Ten Commandments of Coming to Shul

I.      Thou shalt dress appropriately.  No revealing attire (keep shoulders and frontal area covered; nothing risqué). Wear clothes that reflect standing before the Lord.
II.     Respect and keep the Shabbat.  This means no smoking, cell phones, pagers, cameras, etc.
III.     Do not disturb thy neighbor.  People are trying to daven (pray).
IV.     Children are always welcome at Shul.  Use our children's room if they need a change of scenery.
V.      Do not swear.  This is the House of God.
VI.     Males wear a kippa.  All those who are called to the bima (elevated stage) cover their heads.
VII.    A tallit (prayer shawl) is worn by adult Jews.
VIII.   Thou shalt not clap.  Instead, say "yasher koach!"
IX.     When the Ark is open, stand and do not enter or leave the Sanctuary.
X.      Covet thy Siddur and Humash.  Treat them with respect.  If they fall, kiss them.  Place them right-side up when finished.

Miracles

A question: If there was enough oil for one night, then the first night was no miracle. So why celebrate 8 days? The answer is that the first night was also a miracle. Why? Because if all the oil were used up on the first night, then even God could not make the lights burn for the other seven. Even God does not provide one hundred percent miracles.  Nes Bederekh Hatevah -- the miracle too is done in a natural way. If there is oil, God can stretch it. Man must provide the one jar, then God can make it burn for eight days.

Elisha is confronted by the Shunamite woman. He asks: Ma Yesh Lokh Babayit -- "What do you have in the house?" After she tells him she has one jar, he tells her to keep pouring, and the oil keeps pouring and fills many utensils.

The same thing happens at sea. Why didn't God raise and carry them from one side of the sea to the other?

You know the story about the child who comes home from Sunday school and the mother asks: Jimmy, what did you learn in school today? And the child describes how the engineering corps built pontoon bridges, and these escaped convicts ran over the water, while the airforce was giving cover overhead. And the mother says: That's not how I learned about the crossing of the sea. And the child says: Mom, if I told it to you the way the teacher told it to us, you would never believe it!

The sea did not split until Nachshon ben Aminadav jumped in. Man must make his contribution to the miracle. Nes Bederekh Hatevah.

Hashamayim Shamayhim Lashem, Vehaaretz Natan Levnei Adam God is in heaven, and we are here -- this verse is not to be taken literally. Man cannot tell God to mind His own business, stay in heaven and not mix into earthly matters. God expects man to aspire to heaven and not limit himself to earth. 

Thoughts are Real

 Why does the Torah tell us that after giving birth, a mother must bring a sin offering?

Rabbi Simon bar Yohai answers, "Since she may have cried out in the midst of her birthing pains, "I will never again let my husband come near me."
For such a thought, the Torah requires that a sin offering be brought.
Two ideas emerge from this passage. The first is that people are prone to say regrettable things. We will cry out in the depth or pain despair uttering curses or vows that, given a moment of rational thought, we would never say. The second notion is that even though all humanity may succumb to such wrong and excessive language; we are not excused from what comes from our mouths. We are always held responsible for what we say.
 
The Mishna in Pirkay Avot states, “Know what is above from you. An eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all of your deeds are recorded in a book! (2:1)

Future Shock

Not so very long ago famed author J.K. Rowling was asked to address recent college graduates. It was a moving talk. Having eagerly devoured her many Harry Potter books, the students were anxious to hear what advice this successful writer had to offer. What Rowling chose to speak about was failure. Rowling explained that her parents urged her early on to pursue a vocational degree. In having a trade, they believed their daughter would never experience the poverty they had endured. But she had other ideas. This is what the famous author had to say:

"What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be … without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. 
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me…I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had and old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale that I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default. Failure taught me things about myself I could have learned no other way."
Rowling’s advice is priceless. It cuts through humanity because the fear of not succeeding keeps the best of us stuck in our rocking chair.
During Sukkot there is a special prayer that we say during the Grace After Meals, "May the Merciful One (HaRachaman) restore the fallen Sukkah of David." Can God really repair the two-thousand-plus year old lean-to? No, say the great Sages of the Talmud. In that prayer we are asking God to restore to the people confidence. We want to be able to transform our painful past into a better future. In other words, the prayer wants us to build better "us" from the ashes of our failures. The pathway to wholeness happens when we overcome the internal hurdles that hold us back.
I am a professional bumper-sticker reader. One that struck me recently read, "What if you had no fear? What could you accomplish?" 
I mulled that question over in my mind for a very long time. What, indeed, could life offer if I was unafraid of failure? What mountains would come into reach? So many times, the fear of crashing keeps us from trying new things, having new experiences, finding our hidden strengths.
There is a novel web-site that has visitors writing letters to themselves in the future. Called FutureMe.org, people from all over the world write letters to themselves. The messages invariably contain a single element that remains a constant: the writers hope they can get over their pain. 
The creator of FutureMe.org sees this site as an attempt "at forward narrative, a poignant, maybe desperate, assertion of personal continuity over time. … More deeply, such a message implicitly accepts a duty to future generations. … Future me may reject present me’s choices, but my message … is, in its way, an attempt to acknowledge responsibility rather than evade it. Globe and Mail, April 28/07
People are deeply concerned that they will not survive the pain they are living through now. Here is one entry dated October 27, 2005, Dear FutureMe, How are you now? you happy? did you find your "next big thing"? work ok? did dad survive the transplant? 

Unlike the usual conventional wisdom, "failure is an option" is closer to the truth than it not being an option. In fact, failure is how we learn. The greatest challenge for us to be unafraid of non-success. Think of what is possible, as the bumper sticker read, if we allow ourselves to fully test the limits of our abilities. And if we fail? We have learned our limitations and will have grown in the process. And towering above us is the Lord God who urges us to test the limitations of what is possible and grow to become what He has envisioned for us.

Wonder of Wonders

Miracles abound in our people’s past.  Perhaps the most famous miracle of all was when the Sea parted allowing the slaves to pass through to newfound freedom.  Celebrated each year at the Passover Seder we recall this powerful deliverance.  Yet, there were others too.  Think of the manna in the desert or the appearance of wells slaking the thirst of those on the forty year trek.  What about the walls of Jericho?  Or the famous walls of Solomon carved from rock without use of any metal?!  Hanukka remembers another kind of miracle; great light generated from a miniscule amount of oil.

It is surprising that the birth of the universe is not accorded status as a miracle.  Perhaps that is because no one witnessed the event.  Note: something qualifies as a miracle only when people are involved.

Miracles are often abrupt.  They happen swiftly and are over.  A malignancy disappears: Life goes on.  An accident is avoided and we drive from the scene shaken but unharmed..   Miracles can happen on a small scale: A person walks away after a fall from a treacherous height.  Miracles may occur in a grand way: The salvation of the Israelite nation after Hitler is miraculous.  

Purim is all about miracles.  Yet, the holiday is built around the one Book which makes no mention of God.  Nowhere in the tale of Mordecai and Acheshveros is God named.  What exactly are we celebrating?  

If a miracle is defined as something beyond the bounds of what is normal and expected, what do we make of the eclipse of the Holy One in the chronicles of Esther?

Perhaps the greatest mystery is also the simplest one to solve: a miracle only happens to us when we acknowledge it.  Otherwise it passes unnoticed.  In fact, if you think about it for more than a moment, you will realize that every miracle in the Torah can be explained away or ignored much in the same way we can miss the grandeur of a birth or regeneration of nature.  Maybe that is why the holiday of Purim will still be observed after the Messiah comes: we will still need to be reminded to find holiness and miracles that happen every day..

The Broken Heart

Just having learned of President John Kennedy’s assassination, Daniel Patrick Moynihan exclaimed, "When you’re Irish, one of the first things you learn is that sooner or later the world will break your heart."

Coping with pain is the great trial we confront time and again. It is no simple matter to deal with the pains of life an adult, well-adjusted manner. We want to scream, curse, cry, or ball up into a tight cocoon where no one can touch us. The older we get the more the same patterns of behavior repeat themselves in our lives. We do the same thing over and over. The source and kind of pain changes but not our reaction to it. 

There is a discussion among the sages in the Talmud about right and wrong blessings. In the midst of one long conversation a rabbi comments that it would be a sin to approach your home, see smoke rising in the distance and pray, "I hope that is not my home." Such a prayer implicitly asks that it be someone else’s home.

A minister was giving an impassioned sermon to his congregation and said, "Everyone in this church is going to die."

The preacher then noticed a man in the front row who was smiling broadly. "Why are you so happy?" the minister asked. 

"I’m not from here. I am just visiting my brother for a couple of days."

We know what pain is like. We are familiar with its taste, texture, how we react to it. For most of us, we are far too intimate with the way it feels. We all know that Moynihan was correct: the world will and does break our heart.

A strong Jewish current of thought is that we are supposed be familiar with a broken heart. That kind of woundedness gives us empathy for others who suffer. It makes us better friends and spouses, better parents and leaders. Above all, it makes us better Jews. Our job is to help people, not be personal consumers for our own welfare. That is why it is a sin to be unconcerned with those who suffer - whether we know them or not.

In the aftermath of the Great Liberation from slavery the Jews threw themselves on the shore of the Sea as the waters rushed to engulf the Egyptians coming to capture them. As the languid waters suddenly gushed over the helpless bodies of the slave-masters, hosts of Angels began to sing in heaven. Praising God’s might and sovereignty they cascaded into a massive chorus of praise. "Stop," said the Holy One. "My children are downing and you sing?" 

Shir HaShirim Rabah 5

Waiting for Elijah

 Opening the door for Elijah was a highlight of our Seder evening, an experience we treasured ever since childhood. That full goblet waited for the prophet, and we couldn’t see him, but somehow the level of the wine seemed to drop. Just a little, didn’t it? Eliyahu hanavi, we sang happily. We dramatized the tradition that told us he was here to announce that the Messiah, son of David, was coming.

This year when we enter the closing days of Passover, when that same tradition predicts that when the long-awaited deliverer does arrive, it will be on one of these days.

And what will happen then? 

The Jerusalem Talmud in the tractate Sanhedrin presents rabbinic teachings about the week when the Son of David will arrive, and what disaster will take place each day of that week. Deluge, earthquake, etc. Nature, too, will do its worst to bring the Messiah.

The Tzemah Tzedek, was asked why David’s song is read on the Seventh day of Pesach, rather than the Song of Deborah, since the women rejoiced more than the men when the Red Sea split. He answered: “The Haftarah is the Song of David because on the final days of Pesach there is a revelation of Mashiach, who is a descendant of David. Thus, it is to honor Mashiach that we recite the Song of David.”

What he will do, that no one else could do, would be to cure this planet of its trouble, its corruption and its wars.  

We need this now. more than ever.

Pesach’s Meaning

 Pathos is understanding feelings, particularly disease (think pathology) and  the root causes of sadness.  Empathy is related to pathos but is more about feeling what other people feel, understanding them on an emotional level.  Both are commands on Pesach.

 

-On the holy day we open ourselves to understanding the pathology of hatred, the superiority of one people, or class, over another.  Were our ancestors slaves in a distant land?  Yes, historians have located the time and name of this people from ancient Egyptian documents.  These are your ancestors.  They were untermenschen, subhuman, ignored and abused.  Our concerned God heard the pitiful cries and sent His deliverance releasing them from the lash of their overlords.  

The pathology of understanding the past should lead us back to God and knowledgeable enough to recognize those same signs of raw discrimination emanating from hatred in our day.  And those signs are present now.

-We are commanded to feel as if we were personally liberated from bondage.  This is empathy.  We need to feel the empathy of being on the side of the oppressed.  Everyone understands pain.  We have all felt oppressed and abused at some point(s) in our lives.  We used those reference points to feel the prize of liberation.  It is a great gift that we should not take for granted.  We are free here.  We have a Jewish homeland.

Virtually every day we learn of some group in the world that is being oppressed.  We have to make a decision to be on the side of the victim or victimizer.  Who would dare to stand with the victimizer?  Every time we are silent we are providing fuel for the victimizer to carry on their path of hatred.

Empathy is two sided.  As Hillel pointed out millennia ago, “If I am not for myself who will be for me?  And if I am only for myself what am I?”  

We are not fulfilling our mandate if we do not stand up for ourselves, our people.   And we are woefully inadequate when we do not stand in solidarity with the other. 

Support Your Shul

 When God gave His holy Torah to the people there was thunder shattering the air already thick with smoke.  The earth convulsed, as it was about to give birth to a new universe of order and justice and hesed.

 

And yet as we come to the next book of the Torah we are perplexed.  God speaks to the people through the Ohel Mo’ed, the Tent of Meeting.  In there, God spoke directly to His servant, Moshe.  When the Divine Voice spoke Moshe heard clearly, the ancient ones tell us.  Those outside the Ohel Mo’ed heard God’s Voice indistinctly.  They had to try to listen to hear the words being spoken.

 

Many of the sages wonder why the change.  Why was God’s Voice so thunderous at one time and barely discernable the next?

 

An answer: God was preparing us for a time when His diminished Voice would have to be sought.  That is why we come to the sanctuaries of today; it is where the Voice is most keenly felt.

 

That is why synagogue has been the central hub of all things Jewish for millennia.  From that place we feed the hungry; it is where we learn Torah.  Synagogues are places where children are educated; babies are named, brises are conducted, weddings performed and mourners encouraged.  From this cornerstone of Judaism cemeteries were purchased, news about Israel was gathered, and Federations were born.

 

When something goes wrong where do we gather for mutual support and strength?  Where can we pour out our heart without fear of ridicule or judgment?  It has always been the same whether in France, Poland, Russia or Yemen.

 

That is why support for the Synagogue remains the first and most critical arena for our ongoing care.  Without this what would remain?  Most of us know from our personal experience growing up in small hamlets around the south that when a synagogue closes in town there is no Jewish life left.  It is dead.

 

Consider either a gift to the synagogue of whatever amount you can afford….or even better….think of leaving a legacy grant to the synagogue in your will.  Imagine the great good that can be done in preserving and enhancing Jewish life in  for years to come!  The power of extending the gift to the next generation – as it was gifted to us – lies within our hands.

 

Remember all Jewish events and program are extensions of what we teach and promulgate.

 

Yet. Don’t wait to be asked.

Torah Truth

 There are many Torah passages which could raise eyebrows well into the nether regions of the forehead.  Among them are the age of the universe versus our almost six thousand year calculation, manna feeding at least 1 1/2 million freed slaves for forty years, burning bushes and parted seas to name a few.

The question actually runs yet deeper:  If the Torah cannot be read at face value, if we cannot trust it to tell the truth all the time, how can we depend on it for truth any time?

No one who reads Torah with any degree of seriousness will fail to notice these and other incongruities.  In fact, it is probably the most frequent question asked of rabbis today.  What do I tell people?  Even more, how can anyone, including a rabbi, have faith with such unbelievable tales and inconsistencies?

I am fond of telling the story of the grandfather who greets his little one at the door.  

“So how was Hebrew School today, Yaacov?”

“Oh great!  We learned about how General Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.  Cornered by the Egyptians with their troops, General Moses fired bazookas and strafed the advancing army while the Israeli navy placed pontoons across the Sea.  The people narrowly escaped!”
“Oy,” said the grandfather. “Is this what they taught you??”

“Grandpa, if I told you what they said, you’d never believe it.”

On a primary level, the Torah is filled with stories.  The tales we tell are human, full of adventure, achievements, falls, and recoveries.  They are great stories that we know well and retell through generations.  Think of Adam and Eve.  They tell the story of reward and punishment; listening to God and the penalty of disobedience.  Think of Noah, the savior of a world.  What about Abraham, the one who discovered and was discovered by God?  The narrative then follows Abraham through his trials and triumphs.  This is story-telling at its finest.  These are well worn tales that have traveled the world many times over, through millennia.

On a secondary level, each story contains kernels of knowledge and philosophy that we often miss (because we stop in step 1).  For example, the depiction of Adam and Eve serves the purpose of telling us we are free.  God rewards and punishes but the real lesson is about personal control and responsibility.  And Noah?  It is all about choosing your destiny regardless of what the outside world does and thinks.  Consider that Noah’s righteousness was singular in a world gone bad.

On a tertiary level, we are guided by the Zohar which states, “If the Torah were mere tales I could tell better stories myself.”  We learn through metaphor.  In Eden, we understand the trappings of Paradise.  We are not meant for utopia.  Our lives are only validated through struggle.  We are Adam and Eve.  We choose banishment because there lays our greatest hope.  Abraham is the paragon if self-discovery.  We must pass through walls of flames, become scarred before we can contemplate wholeness.  We must travel far in our youth to find what is most close, so close that it cannot be seen; only perceived.

Is there more?  Yes, there is always more.  That is why it continues to feed our souls after a ll this time.

 

Kaddish

The kaddish is not Hebrew, it is Aramaic.  It was put into that language because it was the spoken tongue at the time.  That places it in the post-biblical era.  It was crafted at a time when many Jews no longer fully understood Hebrew despite the fact that they still prayed in that language and  the fact that Aramaic is a very close relative to Hebrew.

Parts of the prayer are mere renderings of Hebrew into Aramaic.  For example, Yehi Shmay (the refrain after the first paragraph) is a direct translation of Baruch Shem (the line after the Shma).   Originally Baruch Shem, or Yehi Shmay, was the response by the people to hearing the Holy Name of God fully and only pronounced on Yom Kippur.  Hearing the name was so powerful that the people fell on their faces as they shouted this phrase. That is, by the way, why we only say Baruch Shem to this day out loud only on Yom Kippur.  In any event, the Yehi Shmay response is as if we have just beheld the Face of God.  It is a powerful phrase that indicates something far more intimate than most prayers.  It is, by the way, also the line that we state when we use God’s name inappropriately, i.e. when saying the wrong prayer.

There are several kaddishes.  Some of them are sung and some are recited like the mourner’s kaddish and a few others.  The two kaddishes that are most alike are the kaddish shalem (full Kaddish) and the mourner’s kaddish.  The difference between them is a single line that begins with “titkabel…”    Titkabel means “receive.” In a state of mourning we do not ask anything of God but accept our prayer.  We do not decry God’s decree, ask that death be reversed or anything else of God when we are mourning.  Our tradition asks us to simply accept the judgment.  That is the essence of the mourner’s kaddish.  

It is probable that the mourner’s kaddish takes its theology from the book of Job.  Job, the man who lost everything, is urged by his companions to atone, consider how he offended God and even repudiate the One that took away all that he loved.  In the end, God speaks to Job stilling his queries by indicating that he will never know the ways of God.  In a rhetorical query, God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?”  In other words, humankind can never fathom God’s ways.

The mourner’s kaddish is then an acceptance of God’s will, knowing that we will never comprehend His ways or understand why death has taken someone we love away.

Implicit in Job’s quandary and explicated by the Talmud is the idea that physical life is finite but life itself is not.  We believe in a life that goes beyond death. That is the underpinning of the mourner’s kaddish: it is the ultimate belief that death is not the end, it is an end.  The soul survives.  For this we thank God for both the life that we shared and the one that endures beyond the physical realm.

We recite the kaddish, as opposed to singing it, because we cannot ignore that fact that we are wounded as we publicly proclaim when we utter the words of the mourner’s kaddish that our faith in God remains firm, unshaken.

Most of the other kaddishes are sung because they extol God’s glory and justice.  Yet when a person is in mourning it is hard to sing, it is enough just to say the words.

Aside from these considerations there is also the sacred notion of continuity.  “Just as my father did for his parent, so I will do for him.”  This idea of traditional passing on what one generation has done to the next takes on a power of its own.  The strength that we gain from saying these holy words alongside others who have suffered similarly is also a comfort.  We are never alone in our pain.

High Holy Days

 Praying for some comes easy.  For others it is arduous.

On the High Holy Days we do a lot of it.  For those who find it easy to pray, time flies.  For those who find prayer difficult, time is inexorable; it could not pass any slower.  This column is dedicated to those in the second category, the ones who find it hard to pray.

There are essentially two ways to come to synagogue, in need or on empty.  

Need: Need means you walk in the doors of Beth Shalom wanting healing.  We are all broken.  Some are afflicted with physical ailments, some are psychically torn, some are scarred by loss of a job, some feel just worthless, some are wrestling with dark demons that take the form of abuse, and some are looking for their direction.  Most everyone suffers from all of these in varying degrees.

Healing begins when we acknowledge our brokenness.  We come to the Synagogue with open wounds and ask God to help us get through them.

Idea: On Rosh Hashanna we do not wish one another a “Happy New Year.”  We say Shana Tova, which means “A good year.”  What is the difference?  It is already here, so it is “new.”  What we have come to find is not just an acknowledgement that another year has passed, but we seek a cleansing of the self, a purging of the negative parts of our person.  We seek a “good” year not a “new” one.

Take time before the Holy Days and search for exactly what part of us needs healing.  Then bring it to God.

Empty: Expectations can be terrible.  An expectation indicates that we know what is about to happen.  If we go to a fine restaurant, for example, and expect to have the same quality service and food that we had last time, the evening may be a let down.   We anticipate the night out with our new friend will be as spontaneous and joyful as the last one.  We are disappointed when they are in a pensive mood.

The same principle applies with the service.  Before coming into the Synagogue, it may help to verbally acknowledge that we want to “hear” whatever God has planned for us.  This means emptying ourselves of all else.

This is an ancient poem translated by Robert Bly:

“Listen, friend, this body is his dulcimer,

He draws the string tight, and out of it comes

The music of the inner universe.

If the strings break and the bridge falls,

Then this dulcimer of dust goes back to dust.”

Like the dulcimer we sit.  Turning the pages of the mahzor we look to find and sing the song of our redemption.

God does not disappoint.  At times a single word or phrase jumps out of page to arrest our vision and communicate something vital.  Other times, it is a word spoken or a seemingly random thought that emerges from the inner emptiness.

In one old story, a rabbi sings loudly and forcefully exhorting the congregation to follow his example.  He says, “The moment you begin to sing your soul becomes one with everyone before you.”  

Without out preconception just sing, read, and sway.

 

Thought: If you have a setback, don’t throw in the towel.  Even if you need to take one step back before taking two forward, it is one step toward success.