jewish lifestyle are a few examples of that kind of risk taking.  It is far easier to insist on good grade than moral backbone or mowing the lawn on Shabbat instead of spending a thoughtful day with family.  There are very few lines in a person's life that must be drawn in the world to chief the height of a lifetime’s success.

What is yours?

“Why you spend money for what is not bread?

And your wages from what does not satisfy?

Listen diligently to Me, and eat what is good.”  Isaiah 55:2

Ode to a Synagogue

Rabbi Akiva was asked, “Since your God loves the needy, why doesn’t He care for them Himself?

The sage responded, “God, the father of rich and poor alike wants his children to help each other. The Lord desires a world of love.”

Our purpose is not merely to survive.  Survival itself is not noteworthy or even worthy of comment.

So what then is our purpose?

We celebrate life, those who preceded us and upon whose shoulders we stand. We celebrate marriages when we sweated under the chairs of the bride and groom. We celebrate the warm friendships on Shabbat morning.  The evening services where we come together to console the bereft at the house of death. We celebrate the countless baby namings and Brit Milahs. We remember the little ones who spilled wine on the carpet who now have children of their own. We relish the Passover Haggaddas whose pages are stained a dark hue. We remember Friday evening dinners. We revel in recalling High Holy Days and our precious relationships.  The loves, the tiffs and the forgiveness.

The Puritans called marriage “the little church within the church.” Every day without letup our synagogue functions as a sacred place where love and forgiveness are continually recycled. Just like marriage. That is what community is.

George Hallas, owner of the Chicago Bears, work well into his 80s.  He was once asked, “George, at your age what are you doing here working?” Halas responded, “It's only work if there's some place else you'd rather be.”

There is no other place we would rather be than standing shoulder to shoulder with devoted members of our sacred community. Our children have played together.  They have learned in the classrooms.  All of us have grown up together and fought for the sake of goodness throughout the years.  After all this, we still say, there is no place we rather be.

There is a reason we call the place where we pray a "Sanctuary."  It is a place of respite from harm, malcontent and soothing our roughest edges.  When we gather later this month to celebrate our freedom from bondage, remember that it is not our survival that brings us together.  We collect ourselves to remember that we must aid one another.  Our task is to bind the wounds of our sisters and brothers.

Invite someone new to your seder.
Focus on the lesson God wants you to learn from the Haggadda's narrative and then be that change.   Pay for someone you do not know to come to the congregational seder.  

Rabbi Akiva was right, “God, the father of rich and poor alike wants his children to help each other. The Lord desires a world of love. This is our charter.

Factionalism in Israel

Israel's charter states that every Jew has the right to return home. Fleeing from horrors of hatred, the passport control at Ben Gurion airport turns no Jew away . Hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands have arrived in the holy land with little else but the clothes on their back.

Simply stated, the Law of Return stipulates and provides a home for any and every Jew. But the law recognizes that an “oleh” is not merely someone who has made a decision to settle in Israel, it has a higher value for it is about someone  returning home.  After centuries of wandering, several restricted or expelled at the whim of warlords and kings there was finally a resting place established in 1948 where all Jews could find a place from which they could never be thrown out.

The historic connection between the diaspora and the Land is like that of a parent and an estranged child.  The offspring has moved away.  They have long forgotten their roots.  Yet, once in while they have a pang of conscience and send a card.  The parent hopes that one day the child will make the long journey home.  Those days of yearning are over.  The family of Israel can be whole once more.  

For many years Orthodox groups have been trying to amend the Law of Return to include on people whose identity can be proven (it used to be just a person’s word that they were Jewish was enough) or converted according by an Orthodox rabbi.  Needless to say this amendment would exclude all non-Orthodox conversions in addition to calling into question marriages as well as many Orthodox (as the latter vie for control) conversions and marriages.

The pivotal question that lies at the heart of broad acceptance of evert professing Jews is the validity of rabbinic authority outside the sphere of the political machinations of Israeli religious politics.  Imagine if Israel became a de jure religious state under the thumb of Orthodoxy.  As Jews, we are inextricably connected with the land. While the Orthodox community would largely embrace such a change in the Law of Return, Conservative and Reform communities would recoil in horror and begin to feel distance from Israel.  It is a real danger is when the non-Orthodox community begins to feel threatened and withdraw not only their support from Israel but develop an antagonistic attitude toward Orthodoxy, out brothers and sisters.

Presently, we are held together in a precarious balance; each side vying for domination. The consensus uniting Israel is fragile.

Many times in our history our people have been divided over the interpretation of law. One example with which we are all familiar is when the Maccabees brought about an end to Greek rule. The Maccabean rebellion was essentially against the Greeks and the Jews who sided with the Greek overlords.  It was a terrible war. Another time was when Jews split which during the revolt against Rome a few centuries later.    This time the rift produced Christianity.  At first they called themselves Jews and were accepted as such until the gulf between them became bridgeable.

In the diaspora, our differences are kept in check, as no one group has power over another. In the Jewish land, the sword of Damocles hangs over our heads as it did long ago with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and, before them, with the Maccabees and the Hellenizers.  Sinat hinam, baseless antagonism, enmity between Jew and Jew, brought about the destruction of the Second Temple.  Could such hatred bring about more destruction?

Myth, Fiction and Truth

Myth is a dirty word.  It portends of specious argument; maybe flat out lies. Myth, at best, speaks of children’s bedtime stories; at worst, it is misleading and insults and degrades real historical events.

On the other hand, I believe that myth make us truly human.  It defines our psyche.  Myth makes sense of a senseless world.  Carl Jung taught that myth is often more true than what we perceive and have learned.

Years back I heard a sage remark, “God is more real than you” (addressing an audience).  The listeners were shocked.  Did he mean to intimate that he sees God more clearly than he sees his wife?  Did he mean to say that God speaks to him with greater clarity than people?  I do not think so.  What this scholar meant was that he understood “truth” as only coming from the Holy One. 

People are deceptive.  They misconstrue and misuse words and ideas.  They have skewed moral values.  Only God is the pure essence of truth.

I do not critically analyze King Arthur and the legends that surround him.  Did he really have a ”round table?”  What does it matter?  The important thing is that King Arthur held court with a round table indicating that he had a nascent understanding of democracy and sharing.

A lot of Americans seem to be obsessed with angels.  Books appear on shelves in libraries, on line and in stores detailing the names and various assignments of these otherworldly ethereal beings.  I have even seen parlor meetings to address the meanings and existential implications of angels.  Has America gone mad?

I have yet to meet someone who has empirical proof of their existence.  What about UFO sightings?  Are they linked?  I have yet to read in any scientific journal about them.  Yet good, learned folks are swarming to purchase tomes about their favorite angel.

What all seems to mean is that myth provides some semblance of order to an otherwise random universe.  Myth makes sense from deep personal pain as well as questions of existential nature.

So what do we make of miracles and myth?  They may be more real than any hard fact that we know.  For example, I do not believe in God, I know God.  That to me is more meaningful and true than bland facts.  That is my myth.  One of them, anyway.