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.
Advocacy Works: Haiti and Debt Cancellation
March 1, 2010
by Bob Brown
If you wonder if sending a message to your congressman matters, this story will demonstrate that it does matter.
The Jubilee USA Network organizations have been advocating for debt forgiveness for Haiti since 2007. The story of Haiti’s poverty and debt is complicated, having both political and economic aspects that have perpetuated the poverty of the Haitian people. Natural disasters have exacerbated the country’s poverty.
The earthquake on January 12, 2010 has caused unimaginable destruction. In response to the crisis, the International Monetary Fund responded by announcing its intent to give Haiti a $100 million loan. Loaning Haiti more money was completely inappropriate. This action by the IMF caused the advocacy community to act. Jubilee USA and other organizations organized a letter writing campaign to Members of Congress. This caused a bi-partisan letter to be written by two Representatives to Treasury Secretary Geithner, calling for “the complete cancellation of debts owed by Haiti to multilateral financial institutions…and the provision of assistance to Haiti in the form of grants so that the country does not accumulate additional debts.” 94 Members signed this letter as a direct result of phone calls and emails that were made by you and people like you.
Next, individuals were asked to sign a petition to Treasury Secretary Geithner urging him use his leadership to negotiate the cancellation of Haiti’s remaining debts to international institutions and ensure that all new aid comes in the form of grants, not loans.
The consequence of these advocacy actions;
On the eve of the G7 meeting in Canada, Geithner announced that the U.S. intends to seek a commitment with other donors for Haiti’s debt relief to the international financial institutions “in a manner that provides direct and immediate grant support to Haiti.”
At the G7 meeting in Canada, these countries have told Haiti that any debts it owes them needn’t be repaid and international lenders (such as the IMF and the World Bank) should do the same.
The story is not over. Jubilee and other organizations must hold these countries and the international financial institutions accountable to their stated intention.
Actions of advocates like you made this happen. If you wonder if sending a message to your congressman matters, this should demonstrate that it does matter.
Jake Sullivan Rosh Hashanah Drash 5770
October 5, 2009
Shannah Tovah everyone.
Before I begin my commentary on Vayiera, I wanted to let you know that today is an important day for my family. Today is my Grandma Florine Gelfer’s Yortsite. She died three years ago, erev Rosh Hashanah, in Portland. She was an incredible, dignified, passionate, and dedicated person who has been a great role model for me throughout my life; thinking about her as I prepared this speech got me thinking about role models and what they mean to me.
Secondly, before I begin my speech I would like to offer a disclaimer. Embarrassing as it is to admit it, I will admit that I hadn’t read Genesis fully, or read the parashah that I will be talking about for this speech–called Vayiera–fully, before I was invited to do this. I know that many of you in this audience are very learned and know this text very well, and I ask you to please indulge my naiveté as I recount to you the experience that I had as I read these stories through fully for the first time.
I came into this High Holiday season looking for inspiration. I’ve finally reached senior year of high school, a position that is traditionally looked up to and admired by younger students. Despite the fact that I assumed seniors didn’t need role models when I was a freshman myself, still looking for people to look up to.
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Ben Anderson-Nathe Yom Kipppur Drash 5770
October 5, 2009
I am not a person of great faith. In spite of this, I served as a Chaplain for a liberal arts college in the upper Midwest. I wear my head covered when I set foot in public. I keep kosher. New students entering my classes at Portland State University see my kippah and automatically label me as a person of faith – for some, it is an invitation, a point of potential alliance. For others, it’s a point of contention. I teach some of the young people here today in our own Havurah High School program. But I am not a person of great faith, and at times this makes me feel like a bit of a fraud.
Being a religious person without great faith leaves me in all kinds of quandaries, particularly when it comes to observance, and specifically to many holidays. At its most basic, I struggle with the notion of a supernatural G0d. The image of a personified G0d who actively intercedes in human affairs, and in whom one can have faith, is one that doesn’t resonate well with me. I am drawn into davening, into tradition, and am captivated by our liturgy … but I often wonder to whom I am praying. I observe mitzvot, but not because “G0d says.” Instead, for me it is because Jews have observed these mitzvot for millennia and in my observance of them, I find meaning. Of course, in good Reconstructionist tradition, Kaplan would call that meaning-making an encounter with G0d … but we’ll leave that alone for now.
Most of the time, my meaning-making comes fairly easily. I do what I do, it is meaningful for me, and I feel Jewishly connected, grounded, and content. But Yom Kippur introduces new complications every year. First, let me say that of all the Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur strikes the deepest chord in me. It is, without question, the most transcendent. The melodies, the symbolism and imagery, and most significantly, the vidui (the recitations of sins, including the ashamnu and al chet), all leave me breathless. But why?
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