Read Rabbi Joey’s Kol Nidre Drash.
September 22, 2010
Kol Nidrei Drash – 5771
Rabbi Joseph Wolf
The older we get, our faces tell a story. Like doorways, however, they open and close to others. A subtle understanding is that they open and close to Heaven too. In Jewish tradition, the way we show our delight or our disgust – or our unresponsiveness – mirrors our capacity to open to deeper truths. Sheeveetee Adonai l’neg’dee tamed … We’re supposed to keep God in front of us at all times, even when it’s painful.
I got to thinking about this more while I was praying one morning. I noticed how many instances there are in which the Divine Face is the subject of contemplation. You are familiar with one, for sure, in Sim Shalom, when we say the words, “Kee v’or panecha natata lanu…”. What it really means is we receive Torah, while looking straight-on at the “light of God’s Face”. Put differently, it’s about knowing what we know: it happens intimately, in the second person. “When we enter the brightness of Your True Presence, we are bestowed a gift!” “In Your light do we see light,” says the Psalmist.
But what do these words mean, when we’ve come to think of that light as something paler than it really is? What can it mean for a generation, for whom “presence” is often virtual, to come into God’s Presence? What can we do to make up for our lack of mindfulness and patience? What will prevent us from putting on masks, when confronted with the glare?
In that Thomas Pynchon book (I mentioned the other night), Inherent Vice, in one of the passages, the lead vocalist in a rock band takes drugs, and experiences a crisis of self-doubt. He peers into a mirror, and what he sees, are, in the novelist’s description, “actually two distinct sides of his face, expressing two violently different personalities. . .” When he emerges from his bad trip, the first thing he does is legally change his name, but his vividly described identity crisis reminds me of what the rabbis had to say about the first created human being: Du partzufim bara ha-Kadosh-Baruch-Hu ba-adam ha-rishon. “The Holy One created the first human being with two faces.” Technically, this is about gender – and explaining how the first human creation came to be Adam and Eve. But “two faces” tells us more than about male and female polarities. It’s about front and back, surface and beneath the surface. It begs the question about deep character composition; and it makes a mockery of what I’d like to call our penchant for cheap “composure”. Too often we identify with our “red lines”, our surface loyalties, our public posturing. It obscures the Truth.
A character in the Nobel Prize-winning Romanian author Herta Muller’s book The Appointment, depicting the repression of the Ceausescu era in harrowing personal terms, also sees her face in the mirror. As she looks at it, she reflects that it’s a “face with froggy creases over its eyes which looked like me.” She’s overwrought for good reason, because she is forced to keep her regular appointment with an interrogator who exposes her every move. There’s no such thing as a mask in a totalitarian regime. In her account, an oppressive society, paradoxically opaque and transparent, has eviscerated not only her outer markers, but her inner core as well. Says Muller’s character, “I held my hands in the water, it felt warm; on my face it felt cold.”
Similarly, on Erev Kol Nidrei, we call into question the correlation of what’s revealed with what’s concealed. Or we wonder about the discrepancy between ourselves as symbolic creatures who go through the motions in here and out in the world. . . and who we are essentially. As we say when we sing Limnot Yamenu, we’re here for such a short time on this earth – surely we should be doing something truthful v’navee le-vav chachma, “that we might cultivate a heart of wisdom”. Our actions outside of ourselves, not only the cues we transmit, should corroborate powerful spiritual interior motives.
In a favorite book of mine by Arthur Green, Seek My Face Speak My Name, he tells the famous story of Rabbi Nahman of Kossov, a member of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s circle. It is said that Nahman stayed focused on Truthfulness – which was everything in the Hasidic world – by repeating the Name of God over and over again. This worked fine, until his fortunes turned sour, and he was compelled to go into business and was no longer able to study and pray all day. There were accounts to keep and people to satisfy. We can easily identify with this level of distraction, but for him it was a crisis. His remedy was entirely practical: he hired an assistant who would go with him wherever he went. The assistant served a simple purpose: the story goes that whenever he found himself straying from God’s Presence, all he had to do was look at his assistant’s face – and he’d return.
Arthur Green writes: “I have been thinking about that assistant for a good many years. I wonder what he looked like. Dare we think that he was particularly beautiful? Probably not, given the values of traditional Jewish society. Might he, on the other hand, have been particularly tormented? Might it have been in the agony of a suffering face that Reb Nahman of Kossov saw the letters of the divine name. . .?”
I wonder if something like this was at work recently, when Time Magazine plastered the face of a young Afghani woman on the cover? It was a shrewd publishing decision. It was a beautiful face, except for the shocking fact that the Taliban had disfigured it – cutting off her nose. She was a child-bride, the victim of misogynist internecine clan violence, and Time, in its lead article, seemed to be issuing a warning about the carnage yet to come in that part of the world, should America make an early exit. What to make of it?
On August 3rd, Cambridge University professor of post-colonial literature Priyamvada Gopal wrote an editorial in The Guardian, in which she berated the tendency of Western storytellers, both those who report facts on the ground and those who write novels about the region, for fabricating a salvational approach to war and western beneficence. In her view, the gaping hole in this woman’s face signified both what’s missing – in terms of the way we capture superficially our own role, as merchants of warfare and consumers of war’s dividends and how we portray the vacant, excised “other face” we’d prefer not to see when we look in the mirror. . . Du partzufim, two faces, the rabbis tell us, did the Kadosh Baruch Hu give us.
Likewise, Vogue Italia’s recent spread of fashion art dramatized the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and evinced widespread condemnation. It was a display of fashion models arrayed in macabre black and white, like marine animals covered in oil and washed up on shore – in various poses of extinction. You can just imagine the anxious response of commentators, wrestling with the grotesque “face” of environmental degradation. Here, in this case, I think the photographic exhibit shined a light on the narrative of consumption. I couldn’t help but think that, just as our appetite for the oil gusher story was coming to an end and the scientists and politicians subordinate to the petroleum industry were telling us that the vast majority of oil spilled had all gone away, that there was something getting in the way of us gazing deeply into the “face” of deepwater ecology, of rapacious northern greed, of southern poverty.
Of course, at home in our communities, we airbrush the picture of the family every day. By disallowing equal rights to marriage and begrudging a more robust understanding of love and desire and beauty, we undermine the happiness and security of our neighbors, an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, a brother or sister, our own children. We live in a culture frightened by, God forbid, its own disfigurement.
And, as you know, as a member of Rabbis for Human Rights, I often wonder how American Jews get so taken in by an uncritical Zionism. On the face of it, of course we’re thrilled to take the trip over there and lay our eyes on members of the extended family and old friends, but by the same token what is it that prevents us from caring about the faceless Bedouin, whose ancestral villages are being erased in their native land; or the aggrieved West Bank Palestinians whose hopes for a contiguous territorial state hang in the balance while 13,000 housing units will be built if a moratorium is rescinded next week. And what diverts our attention from the blatant ethnic cleansing taking place in east Jerusalem?
But it’s understandable! How long, after all, can we look penetratingly at such things? How capable are we of gazing at the Truth?
There’s a warning about all of this in the Netane Tokef prayer we read tomorrow morning. It says that even the angels get anxious, so it’s easy to imagine why our preferences are for prima facie evidence. It’s a deal we make: no questions asked, no lingering suspicions, no follow-up. But on Yom Ha-din, this day of introspective judgment, we’re asked to look more carefully.
As the psalmist wrote:
שַׁתָּ עֲוֹנֹתֵינוּ לְנֶגְדֶּךָ עֲלֻמֵנוּ לִמְאוֹר פָּנֶיךָ
“You put our iniquities out in front of you; our hidden sins in the light of Your Face.” The Hebrew etymology is faces plural – panim, perhaps because there are so many different portals through which we come to know another human being. And in Hebrew, panim and pnim mean, respectively, faces and interiors. Encountering an Other is like facing the Divine – rejecting hasty cognition, refusing to look away from the Truth.
This is what I’ve been musing over, as I pray the words of the Siddur every morning:
דִּרְשׁוּ יְהֹוָה וְעֻזּוֹ בַּקְּשׁוּ פָנָיו תָּמִיד“
Search more deeply; again and again seek out God’s Face.”
Where do we see God’s face? If we fathom the plight of an undocumented worker, it’s there, or the otherwise faceless victim of human trafficking, it’s there too. It’s wherever there’s poverty and incarceration and illness without a cure. But it’s also there, when we look deeply and patiently into the face of a loved one. Wherever we’ve put off getting Torah, comprehending the deeper knowledge, therein lies the Truth.
This year, may we embark upon a quiet path. May it lead us, courageously, in the direction of more honest relationship and unwavering faith in humanity. May we have the fortitude to learn more, even when the bright light terrifies us and tests our convictions. It shines everywhere – waiting for us to come in and discover it.
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!
Adult Drash Script from Rosh Hashanah Services is here!
September 22, 2010
Were you at Rosh Hashanah Day 2 services? Did you happen to see Emily and the Adult Drash Group perform? Dont fret if you missed it because you can read the script right here!
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.
Havurah Cemetery Consecration Thoughts
September 22, 2010
by David Weil
On September 12th, Rabbi Joey and a group of us met at the cemetery to consecrate our new section. It turned into a wonderful and poignant moment as we told stories and remembered those who are buried there. There was even a Russian couple who was incidentally there and shared the lovely story of their aged grandmother, who emigrated with them and is now buried there. The location reminds them of the hills in their native Ukraine. The following is the history of the cemetery and some of my thoughts about this beautiful plot of land that we call ours.
Thirty years ago, our first rabbi, Alan Berg, told us it was important to have a cemetery. He advised us that without one we would have no permanent presence in the community. We were young and Havurah was small and cash strapped, but with congregant and lawyer, Elden Rosenthal’s and other’s perseverance, we found this lovely spot in Jones Pioneer Cemetery. Using congregant loans, contributions, and sales of plots we purchased the first section.
When we first came up here in 1985 with Rabbi Roy Furman to consecrate our new cemetery it was mostly an empty field. There was only a gravel driveway shared with neighbors that came in from the south. Because of this impediment, the cemetery was rarely used. Through negotiations between Metro and the neighboring church, the new entrance was developed and the cemetery has become vibrant and active once again. Over the years, through sales of grave sites, we have purchased two more sections.
The hedge separates our sacred Jewish cemetery from the non Jewish section. The new section is also separated by a beautiful border, as is halachicly prescribed. As you all know the empty field has unfortunately filled up much faster than I would have ever imagined. But it has also filled up with cherished memories of loved ones, dear friends, and Havurah history. Alan Berg was right. In the future, even if we are no longer here as a congregation, the cemetery will live on as a lasting memorial.
Jacksonville, near Medford, had one of the first Jewish communities in the state. It’s wonderful to go to the Jewish section of that cemetery and be reminded of the Jewish presence there 150 years ago. If you go around Jones Cemetery, you can also find stones from the 1800s. It’s comforting to know that 50 to 100 years from now our descendants and other visitors will also have a place to pay their respects to those who have gone before them.
I want to thank Rabbi Joey and those who joined us on Sunday and shared their memories with us. It was truly a touching and magical moment.
