Mordechai Liebling at Shabbat services
October 21, 2009
Havurah Shalom Hosts Rabbi Mordechai Liebling at Shabbat services, Friday, October 30 at 8 pm
Don’t miss the opportunity to hear and meet Rabbi Mordechai Liebling on Friday, October 30. He will be joining Havurah Shalom for the weekend as Havurah launches Operation Reconnect.
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling visits Havurah Shalom
Rabbi Liebling most recently served as the Executive Vice-President of Jewish Funds for Justice, prior to its merger with The Shefa Fund, he was the Torah of Money Director at TSF. He was the Executive Director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation for 12 years. He was a Spiritual Director at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College for eight years and has taught courses there.
He was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, prior to rabbinical school he worked as a community organizer. He has a B.A. from Cornell University in Government and an M.A. from Brandeis in History of American Civilization, specializing in American progressive movements. He served on Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations for 12 years. He has served on the boards of national and international non-profit organizations. Currently he is on the boards of the Faith and Politics Institute, Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and is the President Emeritus of the Shalom Center. He has received awards from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and Mazon.
He has written articles for numerous publications. He is married to Lynne Iser and they have five children. Their family was the subject of the award winning documentary Praying With Lior.
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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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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