Read Rabbi Joey’s Erev Rosh Hashanah Drash
September 22, 2010
Erev Rosh Hashana Drash – 5771
Rabbi Joseph Wolf
The great Hasidic teacher Aaron of Karlin was deep in prayer on Rosh Hashana. As he was about to call out God’s Name, Ha-Melech, Sovereign, he began to cry. His disciples asked him why he was shedding tears? He then recalled for them the tale in the Talmud: When Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai, in the moments when Jerusalem was burning, encountered Vespasian, he hailed to him: “Peace be unto you, King.” Vespasian curtly responded, “You should be put to death on two counts. First, I am not the King, and second, supposing I was the King, why have you not come to me before now and acknowledged me?” Aaron of Karlin continued: “As of yet, God is still not HaMelech, Soverereign of the world, and I have still not accomplished a ‘turning’; why have I still not come to acknowledge God’s Presence in the world?
What keeps us from doing so?. . . I suppose there are a lot of ways to answer that question. We have to confront the world’s reality everyday – and there are so many problems. And there’s this matter of the public political discourse that has become shallow and distorted. To find God in the world would require us to distinguish between the truth and what is not true.
So tonight, on Erev Rosh Hashana, I’m thinking about three works of fiction: Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Each has a message for us about the continuity of the world; each debunks a shallow kind of belief in things just rolling along the way they’ve always done so in the past. These are ingenious satires, blending genres and bringing us, as readers on a roller-coaster, through the past, present and into the apocalyptic future.
Adonai melech Adonai malach Adonai yimloch l’olam va-ed, we read throughout the next couple of days – that holiness is, was and will ever rule. And yet, if these authors capture the spiritual and cultural quandaries of the day, everything around us has gone haywire. When Yochanan ben Zakkai imagined the future, it was all Rome. Today, it’s complex financial instruments and technology that replaces our brains and works more efficiently. In Lethem’s work, the best of the three, he uses the city – Manhattan, of course – as his laboratory for how things work and what we can expect. In it, an art and rock critic’s life unravels. He’s a long-time substance abuser, the deconstructed caricature of his own circular theories. Bearing witness to the urban fabric all about him that gets torn apart, he becomes a sidebar to paroxysms that keep the plot moving, though in what direction it’s hard to tell. For instance, there’s an underground boring machine for the long-rumored Second Avenue subway project that’s on the loose: it uncontrollably rips up whole blocks of the city. The lead character is the inept narrator of the story. He was a child-actor, and like some of us at our worst, he lives off, well, “residuals”. He’s vacuous and most of the time the passive bystander to a culture run by avaricious developers, City Hall, and former student radicals-turned-impresarios. In Lethem’s Chronic City, the cultural critic suffers from cluster headaches and repeated incidents of what he calls “ellipsis”. Like the city, his rants go on late into the night and he’s prone to blacking out. It’s nihilism run amok, were it not for the whacky, transparent, self-deprecating humor.
Here and elsewhere there’s the theme of craving what others have, even if they only have it for a minute, before it’s no longer current, loses its cachet. In Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, there’s a similar quality of hyperactivity and distraction. The real estate magnates and the police are in each other’s pockets, and parcels of land are “zoned”, in order to achieve an overnight profit and be ravaged. The healthcare industry is merged (in all three novels, actually) with spa treatment centers and scams to preserve wellness and softer skin – to fend off old age. Although Inherent Vice is set somewhere around 1970, it’s about today. The lead character is a hippy turned private detective; and he hasn’t entirely made the transition. (Pynchon ingeniously spoofs a film noir telling of the tale.) So this detective, also like us, is trying hard to manage his life, however pathetically. Throughout the book, he’s chasing the conceiver of the crime, and yet, comically, he can’t seem to discover who has put him onto it, or what exactly the crime is! In this one, money changes hands quickly, and as in the case of the other two novels, there are multiple references to film directors and rock stars. They serve as coordinate points on our virtual map of what used to be the world last year. This one is definitively set in Los Angeles; and what was hip just yesterday is now kitsch, as is the main character himself.
It’s back to New York in Shteyngart’s book, Super Sad True Love Story, just off the presses a couple of week ago. The main character is a sweet but flabby, unattractive middle-aged Russian Jew, named Lenny Abramov (Shteyngart’s stand-in). Just the notion of being a Russian Jew in America when it’s too late to have arrived here is funny in itself. He’s a belated romantic with links to the old world, but even they are frayed, because he was too young when he together with his parents immigrated to this country. And here he is in a culture dedicated to youth and fitness and he has neither. He falls head-over-heels in love with a tiny Korean-American 24 year old who, when she’s not texting, downloads her calorie intake (she weighs 88 pounds), along with comparative pricing on cosmetics and lingerie that will make her ever more attractive. She’s not sure about her quaint and pathetic boyfriend, and she certainly can’t imagine what these smelly old things called “books” are on his shelf. He’s cute but klutzy, and he works for a futuristic company. He’s precariously high up in a branch of Post-Human Services called Indefinite Life Extension. His business targets HNWI’s – High Net Worth Individuals – and he has trouble meeting his quota. It’s all about the fusion of technology and perpetual youth – and he’s laughably misplaced. His and everybody else’s privacy are routinely violated or no longer exists, and he lives in a world that is being repossessed or dispossessed.
In each of these three stories, squatters inhabit the vestiges of our planet and veterans of dirty wars have had their lives wrecked and they’ve been abandoned, disinherited, denied a stake in the future. In this kind of world, all our old cherished ideas about moral virtue and justice are shaken out, as it’s the rich and the perennially young who make their deals. In this sense, there’s nothing new. It’s the Shabbat psalm all over again – the wicked popping up like crabgrass. The problem is, there’s no time for the righteous, who require old age and the patience of palm-trees; and there may be no planet left for them either.
What are we to make of the world, as presented here? First, we should consider what the Irish writer Colm Toibin has written about novels, in general, and maybe even about the way we should embrace today’s larger-than-life propositions about the world. Toibin writes: (They are)
“a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and metaphors are chosen and offered shape and structure, they may indeed represent the self, or the play between the unconscious mind and the conscious will, but they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession.”
We see ourselves in the characters, and the plot as it unfolds, and yet fiction is not about “self-expression, or true confession,” and that’s the part that gets us confused. I find his observation illuminating and it centers some of my thoughts about the task ahead for us in 5771. This is because, as a Jew, I realize there’s a tension between what I’m discovering right now today – that may be glaringly deficient and shocking – and what I’m going to allow myself to imagine for tomorrow. The information I get today can pull me down, like an undertow, if I let myself submit to despair. But, as Toibin says, there’s this play “between unconscious mind and the conscious will” too. You see, I very much want to affirm what I’ll call Malchut, the ongoing, connected march of goodness and abiding, transcendent ideas. Still, when I say Adonai Melech, Adonai Malach, Adonai Yimloch – it certainly won’t suffice for me to say in 5771 that God is in charge, God was in charge, and God will always be in charge. That won’t work. So I’m going to have to find a way to state my convictions in this era, in which we doubt ourselves, and we snicker at transcendent themes. We don’t pledge up easily these days. Monetary values are the only sure ones, and, of course, they fluctuate.
Yet it’s worth noting that what redeems each of the leading characters in these stories that define the times we live in are moments of tenderness and genuine, selfless love. Set in the city, which as a Jew I really appreciate because the city – as a tableau and metaphor – is where people bump up against one another and where we’ve discovered our sharper edges and the edginess of others, there are moments of respite in which two characters unexpectedly embrace. In a culture obsessed with sex, these stories are about love. Not what one can get, but what one can give. These interludes of tenderness act as buttresses against the onrush of fragmentation in which, as readers and consumers of culture, we might otherwise recapitulate the machine-like processes that threaten us with obsolescence. We can’t help but see ourselves in quiet gestures, in knowing smiles, in caresses that offer comfort and awareness beyond the Self. So where is Malchut? It’s turns out that Malchut is here at all times, but we need to treasure and protect it. It’s where people connect and welcome one another.
In an age in which the majority of the citizens of our tolerant, democratic country are outspoken and clearly opposed to – or appalled at the prospect of – building a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, (and now we even have a book-burning to worry about, and we know all about that); or when the Pew Research Center reports that nearly one out of five Americans suspect that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and they despise his “socialist” policies, I want to suggest that everything requires Jews to stand up for this expansive “thing” – alternately belittled or written off as the concern of the benighted few – called human rights. It’s the work thats putting empathy and altruism at a premium. It’s based on a more-inclusive narrative about the world that reminds a “confessionary” society – one that spends a lot of time in the blogosphere – that it’s best to close some significant gaps, to do some reaching out to others. It’s the inoculation against cynicism and for loving and caring. . . And yet, it’s becoming a riskier business to stand up for human rights.
How so? Writing in the Brown Journal of World Affairs, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch depicts a frightening scenario that has repeated itself in repressive regimes around the world, in which those who faithfully document and report human rights transgressions have been abducted at gunpoint, or strangled, or left by the roadside. The murders of heroic decent people have been carried out with relative impunity. But it’s what Roth notes has been happening recently in ostensibly more welcoming countries that has had an even more chilling effect. . . And this is where we, as Jews at Rosh Hashana, concerned with Malchut – abidingly harmonious principles reigning supreme – need to stand up and be witnesses. . . In places where open government and freedom of speech are held to be high priorities, human rights advocates are increasingly being stigmatized and openly questioned as seditious. So, for example, the US government will use its spin against Wikileaks, even though hackers are offering us the transparency we seldom get, in the face of a futile and often ugly war in Afghanistan; or those who called for open and independent inquiries into the Gaza campaign or the flotilla debacle here and in Israel are the object of communal scorn; or we can refer to the enforced silence of western governments in response to the African Union’s solidarity with Bashir and the Sudanese government when it comes to Darfur. Each of these responses jeopardizes what I’m calling Malchut. Malchut means nothing, after all, if it doesn’t signify credible good government, and all good governments should realize that they have everything to gain from working in collaboration with a culture that supports human rights first! That’s the case we need to be making – here in America, in the United Nations, before the IMF and the World Bank, and, yes, in Israel too, where – in our Golden Jerusalem, it often appears these days that the construction of a veritable Jewish history theme park takes precedence to the human rights of all the city’s inhabitants.
Like Aaron of Karlin, we should be in tears. As Jews on Rosh Hashana, we should be acknowledging God’s Presence, but we’re too often distracted. How often we are complicit in letting the world be bought up, the world that’s holy. . . come apart.
For all the lies exposed by the tide of great works of art and fiction, there’s the underlying hope that draws us back to shore. There’s tenderness in the lengths to which you and I, the main characters in today’s drama, might go, in order to take care of another human being. Where the tent on shore was once narrow and teetering, the one we pitch on the stable ground of human rights and caring for others is expansive. The world-as-marketplace can be deceivingly callous and shallow; but in its streets we can come upon our neighbors, look them in the eye, and say “Peace be unto you.”
There’s a paragraph about Malchut – about the old-fashioned concept of Sovereignty – that we read every morning of the year, not just on Rosh Hashana. It goes something like this:
“Hashiva shoftenu k’varishona v’yoatzenu k’vat’chila. Bring back
our judges as before and our advisors as in the beginning. V’haser
mi-menu yagon va’anacha. And remove our anguish and our
sighing. U’m’loch alaynu ata Adonai levad’cha b’chesed u’v’rachamim
v’tzadkenu ba-mishpat. Rule over us Adonai, only You – in kindness
and compassion, making us righteous in accordance with justice.”
We say, Enough sighing: There are too many decent people who, in the name of speed and greed and access to technology, are being cut out of the tomorrow that belongs to them. Enough (already!) with the anguish that undermines our will to hear the poetry of others, who may speak a different dialect, or cook with strange spices, or play a musical instrument unfamiliar to our ears. This year, may we establish a rule of kindness and compassion and justice – as was the hope in the beginning. Most importantly, this year, may we begin again to look carefully at our role in things, and do the world’s work!
Reflecting on What’s Next for The Jews
September 22, 2010
by Rabbi Joey
A while back, I thought about writing a number of articles on what I thought of as “the religious personality”. Essentially, I wanted to get a handle on what it might mean to behave in a manner commensurate with a deeper understanding of rabbinic precepts, at the same time that it would match up with twenty-first century challenges. I’d like to enumerate some of these challenges, and consider how we might move forward.
First, as we all know, the world is more interconnected. Even in a way that Jewish leaders at the close of the nineteenth century could not have imagined; the end of the twentieth century opened windows like never before. If a hundred years earlier, the establishment Jews quivered about the erosion of observance and the flight to materialism, who would have anticipated the eclipse of national governments by corporate power, the electronic transmission of money, the mass migration of previously subsistence-level farmers to countries halfway around the globe, not to mention the looming decimation of the Earth’s natural resources? Did Sholom Aleichem ever think that that his bickering shtetl inhabitants would get connected to the Internet? (He probably would have opened a Google Group for them to insult one another.)
What’s more, the allegiances of the Jewish people, however much we might praise them as being abidingly concerned with the betterment of the many at the expense of the few, do not outweigh the reality that hits us in the face. Even the Jews are diverse: multiethnic, multi-racial, swelling with Jews by choice as never before; increasingly concerned about issues that were traditionally understood as “outside” the Jewish agenda. Whereas the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel preoccupied us in the last century, it’s been well-documented that these twin foci will not be the ones that animate our children’s Jewish identity.
So what will it mean to be Jewish? I return to the religious personality. If there is a power source within the Jewish tradition, it’s the role of the teacher. Currently, social commentators deride the failed state of educational systems in this country that was once known for its model institutions. Lately, certain critics have even shifted the blame away from the schools or the quality of the teachers, to the lack of motivation among this generation’s students. Well, if this is the case, what is responsible for this lack of enthusiasm, when it comes to learning?
It would seem that, in order for a community to believe in itself, it would need to make commitments that override individually set goals and entitlements. I am not suggesting a return to narrow patriotic formulas or pledges to die on behalf of an ideology. But it would seem that, considering the increasing gap between the rich and poor (domestically and all around the globe), an investment in the common wealth makes sense on economic and security grounds, not just in terms of moral justice. How can the next generation, who feel defeated from the get-go and dispossessed, be expected to attach themselves to a larger citizenry? How can they want to learn, if learning is circumscribed to the extent that it means familiarity with a set of tools that will predictably be obsolete as soon as it is acquired? Moreover, what is the place of a teacher in a society that devalues its young and old, and puts them at the mercy of profiteers?
A few weeks ago, at the end of the Torah, we read a succinct rationale for how idolatry takes a hold of us. In the poem Haazinu, Moses’ swan-song, the condemnation of people growing fat and honoring their own fortune-making proclivities opens the door to false worship. It gets to the point that we pay attention to nothing besides all those material possibilities that come to define who we are. Well, if there is going to be a place for Jewish ideas, it’s going to be religious personalities who convey the opposite. There is going to be a place – not only at retreat centers and in synagogues but in the heart of our cities – for teaching to shape a message that is simple. It is one that will be based in truthfulness, what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “depth theology” – an awareness of virtues, such as fairness and solitude and quiet compassion.
Some people think, mistakenly, that it’s the great books that define us. They are wrong, because it’s really the person-to-person transmission of the stories, the awe-inspired moments, the quest for truth. In the next century, it will take personal models to convey how we must protect the planet, take care of the stranger, and set a table around which a community can break bread together. The communication of virtue must precede virtual communication. This will make it vital to be Jewish, to share in a tradition that reveres what lies across the continents, by shoring up those who abide nearby. In essence, what’s next is for us to measure how much stock we put in raising religious personalities. Only they can be the standard bearers for a society that is currently doing incredible harm to itself.
According to many midrashim, God would smile at himself, pleased by human resourcefulness in the face of insurmountable challenges. In these anecdotes, God was bested, but he enjoyed it! What we need to be asking ourselves is what it will take to get God to feel delicious pride again. We can only begin to explore that question by spending time in each other’s company, knitting the communal fabric in such a way that we demonstrate that life is good, and that the people – once again – are good too! Praise the teachers who convey this message.
Elul- A Time of Reflection and Preparation
August 11, 2010
Monday night, August 9th, ushered in the month of Elul. The heat of summer may still be upon us, but our spiritual clocks transmit a message that we are in for a change. What can all of this mean? Certainly, we realize that our evolutionary regimen of indicators explains so much about how we assign ourselves tasks to get accomplished. Is there really a point to a month-long awakening? According to tradition, this is the time we get up early to ask for forgiveness. The Shofar is blown at the completion of davenning. Why not see this business of soul-searching as a way of making the seasonal shift more conscious? Havurah invites you – wherever you are – at the early morning hour, to take a few minutes to contemplate the changes in your own life. What’s different right now? What difference would you like to make? May you come into the New Year already awake!
2010 High Holidays Information Here!
August 3, 2010
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For more information, please contact the Havurah Office.
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.
