Thinking About Summer
July 1, 2010
by Rabbi Joey
Summer means a lot of things for the Jews. For one thing, it’s the traditional period during which Hebrew School teachers quit oppressing me and my friends. The hallways darkened and the final chalk conjugations of early May yielded to half-hearted reminders that people ate dairy at Shavuos. Mr. Gomborow and Mr. Shindler, immigrant classroom managers from European firestorms, removed their suit-jackets and wiped their brows. They despised these American kids, dropped off by mothers in curlers, who motored their wide gas-guzzling coupes like big fish in an aquarium. They were nothing but grief. It was the end of an era, and no one seemed to be paying attention. Even they, angry prophets bewailing their lonely fate in America, rented apartments at the beach only blocks away from where the graduates of Jewish learning academies lay on towels, got tans, and gawked at adolescent girls in bathing suits, while they listened to The Ventures and the Everly Brothers on transistor radios. Better to get some air by the sea than to get swallowed up by the beastly heat in the old synagogues.
Shavuot meant the way out, rather than the way in. Standing on Sinai in the mid-twentieth century, Moses would be disappointed when he’d come down. There would be few hangers on by the time we were in the thick of the sixties. When I somehow landed at a Jewish summer camp in 1963, I learned about the Torah portion dedicated to a foreign sorcerer who attempted to curse the Israelites in the desert, and instead ended up intoning Mah Tovu. I had never heard of Balaam, and the Hebrew School principal turned head counselor momentarily charmed me with this July lullaby. It would be a whole three years later, until I read passages from Elie Wiesel’s Night, and endured for the very first time the poignant communal mourning of millions hitherto unspoken of. A year later, during the summer of love, we all thought we saw a cameo appearance of the Holy One. That’s when our quaking for encircled Jerusalem turned into a liberation we cast in biblical terms. Summertime, until now the lacuna in a truncated American Jewish experience, redeemed the embers of a fire that had all but gone out.
There were the moods of summer too, the heartbreaks, the sizzling asphalt that gave rise to hallucinatory wiggles in the lower atmosphere and made teenagers wonder. We read Kerouac and Camus and fancied ourselves as potential solitary victims, alternately, heroes. We watched the film Z, we sang along to the theme song of Easy Rider. There were a host of chemical inducements to pry open the gap between the rest of the year when we were ostensibly geared to achievement and the hypocrisies and corruptions we perceived on the other side of the time off we called vacation. The life we had been assured was a good one seemed vacant.
All along we learned what we could about love. We now admit that men and women love differently, or at least, asymmetrically, but who knew these things then? This meant that I had to find out what I could away from home, unloved unconditionally, or loved on condition that each of us, apart and together, might construct a path out of the desert towards truth-telling. In this sense, the summer went on for years. The Torah being given in slow motion… Years later, a teacher myself, I began to take up the challenge of this patient time, in terms of the catch-phrase from Song of Songs: “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.” I became familiar with the tradition that the initials of these words spell out the name of the summer month in the Jewish calendar that precedes Rosh Hashanah. In spiritual terms, I fathomed that recognizing one’s solitude and inevitable sadness, coming to terms with our limits and our lies, can be viewed as a way forward too. For it’s only this kind of awareness that can ultimately serve us.
If we are to plant on feet on the ground and hear the divine voice, it must come about as a result of some legitimate grieving. All those years of growing up and coming forth from a land where everything was a given, required an ecstatic level of being the truth. The summer’s heat can hold us to account. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Two Rabbis and 20-Something Jews: Our Connection With Israel: A Conversation Worth Having
April 29, 2010
Thursday, May 13th at 7:00 PM, at Mittleman Jewish Community Center
We will show the acclaimed short documentary Eyes Wide Open, depicting the lead-up to the fabled trip that American Jews take to Israel. This film chronicles the complex sea of emotions and ideas that come up while people are there. Across the denominational spectrum and taking into consideration the range of spiritual and political concerns, we’ll connect with one another. Your generation’s yearnings and worries take center stage. Here’s an opportunity to meet people, speak out, and embrace our rich diversity.
We invite you to bring your friends, age 20-29. Food and beverages for all!
Rabbi Joey Wolf, Havurah Shalom and Rabbi Tzvi Fischer, Portland Kollel
This event is sponsored by Havurah Shalom, Portland Kollel, Mittleman Jewish Community Center, and Moishe House
Kol Nidrei Drash 5770
October 1, 2009
We’re on a deadline: Obama has given Iran a matter of weeks to come clean on its newly revealed nuclear site. We’re on a deadline: We’ve got to do something about the healthcare enigma, because 52 million non-elderly Americans will go uninsured in 2010. We’re on a deadline: It’s been said that by the year 2020 in Israel the Arab population will outnumber the Jewish population west of the Jordan River, unless we don’t give back occupied territory on the West Bank. We’re on a deadline, because a World Bank study recently indicated that by the end of this century, 60 million people in developing nations will be forced to abandon their homes along coastlines – coastlines that will be inundated as a result of a 3 foot rise in sea levels, thanks to global warming and the rapid melting of ice sheets. We’re on a deadline: A while back, on the first of the month of Elul, we were given forty days to do teshuvah – sufficient time earlier on for Moses to get enlightenment on top of Sinai. On Rosh Hashana, we received a “posting” that we had ten days. Now we’re down to twenty-four hours or so to mull things over.
Now, we do this every year, so we know the drill. We also know how to cut corners.
The Mishna in Tractate Rosh Hashana reads: “If a person passes by a synagogue and hears the Shofar being blown – if she’s listening with intention, then she has performed the mitzvah… If she, let’s say, never intended to hear it – she was on her way to a gallery opening or a Ducks game, and there was this familiar, long shrieking tone that she heard emanating from a synagogue on the way – then she has not accomplished the ritual at all.” I draw the conclusion from the fact that the ruling was issued back in the second century that we’ve been going through the motions for a long time.
So what is it that prevents us human stewards of one another from staying on task? Why can’t we make up our minds to stay awake, to pay attention to what we set out to get done in our lives? What about the assignment itself gets in the way of us wanting to hang in there?
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Erev Rosh Hashana Drash 5770
September 21, 2009
Nahman of Bratslav said: “On the day that a person does teshuvah, he rises above time, and he elevates all days above time….. for teshuvah is the nullification of time.” And so – here we are once again, at Rosh Hashana. It seems like less and less time passes between one Rosh Hashana and the next! I almost went to the extreme of saying that Rosh Hashanas run together – but that wouldn’t have been an accurate statement, because we’re all familiar with the feeling of being yanked away from sacred time, when we walk outside and witness the world going on with its business as usual. When Nahman talked about nullifying time, he was zoned into a different way of being with people. To him, the past and the future could cease to exist, because he could bring all of his faculties to bear. For him, there was just the present; and seeing things through this set of eyes, he – and anyone else who had this clairvoyant power –would always be where he started out – fresh, unscathed, full of possibility.
But nowadays, I wonder if this a good thing, to be so focused on the present? The Brazilian writer Ignacio de Loyola Brandao considers us poisoned by the media – so that, in the present, we seek nothing but celebrity, or the celebrity status that attaches to being mindful of who we think we are and how we’re representing our feelings to an imaginary public. So what can it mean today to think of deep spiritual knowledge and awareness only in terms of the present? And is it such a good thing that the way we fancy ourselves as Jews today amounts to what we can “cobble together” right now? Why are we so inept when it comes to accepting the weight of the past? What leaves us so ill-prepared, so arbitrary, when it comes to thinking about a Jewish future? ……Nahman didn’t know what we’re up against today.
Yet, right now in here we are awake in a way that maybe he could identify with. We’re present at the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. Something happens, when we come in here together! In contrast to this, contemporary life is distracting. The world we move about in gets in the way of establishing the deeper bonds with one another we will be affirming over the next ten days. The Havurah intends to bring water to a poor village in Nicaragua and we’re looking for everyone’s involvement. Give whatever you can… just get involved; do something about poverty that is global and experienced in the developing world like nothing you’d otherwise believe here in this country. The rich nations – our own behavior vis a vis our squandering of resources that belong to everyone – are implicated. In here we realize these things. And yet, when we leave this hall we can become distracted by a present that overwhelms us. The trick is to stay focused.
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Chutzpah, Voluntarism and Spirituality
September 5, 2009
In a pivotal but lesser known teaching, Nahman of Bratslav taught his followers that not everything was up to the teacher. He urged them to bring something new, of their own, to the Torah he presented. It would be best, of course, (he reserved some honorary status to himself!), if they mastered what he taught them. However, if that were not possible, he encouraged originality.
This teaching might suffice to base the work that lies in store for Havurah on creativity and imagination. But Nahman adds something else: he refers to the errant quality of our thoughts. It seems that it’s the view of the spiritual master that our proliferation of ideas – about goals, about art, about virtue, about fantasy – is a blessing and a curse. And it’s up to us to direct the power of our minds to a higher purpose. Especially if we consider what it means to be postmodern Jews, we are constantly breaking things down and reconceiving them. Not all our ideas or the combustible energy we bring to celebrating our great minds will bring us home. To be at home will require us to be intentional, truthful, and at rest.
At the Yamim Noraim (the Days of Awe), we come home to ourselves, as individuals and as a community. More than ever, in the Havurah we recognize this to mean that our diversity refers not only to color or gender or to status, but to imaginative prowess and volubility. We are producers of Jewish life. Everything depends on us expressing ourselves, but putting in the effort to work cohesively. To the extent that we can organize ourselves and play a role – whether it be within the context of advocating for debt relief for impoverished nations or in terms of bringing in new music and actually singing – we will work effectively. If we embrace spiritual practices instead of leaving them to others – we will have an impact. If we listen to one another reverently and empathically, we will nurture hope and habits of kindness. On the other hand, if we just make noise, it will be an indication of our failure.
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