Chaim Steinmetz - Happiness Warrior

2012-01-24T11:27:00.000-05:00

A Hard Heart = An Addiction to Being Right

2012-01-23T17:30:00.002-05:00

What the Bible has to Say About Blaming the Victim:

Some Thoughts on the Origins of Slavery in Egypt

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for her constant support, and Chris Zacchia for his exceptional camera work

2011-11-25T11:15:00.000-05:00

Interest Free Loans: The Uncharity

Charity comes straight from the heart. Everybody can feel the pain of those in need, which is why compassionate people want to give the hungry food. When it comes to charity, the Jewish community can certainly take pride in the remarkable sums that we raise each year to take care of the poor. This philanthropic excellence highlights what is called “the Jewish heart”.

But charity at its best doesn’t only come from the heart; it comes from the mind as well. Charity should be given in a way that maximizes the impact on the recipient, and it should be given in a way that best preserves the dignity of those in need. The Bible tells us that we need to dream of a day when “there may be no more destitute among you”; to accomplish this, we must not only give from the heart, but also from the mind. When you give from the heart, you give the poor food; when you give from the mind, you give the poor a livelihood.

The Jewish tradition of giving from the mind is best expressed by the interest free loan. The Bible insists that we lend to our hand “to strengthen” those who are slipping by lending them some money. As the 11^th commentator Rashi explains, to strengthen a person when they slip will save a great deal of effort; a lot less help is required to help someone who is slipping than to help someone who has fallen. Lending to someone who is in a credit crunch is much easier for the community than supporting someone who has fallen bankrupt.

But the interest free loan is more than a preventative measure. It is actually a form of charity that isn’t charity, the “uncharity”. Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish thinker and author, explains that there are different levels of charity; the highest form of charity is found when you give someone an interest free loan or a job. By giving someone an opportunity to flourish independently, we have given them the greatest gift of all, and by giving someone a loan rather than a gift, we have preserved their dignity. Ironically, the greatest form of charity is not a charity at all, it is the uncharity, where the recipient leaves without a handout, but with his head held high and with hope for a better future.

Today, the world has begun to understand the Jewish wisdom of the uncharity. Microlending, another form of what Jews have practiced for decades, is now making a powerful impact on the developing world. It is based on this simple wisdom that one must always give from the heart and the mind, and look to enable the poor to feed themselves. The practice of this “uncharity” can remove poverty from the world, by enabling the poor to support themselves in dignity and pride.

2011-11-06T06:39:00.001-05:00

Steve Jobs, Noah, and Living Outside of the Box

2011-10-11T17:39:00.002-04:00

Welcome Home Gilad

Tears are running down my face; I have just heard the news that a deal has been reached to bring Gilad Shalit home in a few days. I read articles about the deal, and I cry.

No, I have never met Gilad Shalit; yet I cry about his return anyway. I don’t know his family, yet I have spoken about Gilad every Shabbat for the last five years. In that time, I’ve lobbied the Canadian Parliament for Gilad, run publicity campaigns for Gilad, and written articles for Gilad.

And now I cry for joy. I cry for Gilad.

There is of course, a big question about Gilad’s release: is it worth it? There’s been a great debate about whether or not this deal is a good idea or not. In return for Gilad, 1,000 hardcore supporters of Hamas will be released. Hundreds of them have blood on their hands. Some argue that not only is Israel giving up too much, but that this deal will encourage Hamas to continue acts of terror. And of the 1,000 who are released, who knows what harm they will do?

The other point of view maintains that bringing Gilad home is important for the morale of every soldier. Hamas needs no encouragement to do acts of terror, but Israeli soldiers and their families need to know that the government of Israel will do anything for their release. Both points of view have real merit, and even though it sounds wishy washy, I find it hard not to nod in agreement with both sets of arguments.

But today I’m not thinking of debates; I’m just happy for Gilad and his family, and that’s what’s unusual. I’m left wondering why I’m crying for a total stranger. Is it normal to walk around with teary eyed about someone you’ve never met? And I know I’m not the only one to cry; I’ve seen the reactions of everyone around me to this news. Gilad is not a celebrity, he’s certainly no Steve Jobs; he’s just a nice young man who had the misfortune of being kidnapped. Yet for five years, millions of people have been thinking about Gilad every day, and today, they are crying tears of joy. But why are they crying?

Actually, there’s lesson about Jewish identity in our tears. To be Jewish is not just to be part of a religion or a nation, it’s to be part of a family. The Book of Genesis tells a story of a family, the family of Abraham and Sara, the family that ultimately gave birth to the Jewish people. One would think that Genesis would be a lot shorter, and would only dwell on the spiritual and political achievements of this family; after all, we just want to know a little bit of the early background of the nation, before jumping into the actual history of the Jews. But instead, Genesis goes on at length about this family’s dynamics, telling all about feuds and competition and love and forgiveness. It does so, because Genesis isn’t merely the prologue to Jewish history, it is the foundation of Jewish History. The lesson of Genesis is that even when the family evolves into a nation, the nation never stops being a family. We are, to use the Biblical phrase, “Israel’s children”, brothers and sisters in one large family of thirteen million people.

For better or for worse, this sense of family is very much a part of Jewish identity. Jews, even total strangers, will treat each other with all the familiarity, warmth and dysfunction of any family. Yes, we argue too much, often about petty things; but when the chips are down, we’re there for each other. One feels connected to a fellow Jew no matter where they are from, whether it be Montreal, Montivideo or Mumbai, because we’re all from the same the family.

And that’s why I had tears in my eyes upon hearing of Gilad’s release. Even though we don’t know each other, Gilad is still part of our family; and even though we haven’t met, Gilad is still my brother. Like millions of other Jews, I’m really happy Gilad’s coming home.

So, welcome home Gilad. Your thirteen million brothers and sisters have been waiting for you.

2011-09-23T10:58:00.001-04:00

How to Keep a Defeat From Becoming a Failure (pre-Rosh Hashanah video)

Thank you Abigail!

2011-08-30T17:51:00.006-04:00

My Problem with Jason Alexander

I got a sick feeling in my stomach when I read that Jason Alexander, (who played George Costanza on the hit T.V. show Seinfeld), was going to headline fundraising events for the Federation’s annual campaigns in Montreal and Toronto. Of course, events like these are not unusual; similar occasions elsewhere regularly feature all sorts of celebrities, including sports stars, politicians, business executives, models and movie producers. But it still bothers me that we need celebrities to sell charity.

Make no mistake; I absolutely supported inviting Jason Alexander. (full disclosure – I’m a Vice President of our local Federation). Federations have first and foremost a responsibility to raise money to feed the poor, to support Jewish education and to defend the state of Israel. The Montreal and Toronto events sold out, due to the celebrity power of Jason Alexander; and that translates directly into more money for communal needs. If Jason Alexander can help the community feed even one more poor family, then I’m all for inviting him. The needy family receiving some extra support certainly won't mind.

I didn’t have a problem with Jason Alexander’s presentation either. Yes, I cringed when I heard some of the sarcastic things he said about his Jewish background. He made fun of his Hebrew school, his Bar Mitzvah, and his parent’s hypocrisy. Judaism doesn’t inspire Jason Alexander spiritually. But I can’t fault him for that; like many Jews of his generation, Jason Alexander was taught a hollow Judaism, an empty piety based on guilt, fear and hypocrisy. You can’t blame the messenger for the message he delivers.

Actually, my problem with Jason Alexander isn’t with him, but with the size of the audience that went to see him. It’s always easy to get a sellout crowd for a man whose major accomplishment in life was appearing on a hit TV show that ran for nine years. While he was speaking, I couldn’t help wondering; would a similar crowd have come out for Natan Sharasky, who spent nine heroic years in a Soviet prison? Sadly, a hero like Sharansky just wouldn’t sell the same way. Today, celebrity matters most, and style is prized above substance; in virtually any venue, an Oscar winner will sell more tickets than a Nobel Prize winner. The reality is that an actor from a “show about nothing” is far more popular than the real people who have done something, and celebrities garner far more respect than the fireman, policemen and soldiers who risk their own lives daily in order to protect and save the lives of others. North American culture seems to get more superficial by the day.

For Jews, this superficiality is especially dangerous. Far too many Jews subscribe to the movie set version of Jewish identity. All you need is a few Jewish props, and you’re an authentic Jew: a plate of gefilte fish on the table, some cantorial music in the background, and a conversation sprinkled with a few Yiddish words. A Jewish style Jew will know all of celebrities in Adam Sandler’s Hannukah song, but none of the Rabbis in the Mishnah. In an era of superficiality, it’s easy to latch on to a Jewish identity that is about nothing.

Jewish identity used to be about something. Jews have disagreed on about virtually everything, but there was once a universal consensus that Judaism is a serious, thoughtful undertaking. Instead of chasing movie stars, Jews used to pursue ideas. Indeed, Jews have always been passionate about learning. Jerome, the Church father, remarked that in the fourth century that the average Jew knew the Tanakh by heart. In Eastern Europe, bakers and coachmen would hurry to the shtibl to study some Ein Yaakov and weekly Parsha. Even the illiterate would come to synagogue, hoping to catch a snatch of enlightening conversation. We have always seen ourselves as “the People of the Book”*, a name that we have proudly embraced. At the very least, to be Jewish means to be passionate about ideas and learning.

But now superficiality threatens to undermine this vital tradition. The new Jewish “Stars of David”** are known for their acting and not their actions. For too many Jews, Jewish learning is no longer a passion. Sadly, we are no longer the People of the Book; we’re now the People of People magazine.

And that’s my problem with Jason Alexander.

* (the phrase "People of the Book" first appears in the Koran)

** (name of an actual book about Jewish celebrities. Jason Alexander is interviewed there as well).

2011-06-20T14:18:00.008-04:00

Circumcision is Incompatible with the 21st Century: An Orthodox Rabbi Agrees

It’s easy to dismiss the supporters of a November ballot initiative in San Francisco to make it “unlawful to circumcise, excise, cut, or mutilate the whole or any part of the foreskin, testicles, or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years.” Like all true believers, these “intactivists” engage in junk science and exaggerated rhetoric about “male genital mutilation”. Further discrediting the anti-circumcision cause is the fact that the movement’s leadership peddles propaganda that borders on the anti-Semitic, such as the anti-circumcision comic book “Foreskin Man”, which reads like a sophomoric plagiary of a superhero cartoon, a racy Penthouse fantasy and Der Sturmer. One could imagine that after November the intactivist movement will quickly pass from center stage. But that would be a mistake.

Circumcision is unsettling. As the actor Russell Crowe wrote on Twitter: "I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies.". Despite the politically incorrect tone, Crowe makes it clear why the anti-circumcision movement is here to stay: circumcisions are bloody and make babies cry. Even the committed among us are uncomfortable, and most of us look down nervously when the mohel begins the ceremony. It’s painful to enter the Covenant of Abraham.

In the past, circumcision was considered attractive because of its health benefits, and even many non-Jews were routinely circumcised. Today, it’s debatable if circumcision’s health benefits warrant it being a standard procedure. Without a clear medical rationale, non-Jews will stop circumcising their children, and marginally affiliated Jews are sure to follow. The Jewish community can no longer rely on doctors to do the mohel’s job, and regardless of the outcome in San Francisco, it will be a lot harder to convince apathetic Jewish parents to perform circumcisions. Why would any parent want to endure the blood, pain and tears of their baby’s circumcision for no reason?

In short, circumcision is a marketing nightmare; outside of a deep commitment to Judaism, there’s no good reason to do them. This point is significant, because the Jewish community is intoxicated with marketing. Federations commission countless surveys to find out what young Jews want. Jewish professionals search for ways to make their programs “hipper”. The almighty “social media” must be deployed in the battle for the hearts of the younger members of the tribe. Grant money flows liberally to market driven, cutting edge, jargon laden programs with a social media presence.

I can’t argue against good marketing; representatives of a religion that has prized ideas should be able to communicate well. But there’s a thin line between marketing well and being “market driven”. The market driven vision believes that the customer is always right. So if it’s Yiddish or yoga or Jewish jokes that turn young Jews on, let’s pour community resources into a Yiddish Yoga Yuckfest. (With bagels, lox and cream cheese, of course). Instead of challenging young Jews, a market driven vision of Judaism seeks to produce a 21st century Judaism that will make our customers happy.

But here comes the problem. Aspects of Judaism like circumcision will always be unpopular in customer surveys. If we leave the future of Judaism in the hands of marketing experts, challenging rituals like circumcision or Passover or Yom Kippur will be ignored, and we will end up with a smooth syncretistic mumbo jumbo that has no resemblance to our 3,000 year old tradition.

I’m a modern Orthodox rabbi who talks a great deal about the place of Judaism in the 21st century. But increasingly I’ve come to realize that circumcision is incompatible with the times, as is much of Judaism. But Jews should be proud of how different we are. In an era of unprecedented individualism and hedonism, Jews declare that community is critical, even for an eight day old baby. We take pride in a ritual that affirms that sexual desire is not meant to be left unrestrained, but must be shaped by values of fidelity and devotion. When others seek endless comfort, we are willing to say that doing the right thing might be painful, but it’s still worthwhile.

Over the years, I’ve met inspiring people from the Former Soviet Union who performed circumcisions under heroic circumstances. Defying the Communist dictatorship, they would huddle surreptitiously and perform the covenant of Abraham on children of varying ages. The amazing thing is that these Jews in the FSU had no Jewish education whatsoever. But even with only a rudimentary knowledge of Judaism, they understood that being Jewish means going against the current, and being Jewish requires personal sacrifice.

Even though North American Jews enjoy freedom and prosperity, we need to explain to young Jews that they too have to be willing to defy the spirit of the times to be Jewish. After all, Judaism is more than apples, honey and funny little hats.

2011-05-26T09:06:00.002-04:00

Survivor's Guilt and The 614th Commandment

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for a wonderful job videotaping, and to Lorne Lieberman for his encouragement and ideas.

2011-03-14T12:39:00.009-04:00

The Pope Pardons the Jews!!!!

This item is big news for some.

I wrote a short response, because I think the problem has always been with a misunderstanding of the context of early Christianity.

Forgiving the Jews

Did the Jews kill Jesus, or did the Romans kill Jesus? It doesn’t really matter.

The sources on the crucifixion are fragmentary and contradictory. But even if an archeological discovery proved the Jews responsible, it shouldn’t make the slightest difference in Christian-Jewish relations.

For centuries, some Christians projected their anti-Semitic biases onto the events surrounding the crucifixion. They imagined the Jews set out to kill Jesus because he was a Christian, and only a people that hates Christians could do that. They imagined the Jews set out to kill the Son of God, and only demonic people could do this. Because of this, countless Jews were persecuted as “Christ-killers”, and Crusade upon Massacre upon Pogrom were perpetrated against the Jews.

Jewish and liberal Christian scholars once spent a great deal of energy trying to prove decisively that the Romans were responsible for the crucifixion; they imagined if Jews ceased to be “Christ-killers”, then anti-Semitism would diminish.

This was a mistaken approach, because it reinforced the myth that somehow Jesus was a Christian cast into a foreign Jewish society. In actuality, the crucifixion occurred in the aftermath of an intramural Jewish struggle, involving theology and politics; all involved were proud Jews. These sorts of internecine battles sadly still occur today, in events like the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin.

The Jew vs. Jew context of the crucifixion narratives render the question of who killed Jesus irrelevant to Christian-Jewish relations. Vatican II recognized this. Pope Benedict XVI continues to recognize this. It’s a tragic shame that Christians in previous generations couldn’t recognize this; far too many Jews lost their life due to a theological fraud, an anti-Semitic misreading of ancient Jewish history.

2011-01-31T07:44:00.001-05:00

Our Friends, Our Enemies, and Ourselves

My synagogue has recently been in the news. On a cold January Saturday night, vandals broke the windows of six different Montreal synagogues, including my own, an attack that was reported in the media the world over. In 2011, even a small wave of anti-Semitism is big news.

The fact that Jews still have real enemies will come to some as a bit of a shock. This attack provided an ugly reminder that even in open and democratic countries anti-Semitism is still very much alive. Living in a liberal society, we sometimes imagine that anti-Semitism is the result of some sad misunderstanding, and if only we can have anti-Semites meet with Jews, this age old hatred would melt away, Hollywood style. But that would be a mistake. In the online comments section of the Globe and Mail newspaper, multiple comments were removed by the moderator; a quick glance at some of the remaining comments gives you the flavor of what was removed. One commenter wrote that “Maybe the reason there is so much hatred toward Jews is because people feel in their heart something isn't right. This makes the news ?!? But truth about 9/11 and "dancing Israelis" Mossad boys doesn't make the news.” Another commenter wrote “I suspect that this was done by local kids... jewish kids stirring things up. Or maybe somebody not so young, cranking up the goyim guilt factor.” Like anti-Semites of every era, these writers believe that Jews should be hated because they are conspiratorial and evil. Paranoid hatreds like anti-Semitism are impervious to diplomacy and conciliation. Our synagogue’s broken window is a reminder that Jews still have real enemies.

At the same time, the aftermath of this attack demonstrated how many friends our community has. I got a call from the leader of the Liberal opposition in parliament, Michael Ignatieff, and an e-mail from the Minister of Immigration, Jason Kenney. My inbox was a veritable interfaith gathering, with multiple responses from Ministers, Priests and Imams. Most touching was a note from the grandson of a Dutch man who had defended Jews from the Nazis, and had died in Sachsenhausen because of his activism; he wrote me to say that he would continue his grandfather’s legacy, and do anything he could to protect the Jews. 2011 is not 1938. The Jews are integrated into the mainstream, and most Canadians see an attack on Canadian Jews as an attack on Canadians, just as most Americans would see an attack on American Jews as an attack on Americans.

Contemporary acceptance of the Jews is remarkable by any standard. In a recent book, political scientists Robert Putnam of Harvard and David Campbell of Notre Dame found that Jews are the now most warmly regarded religious group in the United States. Sadly, the people who seem to show the least enthusiasm for Judaism are the people who matter the most: young Jews.

It’s sad that it takes a broken window to get Jews to think about their Judaism; in the aftermath of this attack, I heard from people I rarely see in synagogue. Like many North American synagogues, the majority of our members visit infrequently; and unless someone throws a rock through our window, the synagogue is forgotten 362 days a year.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks jokes that the one way to fill up synagogues would be by putting up large signs outside declaring “no Jews allowed”, because contemporary Jews would be certain to join any institution that would refuse them membership. Sacks is absolutely correct. Jews have had enormous success battling hatred and discrimination; we have made our way into country clubs that once restricted membership, and moved into neighborhoods that had restrictive covenants. But we are finding it much more difficult to handle success, and as Jews enter the mainstream, they leave their Jewish identities behind.

The Jewish world has changed in the last 100 years. Yes, we still have enemies, some as vicious as our enemies of 100 years ago. However, we have many more friends today, and Jews are a North American success story. What has changed the most is who we are ourselves. Jewish identity is increasingly defined by what we oppose: anti-Semitism, terrorism, and Holocaust denial. Otherwise, we have only the vaguest idea of what it means to live as a Jew.

But anti-Semitism may eventually fade away. And if anti-Semitism disappears, what will become of Jewish identity?

2011-01-17T09:28:00.010-05:00

Anti-Semitism is My Problem. And it’s Your Problem Too.

(The news story can be found here.)

The first time I can remember encountering anti-Semitism was as a child of seven. An older child had spotted my kippah and started to make exaggerated faux "sneezing" sounds, saying "ah-Jew", with a sharp emphasis on the J. She repeated it several times, to make it amply clear what her true intent was.

As a young child, you aren't sure how to react. Do you start a fight? Do you shout? It'll make you look sillier. So you walk away, more comfortable avoiding anti-Semitism than confronting it.

Most of my life I have worked among Jews and lived in Jewish neighborhoods, and I’ve only had a few small experiences with anti-Semitism. And so, when I heard a vandal had broken a window in my synagogue, I went about my business, much like I had as a seven year old boy, some forty years ago.

My initial reaction is a common one in the Jewish community. After all, we think, this attack is not the end of the world. A broken window is a minor headache, several hundreds of dollars in damage and a five minute cleanup. So Jews shrug off petty attacks like this, realizing that they don’t even merit a footnote in the history of anti-Semitism.

Jews understand that we have it a lot better than our counterparts in Montreal 50 years ago, let alone our ancestors in the middle ages. So we ignore minor attacks, a defense mechanism that allows us to cope with world’s longest hatred. And when anti-Semitism does reach toxic levels, Jews have always found the courage to carry on in the face of persecution.

But when I got home and told my children about the attack, it felt uncomfortable. My children are less cynical than I am, and expect more from Canada. Yet I was telling them that their synagogue had been attacked. It was then that I realized I had reacted the wrong way.

Even when Jews try to forget about petty anti-Semitism, it really hurts inside. When someone has a break-in in their home, they feel their personal space has been violated and their sense of security been undermined. The broken window at our synagogues brings a similar sense of violation, and more. The perpetrators broke this window because they hate Jews; they hate me, they hate my wife, they hate my children, and they hate my community. They hate us just because we’re Jewish. I shudder to think of what these perpetrators would do if they found one of my children alone in a dark alley.

So a broken window is also a lot more than a broken window; it’s a direct attack on the Jewish community. And the Jewish community deserves better in Canada in 21^st century.

The question that keeps popping up is "what can we do?". Well, we can start with the basics - condemn anti-Semitism. This may seem like motherhood and apple pie, but it's not. Some groups hide their anti-Semitism behind inflammatory slogans, using political conflicts to pursue an agenda of hatred. Others find it difficult to condemn anti-Semitism, thinking that because Jews have achieved remarkable success, the threat of anti-Semitism is unimportant. They feel that if you can well afford to fix the window, the broken window doesn’t hurt. These critics belittle anti-Semitism, seeing it a minor headache unimportant to most Canadians.

What we need to understand that Anti-Semitism is not just a Jewish problem; it’s everyone’s problem. History has shown that any tolerance for hatred opens the door for greater hatred. Anti-Semitism is an ideological illness, something that can spread if left unchecked. For the last century, the Jews have been the proverbial canary in the coal mine; the people who first target Jews continue on to murder millions of others. For the fomenters of hatred, Anti-Semitism is merely a phase in a grand plan of upheaval and destruction.

We cannot underestimate the violence of one broken window, and as Canadians, we cannot tolerate this type of hatred in our country. It’s time for public figures and the leaders of faith communities to condemn these attacks. Because anti-Semitism is not only my problem, it’s your problem too.

- Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz

2010-12-22T21:42:00.005-05:00

Why is Moses Pharaoh's Son?

Isn't it strange that the Jewish redeemer grew up in Pharaoh's house?

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video (and my apologies for having a verbal slip and referring to Artachshasta a 'Babylonian' king, when he was of course Persian)

2010-12-17T10:39:00.001-05:00

Parshat Vayechi - The Optimism of a Survivor

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for taping this video

2010-12-16T11:04:00.003-05:00

What Christmas Can Teach Us About Being Jewish

Hi Everyone! A recent article of mine entitled "What Christmas Can Teach Us About Being Jewish" was published in the Jewish Week. Please take a look at it!! (the story mentioned at the end of the article can also be accessed, in greater detail - here.

2010-11-29T15:04:00.002-05:00

Hanukkah With Sarah Palin and Larry King

After last week's little animation got over 400 hits, I figured it was time to try again (and this xtranormal format is fun, and fast!) Enjoy!!

2010-11-23T14:34:00.003-05:00

The Power of Confession

Yes, this is a bit unorthodox: using Sarah Palin and Larry King (via xtranormal) to deliver a Dvar Torah. But I had no one to videotape me this week, and the xtranormal format is intoxicating. So enjoy!

2010-11-16T12:38:00.004-05:00

My 1995 Article on Cremation and Jewish Law (Halacha)

I've published it on my other blog. The link is:

http://happiness-warrior.blogspot.com/2010/11/cremation-and-halacha-originally.html

I'm republishing this because of the following article in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent:

http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/22293/

2010-11-03T21:55:00.002-04:00

Playoffs on Passover and a Pot of Lentils

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping.

2010-10-14T12:15:00.005-04:00

(This article is the continuation of a previous, bleaker article found here.)

What Are The Odds?

“What are the odds?” should be the motto of the Jewish people. Amidst all of the highs and lows of Jewish history, Jews have become afficianados of “mazel”, acutely aware of life’s possibilities and vulnerabilities. We cherish good luck, and at every Simcha we wish “mazel tov”, praying that the young couple, the new baby, the Bar-Bat Mitzvah child have good luck. And we certainly know what bad luck looks like; I don’t need to recite the encyclopedia of Jewish suffering, from Nebuchanezar to Titus to Hitler to Ahmadinejad, to remind you of Jewish bad luck.

But there is one type of luck that Jews overlook: bad luck that looks like good luck.

Today we live in era of deceptive luck. There is no doubt that the American dream has been a Jewish dream too. We have prospered and excelled. For the first time in our history we have moved mainstream, and we are accepted as both Americans and Jews. An exchange during the confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan underlines just how comfortable Jews are. Senator Lindsey Graham was asking Kagan about the Christmas Day bomber in Detroit, and started by asking “Where were you on Christmas Day?”. After a short aside, Kagan answered with a laugh “You know, like all Jews, I was probably in a Chinese restaurant.” The Senate filled with laughter. Jews are very much at home in North America.

But as I pointed out in my last column, Jewish success has brought with it bad luck. We are assimilating like never before; in the United States, there are fewer Jews today than there were in 1960. The Jewish American experience is truly a mixed blessing. What are the odds that the best time in Jewish history would also be the worst time in Jewish history?

But it would be a mistake to give up on the Jewish future. The Jews are what Simon Rawidowicz called “an ever-dying people.” Every time we’re down, we beat the odds.

We beat the odds because it only takes one committed person to ensure a Jewish future.

Rabbi Akiva understood this lesson. He had 24,000 students who perished, disappearing in a month’s time. Yet Rabbi Akiva continued on, and gathered five students with whom he rebuilt the Jewish tradition.

I’ve always wondered what it must have been like for Rabbi Akiva. Here’s a man used to lecturing in packed auditoriums, now reduced to lecturing a handful of survivors in a broom closet. How do you not lose your faith in the future?

But Rabbi Akiva perseveres because he understands that there are odds, and there are Jewish odds. Numbers and statistics don’t matter; because if they did, Jews would have disappeared a long time ago. For the Jewish mission to continue, all you need is commitment, all you need is one devoted teacher.

Judaism has defied the rules of statistics because in each generation there were people like Rabbi Akiva, and people like a little old lady by the name of Yitta Schwartz.

When Yitta died last year at 93, she left behind 2,000 living descendants. What are the odds of that happening?

But that’s precisely the point. Yitta was a survivor who lost two children during the Holocaust. But like Rabbi Akiva, she understood that one committed person can change the odds dramatically.

The Jews should have disappeared many times in the last 2,500 years; and we face major challenges in our future. But Jewish survival is not about statistics and demographic studies, it’s about committed people.

And if you ask Rabbi Akiva and Yitta Schwartz, the odds for Jewish survival are very good indeed.

2010-10-08T13:38:00.001-04:00

There Are No Jewish Goodbyes

A Joke That Has Legs from Abigail Hirsch on Vimeo.

Thank You to Abigail Hirsch For Videotaping!

2010-10-06T15:37:00.008-04:00

Burnout Lessons: Finding Your Shofar, Finding Your Envelope

At the beginning of August I received multiple e-mails from colleagues and organizations, all urging me to read the same newspaper article. The New York Times had published a feature on clergy burnout, and many of my colleagues felt it was required reading for rabbis.

The reporter cited multiple studies, each more fascinating then the next. The Presbyterian Church found that since the 1970’s the number of ministers leaving their jobs during their first five years of work had quadrupled. The Evangelical Lutheran Church found that 13 percent of their ministers were taking antidepressants. And my favorite was a seven-year study at Duke University, of 1,726 Methodist ministers in North Carolina. Compared with congregants, the ministers reported significantly higher rates of arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma. This study fascinated me. First of all, who knew there were 1,726 Methodist ministers in North Carolina? And more remarkably, it took the learned professors at Duke University a full seven years to learn something that every Jewish mother knows: being a Rabbi is “not a job for a Jewish boy!”

1. It Makes Sense

Clergy burnout is understandable. The work of rabbis, as well as teachers and organizational professionals, is community work, the hardest work in the world. It’s hard in any community, but in the Jewish community….oy!

Communal leadership is very difficult. Indeed Rashi famously quips that if you place the burden of communal leadership on someone’s shoulders, “they will disintegrate on their own”. The Rabbinate is not a job for a Jewish boy.

Twenty years ago, when I’d first started to attend rabbinic conventions, I’d listen to older colleagues talk about burnout and think they were crazy. What were they burnt out about? To me, being a Rabbi was such a thrill, such a privilege, that I planned to do it for free after I retired!

But now I understand those colleagues. I too am getting burnt out.

Now, I’m not embarrassed by burnout, because I know I’m in good company. For example, listen to what Moses says to God, after another one of the Jews complaints in the desert:

“Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant..?”

I would say, Moses sounds burnt out!

Or listen to the words of Maimonides, in a letter to a student who wants to visit:

“I will write you my daily schedule:

I live in Fostat, and the Sultan lives Cairo. The distance between them is 4000 cubits [a mile and a half]. My duties to the Sultan are very heavy.…….by the time I come back to Fostat, half the day is gone. Under no circumstances do I come earlier. And I am ravenously hungry by then. When I come home, my foyer is always full of people – Jews and non-Jews, important people and not, judges and policemen, people who love me and people who hate me, a mixture of people, all of whom have been waiting for me to come home.... I apologize and ask that they should be kind enough to give me a few minutes to eat. That is the only meal I take in twenty-four hours…….Patients go in and out until nightfall, and sometimes – I swear to you by the Torah – it is two hours into the night before they are all gone. I talk to them and prescribe for them even while lying down on my back from exhaustion. …..On Shabbat, the whole congregation, or at least the majority of it, comes to my house after morning services, and I instruct the members of the community as to what they should do during the entire week. We learn together in a weak fashion until the afternoon. Then they all go home. Some of them come back and I teach more deeply between the afternoon and evening prayers…That is my daily schedule.”

Now, after writing all of this, Maimonides throws in the kicker:

“And I’ve only told you a little of what you would see if you would come”.

So I’m not alone in burnout. From Moses to Moses, burn out has been the Rabbi’s lot.

Rabbi’s are idealists, and they expect a lot of the world. And so we get disappointed all the time.
I can tell you that I am burnt out because I expected more.

I expected more of Jewish leaders. Today, there are entire blogs devoted to collecting news articles about the failings and foolishness of Jewish leaders and Rabbis. These misbehaving rabbis are my colleagues, and sometimes they are people I deeply respect. And so it hurts me personally, when I have to read about stupid rabbinic pronouncements: like the Rabbis who write a book advocating the murder of Arab babies, or the Rabbis insisting that parents in Lakewood should not call the police to report sexual abuse. Even worse are the scandals, the rabbis who make headlines for crimes ranging from shaking down hedge fund operators to sexually harassing students. Each scandal hurts, and each one makes me a bit more cynical.

I also expected more of the Jewish community. Teaching Judaism in North America feels like a Sisyphean task, like pushing a boulder up a hill with the boulder constantly rolling down again. We are assimilating rapidly; just look at the marriages page in New York Times on any given Sunday, and you can see how many of our children are marrying non-Jews. And then you turn to the other pages of the newspaper, and read about young Jews who are passionate opponents of the State of Israel. Even at Brandeis University, hundreds of students mobilized against a visit from the Israeli Ambassador. How is it that young Jews are sometimes Israel’s greatest enemies?

I also expected more from God. Sure, when I started in the rabbinate, I knew intellectually bad things happen to good people; after all, I had read the book of Job. But I had never seen with my own eyes the pain and suffering families endure. But now I have. How can you not question when you see good people suffer?

Some people have remarked to me that it must be “easier” now for me to deal with difficult funerals, considering I have twenty years of experience. Actually, the opposite is true. If you go to one tragic funeral, you imagine that this is the only one, and that it is a unique event that happens once in a lifetime. But if you go to ten tragic funerals, you have a terrible sinking feeling in your stomach, because you know full well that if there have been ten tragic funerals, there will be an eleventh too.

Yes, I’m disappointed in God. I’ve seen too much suffering, too much injustice.

I’m actually most disappointed in myself. I don’t feel comfortable talking publicly about my own soul and psyche, but suffice it to say, if I could go into a time machine and meet myself from twenty years ago, I think that in some ways, twenty-something Chaim would be disappointed. He would expect more of me as a Rabbi, husband, father and person.

I’m burned out and disappointed.

2. God is Also Disappointed

But burnout is not a rabbinic preserve. I won’t ask for hands, but I’d bet most of the people in this room 40 and older have also been burnt out. In our twenties, we have an ideal vision of life, and then life turns that vision upside down. We all get disappointed, and then we get burnt out.

But the disappointed among us are not alone. Truth is, God is disappointed every day. The Talmud in Avodah Zara says that during “the second three hours of the day God sits in judgment on the whole world, and when He sees that the world is so guilty as to deserve destruction, He transfers Himself from the seat of Justice to the seat of Mercy”. Remarkably enough, God is so disappointed in humanity every day, He wants to destroy the world.

And if God is overwhelmed by the daily judgment, imagine what happens on Rosh Hashanah!!

And if God is always disappointed by judgment, today must be God’s day of disappointment!!

Wouldn’t God be burnt out by now?

3. Find Your Shofar

But the lesson of this Talmudic passage is that disappointment is daily part of life, and a fixed part of the universe, from God on down. Even so, God manages to find a way to get over his disappointment. The lesson is that even when things don’t measure up, don’t get disappointed. There is always a good reason to love life; all you have to do is find your shofar.

Consider this Midrash in Vayikra Rabbah. It says that the moment God hears the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, He moves from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy.

How does the shofar affect such a dramatic change?

I think the answer is that when God listens to the shofar He sees a different side of humanity. The ram’s horn is a symbol of the akeidah, a permanent reminder of Abraham’s willingness to say “Hineni”, I am ready. Abraham stood ready to sacrifice everything until the last moment, when God allowed Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead.

And even if God sees all of the stupid and petty things man has done, God remembers that when the chips are down, man can say “Hineni”, “I am ready”, just like Abraham did.

When the chips are down, we aren’t all that disappointing.

There are times we feud, yes…but there also the times when we run to the hospital and mend old rifts. (But why does it have to wait for the hospital though?)

And although the Jewish people seem to be falling off the edge of a cliff, whenever the chips are down, Jews have always found a way to survive. 65 years ago, after the Shoah, we managed to survive, and even thrive. Think of the survivors in 1945, emaciated, broken and battered. Yet three years later these very same survivors are in Israel, fighting in the War of Independence.

And for myself, I can look back at one or two things I've done, and say that if my entire career had been for this one thing it would have been worth it.

When we are burnt out, we need to do what God does, and go grab our shofar and see the best side of our community, ourselves, and of the Jewish future. When the chips are down, we see who we really are; and remarkably, we’re usually a lot better than we thought we were!

4. Why Does He Want to Be Disappointed?

But grabbing a shofar is not enough.

The strange thing about disappointment is that it seems to be part of God’s plan. In the Talmudic text we cited, it says that God gets disappointed every day. In the Midrash we cited, it says God is disappointed every Rosh Hashanah. And indeed, Rashi cites a Midrash that says that even during creation, God wanted to create a world that would withstand judgment, only to realize that it was impossible.

So I have a simple question; why does God keep disappointing Himself? If at the very beginnings he knew that the world would come up short when judged, why does he keep trying to judge the world? Isn’t it exhausting?

It may be exhausting, but it’s worth it. A failed judgment reminds us to come home again. Judging ourselves reminds us of who we really are. All of us start with a dream – a plan, no different than God’s. We have high hopes. But we get sidetracked and lost.

Being a good spouse gets lost because we’re too distracted.

Being a good parent gets lost because we’re too busy.

Having good values get lost because we’re too ambitious.

The road map gets lost. We forget who we are.

And so we need to judge ourselves, to be disappointed, if only to remind ourselves of the original plan, of who we wanted to be, who we were supposed to be, and in a sense who we really are. Disappointment leads us back home, and reminds us of our ideals and goals.

Rav Soloveitchik explains that Teshuva, repentance, is a way of recovering our true selves. Sin is a by-product of getting lost chasing foolish dreams and trivial goals. Teshuva is returning back to our true identity. He writes:

“While, in sin, man misidentifies and alienates himself from himself, in the case of Teshuva he reverses the process of misidentification: he discovers himself, and "returns" to his true self.”

Burnout is our soul’s way of telling us to come home again; and on this holiday of disappointment, we need to remember to come home, to do Teshuva, and get back to our true selves.

Or, if I can put it another way, we need to find our envelope.

5. Find Your Envelope

Let me explain.

Dr. David Pelcovitz visited Montreal a few months ago and told a powerful story about a 9 year old girl. The girl’s mother had encouraged her to volunteer by visiting an elderly lady who had lost most of her eyesight. One day, while chatting with the young girl, the elderly lady explained that she could recover her eyesight if she would have a small operation; but because she was an older woman on a fixed income, she lacked the resources to pay for this expensive procedure. Inspired to action, the girl went home and told her mother that she was going to do a fundraiser to pay for the elderly woman’s operation. The mother smiled at her daughter’s good intentions, but assumed, like most parents, that her daughter’s naive dream would soon disappear.

The next day, the girl goes to school and begins to raise money. She goes from class to class, from teacher to teacher, and at the end of the day, after all the change had been exchanged into bills, the girl had a grand total of 83 dollars. She took the thick envelope stuffed with singles, and visited her elderly friend. Not knowing much about contemporary medical economics, the girl announced to her elderly friend that she had raised the money for the operation! So, the young girl and the elderly woman took a short walk over to the local Ophthalmologist’s office.

The doctor examines the elderly woman, and says yes, she is a candidate for the procedure, and he can do it right away. At that point, the young girl chirps in and says that she will pay for the procedure, and produces the envelope with the 83 dollars.

The doctor does the operation.

The girl comes home, and reports to her mother the day’s events. The mother is mortified; she assumes that her daughter has somehow misled the doctor. She runs to the doctor’s office to apologize, and to negotiate a way to pay him the balance. As the mother starts to talk , the doctor cuts her off in middle, and opens his jacket. In his inside pocket is the envelope, stuffed with singles; he had not put the cash away. He tells the mother that this envelope was far more precious to him than money; this envelope reminded him of goodness of humanity, of the goodness of a nine year old girl, and why he became a doctor in the first place.

Today, all of us have to find the envelope in the pocket. We need to remember who we really are. The envelope, our inner goodness, is always there, waiting to be rediscovered.

When we’re burnt out, when we are disappointed in who we have become, all we have to do today is grab a shofar, and find our envelope.

We can always find our shofar, and take pride that when the chips are down we will respond to the call of hineni.

And one day, when we get too lost in our ambitions, a little girl will come to our office with envelope, an envelope that reminds us of who we really are.

Shanah Tova!!

2010-08-24T10:27:00.002-04:00

Chelsea, Marc and the Jewish Problem

One hundred years ago it would have been impossible, for a Jew would never have been considered an appropriate match for the daughter of the President of the United States; and one hundred years ago it would have been improbable, because very few Jews would have married out of the faith.

But 2010 is not 1810 or 1910. The news media yawned when Chelsea Clinton married Marc Mezvinsky in a ceremony that featured a tallit and sheva brachot, a Rabbi and a Minister. Jews have thoroughly integrated into American society, and as a result bigotry is scarce and intermarriage common.

But for Jewish pundits, the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding is a religious Rorschach test. Each pundit gazes into this intermarriage, and sees their own reflection. For some Jews, the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding is actually a source of pride, a sign Jews have truly arrived. Others fret, wringing their hands and issuing jeremiads about how the Jewish community has failed. Orthodox polemicists blame the failure of the Liberal movements, outreach professionals blame the community’s failure at outreach, and Zionists see this intermarriage as indicative of the failure of Diaspora Judaism. Hundreds of op-eds and sermons have been devoted to dissecting this intermarriage and agonizing about the contemporary “Jewish problem”, a crisis of assimilation and indifference.

Many of these pundits make compelling cases, but I can’t help feeling like they’re all missing the point. Assimilation isn’t occurring because Judaism has failed; it’s occurring because all institutions, including Judaism, are declining. As David Brooks has pointed out, institutional thinking has eroded across the board, in schools and sports, in businesses and in banks. Respect for and devotion to institutions is disappearing.

Today’s mindset is profoundly individualistic. Every practice is evaluated by one simple criterion: “what’s in it for me?”. By contrast, institutional thinkers approach their institutions with a profound feeling of reverence and responsibility. Brooks quotes political scientist Hugh Heclo, who writes that “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.” Institutionalists are extremely uncommon nowadays.

Simply put, intermarriages occur when the institution of Judaism becomes a secondary concern, superseded by one’s individual needs. And since individualism is the order of the day, few can justify passing up true love in order to respect a millennia old tradition.

Some Rabbis have tried to repackage Judaism into user-friendly parcels in order to make it more appealing in an age of individualism. They have offered Jewish wisdom about leadership and family, and even tips on kosher sex. I use this approach myself, and it certainly helps make Judaism more relevant and meaningful. But ultimately, this approach will fail as a weapon against assimilation, because in our zeal to make every Jewish practice useful and beneficial, we have actually undercut the very foundations of Judaism. Judaism is founded on a sense of duty; we fast on Yom Kippur, even though it’s uncomfortable; we circumcise babies even though it’s painful. We do so because Judaism is a transcendent institution that we revere.

Abraham, the founding father of Judaism, proudly announced “Hineni- I am ready”; he was ready to sacrifice for any and all of God’s demands. And throughout history, Jews have been willing to put Jewish destiny before individual interests. Until now. With a deeply individualistic zeitgeist blowing by us, who knows if there will still be Jews who will proclaim “Hineni” at the end of the 21st century.

(But in the end, things are not so bleak. for a more optimistic continuation of this article, read this.)

2010-07-14T22:42:00.000-04:00

A Lost Joy

We are lucky enough to live in the lottery winner of civilizations. Our standard of living eclipses that of previous generations. Dreaded illnesses have been banished forever, and life expectancy has gone up by thirty years in the last century. Luxuries that were inconceivable fifty years ago are now the birthright of the middle class.

The past was a lot different. People in my parent’s generation grew up in a world of wars, financial depressions, and inferior medical care. These difficulties shaped their lives and left their scars. One man I knew, who had no money as a child, remained a miser long after he had achieved exceptional wealth. Another survivor I knew, traumatized by the hunger he endured, left caches of food and money all around his house. Adversity leaves a bitter imprint, tattooing antique worries into our hearts.

Thankfully, today we live in an era of exceptional abundance and tranquility; my kids have been vaccinated against a slew of afflictions, will never be drafted into the army, and generally worry most about if and when they will be getting a new electronic gadget.

Every day, we must remind ourselves to appreciate these remarkable blessings, and thank God for our bounty. But for the most part, there is one blessing our generation has been denied: the joy of triumph.

A true triumph is when one has overcome existential challenges. Alongside the painful memories of suffering lies a fierce pride, a profound self-respect built on courage and determination.

One woman I knew, who was disabled as a child by polio, refused to allow her disability to define her life. She lived a life of courage, determination and love, and served as inspiration to a multitude of people, including myself. She had become the exceptional person she was despite her difficulties, but also because of them; she had passed life’s tests. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes that the Hebrew word for test, “nissah” is related to the Hebrew word to raise up, “nasso”. This is because a test is not meant to merely be endured, but rather to raise one up to a higher plane. And there is nothing sweeter than passing life’s tests.

Today, one can observe the joy of triumph at select celebrations such as weddings. The grandparents or great grandparents speak a European accented English, and simultaneously have a tear and a twinkle in their eyes. They are graduates of university of life, and sometimes have a six digit diploma tattooed on their arms. They tell you that the bride is named after a sister who didn’t make it, and then they ask you to make a l’chaim, a toast, to the future of the young couple. This toast is different than any other toast, because it has a message of determination that says: “damn you Hitler, we’re still here”. And as you raise your glass, you realize that the smile on the grandfather’s face is unique: it’s the smile of triumph.

Those of us who have lived privileged North American lives will never experience that smile, because a test free life is a triumph free life. That's how it should be, because God forbid, no one should ever desire the anguish of tests; and in the end, far too many fail their tests. Indeed, if you asked the smiling grandparent at the wedding, they’d tell you their deepest wish is for all of us to live lives of peace and tranquility.

No, we will never know the joy of triumph. But if we look in the right places, for a few fleeting moments, we too can share that smile of triumph, a triumph earned by blood, sweat, and tears.

2010-07-06T16:58:00.001-04:00

My New Hero

I don't even know my new hero's name. She isn't a famous movie star or a politician. Actually, I’ve only met my hero once, serving coffee at the Second Cup where she works.

But she's my hero anyway, because like all heroes, this big hearted barista had a mission: to put a smile on everyone's face. I had run into her cafe hurried and stressed, looking for a quick caffeine fix between meetings; and to be honest, like most other customers, I was a lot less congenial than I should have been. Yet this woman accepted my order gracefully, and with just a few kind words managed to make me smile. This hero had made a difference in my day; and she certainly makes a daily difference in the lives of her customers as well.

Now, calling this cheerful coffee salesclerk a “hero” might seem like a gross exaggeration to you; but I am dead serious about what I’m saying. Yes, I’m sure you agree with the Mishna in Pirkei Avot that we should greet people with a pleasant face; after all, that’s how our mothers raised us. But frankly, there’s a lot more than manners at stake here.

Smiles are in short supply nowadays. People are far more busy and stressed than they were fifty years ago. (Why that is is a topic for another time). Socially, we are cut off from everyone except for those who are closest to us. True “neighbourhoods”, where people actually know their neighbours, no longer exist. Even in the suburbs, people are unable to name most of their neighbours; people may live next door to each other, but they aren’t next door neighbours. We have retreated into well insulated cocoons, entertained by the flickering screens of the electronic age, communicating virtually with virtually everyone, but truly knowing virtually no one. True community spirit, with a sense of being connected to those who surround us, has disappeared nearly everywhere.

Along with the collapse of community has come the collapse of civility. There’s simply no time to say hello; after all, we have to get down to business. People chatter away on cellphones while standing on line, and the polite banter of strangers only occurs when two people are simultaneously between calls. E-mail is even worse; the linguistic structure of e-mail has the ambience of firefighters shouting to each other during a four alarm fire. Greetings, even first names, are omitted, leaving only a blunt request, sometimes delivered in caps, demanding of us to “CALL JIM NOW”. Frankly, we are stretching the social fabric a bit too thin, and we are witnessing an epidemic of grumpiness.

And grumpiness makes a difference. I remember being stunned when a former Member of Parliament, discussing his life in politics, told me that at times legislation, even the course of governments, are deeply affected by the moods of the leaders. A Prime Minister arrives one morning in foul mood because he had a fight with his wife, and all of a sudden, initiatives are upended, ministers are demoted. Grumpiness is not just a mood; it can change history. And much like the famed “butterfly effect”, (that a butterfly flapping its wings can change to course of the weather) a simple lack of civility can have far reaching consequences as well.

And that’s why this barista is my hero. By putting a smile on the faces of her customers, she has pushed back against the impolite and impersonal. And with her cheerful countenance, she has made difference; after all, even one smile can create a hurricane of kindness.

2010-06-07T19:35:00.007-04:00

What a Peace Activist Should Want

(Rally Speech 6-7-10)

Rally speech 2010–06–07

I am also a peace activist.

I pray for peace every day, three times a day. In the daily prayer we say the words “Sim Shalom”, asking God for world peace.

I dream of peace, just like Isaiah dreamt,

וכתתו חרבותם לאתים וחניתותיהם למזמרות

“They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”.

And I hope for peace, much like Yitzchak Rabin hoped for peace when he said to Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993:

“We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”

And like Isaiah and Yitzchak Rabin, I too dream of peace.

I’m also a peace activist.

But I have some questions for the "peace activists" who were traveling with the "Freedom Flottilla".

Why do you ignore the plight of the Muslim Uigers in western China?

Why do you ignore the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit tribes in the Darfur region in Sudan?

Why do you ignore the plight of the pro-democracy movement in Iran, where students are getting slaughtered in the streets of Tehran?

And why is it that you couldn’t bring a measly little package to Gilad Shalit, who has sat for nearly 4 years in captivity without a visit from the Red Cross or a family member?

And why is it that when Jewish blood flows in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, when rockets rain down on Sderot, you, the "peace activists" are silent?

And why is it that as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad builds a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel, you say nothing?

And why is it that whenever someone talks about peace, it must be at the expense of Israeli lives?

My dear “peace activists”, this is the key to understanding the situation in Gaza. Read Hamas’ charter, and then compare it with Israel’s declaration of independence.

The Hamas charter says:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it”

“The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

And the Hamas Charter quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a horrific anti-Semitic forgery that has caused Jews so much suffering the last century.

On the other hand, Israel’s declaration of independence offers peace to the surrounding nations. It says:

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.

Indeed, it’s the only Declaration of Independence in the world to make an offer of peace!

AND THIS COMPARISON TELLS THE ENTIRE STORY – WHAT DOES HAMAS REALLY WANT, AND WHAT DOES ISRAEL REALLY WANT!!

Now, another question for the “peace activists” around the world: why is it that Israel is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent? That until videos and photos from the Mavi Marmara were revealed, all of the “peace” community assumed the worst about Israel, assumed the worst about the one democracy that actually treasures human rights in the Middle East?

Why was there a rush to judgment, eventually overturned when the videotape was revealed?

And indeed, “peace activists” in this very city, gathered two days ago to criticize the Government of Canada for not rushing to judgment.

These “peace activists” came to criticize Canada, and show their support for Hamas.

Well, as a Canadian and a peace activist, I want to say that I take pride in the Canadian government. I’m proud of her support of Israel.

Yes, I am also a peace activist, but I want a true and just peace.

I deeply want to see the Palestinians live in peace and prosperity….. but I also want Israelis to be able to live in peace in their ancient homeland.

I want Israelis to wake up in the morning, and not worry about Kassams and Katuyshas and suicide bombers.

I want a Middle East without terror, a Middle East with true peace.

I too say: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”

And enough of Ahmadinejad and Hamas and Hezbollah.

It’s time for true peace in the Middle East.

2010-05-21T15:30:00.003-04:00

What’s Your #ish?

No, that’s not a typo. #ish is a word, or at least it’s word-ish. #ish is actually a marketing invention, an amalgam of a hashtag, (a secret symbol comprehensible only to users of “social media” like twitter), and the funnier sounding half of the word Jewish. “What’s your #ish?” is the slogan of a $300,000 Jewish Federations of North American marketing campaign aimed at 18-35 year olds. Armed with a trendy tagline and comically offbeat video, this cutting edge marketing campaign invites young Jews to offer serious and silly descriptions of their “#ish”, the essence of their connection to Judaism.

Despite the comic ambience of this campaign, no question could be more serious. Jews need to know why they should be Jewish. This question is THE question, and needs to be discussed by everyone, from husbands and wives to parents and children, to the board of directors at every Federation in North America

But in many ways, this question is a sad question; or to be more precise, a serious question that gets too many absurd answers. I know this campaign is meant to elicit comic, tongue in cheek banter; at the same time it’s still distressing to consider that for many Jews, Jewish identity has been trivialized down to an absurd caricature, and a proud spiritual tradition has been reduced to a series of kitschy icons: Bubbies, corned beef, Woody Allen, Yiddish and Jewish jokes.

The Jewish community has done an awful job articulating “what’s our #ish?”. Instead of embracing a serious Jewish mission, we have poured our energies and philanthropic dollars into building nostalgia based cultural institutions. We forget that Judaism is not the “shvitz”, and not a pastrami sandwich, and not a production of Fiddler on the Roof. Yes, Judaism is more than lox, bagels and Woody Allen; it is a proud intellectual and spiritual tradition. Judaism is more than a hashtag, it’s a mission.

That Judaism is a mission is the fundamental idea embraced by serious Jews of every stripe, from the Jewish Socialist to the Ultra-Orthodox Chassid. (What exactly that mission is, is another story!). And Jews have made significant sacrifices throughout the ages to pursue this mission. When Abraham is asked by God to wander in search of his destiny, it was not in order to find a better cholent recipe or a good joke.

Well then, what’s my #ish? I’d like to answer with a story. (How Jewish is that!).

Dr. Rick Hodes has been doing a heroic job serving the JDC in Ethiopia for the last twenty years. One day, a young Muslim woman, Merdya Abdisa, comes in with a tumor the size of an orange around her eye. Hodes sends her file to leading surgeons around the world, but they all say it's impossible to operate on her. One day while visiting Minneapolis, Dr. Hodes overslept, and arrived at the synagogue just after services. The Rabbi was still there, studying with another man.

After praying, Dr. Hodes chatted with the Rabbi and his student. As it turns out the student was a doctor, with the precise specialty needed to do Merdya’s surgery. After showing the doctor, Eric Nussbaum, pictures of the young girl, Dr. Nussbaum said: 'I'd love to try to help this lady.'". A short time later Merdya was in Minneapolis having her tumor removed.

This story is a classic Jewish saga. It includes Torah, prayer, Jewish doctors and a Rabbi.

Most importantly, this story is about the Jewish mission, the profound desire to change the world, from Ethiopia to Minnesota.

And that’s my #ish.

2010-05-07T11:53:00.003-04:00

The Zero Dollar Solution to the Jewish Continuity Problem

2010-04-18T19:07:00.007-04:00

Why Do We Have Children? A Speech for my Son Eitan’s Bar Mitzvah 4-17-2010

Why do we have children? What motivates people to bring small, demanding, and noisy dependents into the world?

This question is particularly relevant this morning, as the Steinmetz family celebrates our third Bar Mitzvah in 20 months.

And that’s a lot of bar mitzvahs!!

But imagine what it was like 13 years ago!! It was a lot of baby boys.

Your mother and I used to joke that we have triplets, carrying around you and Akiva and Hillel, three boys two years old and under. Then Ilana came along, and we had four children four and under.

So, we have to ask the question again: why do we have children? It can be a lot of work.

The Rabbi’s Answer: To Teach

So if you ask a rabbi, he would tell you that having children is a mitzvah, the first mitzvah in the Torah, to be fruitful and multiply.

But what is the purpose of this commandment? To the Rabbi, the commandment of having children is not simply intended to populate the earth; it is part of a larger project, not just to give birth to the children, but to teach the children as well.

Rav Soloveitchik has explained that there are two levels of parenting: natural parenting and covenantal parenting.

Natural parenting is having children, following nature. In covenantal parenting, teaching becomes the key part of the parenting experience, in which the child is nurtured spiritually as well.

Soloveitchik’s comments underline how the role of father and teacher are already compared and combined in the Tanach, and even more so in the Talmud. Having children is simply a prerequisite to teaching children.

And we teach Torah because we must share, with our children, with our friends, and with the world, Torah wisdom and insights.

And this teaching mission starts with Abraham. Abraham teaches everyone about the foolishness of idolatry and the way to God.

And from Avraham on, we’ve been a teaching religion, and a religion of teachers. We have taught the world about:

belief in one God

brotherhood

freedom

man being in the image of God

and loving your neighbor and loving the stranger

And teaching has been your father’s passion too. That’s why I became a Rabbi, believe it or not.

I became a Rabbi because I loved Tanach and Talmud and Maimonides and Rav Zaddok and Rav Soloveitchik, and the Aruch Hashulchan. And I loved to teach about them.

Now I don’t expect you to become a Rabbi, Eitan….. but I do expect you to become a student of Torah and a teacher of Torah. That’s been the Jewish passion for the last 3,800 years, and it’s what Jews do.

And that’s why each generation of Jews looks forward to the next generation, to be able to pass the lessons of Judaism onto another generation.

The Scientist’s Answer: To Love

But, if you ask a scientist, the reason we have children is simple: to ensure the continuation of the species.

To the scientist, the maternal instinct, and when it exists, the paternal instinct, the desire to raise children, is a deeply held instinct, shared by man and animal.

But even though this is a basic instinct, an animal instinct, the Torah honors it a great deal.

Maimonides in the Moreh Nevukhim (3:48) makes this point as well, when he says that one must treat the mother bird with compassion when taking her chicks because the concern of a mother for a child is the same, both in animal and in man. And if humanity wants to merit “long days”, they must treat the parent-child attachment (of all animals) with respect.

And although the scientist may not speak poetically, in actuality most of us call this instinct something else: love.

Love is the powerful, loving attachment and devotion of the parent for the child.

And that’s why this “instinct”, even when found in animals, is so admired. The Tanach often uses the images of animal parents watching over their young, because some of the most powerful images of parental love come from the animal kingdom, where love is absolutely instinctive. And there is nothing more beautiful than the love of a parent who will do whatever it takes to nurture their child.

Love is a powerful reason to have children. No it’s not easy to have children, to love children; it requires sacrifices.

In your own family, you have seen the enormous sacrifices mommy makes for you, and for all of the children.

Mommy works,

runs a home that is open to an entire community,

has volunteered abundantly for your school and for our community,

and she is a nurse,

a taxi driver,

a cook,

a homework tutor

a psychologist

to you and your three siblings!!

and look how she plans amazing and beautiful bar mitzvahs!!!

Now that’s love Eitan!

And Mommy’s love reflects the wonderful example set by her parents, by your Bubby and Zaidie, and the wonderful home they built, and how devoted they are to their three daughters and all of their grandchildren.

And I have seen my mother bring up four little children on her own, as a widow and single mother. She had to provide for us and care for us, and be a mother and father to us.

It wasn’t at all easy.

It was love.

And trust me, I didn’t make it easy for her. I wasn’t always a Rabbi!

One day when I was seven, I went into the garage in our home and decided to drive the car. The garage was on the top of a hill, and I released the emergency brake and parking brake; and the car rolled down the hill. My mother looked out the front door and shouted at me to jump out; she shouted at a neighbor riding his bicycle in the path of the car to jump off. The car rolled down the hill, ran into a telephone pole; the car’s back window got smashed, and the car lost the door I jumped out of.

(By the way, don’t you ever do anything like this!!)

To deal with situations like this, you need courage. More importantly, you need love.

But that powerful instinctive love is why we have kids. That’s why Mommy and I wanted to have you.

The Simple Jew’s Answer: To Survive

So, you might ask scientists and Rabbis why they have children.

They might have sophisticated, thoughtful answers – and explain how instinctive it is to love, or how essential it is to teach.

But there is someone else you need to ask this question to as well: the simple Jew.

The simple Jew might not have any degrees; he might not have spent a great deal of time studying.

But the simple Jew has life experience, he has learned the lessons of history.

And if you ask the simple Jew: why do you have children?

He will tell you simply: we have children in order to survive.

Without children the Jewish people would disappear.

The Gemara (Sotah 12a) tells us that when the survival of the Jews in Egypt was in crisis, it wasn’t the great Rabbis and great leaders who led the way to survival – but rather a little girl. Amram, Moses’ father, was the leader of the generation. He decided that it was absurd for Jews to have children if the Egyptians would throw every male child into the river.

Now Amram’s decision was sensible and ethical, the sort of decision you’d expect from a great Rabbi. But his daughter Miriam, a young girl said to him: “Abba, if you do this, the Jewish people will disappear! If you do this, you’ll actually end up being worse than Pharaoh.”

Miriam was right, and Amram was wrong. Great Rabbis may have great ideas – but sometimes they outthink things, and miss the big picture.

When it comes to something as basic as survival, go ask a simple Jew what to do – that’s their specialty.

Simple Jews understand that for the Jewish mission to continue, we need to hang on.

To have children.

To survive

We now stand during sefirah – when we remember the destruction after the Bar Kochva revolt of 132-135.

At least 600,000 Jews were killed in the aftermath of the Bar Kochva revolt.

We also remember the events of the Crusades at this time of year. In 1096, during the First Crusade – 800 were Jews killed in the synagogue of Worms on May 18^th.

Just this past Sunday night, right at this Bima, we had a community wide Yom Hashoah service, to commemorate the deaths of the 6 million, including your great grandfather and quite a few members of your family.

So how did we bounce back after all of this? How did we survive?

We survived because simple Jews knew they had to survive – they knew they had to rebuild after the Shoah, to have children and grandchildren.

They had one dream – to keep the Jewish people alive.

And that’s my dream too.

You know, my mother, your grandmother, is a survivor of the Holocaust.

One of her most powerful memories is in Auschwitz, Simchat Torah 1944.

In a dream, Bubbie had a vision of her late mother, who came to her and told her that everything would be OK.

Right afterwards, she was called out and selected to be among a group of people transferred to a work camp, a place much better for survival. Bubbie’s dream was so powerful, so vivid, she to this day has no doubt her mother appeared to her, and was truly watching over her.

But actually, what is most remarkable about this dream is that it reflects an earlier dream. While Bubbie is dreaming of her mother, there’s never any doubt in Bubbie’s mind that her mother is there with her. Bubbie knows that wherever her mother's soul may be, her mother is thinking of her, watching over her her,

Bubbie knows that her mother is always dreaming of her.

Bubbie knew, even when she was a small child, that her mother had dreams for her, dreams of a Jewish future.

And the truth is, it’s not just Bubbie’s mother, your great grandmother, who dreams of her children.

Every simple Jew has the same dreams.

The dreams of the simple Jew are:

to survive,

to have Jewish children,

to continue 3,800 years of Jewish History,

and to pursue the Jewish mission.

And so Bubbie’s mother dreamt of Bubbie surviving the Shoah, and continuing the Jewish tradition.

Then, Bubbie dreamt of me, Abba, continuing the Jewish tradition.

And now Mommy and I have a dream, Eitan.

And that dream is you.

We’ve been dreaming of you. And that’s why we had you.

We had you to love you.

We had you to learn with you.

And we had you to add another link in a 3,800 year old tradition.

May God bless you, and may you give us, and everyone else in this room, true yiddishe naches.

Mazel Tov!!

2010-04-11T11:59:00.001-04:00

God, The Holocaust, and Lighting a Candle in the Dark

Why do you believe in God?

Fifty one out of fifty two weeks a year, the answer is obvious. The world is beautiful and brilliant, a bright shining example of divine spirit and creativity. The book of Psalms gushes “how wonderful are your creations God, all were created in wisdom”, and Maimonides teaches that studying the scientific structure of the universe will inspire us to love the wise creator of the cosmos.

Philosophers call this the “teleological argument” for God, and I usually appreciate this argument. Step outside during the summer twilight, and you cannot fail but to be moved by the living poetry of the natural order, the divine harmony of birds, crickets and rustling leaves. The world is a bright and shining inspiration to faith.

But one week a year, this argument collapses completely. The week of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, leaves us numb with pain. It is not only the deaths of six million that overwhelm us; it is the barbarity with which they were murdered. Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground who was one of the first witnesses to tell the world about the Holocaust, reported about one such atrocity he witnessed in Izbica, Eastern Poland. There, a group of 120-130 Jews were forced into a train car made to fit 40 people, and the doors were slammed shut. On the floor of the train was quicklime powder, a chemical that generates enormous heat when mixed with water. The human sweat dripping down to the floor caused the quicklime to bubble, and painfully and slowly, the inhabitants of the cars began to burn. These poor victims cried in agony for over a day until they met their inevitable deaths.

How can one believe in God when such evil stalks the earth?

Dark deeds of evil challenge the faith of everyone, even great rabbis. The Talmud tells of Elisha Ben Avuyah, a Rabbinic leader who lost his faith when he witnessed a pig dragging around the tongue of a Rabbi who had been executed by the Romans. The Talmud seems to be insisting that we understand Elisha’s heresy, and to be aware that at times everyone doubts their faith.

The evil of the Holocaust challenges our faith not just in God, but in life itself. In the shadow of horrific evil, all joy seems like lunacy, and the pursuit of meaning seem like an absurdity. When the Gestapo eliminated the hospital in the Lodz Ghetto, the SS officers threw babies out of the window. One intrepid young officer, stationed on the street, decided to “catch” the flying babies on his bayonet, slicing through these innocent infants.

Who can believe in anything after witnessing such a crime?

Despair is particularly painful for sensitive souls. The students of Hillel are exceptionally humble and charitable; yet when it comes to discuss the value of life, they concluded “it would be better for man to have not been created than to be created”. These sensitive Rabbis take the suffering of the world to heart, and find it too overwhelming, and they are left wondering about the value of life.

In the dark shadows of the Holocaust, faith becomes a painful question rather than an easy answer.

Yet, despite doubts and despair, we teach, talk and think about the Holocaust. Instead of considering Aushwitz to be a theological disaster zone, we view it a semi-sacred site, a place for communal pilgrimages. We even send high school students to visit concentration camps on The March of the Living.

Presumably, exposing gentle young students to the dark horrors of the Holocaust should warp their souls and leave them cynical and bitter. But strangely enough, the students return from the March of the Living inspired. They walk up to the abyss and come into contact with the darkest horrors man has known; yet they walk away with a spiritual experience. Why does this happen?

Because man instinctively resists evil. The darkness of evil inspires us to do good, because our soul simply cannot tolerate evil. The Bible says “man’s soul is God’s candle”, and each soul has a profound spirituality. (Yes, this is still true despite the fact that the Nazis perverted and corrupted the image of God, burying their souls under a miasma of evil). Deep inside, we have a divine impulse that searches for goodness.

Even in the desperation of the death camps, there were heroes of kindness, like the man who saved Mayer Schondorf’s life. After an all night death march, sixteen year old Mayer’s cap blew off. Frozen and broken, Schondorf wanted to quit and step out of line, and get shot by the German guards. The man behind Mayer encouraged him to hold on, and when they passed by a corpse on the side of the road, this man risked his life to grab the cap and give it to Mayer. Enveloped by cruelty, this anonymous hero refused to capitulate; instead he lights a candle of kindness.

When confronted with evil, one needs to battle for the good; when confronted by darkness, one needs to light a candle.

When walking in Auschwitz, surrounded by the horrors of the Holocaust, belief comes from within, from our own souls. Repulsed by horror, our spirits stir, and demand that we transform ourselves and change the world. And that impulse to battle evil and do good is powerful evidence of the divine spirit within all of us.

Our souls, God’s candles on earth, can still light the path of faith in the darkest of places.

2010-03-26T12:05:00.002-04:00

"Is Singing the Song of Shame the First Step in Inspired Leadership?"

A different take on the Haggadah shel Pesach (The Passover Haggadah)

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for filming and producing this video.

2010-03-10T12:14:00.001-05:00

Son of Hamas

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project. You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2010-03-02T10:27:00.002-05:00

Blackberrys, Cellphones And Sanctuaries in the 21st Century

"Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested."

2010-02-24T17:37:00.003-05:00

Until the Last Breath

In times of distress, it feels like we don’t have free will. Overwhelmed by suffering and oppression, it seems like all options have been snatched away from us, and that there’s no way to grab control of our lives. When someone is holding a gun to our head, what choice do we have?

But there is free will in hell. Even when man has lost control of his fate and is about to lose his life, he still has some free will left. Even when deprived of the ability to act, man can make choices, and choose courageous words and quiet nobility. These limited choices won’t affect the outcome, but they can still transform life dramatically.

It is easy ignore these last fragments of free will; after all choice seems so insignificant when the outcome is inevitable. The Romans executed the great Rabbi, Akiva, in the year 135 A.D. During the execution, his students stood nearby, to accompany their teacher during his last moments. As the Romans were slowly and tortuously tearing Akiva’s skin off, the time for the Shema prayer arrived. Weakened and dazed, Akiva pushed himself to recite the prayer. Akiva’s startled students called to him and said: “Rebbe, even now?” Do you still need to say the Shema seconds before your death, when you have already proven your courage and loyalty?

The students’ amazement is understandable; how many people maintain their composure while tortured? But Akiva’s lesson is a significant one: there’s still free will in hell.

Free will remains with us as long as we are capable of choosing our words and our thoughts. Even if we can no longer choose whether or not we do live, it is in our hands to choose how we live out the last moments of our lives. To spend one’s last seconds whispering a prayer may seem insignificant, considering the impending tragedy; but actually, this whispered prayer is heroic, a declaration that as long as man can breathe, his choices still matter. Indeed, Akiva’s choice to say farewell to this world with the Shema on his lips has been emulated hundreds of thousands of times since. Akiva reminds us that free will is possible everywhere, even in hell.

Of course, free will under duress is both rare and precious. Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote a moving book about his experiences entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning”. He spends much of the book explaining that each concentration camp inmate retained his free will, even when things were at their worst. Frankl is inspired by the few who chose to rise above their circumstances. He writes:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

No one can take your free will away!! Yes, it’s normal for the powerless to feel hopeless; after all, once a person has been degraded and demoralized, it’s easy to believe you’re an animal. But you can always decide how you act and react, and you can always retain your humanity. Man’s free will shines through in moments of crisis, when people make heroic choices, and choose to recite the Shema in their dying moments, and to share their rations in a concentration camp. Man always has a choice.

It may seem absurd to stand under the gaze of the angel of death and still worry about mumbling a prayer or giving away a half eaten crust of bread. But in actuality, these small choices are heroic, and affirm man’s invincible spirit, a spirit as infinite as the image of God.

And that invincible spirit remains with us, until the last breath.

2010-02-16T15:45:00.013-05:00

The Value of Everything

What does it take to survive as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam? Admiral James Stockdale, an American POW who heroically resisted torture and torment for eight years, explained to author Jim Collins how he found the courage to carry on:

“I never lost faith in the end of the story...I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life...”

Stockdale’s powerful sense of optimism inspires. However, Stockdale doesn’t see himself as an optimist. In fact, he explained to Collins that the POW’s least likely to survive were the optimists, because: “they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go.... And they died of a broken heart.”

Ironically, Stockdale is optimistic about the long term future, yet pessimistic about the short term, steadfastly resistant to any false hopes. Collins labeled Stockdale’s views on optimism “The Stockdale Paradox”.

This paradox resembles Maimonides’ views on the Messiah. Belief in the Messiah is an optimistic vision of worldwide redemption. Maimonides is quite clear that faith in the Messiah is a fundamental belief of Judaism; yet, at the same time, Maimonides is emphatic, both in his legal code and in his letters, that one must be careful not to speculate about when and under what circumstances the Messiah will arrive. Maimonides refuses to open the door to Messianic fervor, well aware of the destruction brought by the false Messiahs of his generation. Much like the “Stockdale Paradox”, Maimonides paradoxically demands that we dream of the Messiah’s arrival, yet at the same time Maimonides ignores the possibility the Messiah will come in the near future.

At the heart of both of these paradoxes is a riddle about optimism. Optimism seems to have two definitions; one refers to being contented with whatever we have (“the glass is half full”), and the other refers to hope for a better future ("it’ll all turn out for the best in the end”). These two definitions are dramatically different. One reflects acceptance, the willingness to be satisfied with whatever life gives you; the other reflects dreams and aspirations, motivated by a profound desire for change. Indeed, the common use of the word “optimism” is itself a paradox, because it demands of us to dream of a better future while being absolutely happy with our present situation!

While accepting both of the two definitions of optimism may seem paradoxical, it is not illogical. Oscar Wilde famously said that “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. Optimism would then be the opposite of cynicism, with the optimist seeing the value in everything, unconcerned about the cost. Of course the optimist values the future, and dreams of a better world and a better life. But the optimist can also see how precious life is, even in a POW camp; an optimist can see the enormous value in pursuing one’s duties, no matter what the costs are, even in the most horrific of places. Optimism sees the value of the present while embracing the potential of the future.

What sustains people like Stockdale who have overcome their ordeals is a dogged refusal to let go of their duties and their dreams. But even optimists sometimes falter when suffering. In March 1945, the Grand Rabbi of Bluzhev, Rabbi Israel Spira, was overwhelmed by despair. He had lost all of his family, and was alone to the world, and he walked up to the electrified fence at Bergen Belsen in order to end it all. A woman, witnessing the Rabbi, began to speak to him. She told the Rabbi: “how can you stand here now and think of ending your life? A day will come and God will bless you 0nce more; you will be grateful that your life was spared. And besides, the world needs you!”.

Rabbi Spira stepped away from the fence. He realized it was his duty to be courageous and optimistic.

From then on, until his death in 1989, Rabbi Spira fulfilled his duties; and he built a better future for himself, and inspired others to do the same.

2010-02-03T10:20:00.005-05:00

Women, Survival, and Heroism

(For Parshat Beshalach 2010)

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video (check out the fancy TV quality camera!!), and to Lorne Lieberman for supporting this project.

You can sponsor this video with a 54$ donation. Please contact office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2010-01-14T16:10:00.001-05:00

Hope is Irrational, Hope is Invaluable

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch and Lorne Lieberman
Please contact office@tbdj.org about ponsoring these videos

2009-12-10T11:11:00.002-05:00

The Jar is One Eighth Full: The Case for Jewish Optimism

I’m an Orthodox Rabbi, and I’m an optimist.

Optimism is out of place in the Jewish community. Every year, Jews are chronologically further removed from the events that founded the Jewish tradition, and there’s a foreboding sense that as time goes on, Jews are becoming progressively removed from their spiritual traditions as well. Indeed, one could say that contemporary assimilation is predicted by the theological concept of “Yeridat Hadorot”, “The Decline of Generations”, which affirms that every generation is spiritually inferior to the previous one. Jewish law assumes that contemporary Jews cannot understand religious texts as profoundly as previous generations, and even the ability to concentrate during prayer has been lost. Yeridat Hadorot can leave Orthodox Jews in particular with the melancholy feeling that we have missed the boat historically, that the golden age of Judaism occurred generations ago.

Historically, the 20^thcentury was a challenging time for Jews. The enormous destruction caused by the Holocaust has left many Jews feeling like orphans in history, torn away from a culture that embodied authentic Jewish practice. And the unprecedented tranquility that Jews have experienced in the last 60 years has ironically had an unexpected negative impact. Jews were always prepared for the challenges of discrimination and anti-Semitism; but we have been woefully unprepared for the challenges of prosperity. Affluence has brought with it a soul numbing materialism that leaves many people uninterested in religious values and spiritual depth. Acceptance into mainstream society has enabled Jews to comfortably work with, live with, and marry with non-Jews. Jews are well accepted into all strata of American society, to the point that the engagement of President Clinton’s daughter to a Jew went unremarked in the national press. Considering the powerful forces for assimilation, it’s easy to imagine the gradual disappearance of the Jewish people. Indeed, in one lecture, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik related that worries about assimilation literally kept him up at night. Jewish optimism seems impossible; there are just too many things for a Jew to worry about.

But Jewish pessimism is costly; worrying too much leads to anger, distrust and paranoia. Paranoia makes it impossible to see the world clearly; concerns about anti-Semitism become inflated, and a President who is less supportive of Israel than his predecessor is immediately branded an anti-Zionist, and his Jewish aides branded self-hating Jews. In this culture of pessimism, disagreements between Jews become exaggerated, and political and ideological rivals are no longer opponents, but rather enemies. (Yitzchak Rabin’s assassination is the prime example of this, but the needless hatred that led to his assassination can still be found today in many groups on both the left and the right). In the religious realm, every choice is endowed with excessive significance, to the point that Jews who agree 98 percent of the time with each other consider each other irreconcilable foes, all because of an ideological nuance. Rav Naftali Tzvi Berlin astutely predicted that healthy criticism can morph into unhealthy condemnation, and create a paranoid atmosphere where anyone to one’s right or left is hated for their fanaticism or heterodoxy.

What we all need to remember is that the most critical message of Chanukah is optimism. The iconic ritual of the Menorah reminds us that we must consider the possibilities even one measly jar of oil holds; miracles are possible, if you make the effort. And we light the Menorah on the darkest, coldest nights of the year to show that even one candle can shine bright with the spirit of redemption, and to symbolize that even a few ill prepared people can take on a powerful army and change the course of Jewish history.

There many areas that Jews can be optimistic about today. The State of Israel remains a miracle 61 years later, and some of her most devoted supporters are non-Jews. Young Jews still exhibit remarkable idealism and devotion to higher ideals; and many Jewish communities are thriving, and filled with passion. And today, Jews have remarkable economic resources, and Jewish philanthropies raise billions of dollars a year. The Jewish people have come a long way in the last sixty years.

On Chanukah, it’s time for some Jewish optimism. It’s time for Jews to stop looking for the worst in their fellow Jews. And it’s time to celebrate the possibilities of the Jewish future, because when it comes to Jewish destiny, the jar is never seven eighths empty, it’s always one eighth full.

2009-12-03T19:45:00.004-05:00

Everyday Angels

What is an angel? Mentioned throughout Jewish literature from the Bible onward, the existence of angels is both universally accepted and vaguely understood. Lurking in the netherworld between heaven and earth, the precise nature of angels is the subject of a fair amount of controversy. Are they independent beings, or manifestations of God? Do they have a physical image? Can they choose their actions, and perhaps even sin? Are they jealous of human beings? Is it acceptable to pray to angels?

Many of these questions are thrashed out in debates between mystics and rationalists, debates that are familiar territory to anyone who has studied medieval Jewish philosophy. On one side, there are philosophers who reduce the nature of angels to the philosophical minimum, because a more robust depiction of angels would be a threat to pure monotheism. To rationalists, angels, as beings that can be prayed to and can intercede for man, contradict the idea that the Bible emphasizes that “the LORD is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else.” (Deut. 4:40). On the other hand, mystics see angels as an element within a varied and complex spiritual world that inhabits the space between God above and man below; angels are but one of a host of spiritual creatures in the four worlds that span from God to the physical world. The specific nature of angels is vague, a topic that is debated and debatable.

The very Hebrew word for angel is ambiguous. The word employed for angel, “Malach”, literally means “messenger”; the word “malach” can refer equally well to the young man carrying a package by bicycle from one downtown office to another, or the winged spirit carrying a message from God to man. Indeed, at several points in the biblical narrative, commentaries are unsure if the word “malach” refers to an angel, or just a flesh and blood messenger! I would argue that this ambiguity is no coincidence; the Torah intentionally chose to leave the identity of angels murky, to impart an important lesson. The Torah wants us to shift our gaze, and instead of searching for winged angels above, open our eyes to the everyday angels below.

In order to find “everyday angels”, one must appreciate the fact that God winks at man from time to time. “God has many messengers”, and sometimes the message is for us. Indeed, some of the Rabbis of the Talmud would listen to schoolchildren memorizing the Bible, certain that the verse the child was reciting contained a hidden message. And in everyday life, there are everyday angels, on a divine mission to make us stronger by encouraging us, protecting us, and even wrestling with us.

Sometimes, even rationalists like me can feel the presence of angels. My wife Lisa and I had struggled to have children into the third year of our marriage. One Friday night, after a long week, we chose to have dinner at home alone. As we were making Kiddush, we heard a knock on the door. Outside was a young Chassidic man with his very pregnant wife. They had been driving from Crown Heights to Monsey, but got stuck in traffic and had to get off the highway before Shabbat began. After finding their way to the Reform Synagogue, they ran into the Conservative Rabbi, who wisely directed them to our home, the house of the Orthodox Rabbi, over a mile away. (I guess the Mitzvah of welcoming guests brings all Jews together.). We had not prepared for guests, but managed to make them feel comfortable, and we shared our home and our food with our unexpected visitors. Lisa and I felt as if taking in guests that week was our special obligation; after all, that Shabbat was the Parsha of Vayera, where Abraham and Sarah show exceptional hospitality to three strangers who come by their tent.

Now it turns out that the three strangers who visit Abraham and Sarah are actually angels. It also turns out that they are coming to tell the old couple that they will finally have a child.

Abraham and Sarah have a son one year later. And, as it turns out, after inviting in our unexpected pregnant guests, Lisa and I had twin boys ten months later.

This young husband and wife weren’t angels; but there’s no doubt in our minds that they were malachim, messengers from God. They came bearing good tidings, and the message that it’s important not just to fill our homes with children, but also to open our homes to guests.

They were everyday angels carrying an extraordinary message.

2009-11-21T23:19:00.000-05:00

After You Get Punched in the Face

Super Bowl XLIII certainly ranks as one of the greatest sports upsets of all time, with the New York Giants defeating the undefeated and seemingly invincible New England Patriots. In a postgame interview, Giant star Michael Strahan explained that his team had won by throwing the Patriots off with unrelenting pressure, which worked because “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

While this short quote is meant to describe football and boxing, it is also an excellent description of life. Many people have brilliant futures until an unforeseen event derails their lives, their grand plans undone by an unexpected punch in the face. Families are shattered by divorce and discord, careers ruined by bad luck, and lives disabled by illness and injury. The punch in the face leaves many a person down for the count.

After getting punched in the face, there’s a great deal of pain accompanied by humiliation. For those accustomed to success, the bitter taste of failure is sometimes too difficult to swallow. After major losses in the financial markets, German Billionaire Adolf Merckle threw himself in front of a train; after losing hundreds of millions of dollars in clients money to Bernie Madoff’s scheme, French banker René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet took his own life. The anguish and embarrassment of defeat can be a knockout punch.

However, there are people who have been beaten and humiliated, but refused to throw in the towel. These determined losers seem absurd, continuing to fight on after the battle seems lost.

This quixotic determination is evident throughout the history of the Jewish people. Until the establishment of the State of Israel, Jewish history was a long string of defeats, with the Jews hanging on from one beating to another. Why did we do this? Why keep getting up off the canvas, just to be knocked down another time?

Joseph provides the answer. Joseph antagonizes his brothers with his dreams and his status as Jacob’s favourite son; but one day, on a mission of peace, Jacob sends Joseph to the city of Shechem to check on the welfare of his brothers. Instead of giving Joseph a chance, the brothers seize him and sell him into slavery. For the rest of his days, Joseph struggles mightily to rebuild his life and family.

Yet at the end of his life, The Midrash tells us that Joseph makes a strange request: to be buried in Shechem, the very city he traveled to on the day he was sold into slavery. What could possess Joseph to choose the location of his humiliating “punch in the face” as his final resting place?

The answer is simple: Joseph had a mission. That day, he had set out to Shechem in hope of attaining peace with his brothers; and even though he had been kidnapped, enslaved and exiled to another country, Joseph never let go of this dream. And in the end, he chooses a final resting place that reflects his determination to fulfill his mission.

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." This pithy quote from Nietzsche best describes Joseph’s return to Shechem, and Jewish people’s return to Israel; and it also reminds us that if you’re on a mission, the game plan remains the same, both before and after the punch in the face.

2009-11-18T10:30:00.002-05:00

The One Blessing We Forget to Pray For

We thank Malca and Louis Drazin of Montreal for sponsoring this video.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-11-12T11:22:00.002-05:00

A Joke of a Name

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-10-29T18:32:00.003-04:00

Everybody Has a Gameplan Until You Punch Them in the Face

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-10-19T15:56:00.003-04:00

Continuation:
The Power of Now, Part III

We thank Rima and Eliezer Brodt of Toronto for sponsoring this video, in honour of the recent birth of their son, Noah Joseph Brodt.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-10-15T11:26:00.002-04:00

The Power of Now, Part II

We thank Rima and Eliezer Brodt of Toronto for sponsoring this video, in honour of the recent birth of their son, Noah Joseph Brodt.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-10-08T17:42:00.000-04:00

The Power of Now

Tomorrow is too late.

Every year, as I ready myself for Neilah, the final prayer of Yom Kippur, I reread a paragraph written by the sainted Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan. In it he reminds us that the Neilah prayer is the last prayer of the High Holiday season, the last few precious moments available to us to change our ways and our destiny. Rabbi Kagan reminds us of Hillel’s famous saying “if not now, when”. Neilah is a spiritual “bottom of the ninth”, and we better be ready for our turn at bat. We need to wake up and grasp the power of now.

But in many ways, every day is Yom Kippur. The power of now applies every day. Unfortunately, we usually overlook this.

Procrastination is based on the illusion of immortality. It’s easy to put things off for later when you expect to have time later. For a procrastinator, the answer to “if not now, when?” is: tomorrow, or the day after. Hillel, however, wants to remind us of a tragic fact: there might not be a tomorrow.

Too often we let things fester, for no reason at all. I remember a grudge I held in 11th grade against a roommate. We had had a trivial falling out in September, a falling out that festered to the point that we didn’t speak for the entire school year. Only in June, after having spent the entire year in the shackles of a speechless resentment, did we finally make up, having virtually forgotten why we fighting in the first place.

My adolescent grudge is a familiar experience for many, and not just for adolescents either. Too many mature adults hold grudges, breaking off communication with those closest to them. Usually, in the back of their minds they figure they’ll make up in the future. But as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to reconcile. And sometimes, it really is too late. Every Rabbi has seen the tears of guilt at funerals, when mourners realize they have left too much unsaid; they figured they still had time. In reality, when a grudge is disrupting a relationship, every day is Yom Kippur. We have to seize the power of now, because tomorrow may be too late.

When I was younger, I was troubled by the enormous emphasis we place during the high holidays on “who will live and who will die”. All of this talk about death seemed to be morose and pessimistic. But in actuality, this emphasis is deeply life affirming; we need to recognize that now is the time, that we must live deeply and completely, today; we cannot wait until tomorrow. Our inevitable deaths remind us not to procrastinate away precious opportunities.

These precious opportunities can be mundane, like calling your mother. There’s an anecdote told about a South Central Bell commercial featuring the legendary college football coach Bear Bryant. It was meant to be a humorous commercial, and the gruff football coach was supposed to look at the camera and say: “have you called your mama today?”. Coach Bryant, whose mother had passed away many years earlier, instead said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” This ad libbed ad touched everyone.

Coach Bryant and Rabbi Kagan are both teaching us the same lesson; the importance of the power of now. And on Yom Kippur, and every other day of the year, tomorrow may just be too late.

2009-08-31T13:13:00.000-04:00

Flying Rabbis and Building Fences: The Right Way to Respond to H1N1

It was the perfect newspaper picture: fifty Rabbis sitting on a plane, sounding the shofar. They were on a special charter flight flying over Israel, hoping to use special prayers to ward off an onslaught of H1N1.

Now, I love prayer; without it, Judaism is unthinkable. And I appreciate how these Rabbis want to protect the entire community. But even so, I wasn’t happy with this flight. By emphasizing an exotic form of prayer, these Rabbis seem to have forgotten that in Judaism, using purel is also a religious act.

Safety is a religious obligation. The Bible requires that a roof be properly gated to prevent people from falling off it. The late chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Benzion Uziel, included in this commandment the employer's responsibility to ensure occupational safety, and the late leader of the Edah Hacharedit, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Weiss, saw this commandment as an injunction against reckless driving. So why are Rabbis flying around in planes instead of handing out purel dispensers?

Regrettably, this can be traced to a false dichotomy between the ethical and the ritual. Some mistakenly see ritual requirements, such as the kosher laws and the Sabbath, as “true” Judaism, and underemphasize Judaism’s ethical requirements. This is why it’s not unusual for Orthodox Jews to be extremely punctilious about ritual commandments, and at the same time smoke like chimneys and drive like maniacs. In particular, we ignore the responsibility of committed Jews to take responsibility for the world politically, ethically, economically.

In contemporary society, there is a new phenomenon behind this false dichotomy. Orthodox Jews are often seen as exotic figures straight out of the movies. We look different, eat different foods, and have different holidays. To the mass media, Judaism is primarily about rituals that make Jews mysterious and different.

Unfortunately, Jews have internalized this view of Judaism, and we now imagine the primary purpose of Judaism is simply to be different. This is why mundane topics like safety and ethics are neglected; after all, being ethical isn’t all that exotic.

Of course, as both Rabbi Akiva and Hillel emphasize, ethics are the foundation of Judaism. Yet this emphasis does not devalue the Torah’s rituals. On the contrary, combined with ethics, these rituals become part of a powerful, meaningful whole. Judaism is not about being exotic, it's about being holy. Defining Judaism solely by being different puts us in danger of becoming caricatures of ourselves.

Indeed, many great Rabbis hold a much broader view of Judaism. Rabbi Yehuda Amital, the former Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion, was once asked what position he would seek if he was asked to join the Israeli cabinet. He explained he would want to be minister of Health, because Halacha demands one be more stringent about health than any other religious requirement. The late Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekusiel Halberstam, saw treating other human beings with great compassion as his legacy, and made it his life’s work to open a hospital in the city of Netanya. To these Rabbis, safety and ethics were not at all secular concerns.

Safety is a religious issue, and health measures are the authentic Jewish response to H1N1. Thinking otherwise produces a movie set Judaism that is both narrow minded and empty.

(much of this is recycled from an old post of mine)

2009-08-28T10:06:00.002-04:00

H1N1, Flying Rabbis, and Building Fences - Parshat Ki Teitze

We thank Lessy and Earl Kimmel of Montreal for sponsoring this video.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-08-06T10:42:00.003-04:00

A Test Too Easy To Pass: The Problems of Wealth and Security

We thank Anna and Joe Mendel of Montreal for sponsoring this video.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.

You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ! Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-08-05T16:59:00.003-04:00

Why Jews Fight, Why Your Kindly Uncle is a Racist, and Why Your Cousin is Volunteering in Senegal: The Mysteries of Love Explained, in 1000 Words

Montreal’s Orthodox Jewish community is situated alongside a five mile stretch of Van Horne Avenue-Fleet Road. On this road, ranging from west to east, is every philosophy of Orthodoxy from left to right. In the west is the “modern” Orthodox area; traveling east, you pass through the neighborhood of the Lubavitch Chassidim. Further east are the neighborhoods for “Litvishe”, and then “Chassidishe” Jews.

In June, communities in the west and east gathered for the sake of “pidyon shevuyim”, releasing captives who have been unjustly incarcerated. In the east, a communal meeting was held on behalf of Yaakov Grunwald, Yoel Goldstein and Yossi Bandau, three young Chassidic boys who were caught smuggling drugs and imprisoned in Japan. In the west, synagogues gathered to pray for Gilad Shalit, the 23 year old Israeli soldier who was kidnapped by Hamas on June 25th three years ago.

Of course, I worry about all of these young men. I worry for the prisoners in Japan, who naively thought they were making a delivery for a member of their community. I worry for Gilad Shalit, who is being held by violent, hate filled terrorists who want to torture and murder him. But I worry most about our community. How is it that on one side of Decarie barely a word is mentioned about Grunwald, Goldstein and Bandau, and on the other side, all are silent about Shalit? Each community seems to pursuing narrow interests, working to release the captives that are one of their “own”. It seems that despite physical proximity, the world of the “modern” Orthodox community in the west and the ultra-Orthodox community in the east couldn’t be further apart. And the divide within the Orthodox community in Montreal is a common one, found in communities around the world from Brooklyn to Beit Shemesh. And as disappointing as this inter-Orthodox divide is, it pales in comparison with the battles between secular and religious in Israel, and the split between Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews around the world. And of course, if we consider the divisions between Jew, Christian and Muslim, Black and White, ethnic rivalries, political rivalries, etc, etc., you begin to realize that the world can be a pretty divided place. Loving one’s fellow man is a challenging task indeed.

What makes love so difficult? There are two primary challenges. One is xenophobia, the fear of the stranger. Human nature is such that we meet people who are different than us with condescension and concern. The stranger is viewed as a threat or an inferior, either as someone who we fear may abuse us, or someone whom we desire to abuse. In some instances, both xenophobic images are combined. The biblical Egyptians, frightened at the increasing strength of the local Jewish population, decide to enslave the despicable, insect-like Jews. Later, the Nazis would also present a contradictory picture of the Jews, as both manipulative, omnipotent creatures, and as dirty and despicable vermin. The incoherence of this picture is irrelevant; xenophobia stirs up the irrational.

Ironically, xenophobia doesn’t discriminate in its pursuit of discrimination. Any difference, including skin color, religion, and even gender can inspire xenophobia. And xenophobia is a two way street; Christians can hate Jews because of their religion, but Jews can hate Christians just as intensely. The subtlest of differences can feed the paranoia xenophobia depends on.

The second challenge to love comes from closeness. Freud used the phrase “the narcissism of small differences” to describe the work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley. Crawley discovered that groups with greater degrees of similarity would often treat each other with greater degrees of enmity and aggression than strangers. Indeed, the people most similar to us upset us the most, because we expect them to be exactly like us, and are disappointed when they aren’t. (Which is why it shouldn’t be a surprise that in the Book of Genesis, sibling conflict is the virulent and frequent. Siblings are the ones most like ourselves, and therefore the people most capable of inspiring the narcissism of small differences).

The narcissism of small differences is why many Orthodox Jews spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the material and size of their kippot, and why the minutiae of Shabbat laws can inspire a synagogue battle royale over the use of frosted greetings on birthday cakes. Despite being only .02 percent of the world’s population, even Orthodox Jews find it hard to get along with each other.

Everyone wants to love someone, and so many choose to love some people and ignore others. Some people love those closest to them so intensely, they immediately disdain those who are different; xenophobia gets in the way of universal love. Others desire to embrace the exotic, and find it difficult to care for their boring and unenlightened kinfolk; here, the narcissism of small differences gets in the way truly universal love. This is why your uncle, who is deeply devoted to community, says the most despicably racist things at the dinner table; and this is why your cousin volunteers summers in Senegal, but completely ignores the people of Sderot.

The Torah requires that we open our hearts to both kinds of love. It commands us to love the neighbor, the people closest, and most annoying, to us; it also requires that we learn to love the stranger, the person who is suspiciously different. The genius of these two parallel commandments is that for some it is a challenge to love the stranger, while for others, it’s loving our neighbors that gets complicated.

God demands of us to love his children, all 6.6 Billion of them. That includes your irritating second cousin and the strange looking foreigner on the subway; and believe it or not, it even includes the Jews five miles down the road.

2009-07-31T11:30:00.004-04:00

Why Do Some Religious People Act Unethically?

Some Thoughts On The Arrests of Rabbis, Last Week and Last Year.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.

You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ!Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-07-27T23:44:00.004-04:00

Michael Vick’s Reinstatement: One Rabbi’s Thoughts

I’m a serious football fan. (Football has contributed to my spiritual development by teaching me the virtue of patience; I’m a Jets fan). So I paid a great deal of attention to the NFL’s reinstatement of Michael Vick.

Michael Vick is a talented quarterback (drafted first overall in 2001), who by 2004 was one of the highest paid athletes in the world. In 2007 it was discovered that Vick was running an illegal dogfighting ring on a property he owned in Virginia. (This was just one incident in a pattern of troubling behavior that Vick had shown in his six years in the NFL). He was convicted of Federal and State charges, and served nearly a year and a half of jail time. He was suspended from the NFL, and had to declare personal bankruptcy.

On July 27th, Vick was reinstated to play in the NFL. This reinstatement is conditional, provided that Vick follows a set of conditions to ensure he improves his personal behavior.

Vick’s reinstatement is extremely controversial, as many feel that Vick should banned for life because of his crimes. Personally, I don’t agree. Let me explain.

No question, animal cruelty is a serious crime. Rules against animal cruelty are included in the Noahide laws, Judaism’s universal laws for humanity. There is no way to diminish the crime of animal cruelty by claiming “it’s just dogs”.

And without question, punishment must be meted out for crimes. This is true even in cases where the person has changed their ways. As I have pointed out elsewhere, human justice cannot constantly adjust to the spiritual status of the criminal. There needs to be consistent penalties for the justice system to function as a deterrent.

But Vick has been punished for his crimes. There is no need for the NFL to punish Vick a second time for his crimes.

However, the real question facing the NFL is this: does Michael Vick deserve forgiveness? The Talmud is clear that punishment alone doesn’t rehabilitate the criminal. The criminal must commit to act differently in the future, and regret his past actions; in short, the criminal must repent. There’s no reason for the NFL to treat Vick as a citizen in good standing, just because he was released from jail.

To offer Vick an unconditional reinstatement would have been a mistake, because a criminal remains a criminal until he has changed his ways. That is why the current conditional reinstatement is the right way to do things. Vick is not being given a free pass; he must commit to be a good citizen in the future. But if Vick is willing to change his ways, to repent, he should be given a second chance. The prophet Ezekiel (18:21-23) declares that God wants to offer second chances to those who repent: "Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? Says the Lord, God; and not rather that he should return from his ways and live?".

If God is ready to offer Michael Vick a second chance, we should offer him one as well.

2009-07-16T08:20:00.000-04:00

The Hidden Side of History - Parshat Masei

2009-07-08T17:50:00.003-04:00

CNN and Michael Jackson’s Death: A Real Tragedy

The death of a 50 year old father is a tragedy, no matter where it occurs. And Michael Jackson’s death was tragic; his unfortunate overdose deprived three small children of a father, a family of a son and brother, and friends and fans of a superstar they loved. Of course, whenever a public figure passes away, many others will join in the sadness.

But the tragedy of Michael Jackson’s death is no excuse for the media coverage that ensued. Multiple media outlets examined in depth every element of the Jackson saga. The media provided careful analysis of Propofol use and trustees and wills, and made sure we could tour Michael’s ranch, and view footage of his last concert rehearsals. CNN adopted an “all Michael” format, following this story with a thoroughness that rivaled coverage of 9-11. CNN and her media colleagues inflated the death of one celebrity into a blockbuster news story.

And this is a tragedy as well: CNN et. al no longer cover the news. Instead of informing people about what is essential and significant, the news media is far more interested in “infotainment”. Stories about Uigher unrest, the Taliban conflict, the Sri Lankan reconstruction and the Iranian election are ignored in favor of yet another learned analysis on the life of a popular singer. In the last two weeks, we have seen the decline and fall of the news media.

News outlets like CNN are addicted to fluff stories. Since the rise of the celebrity media, beginning with the birth of People Magazine, the mainstream media has been integrating more and more celebrity news. Indeed, Larry King Live, CNN’s primetime interview show, is nearly indistinguishable from entertainment shows like Jay Leno and David Letterman. Sometimes, it seems that a comedy show like Jon Stewart’s is the only place you’ll get serious news coverage.

A lack of interest in hard news augurs poorly for the Western World. Ignorance is not a individual matter or a comic flaw; it has an enormous impact on personal growth. The Rabbis of the Mishna tell us that a boorish person cannot achieve piety. This lesson is a reminder that narrow horizons produce people who are spiritually stunted. Without a true thirst for knowledge, a society will become increasingly corrupt, entranced with cheap bread and charming circuses.

Even more troubling is our obsession with celebrity. There are loads of celebrities aside from Michael Jackson; there’s Brad and Angelina and Jennifer and even John and Kate. Celebrities are trendsetters. Young girls dress in the style of their favorite pop divas, while their parents dream of a flashy and fancy Hollywood lifestyle. For many, celebrities are role models.

Role models are important because they represent our highest aspirations. The Mishna tells us that everyone should have a teacher, a person they look up to as a role model of knowledge and character. You can tell a person’s character by who their heroes are.

Heroes aren’t what they used to be. Old fashioned heroes like the fireman, the soldier and the cop, people who risk their lives for the general good, now live anonymous and humble lives, forgotten by everyone else. Today’s hero wears sunglasses, drives a Ferrari, and is talking on a cellphone with his agent.

Celebrities, our new heroes, are poor role models. Many are often “in and out”; in and out of rehab, in and out of marriage, in and out of court. However, their sins are quickly dismissed by pliant doctors, judges, and therapists, all in time for them to return to their adoring fans. Honest redemption and sacrifice are for the movies; in real life, celebrity fame and fortune is all that matters.

A society follows its role models. If our heroes are shallow and superficial, then it won’t be long before the rest of are wearing designer shades, searching for a new car, a new look and a new spouse.

And that’s the real tragedy.

2009-07-07T12:36:00.004-04:00

The Question of The Week: Zealotry

Parshat Pinchas begins with the end of a story of enormous zealotry - Pinchas killing a wayward prince, Zimri, who was cohabiting with a Midianite princess.

Most contemporary discussions of this event focus on apologetics; explaining why zealotry cannot, and should not, be pursued today. Tolerance is the order of the day.

The Question Of The Week is this: Is there a use for zealotry in contemporary times? Is there anything that deserves a more "zealous" response? When is tolerance misplaced?

Join the discussion here.

2009-07-04T22:22:00.002-04:00

Michael Jackson, Heroism, and CNN

Thank yo to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this video, and to Lorne Lieberman for his support of the video project.

You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ!

Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-06-15T11:28:00.004-04:00

The Holocaust Museum Murder, Anti-Semitism and Chutzpah

Once again, thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping, and to Lorne Lieberman for supporting this project.

You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ!

Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-06-11T07:55:00.003-04:00

Obama's Cairo Speech: Is Israel a Lifeboat, or a Lifeline?

Thank you once again to Abigail Hirsch for filming and editing the video. And thank you to Lorne Lieberman for his continued support of this project.

You can sponsor these weekly videos with a 54$ donation to TBDJ!

Please e-mail office@tbdj.org if you are interested.

2009-06-01T17:08:00.002-04:00

Prepare Your Heart Before You Plan Your Actions
(and why the beginning of Bamidbar is a farce)

Many thanks to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping this segment, and to Lorne Lieberman for encouraging the project.

2009-05-27T15:24:00.003-04:00

Where Are The Jewish Susan Boyles?

On April 11th, a star was born.

On that day, a frumpy looking 47 year old woman named Susan Boyle, (who was single and unemployed), auditioned for the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent”. She took the stage to condescending glances and derisive smirks; however, by the time she finished singing, she got a standing ovation. Within hours Susan was a YouTube sensation, with the video of her performance totaling a hundred million hits in just a few days. This unknown Scottish woman was actually an exceptional singer whose talent had been overlooked for decades.

The Susan Boyle story reminds us how often we let talent get wasted. All too often, jobs and opportunities are awarded to people based on appearances, connections and relationships. A Harvard degree is now valued not for it’s superior education, but rather because it allows students to comfortably network with the corporate and political elite. All too often talented outsiders find it difficult to pursue their dreams, and the Susan Boyle’s of the world are often left in the cold.

The question the Jewish community has to ask itself is this: where are the Jewish Susan Boyles? How many Jews have been frozen out of our community because they have neither the connections nor resources to be welcomed in?

The culture of Torah scholarship was once profoundly anti-elitist; indeed, the Mishnah exhorts Rabbis to “raise up many students”. The Talmud is filled with tales of outsiders who become significant Rabbis. Shemaya and Avtalyon, the teachers of Hillel and Shamai, were converts. Rabbi Akiva was an ignorant shepherd. Most dramatically, Reish Lakish was a common criminal who got invited into the world of Torah study by the greatest Rabbi of his time, Rabbi Yochanan. The rabbis of the Talmud saw enormous potential in every human being, and insisted on opening the door to “non-traditional students”.

In one passage in the Talmud there is a cautionary tale about the dangers of elitism. The great scholar Hillel was a poor woodchopper who would save his last pennies to pay admission into the study hall. One cold winter day, he simply didn’t have the money to pay the admission fee, and Hillel was turned away by the guard at the door. Hillel decided to listen to the lecture though a window, and in the process nearly froze to death. Luckily, the Rabbis inside spied his image through the window, and saved his life.

This passage has a simple message: if you barricade the doors to the study hall, you’ll leave great Rabbis like Hillel out in the cold. Hillel, a poor, unknown woodchopper, ended up being the leader of the Jewish people.

Today unknown Jews without status or connections are often left out in the cold as well. They remain at the periphery, alienated by a country club atmosphere that pervades the Jewish community. Some are excluded because of money, finding it difficult to pay for day school tuitions and synagogue memberships while struggling to pay mortgages. Others feel excluded by Jewish institutions that are insular and unwelcoming. When an outsider wanders in, they are made to feel like an intruder, as both the layman and professionals show little interest in greeting new faces.

Sadly, our community pays dearly. Years ago, a friend (“Donna”) told me of an experience she had in a synagogue. “Donna” had gotten curious about Judaism, and decided one day to enter her local synagogue. There, she was completely ignored by the congregants, as if she were invisible. “Donna” left the synagogue alienated, and refused to go back to synagogue for years.

It’s important that we take Donna’s experience to heart. “Donna” is an outsider, a Jewish Susan Boyle. And as task force after task force ponders how to fix the problems of Jewish continuity, we need to think about the Jewish Susan Boyles. Oftentimes, these task forces issue exotic and expensive recommendations. In actuality, a critical element in solving the problem of Jewish continuity is free: we simply need to make our institutions more welcoming. We need to say hello to visitors, and include them in our community. We need to invite in the Susan Boyles of our community, and make them feel at home. Who know? Maybe we’ll be welcoming in the next generation’s Hillel.

If we want to find the Jewish Susan Boyles, the answer is simple: they are at the entrance of every Jewish institution, waiting for someone to smile and open the door.

2009-05-26T07:26:00.002-04:00

The Difference Between Seeking and Seeing - Shavuot 2009

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for the wonderful camera work, and to Lorne Lieberman for inspiring this project.

2009-05-21T12:54:00.000-04:00

High School Moot Beit Din, Had Gadya, and the Effects of Studying Talmud

2009-05-14T13:52:00.002-04:00

Divine Eyeglasses

Last Saturday, I started to see for the first time. Without realizing it, I had spent the first 45 years of my life blinded to the full extent of human potential.

On Saturday morning, my synagogue held a Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebration. Generally, Jewish boys celebrate their Bar Mitzvahs at age thirteen, and the girls celebrate their Bat Mitzvahs at age twelve. Technically, at Bar and Bat Mitzvah age, children are no longer children, and are mandated with adult responsibilities. However, in a larger sense, the public celebration of a Bar and Bat Mitzvah is a way of recognizing young men and women as full members of the community.

But this particular Bar and Bat Mitzvah was very different. The participants from this past Saturday were all adults, some well into their 50’s. They were celebrating their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs now because they had never had one in their youth. Our six special participants are all intellectually disabled; when they were of Bar Mitzvah age 30-40 years ago, they were pushed to the periphery and their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs were overlooked. Because of their intellectual disabilities, they were deprived of the chance to stand in the spotlight and be affirmed as members of the community.

Throughout history, multiple societies have stigmatized, mistreated and even murdered the disabled. In ancient Sparta, babies deemed “deformed” were tossed into a place called “the apothetae”, a chasm near Mount Taygetus. Martin Luther believed children with severe disabilities were actually “changelings”, demonic beings that took on the form of a human child. He advocated legalizing throwing the “changelings” into the river and drowning them. And the Nazis, even before the start of the Holocaust, initiated “Aktion T4”, a program to kill the physically and mentally disabled. This program may have killed as many as 200,000 disabled people.

Sadly, these negative attitudes continued to have a powerful impact until recently. Due to social pressure, people with intellectually disabilities were often hidden away, their very existence treated as a secret. Up to just a few years ago there was little possibility for an intellectually disabled child to have a large, well attended, public Bar Mitzvah. The developmentally disabled were often viewed as blemished and flawed, the sum total of their disabilities. The general public simply couldn’t see the person beyond the disability.

It is that view of the intellectually disabled that changed on Saturday morning. Human vision is clouded by the superficial and the subjective. There is a powerful passage in the Book of Samuel that says that “man sees only with his eyes, but God sees into the heart.”. Humanity’s perspective is shallow, limited by what our eyes can see. But this past Saturday, our congregants were fitted with a pair of divine eyeglasses. During the ceremony we saw exactly what God sees, the beauty of the human soul.

We saw into the hearts of the participants, who were waiting for this Bar- Bat Mitzvah ceremony their entire lives. In front of us were six people whose hearts were full of joy and pride. In their shy demeanor and gentle words, we could see the long road they had taken in search of dignity, and all the struggles they had faced. And most of all, their faces radiated love; you could immediately feel the sense of connection between the participants and everyone in the room.

There was another group in the synagogue whose lives were transformed by this celebration, perhaps even more than the participants themselves: the participant’s families. These families had experienced the sting of exclusion, as their brothers and sisters were isolated without any friends in the neighborhood, and their sons and daughters bounced from one program to the next. These families were waiting all these years for the day that their sons, daughters, brothers and sisters would take their rightful place in the community.

But by far, the people most affected by this celebration were the congregants. The very people whom the community excluded years ago were now taking center stage; and in standing ovation after standing ovation, the community opened their hearts to the six Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrants. It was truly a family reunion; we, the community, were welcoming back the men and women we had long forgotten.

On Saturday morning, all of us in the congregation were able to see past superficial disabilities, and appreciate the gifts of love, friendship and community. And for a few short moments, we were all wearing divine eyeglasses.

2009-05-13T17:40:00.002-04:00

"A Bar Mitzvah For the Community" - The Miriam Home Bar-Bat Mitzvah

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for sponsoring the video

2009-05-06T22:01:00.001-04:00

What Do You Stand For? - Kiddush Hashem - Parshat Emor

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping!!

2009-04-27T22:09:00.001-04:00

The Sin of "Getting Back to Normal" -Yom Haatzamut

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for sponsoring this video

2009-04-22T18:23:00.001-04:00

You Are What You Dream

“You are what you eat” is a well traveled but powerful cliché. We construct our identities out of the littlest bits of quotidian life; from our culinary style, fashion sense, and literary interests, and from the company we keep and neighborhoods we choose. In a sense, we are what we eat, wear, befriend and read.

We pay less attention to our dreams. Dreams and visions are considered too ephemeral, too intangible to warrant serious thought. Indeed, the word “daydream” connotes an entertaining but meaningless diversion. But in actuality, dreams are the single largest force in determining our identities.

You are what you dream. This may seem trite, but it’s true. Our dreams shape our identities in subtle ways. High school students with dreams of playing basketball or starring in movies will concentrate less on their grades, comparatively, than students dreaming of careers in astrophysics. While there are always exceptions, in all likelihood the aspiring athlete will focus on sports, the aspiring actress will focus on drama, and the aspiring scientist on academics. Dreams may be about the future, but they can affect the here and now.

That is why the power of dreams is the basis of repentance. One of the key elements of repentance is to resolve to improve one’s behavior in the future. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik notes that several philosophers have questioned the value of resolutions. They argue that either the person will improve in the future, or they will not; what difference does making a resolution make?

Soloveitchik explains that our vision of the future is critical to our present. A sincere resolution changes our attitude immediately; a powerful dream can transform immediately.

Dreams have transformed individual lives, and have transformed Jewish history. In exile, the Jews were a stranger in a strange land, a people despised and oppressed. Despite being second class citizens, Jews dreamt of redemption and return to the land of Israel. Jews wherever they were exiled prayed facing Jerusalem, and during each prayer service, large sections of the service were devoted to praying for the return to Israel.

One would imagine that it would be ridiculous for a member of an abject minority to have any sense of optimism. However, to the poor Jew living in a hovel inside a ghetto, the dreams of redemption offered a lifeline. Even if everyone treated him as a cursed subhuman and a landless alien, the poor Jew could straighten his back and dream that he was only a few short steps from returning to his beloved land of milk and honey. And these dreams not only maintained the Jewish connection to Israel; the dreams of redemption transformed the lives of every Jew. By looking forward to the redemption, the Jew could maintain his dignity in the face of discrimination and hatred.

Throughout history, it was a challenge for Jews to hold on to their dreams, and at times, it was downright dangerous. In 1968, Boris Kochubievsky wrote an open letter to the leadership of the Soviet Union stating:

"I want to live in Israel.

This is my dream. This is the goal not only of my life, but also of the lives of hundreds of generations preceding me that were expelled from the land of their ancestors.As long as I live, as long as I am capable of feeling, I will do all I can to be able to leave for Israel……..I will be prepared to go to the homeland of my ancestors, even if it means going by foot."

Kochubievsky was immediately thrown in jail. But Kochubievsky went to jail with his dreams intact and his head held high. Today, forty years later, the situation has changed. The Soviet Union can only be found in history books, but Boris Kochubievsky can be found in Israel.

Boris’ dreams changed world history. We all need to learn how to dream like Boris, because in the end, you are what you dream.

2009-04-13T18:09:00.002-04:00

Judaism and Time: Beyond Bridges and Pendulums

(a short recap of my Pesach sermon)

How does Judaism look at time? Well, like a lot of subjects, in a complex and conflicted way. An excellent example of this can be found in contrasting some of the Jewish holidays.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are holidays that see time as a bridge. These holidays bridge between one year and the next, prodding man to judge himself and improve his behavior. Yom Kippur, the holiday of repentance, is an austere day in which man resolves to transform his nature. These holidays present time as a bridge which allows man to cross his limitations and discover new spiritual horizons.

Time as a bridge is most often associated with personal growth, seeing man as dynamic and ever changing. The famed narratives of Rabbi Akiva and Reish Lakish, in which ignorant and dissolute men become great Rabbis and spiritual giants, reflect the dynamic nature time has, and how it allows everybody to transform and change. (This perspective is less common regarding history; however, some thinkers such as Rav Kook, do accept a dynamic, ever changing view of history.)

On the other hand, Pesach, (as well as the other pilgrimage festivals), view time as a pendulum. These holidays present time as ever recurring; the Exodus, the Revelation at Sinai, the wandering in the desert, happen over and over again and again, year after year. Time constantly swings back to where it once was, producing the same seasons and the same moods repeatedly.

Time as a pendulum is on prominent display at the Seder. The Hagaddah tells us to view ourselves as if we had personally left Egypt, and we declare that “in every generation they come to destroy us”, that anti-Semitism is an iron law of history.

Time as pendulum is reflected in many Jewish sources. A well known passage is the famed Midrashic comment, championed by Nachmanides, “that everything that occurred to the patriarchs is a sign of what will occur to their children”. This seems to say that history is a recurring narrative, and yes indeed, history will repeat itself.

One passage in the Talmud says that even specific months have historical tendencies:

“..in the month of Av, we reduce joy (due to the destruction of the Temple, which occurred in that month) and in the month of Adar, we increase joy (due to the redemption related to the holiday of Purim).

Rabbi Pappa said: therefore, if one has a court case, he should avoid the month of Av, which is bad luck, and try to schedule it during Adar, which is good luck”.

In other words, to Rav Pappa, the calendar itself is a pendulum, moving between dates that are “good for the Jews” and dates that are not.

Pesach and Yom Kippur have very different views of time, indeed. What is fascinating is what they share. On both days, we declare at the very end of the service, “next year in Jerusalem”. In other words on each of these holidays, we say that the holiday itself is a springboard for redemption.

There are bridges one must cross on the road to redemption, and on Yom Kippur, we are expressing our hope that our repentance is finally sufficiently good to be worthy of the Messiah. However, on Pesach, we believe, as the Talmud puts it, “in Nissan we were redeemed (from Egypt), and in Nissan we will be redeemed (with the messiah).” We open the door for Elijah, expecting the pendulum of redemption to finally swing our way.

In actuality, Pesach and Yom Kippur reflect two sides of a famed Talmudic debate. Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer debate the circumstances of the Messiah’s arrival. Rabbi Eleizer says the Messiah arrives due to repentance, period. Rabbi Yehoshua says that the Messiah will arrive at an appointed time, and that the arrival is a law of history. In a sense, the declaration of “next year in Jerusalem” on Yom Kippur reflects R. Eliezer’s view, while the declaration of “next year in Jerusalem” on Pesach reflects Rabbi Yehoshua’s view.

Is there any possibility of finding a connection between these two conflicting views of time? Perhaps. There is one other similarity between Yom Kippur and the Seder. There is a strange custom among Ashkenazim of wearing a kittel, a white coat, both on Yom Kippur and the Seder. On Yom Kippur, the Kittel is worn because it is a garment that inspires repentance due to its similarity to angelic white and burial shrouds. But why do we wear a kittel on Pesach? Angels and shrouds seem quite foreign on the night of divine redemption. This question confounds the Taz and others.

I think perhaps a simple solution can be found. Being that Pesach and Yom Kippur have such different dimensions, with Yom Kippur viewing time as a bridge, while Pesach sees it as a pendulum, we want to remind everyone at the Seder that in truth, we must marry both visions of time together. Even if we see history returning to the same themes, we must be certain that it not be experienced as a thoughtless pendulum, something that keeps going back and forth without change. In reality, time should neither be a pendulum nor a bridge, but rather a tower, where the lessons of the past are cherished, and we grow and relive at the very same time.

In actuality then, we don the kittel at the Seder to remind us of Yom Kippur. It reminds us that the spirit of the Seder must be merged with the spirit of Yom Kippur, and at the Seder, we should not forget all the spiritual bridges we have to cross. We should not think of redemption as a birthright that we can wait passively for; even as we wait for the pendulum to swing, we hope to raise ourselves to new and greater heights, climbing the tower of spiritual growth.

Chag Sameach!!

2009-04-06T21:17:00.001-04:00

The Energy of 11:59

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for sponsoring this video!!

2009-04-01T15:25:00.001-04:00

The Power of Sacrifice

Each year, when the weekly Torah reading approaches the Book of Leviticus (Vayikra), I struggle with Vayikra’s focus on animal sacrifice. Vayikra seems foreign to contemporary sensibilities. We buy our meat in groceries and shoes in boutiques, never witnessing the actual slaughter of the animals we consume, and as a consequence, the sight of any animal blood makes us queasy. The thought that this gory act is to be done in a sacred place with sacred clergy and sacred goals seems too peculiar a ritual to inspire our 21st century hearts. Many who are uncertain about their understanding of Vayikra take solace in Maimonides’ fascinating (and controversial) remarks considering animal sacrifice to be a less than perfect form of worship, allowed only as a concession to the cultural norms of the biblical period. If sacrifices were somewhat deprecated by Maimonides, we think, it’s not so bad if we can’t understand sacrifices either.

But contemporary discomfort with Vayikra goes beyond PETA-style concerns; there’s something deeper at play here. The Biblical ideal of sacrifice demands absolute dedication, with the animal standing as a proxy for our very selves; each sacrifice is a miniature replay of the grand drama of the akeidah, (the binding of Isaac), with the owner playing Isaac’s role. And this type of selfless devotion is foreign to a zeitgeist built around personal identity.

Identity is critical to contemporary man. Our designer made possessions are intended to reflect our personal style, and we focus on building self esteem and self confidence. In marketing, one must work diligently on a “personal brand”, and develop a unique persona. And intertwined with our deep self absorption is a culture of materialism that is bonus built, consumption driven, and consumer oriented. This is not a culture that is sacrifice friendly.

However, sacrifice is an idea whose time has come. The outrage over AIG executive bonuses and auto executive private jets reflect a deep seated anger at the destructive sense of entitlement that has pervaded the corporate world. There is a growing realization that the global economic crisis was not just a failure of the financial system, but also a failure of character, a crisis brought on by the arrogance and greed of traders and bankers. Humility and selflessness, the core virtues of sacrifice, is the very stuff our culture is so desperately lacking.

The Midrash says that the lesson of sacrifice is that there is nothing as perfect for the service of God as the humble, broken heart. A humble soul, empty of pretense, has remarkable spiritual powers. Its vision of the world is not clouded by ego, and its sense of generosity isn’t smothered by greed. Seen this way, sacrifice is not about destruction; on the contrary, sacrifice allows us to release the power of a humble heart.

While the past year has produced more than its share of villains, from Shearson Lehman Brothers to Bernie Madoff, there are quiet heroes as well. One of them, Chesley Sullenberger, successfully piloted US Air flight 1549 into the Hudson River after both of the airplanes engines were disabled, saving the lives of everyone on board. Beyond Sullenberger’s flying skills was a deep-seated sense of dedication. He didn’t leave the sinking plane until he had walked the entire cabin twice to verify that there was no one else was on board, and insisted that he be the last one to leave the life raft he was in.

Sullenberger’s heroism reminds us of forgotten virtues. As we observe how greed and grift have ravaged our economy, perhaps it’s time to give respect to those who live lives of dedication and devotion; perhaps it’s time to remember those old fashioned virtues of humility and generosity.

Perhaps it’s time to remember the power of sacrifice.

2009-03-31T10:03:00.002-04:00

Holy Housekeeping

Carpool, Maimonides, chicken soup, Parshat Tzav and ivory towers.

Thank you to Abigail Hirsch for filming, staging and editing.

2009-03-26T16:37:00.002-04:00

First Things First

Thank you to Jacob Aspler for the camera work.

Let me know what you think of the sound quality - we shot this one with a mic!

Touched on children's education, sacrifices, bernie madoff, vayikra, humility, AIG and A-Rod... all in 3 minutes!

2009-03-17T22:46:00.003-04:00

Can Something You Love Ever Be Boring? - Vayakhel - Parsha Insights

A big thank you to Abigail Hirsch for the videotaping, staging and editing

2009-03-14T23:44:00.003-04:00

Notes to afternoon class on Pesach Seder 3-14-09

(I was asked to post some short notes from today's class for those who couldn't take notes. This has most of the ideas we discussed)

1. The Poem “Kaddesh, Urchatz, Karpas..”

a. Many other medeieval poems with similar purpose. Rabbi Menachem Kasher brings 14 examples of similar poems about the structure of the Seder.

b. These poems give in short verse the structure of the “Seder”. The term “Seder” not used in Talmud – medieval term.

c. several authors note the need for these poems – as a mnemonic device - because there are so many details in the Seder.

d. Rav Soloveitchik – concept of Seder – all elements integrated. Teshuvot HaRosh – telling the story of Passover an outgrowth of eating the food.

e. Idea of Seder – order – profoundly meaningful on evening of Passover. Redemption the opposite of believing that everything is happenstance – that there is no guarantee of a happy ending.

2. Ha Lachma Anya

a. Written in Aramaic – perhaps to be understandable to children. Probably, because it was the contemporary vernacular, Aramaic the language understandable to guests.

b. Intended as an invitation to guests. Otzar Hageonim cites custom to open door before Ha Lacham Anya.

c. What does the words “poor man’s bread” mean? A. most opinions – a bread poorly baked, eaten on the evening the Jews rushed out of Egypt. B. our preferred opinion – Ramban on the Torah – Jews in Egypt, harried, little time to bake. Matzah (probably originally similar to laffa) quick food (Similar evidence – Lot bakes Matzah when the angels appear as last minute guests – because it’s fast bread). C. Avudraham – tells story about Ibn Ezra, that when incarcerated in India, was served matzah – it is a more filling bread, and the slaveowner has to bake less. (but who fed the Jews at the end of the day?)

d. according to Ramban – it turns out there’s an exceptional connection between phrase of “this is the poor man’s bread our ancestors ate” and the invitation to the Seder – a way of making every guest feel comfortable – so we say, “don’t worry about your poverty – all Jews were once poor slaves”.

e. “this year we slaves.. next year in Jerusalem” – remembering the bread of slavery (as per Ramban) reminds us that we have overcome slavery in the past.

f. emphasis on slavery in Hagadah. Here are two lessons of why that is emphasized – sensitivity to those in need, a reminder that even in bleak times, there can be another redemption, there was one in the past.

3. Mah Nishtana

a. Idea of asking questions. For the child to parent (which is why we do several strange things, like remove seder plate, so the children ask questions.) and for any Seder – even when alone, Seder must be in question and answer form.

b. Rav Chaim Soloveitchik: What’s the difference between the nightly mention of leaving Egypt, and the special mitzvah to tell the Exodus story on the evening Seder? Several elements. This is one – the need to tell the story in question answer form.

c. Idea behind this – Seder meant to encourage engagement – people to relive the story of leaving Egypt – and to intellectually challenge us – so we explore the themes of the Seder ever more deeply on a yearly basis.

d. An additional idea – questioning an act of freedom – slaves cannot ask questions.

2009-03-12T10:26:00.002-04:00

Parshat Ki Tissa - Addictive Leadership - Parsha Inspiration

2009-03-09T18:23:00.003-04:00

The Five Minute Recipe for Reviving the Living

Too often, life gets buried under the details of living. The demands of daily life produce empty, pedestrian lives. Perhaps Thoreau put it best when he said: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. Much like caged gerbils running in the wheel, we run busily onward on the road to nowhere. And life squeaks along, as we run from e-mail to errand to carpool to shopping list.

But details are not the villain here; someone needs to take out the garbage and change the baby’s diapers. We need to tend to our basic needs, but we shouldn’t get lost in them. Tragically, the gerbil’s wheel often becomes a substitute for the road of life, with mundane minutiae remaining our highest aspirations.

Humans are hardwired to get lost in the here and now. We buy larger quantities of food at the grocery store if we’re shopping when we’re hungry, and we drive more recklessly when we’re late for an appointment. Parents at a Bar Mitzvah can be so distracted trying to make everything run properly, that they neglect to fully savor the celebration. (I can attest to that from personal experience). We are detail oriented trivia managers, making sure that all important tasks are completed in good time. And so we lose ourselves in minutiae, never to peer beyond the trivial and see the larger picture.

In Hassidic thought, there are two stages of consciousness: “greatness” (gadlut) and “smallness” (katnut). In “smallness”, we tend to the trivial and day to day. However, it is difficult to serve God with a mind filled with trivialities. True service of God occurs only in “greatness”, when man focuses on the bigger picture. Sadly, too many of us stay stuck in the details of the world of katnut, our daily gerbil’s wheel, and end up with lives of quiet desperation.

We all need to reach out and touch the bigger picture. But that’s easier said than done. As the renowned Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk famously said, “I could revive the dead; I have much more difficulty reviving the living.”

I hate to sound like a late night TV commercial, but yes, “in less than five minutes a day, you too can revive the living”. All it takes is a few easy steps, and you’re lucky that this offer is free!!

First we must consider our purpose in life. The Book of Esther reminds us that each person has a unique role to play in the world. Mordechai implores Queen Esther to save the Jewish people, because “perhaps that is why you have been appointed queen”. What Mordechai is telling us is that we all have a date with destiny, that wherever we may be, we each have a unique contribution to make.

We must find our destiny and consider why we are alive and what we are meant to accomplish. Destinies need not be as grandiose as Esther’s; we can also achieve our destinies by hugging children and listening to heartbroken friends. But destiny should never be ignored; there were certainly thousands of “Esthers” we don't read about, who ignored their date with destiny and were forgotten by history. We must lead our souls to “greatness”, and focus on our own date with destiny.

After that, we need to open our minds. One of the more intriguing Jewish ideas, best articulated by 19th century theologians, is the concept of “Torah Lishmah”, Torah studied for its own sake. What this means is the commandment of Torah study is not merely a utilitarian activity, meant simply to inform a Jew of his religious responsibilities, but rather a pathway to enlightenment. Torah study allows us to broaden our understanding and expand our intellectual horizons. Even a few minutes contemplating a passage from the Tanach or Mishnah can inspire serious thought and open our minds.

I have the privilege of being involved in a weekly study group that has studied Pirkei Avot and the Book of Genesis with Rashi. We have had serious debates about the acceptability of saying “what’s mine is mine”, and what the Bible means when it says that God “regretted” making man. In each of these discussions, we have moved our minds from “smallness” to “greatness”, and the rest of the day is elevated as a result.

And finally, we must open our hearts. How often do we remember to appreciate everything we have? When I wake up, even before I open my eyes, I begin to focus on all the tasks and problems of the coming day; and in the process, my heart gets covered in a thick coating of “smallness”, lacking appreciation for the blessing of a renewed life.

But there’s a better way. It is customary to recite a short prayer called “modeh ani” immediately after waking up. The prayer says :

“I offer thanks before you, living and eternal King, for You have mercifully restored my soul within me; Your faithfulness is great.”

To achieve “greatness”, we immediately open our hearts to appreciate the new day. Recently, a Holocaust survivor remarked to me how after the experiences of Auschwitz “every day is gift”. And this is true of everyone, whether or not we have endured a near death experience: every day is a blessing.

A consciousness of "greatness" doesn't take long to achieve. All three of these steps can be taken in less than five minutes: a few moments to focus on the modeh ani prayer, another few moments to focus on our purpose in life, and a few more moments to consider a passage in the Bible or Mishnah.

Or, as they would put it on late night TV:

"Yes, in just five minutes a day, you too can revive the living!"

2009-02-14T19:41:00.001-05:00

Yitro, Amalek and Anti-Semitism

Thank you to Lorne Lieberman for sponsorship, and Jacob Aspler for camera work

2009-02-03T21:50:00.005-05:00

So, There's Been a Financial Meltdown….

You may have noticed a funny thing about your brokerage accounts recently: they're a lot smaller. Financial monkey business has left the world economy with the worst financial meltdown in 70 years and your brokerage accounts are feeling the pain.

Meltdowns can crush your spirit. After losing everything we own, it's easy to lose our confidence as well. Even billionaires can surrender to despair.Under financial pressure, a leading German businessman, Adolph Merckle,threw himself under a train. The financial crisis had taken away his money; a crisis of faith had taken away his soul.

But we can cope with this financial meltdown. I say this with some authority, because I'm Jewish. Jews are the world experts on crisis. Jews have endured expulsions, inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, and a genocide,and yet have lived to see another day. Jews have found hope in the most hopeless of situations.

Jewish optimism is reflected by our holiday schedule. Some like to joke and say that the theme of all the Jewish holidays is "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat". Actually, the joke is true. We celebrate Passover because we survived Pharaoh, Sukkot because we survived in the desert, Purim because we survived Haman, and Chanukah because we survived the Seleucid Empire. The Jewish holidays are all variations on a recurring theme. What is the purpose of this repetition?

Repetition has a powerful effect on character. The Sefer HaChinnuch says that the multiple commandments commemorating the Exodus are necessary because "man is transformed by his actions". Constant commemoration leaves a permanent imprint on one's personality. All these holidays with a repetitive theme remind us repeatedly that redemption is not a pipe dream. By consistently reliving the memories of past triumphs, Jews remind themselves,(to use the words of Ben Gurion,) that "in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles".

Even at the worst times, you can find hope by remembering the past. Yaffa Eliach recounts an improvised Seder in Bergen Belsen. Rabbi Israel Spira,the Bluzhover Rebbe, spoke to the children and quoted Isaiah's messianic vision: "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned". He told the children they too could hope for redemption, to walk out of darkness into light. The message of this unusual Seder is one every Jew has heard repeatedly: redemption is possible, and you must believe in miracles.

The financial crisis has crushed too many people; every day there are layoffs and bankruptcies. But no matter how difficult the situation, we must never let go of our hopes. After all, in a few weeks they'll be another holiday, reminding us that if you want to be a realist, you have to believe in miracles.

Stop Thinking Like a Slave

Thank you to Lorne Lieberman for sponsoring his video, and Jacob Aspler for camera work

2009-01-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

Parsha Inspiration - Vaera - Hope is Not a Warm and Fuzzy Feeling

Thank you to Lorne Liebeman for sponsoring the video, and Jacob Aspler for the camera work.

2009-01-16T13:05:00.001-05:00

Israel Rally - 1-8-09 - Rabbi Poupko's Speech

Thank You to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping the speech. (the other parts of the program have had difficulty loading on youtube - I will post as soon as available)

2009-01-15T09:35:00.002-05:00

Rally Speech - 1-8-09 - Ad Matai

Thank You to Abigail Hirsch for videotaping the speech. (the other parts of the program have had difficulty loading on youtube - I will post as soon as available)

2009-01-14T10:47:00.002-05:00

Hamas And The Road Map to Mass Murder - New Video

Thank you to Lorne Liebeman for sponsoring the video, and Jacob Aspler for the camera work.

2009-01-11T20:46:00.004-05:00

Remarks From The Solidarity Rally

Below are Esti Mayer's profoundly moving remarks from Thursday night's Solidarity Rally. I thank her for letting me reproduce them on my blog.

צבע אדום

By: Esti Mayer

צבע אדום

This COLOR RED alert has sounded some 6000 times over the past two years in southern Israel, sending men, women and children to scurry in 15 seconds for a shelter. That makes 6000 times that the world stood by in muted indifference, the same indifference and silence that greeted the murder of some 130 Israeli children since the year 2000, in coffee shops, restaurants, in the middle of the street, on buses, at school, or even in their beds. Where were those “counter demonstrators” then?

I am an Israeli woman. My uncle יעקב מאיר ז"ל died in 1967. I have lost two cousins and many friends. I know, in my flesh, the horror of war, how wide the concentric circles of sorrow, and how long the pain war causes persists. I want our neighbours, with whom we were fated to live, to be safe, for their children and our children to go to school unmolested, and I want peace and prosperity to grace their streets. Let them have a state of their own, but NOT at the cost of our annihilation, and NOT at the cost of our life and liberty.

This war is just. By any legal and moral standard, this is a defensive act against a terror organization that has placed one million Israelis in mortal danger for years. Let me share with you an anecdote that illustrates my indignation. My friends Eyal and Rachel Kadmon left their home in Gadid, which is in Gush Katif, after 30 years of green-house farming there. Now, in their small “cara-villa” of the displaced, they are being shelled daily by Qassam rockets fashioned out of the very water pipes Eyal left behind in his fields for putative Palestinian farmers, when Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. The verse "וכיתתו חרבותם לאיתים" has been cynically, ironically and cruelly twisted as ploughshares are formed into weapons aimed directly at our children.

That, ladies and gentlemen, must stop. Our children have been traumatized and scarred by the 6000 צבע אדום alerts and 6000 bombs that have rained upon their days and their nights. Let us hope that henceforth, thanks to the heroic dedication of our IDF soldiers, our children’s dreams will once again be sweet and their days sunny.

2009-01-09T11:54:00.002-05:00

Parsha Inspiration - A Message to the Leadership of Hamas

Thank you to Lorne Lieberman for sponsoring this video, and to Jacob Aspler for the camera work.

2009-01-06T09:27:00.001-05:00

Article in National Post

different version - focuses more on Canadian views:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/01/06/reuven-poupko-and-chaim-steinmetz-hamas-would-destroy-gaza-to-pain-israel.aspx

2009-01-01T13:32:00.002-05:00

The Tragedy of Dogma at All Costs

By Rabbis Reuben Poupko and Chaim Steinmetz, Co-chairs, Canadian Rabbinic Caucus

Violence once again dominates the news from the Middle East. Canadians watch images of aerial bombings and rocket attacks, and are sickened by the bloodshed. Sadly, these tragic events are driven by a fanatical ideology that rejects compromise and reconciliation. These events are the result of the tragic pursuit of dogma at all costs, which has brought death and destruction to the entire region.

This dogma was on display in a recent rally in Vancouver. Rather than calling for peace, the rally’s participants chanted the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free.” For those unfamiliar with this slogan, the explanation is simple: these demonstrators were reiterating the Hamas dogma that the Jewish State must be destroyed and replaced with a Palestinian one.

Sadly, as Israel becomes more willing to compromise, Hamas has become increasingly fanatical. In August 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew its entire military and civilian presence from the Gaza Strip. This withdrawal came in the context of a wide consensus in Israel, one that developed in the 1990’s, to seek a two State solution to the conflict. The Gaza withdrawal was understood by all parties involved as a test run for a radically new approach to the conflict that had caused so much misery to both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

We now know the result. The withdrawal was a golden opportunity for Palestinians to demonstrate their willingness to be a peaceful neighbor. Instead, the absence of the Israeli military was used to increase rocket attacks on the Israelis. (Currently, 700,000 Israelis live in areas targeted by Hamas rockets.) Instead of peace, Hamas chose war.

Hamas chose war because it insists on dogma at all costs. Hamas, funded by Islamic radicals (such as Iran), represents the worst elements of Islamic radicalism. For Hamas, there is no possibility for a two state solution. Theologically, it cannot accept the possibility of any Jewish state in Israel, which, in Hamas’ view, is an insult to Islam and must be destroyed. In other words, Hamas would acquiesce to the destruction of Gaza, if Israel would be destroyed at the same time. That is why Hamas takes sadistic joy in killing Israeli civilians; suicide bombers who kill Israelis, including young children, are celebrated as heroes. In the past few days, Hamas TV has featured images of “Israeli” skulls dripping with blood, with the caption "Let them taste violent death" as well as the narration "Send them to Hell! Tear them to pieces!".

Ironically, the greatest victims in Hamas’ war on Israel are the Palestinians themselves. After pushing the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza, Hamas embarked on uncompromising strategy of terror. Instead of building the foundations of a future state, Hamas poured its energy into kidnappings and Kassams, and the economic development of Gaza was held hostage by a leadership intent on war. It may be puzzling for Canadians to comprehend how Hamas, which is at a military disadvantage to Israel, still insists on attacking Israeli civilians again and again. But intent on pursuing dogma at all costs, Hamas does the irrational. Perhaps Bassem Abu-Sumayyah, the director of the Palestinian TV & Radio Authority, said it best: "Hamas blocked its ears… They should have had even a little bit of political and security sense, and not left the people wandering, and losing their way, getting killed and injured. It is clear that Hamas was struck by megalomania since they took over Gaza…. Hamas behaved like a superpower…..”. In the grips of a fanatical megalomania, Hamas is willing to destroy Gaza in order to inflict pain on Israel. That is why responsible leaders in the region, including the leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Egypt, have condemned Hamas in the sharpest terms possible.

No sovereign state can tolerate constant attacks on its civilian population. Hamas has been launching rocket attacks for nearly eight years now, and Israel has tolerated these attacks far longer than any country should. Now Israel has to protect herself. If there is hope for a two state solution, Israelis must be convinced that territory under Palestinian control will be used for development of Palestinian society, and not as a launching pad for attacks against Israeli civilians. If Hamas, which pursues its extreme dogma at all costs, continues to control Gaza, there will be no chance for peace. A permanent two state solution depends on compromise and moderation.

2008-12-19T13:41:00.003-05:00

Parsha Inspiration - "Who Are You Dreaming For?"

Thank you again to Lorne Lieberman for sponsoring the Video, and Jacob Aspler for the video work.

Happy Chanukah!!

2008-12-13T18:06:00.001-05:00

Parsha Inspiration - "Tragedy is a Comma, Not a Conclusion"

Third installment of this new project - a point of inspiration on the parsha or current events, captured on video for youtube.

A huge thank you to Lorne Lieberman for chasing me for 2 years to do this, and Jacob Aspler for doing the video.

Please send me your comments and thoughts on this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYsNG4U4Mlw

2008-12-09T13:27:00.003-05:00

Where is the Jewish Community?

It was a moment of Jewish inspiration. A thousand Montreal Jews huddled together in a synagogue to conduct a memorial service for the victims of the Mumbai massacre and the Mumbai Chabad House. Every type of Jew, including Satmar, Lubavitcher and Belzer Chassidim, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, all came to the memorial. It was a powerful display of Jewish unity.

But after the inspiration, I was left with disappointment. The evening of course was touching and meaningful, but I was left with a nagging doubt: would this unity last? Yes, we Jews come together when things are difficult. Much like the old saying that “there are no atheists in foxholes”, there are no quarrels during tragedies; disasters have the unique ability to unite Jews together in a common cause. Bloodshed brings Jews together.

But when things get a little more comfortable, our unity fades. During the difficult days at the beginning of the Intifada, thousands of Jews, shocked by the images they saw on their TV screens, came out to rallies in support of the State of Israel. It was a critical juncture, a time “when the chips were down”, and even ultra-Orthodox Jews who wouldn’t consider themselves “Zionists” came to support the Jewish State. But once the violence quieted down, people were less willing to give their active support to Israel. Jewish unity is much more difficult to achieve in good times.

In difficult times, our hearts are touched by another person’s suffering. This powerful emotion, empathy, can affect even the most evil of human beings. While murdering six million other Jews, Adolf Hitler went out of his way to spare the life of his mother’s Jewish Doctor, Eduard Bloch. Because empathy is such a powerful emotion, even Hitler could sympathize with a Jew he knew and respected.

However, empathy is not enough. Our commitment to others goes beyond gut reactions; what is required is an unwavering, hardheaded sense of responsibility. Responsibility is based on profound sense of duty, and is not affected by emotional fluctuations. Even in the absence of tragedy, we must fulfill our responsibilities.

Responsibility is greatest towards those closest to you. Judah, when asking to take charge of his younger brother Benjamin, says to his father “I myself will guarantee his safety; you can hold me personally responsible for him. If I do not bring him back to you and set him here before you, I will bear the blame before you all my life.” Judah’s proclamation stands as the paradigm of Jewish responsibility, of how every Jew is responsible for one another.

Unfortunately, we have overlooked our responsibility towards one lonely, forgotten Jew. All of us should be asking ourselves this question: “Where is Gilad?” On June 25th, 2006, Gilad Shalit, a 22 year old Israeli, was abducted by Hamas; (it is certain that he was alive following his capture). Since then, he has not heard the voices of his parents, Noam and Aviva, and his brother and sister, Yoel and Hadas.

Sadly, other voices remain silent as well. Jews around the world, so capable of unity in the aftermath of tragedy, do very little to call for Gilad’s release. There is no dramatic video of Gilad to arouse our empathy; there is no sense of urgency for a crisis that has dragged on for over two years. It’s time we take our responsibility to Gilad seriously.

In Canada, The Canadian Rabbinic Caucus has initiated a letter writing campaign on Shalit’s behalf entitled “Where is Gilad?”. (One can go on the webpage http://www.cicweb.ca/ and quickly fill out a form that sends an e-mail to multiple members of the Canadian Parliament.).

We have to raise our voices with the Shalit family, and ask “Where is Gilad?’. But we also have to wonder why the Jewish community has done so little. Where are Judah’s descendents now, to say “you can hold me personally responsible for him”? Where is the state of Israel? Where is the Jewish community?

Where is our sense of responsibility?

2008-12-04T08:28:00.003-05:00

Parsha Inspiration - The Mumbai Massacre

Second installment of this new project - a point of inspiration on the parsha or current events, captured on video for youtube.

A huge thank you to Lorne Lieberman for chasing me for 2 years to do this, and Jacob Aspler for doing the video.Please send me your comments and thoughts on this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ6CkMyBSfc

2008-12-03T08:04:00.002-05:00

Shabbat For Gilad Shalit - Articles and Links

Canadian Jewish News, 12-3-08

Jewish Tribune, 12-2-08

CIC website (letter writing form on top right hand corner)

Canadian Rabbinic Caucus page at CIC

Facebook Page (login required)

2008-11-26T14:01:00.003-05:00

Parsha Inspiration

This is a new project - a point of inspiration on the parsha, captured on video for youtube.

A huge thank you to Lorne Lieberman for chasing me for 2 years to do this, and Jacob Aspler for doing the video.

Please send me your comments and thoughts on this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohu6G09UBqw

2008-11-22T22:49:00.001-05:00

Free Gilad Now!

2008-11-18T22:19:00.005-05:00

Why Is 25 the New 15?

When it comes to age, it seems that subtract by ten is the new rule of thumb. Everyone is living longer, and at all stages in life, people seem to be ten years younger than their actual age. Our current crop of baby boomers, healthier and more youthful than previous generations, has sworn never to grow old. Indeed, fifty is the new forty.

Subtracting by ten works well with older ages; but what about our twenty-somethings? It seems that younger people are maturing at a slower pace as well. As David Brooks noted in the New York Times: “People….. tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family. In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.”

Twentysomethings are maturing far slower than their parents. People in their middle twenties now seem to be experiencing a second adolescence. Why is 25 the new 15?

The relative immaturity of our contemporary twentysomethings is rooted in the positive phenomena of peace and prosperity. Young people in North America need not serve in the military, and most don’t. Middle class twentysomethings can expect to have their parents provide them with cars, clothing, and cellphones. This dependence on one’s parents continues well after high school. Children who are taking entry level jobs are unwilling to live entry level lifestyles, and their parents are willing to indulge them by paying the rent and covering their credit cards. As one twentysomething observer noted:

The fact is, my peers who flood out of designer stores, arms adorned with shopping bags, wouldn't be able to afford their purchases without ringing up a massive credit-card debt. By continuing to provide for their twentysomething kids, parents hinder their children's ability to be financially responsible.

Or, to put it in simple English: we’re spoiling our kids. That’s why 25 is the new 15.

The problem of spoiling children is an old one. Jacob who works hard all his life to achieve success, spoils his beloved son Joseph, giving him fancy clothes and special treatment. It’s no wonder that the Midrash says that that Joseph was immature! The problem of spoiled children is an old phenomenon; we are simply lucky enough today to have the resources to spoil our children.

Unfortunately, handing our children the good life on a silver platter can do more harm than good. A powerful Kabbalistic idea popularized by the Ramchal is “the bread of shame”. If someone is handed a loaf of bread without earning it, they lose their dignity; and even if the recipient may be happy to live life on easy street, the fact that his achievements are unearned is an embarrassment to a man created in the image of God. To truly be a “man”, one must be dignified and independent, someone who is able to earn his own way. Trust funds may pay your credit card bills, but they can also destroy your character.

This issue is of great importance to the Jewish community. In one generation, the much of the Jewish world has gone from deprivation and suffering to breathtaking wealth. It is normal for a community of immigrants and survivors to want to hand everything to the next generation on a silver platter. And so we give too much to our kids. Hard work becomes unimportant when we hand undeserving young men the keys to successful businesses. Spiritual values get lost when materialism becomes the operating principle. And so we make Bar and Bat Mitzvahs that are so over the top they lend themselves to parody, and are sometimes so garish (and expensive) they end up on the gossip pages of tabloids. Our community has survived, and even thrived in the most difficult of times due to faith, community and character. Ironically, our community’s material success threatens to destroy the very values it was built on.

Adolescent 25 year olds are not an automatic outcome of success; it happens when we forget transmit our values to the next generation. If our priority is to provide our children with values, not valuables, we will have children to be proud of.

2008-11-12T17:02:00.003-05:00

Buzz, Buzz, I’ve Got Blackberry Brain

How long will you focus on this article? Will your cellphone ring? Will you check your e-mail or your Blackberry?

Attention spans have been dramatically (….oops, wait, I have an e-mail…) shortened. A horde of digital devices emitting beeps, bells and buzzes demand our deliberation. Who has the time to think when we have text messages and e-mails that demand immediate responses? Our electronic servants are exacting taskmasters.

Even though I’m a Rabbi, I’m an authority on digital disruption; I’m a Blackberry toting, internet blogging, cellphone conferencing kind of guy. And for a while, I kept my Blackberry on “buzz” (which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Blackberries, means that my Blackberry would vibrate every time an e-mail arrived). Eventually, I started to feel phantom buzzing on my hip, even when I took the Blackberry off; my brain continued buzzing, even when my Blackberry was off. This little electronic gadget was starting to drive me crazy, one buzz at a time.

What I was suffering from was “Blackberry Brain”. With this condition, virtual reality displaces actual reality, and urgent messages trump meaningful moments. Over-reliance on electronic forms of communication alter your relationship to reality.

It’s not surprising that researchers in several countries have documented addictive behaviors in relation to cellphones and personal digital assistants (PDA’s). These devices, with their ever insistent beeping, (with a customized ringtone, of course), demand your constant attention; eventually, you feel empty unless you are typing, tapping or texting something to somebody.

Our electronic masters take advantage of a design flaw us humans have. Human beings have a propensity to fixate on details.

Even in the area of religion, overzealousness in the pursuit of piety can be profoundly destructive. The Talmud refers to the “foolish pious man” who refuses to save a drowning woman because it would be a breach of modesty. This fool is so obsessed with sexual impropriety he’d rather allow a drowning woman to die. Details, in this case get in the way; the pious fool is blinded by his petty pieties, and can no longer see the bigger picture.

We may not be pious fools, but a lot of us are PDA fools, victims of Blackberry brain. We love the wide ranging communications abilities that our Blackberries give us, as in “look, I just e-mailed my friend in Hong Kong”; but if we fixate on this buzzing busybody of a Blackberry, we will forget the people standing in front of us. I must admit, that there are times that arrive home (late) to a wife and children who want to say hello, but instead I’m typing away on the Blackberry, knocking off the last couple of e-mails of the day. (I’d have to assume I’m not the only person who does this). At that moment, when “just one more e-mail” gets in the way, we are experiencing the first symptoms of Blackberry Brain.

Blackberry Brain can be very destructive if you don’t nip it in the bud. As the condition worsens, we completely forget how to focus on other people. Old friends go out for lunch, and instead of catching up, they listen to each other with a half an ear while tapping out quick e-mails; as Blackberry Brain worsens, our old friendships are slowly replaced with shiny new gadgets, soulless devices that just make a lot of noise.

To my mind, the affliction of Blackberry Brain underlines the ever increasing importance of the Sabbath. More than ever, we need a night when we turn off the Blackberry and close our cellphones; more than ever, we need a night when the TV and computer remain dark. We need to find a sacred block of time to gather our family for dinner and conversation. Our technology drenched age needs quiet tranquil moments where authentic, person to person connections can flourish. The Sabbath is the perfect time for that to happen. Because connections come from your soul, not from your cellphone.

2008-09-18T13:57:00.008-04:00

When Saviors Fail

Health care workers life lives of deep frustration.

Doctors and nurses enter the medical profession in the hope of saving lives. Unfortunately, they must watch their patients die on a daily basis. Failure leaves a bitter taste in any person’s mouth; but for those sworn to save and redeem, failure is particularly galling, and questions their very identity.

Indeed, Moses, after the failure of his first mission to Pharaoh, protests to God:

“Why have you brought all this trouble on your own people, Lord? Why did you send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh as your spokesman, he has been even more brutal to your people. And you have done nothing to rescue them!”

Moses doubts his own usefulness as a messenger. It’s not easy for a savior to fail.

I was thinking of this verse after reading an excellent account by Theresa Brown about what it’s like for a new nurse to watch a patient die:

At my job, people die.

That’s hardly our intention, but they die nonetheless.

Usually it’s at the end of a long struggle — we have done everything modern medicine can do and then some, but we can’t save them. ……. And then there are the other deaths: quick and rare, where life leaves a body in minutes. In my hospital these deaths are “Condition A’s.” The “A” stands for arrest, as in cardiac arrest, as in this patient’s heart has all of a sudden stopped beating and we need to try to restart it.

I am a new nurse, and recently I had my first Condition A. My patient, a particularly nice older woman with lung cancer, had been, as we say, “fine,” with no complaints but a low-grade fever she’d had off and on for a couple of days. She had come in because she was coughing up blood, a problem we had resolved, and she was set for discharge that afternoon.

After a routine assessment in the morning, I left her in the care of a nursing student and moved on to other patients, thinking I was going to have a relatively calm day. About half an hour later an aide called me: “Theresa, they need you in 1022.”

I stopped what I was doing and walked over to her room. The nurse leaving the room said, “She’s spitting up blood,” and went to the nurses’ station to call her doctor.

The patient tried to stand up so the blood would flow into a nearby trash can, and I told her, “No, don’t stand up.” She sat back down, started shaking and then collapsed backward on the bed.

“Is it condition time?” asked the other nurse.

“Call the code!” I yelled. “Call the code!”

The next few moments I can only describe as surreal. I felt for a pulse and there wasn’t one. I started doing CPR. On the overhead loudspeaker, a voice called out, “Condition A.” ….

They worked on her for half an hour…… And (then) my patient was dead. She had been dead when she fell back on the bed and she stayed dead through all the effort to save her, while blood and tissue bubbled out of her and the suction clogged with particles spilling from her lungs. Everyone did what she knew how to do to save her. She could not be saved.

Doctors and nurses cannot save everyone; even Moses had his failures. Yes, saviors fail - but failures can be saviors too. We just have to remember, every time we fail, to keep on going, because “it’s not incumbent upon us to complete the job, but we can’t quit either.”

2008-09-10T11:47:00.007-04:00

A Father’s Aspirations

These are the notes to the speech I gave at my twin son's Bar Mitzvah. (I've edited it to make it a bit more readable, but it's still in note form.)

What Does a Father Hope for?

Boys, when a father looks at his children, what do you think he hopes for? What do you think he prays for? What are his aspirations?

Now you might think there’s an easy answer:

He wants his children to be happy

To be content

To have good fortune.

And it’s true, that for the father in me that’s all I would want.

But I am a Jewish father…

If that’s all Jewish fathers ever wanted, there wouldn’t be a Jewish people.

If all we ever wanted from our children is to be happy and content, the Jewish people would have disappeared years ago.

Because it would have been a lot easier to give up; it would have been a lot happier to forget about being Jewish, and just live happy lives.

But we are here because Jewish fathers and mothers wanted more than happiness from their children.

The hopes and aspirations of these fathers and mothers was for their children to carry on the traditions of Avraham and Sarah, of Moshe Rabbeinu and Beit Hillel and Rabbi Akiva.

And I want to talk to you about these aspirations: the aspirations of a Jewish Father.

Actually, I had way too many aspirations to talk about so I had to leave some out – I’ll talk to you guys about them for next couple of decades, God willing!

Aspiration I: To Become a Fireman

You haven’t wanted to be a fireman in a couple of years, right? Well, actually I’d like you to reconsider. (And on the Friday night before the Bar Mitzvah, at the family dinner, a napkin caught fire and the fire alarm went off, and 15 firemen showed up!! - coincidence?)

The Midrash describes Abraham’s search for God to a man who sees a burning castle, and declares “is it possible this castle doesn’t have an owner (who cares about it’s welfare)?”.

Abraham sees the world around him as similar to a burning castle. He immediately understands two things:

There must be an architect who built it, and owns it, and that we must put out the fire.

At this moment, Avraham arrives at the Jewish mission: to be a fireman.

A Jewish fireman must do two things: he must search for, and know God, and at the same time, he must transform God’s world. A Jew must put out the fires of imperfection that rage around us.

And that’s what I want from you Akiva and Hillel; to be Jewish firemen.

Look around this room:

There are Rabbis: people who have dedicated their lives to God’s Torah and to Avraham’s mission.

They are firemen. And my greatest wish for you is that you will become Talmidei Chachamim, Torah scholars.

There are doctors and engineers and teachers and social workers: people who make the world a better place, one person at a time.

They are firemen.

There are volunteers; people who give their time and money and hearts.

Why do they do it? because they love other people. And follow the ideal of v’ahavta l’reacha kamocha, love your neighbor as yourself. Which by the way, was the central teaching of your namesakes, the Rabbis Hillel and Akiva, rabbis who lived 2,000 years ago.

These volunteers, people who love other people, are firemen.

There are activists, who refuse to accept the evil and corruption in the world:

People who come to rallies and organize to denounce the genocide in Darfur, and suicide bombings in Jerusalem, the Chinese in Tibet, and Kassam rockets in Sderot.

They are firemen!!

And boys, I really want you to be firemen too.

Aspiration II: To Love Your Family

Family is perhaps greatest lesson taught in the Book of Genesis. The entire point of Sefer Bereishit is to love your family, although it takes much struggle, indeed the entire book, to get to the point of family togetherness.

I am privileged to be part of a family with such devotion.

And that’s why today we have family members from Toronto, New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, North Carolina, Brazil and Israel.

And you know Mommy’s family; Bubbie and Zaide, and Rona and Brad and Sari.

Any you know they will do absolutely anything for us, and they are always there for us all of the time.

And, on a personal level. I cannot express in words the devotion Bubby has given to me and all her children all of her life, nor can I express enough thanks to my older brother Mayer and sisters Sarah and Chavi, as well Yossi and Adina, who did so much to raise me.

And of course, Mommy.

You know Rabbi Akiva said to his students about his wife Rachel, the most wonderful thing ever said about a spouse:

Sheli v’shelachem shelah hee – what you and I have accomplished, belongs to her.

And this is Mommy, who is absolutely devoted to me and to the shul, and to you, and to your school, and to her friends, and to her community.

She has twice arrived in communities where she knew no one, in order to serve the Jewish people. And she is always at home, ready to serve her family with a smile.

I pray the two of you will find spouses as wonderful as her.

Aspiration III: Pass the Test

The final, and most important hope that I have for you, is that you pass the test.

This is not an aspiration we want to have, but one we are forced to have.

Every Jewish father knows that in life, there have been many tests. The tests start with Abraham's life,where he was tested 10 times. But these seem to continue over and over again in history.

Actually, life always brings many tests.

You will be forced to show your determination and courage.

You will have to work hard without quitting.

You know your namesakes, Rabbis Akiva and Hillel, were determined.

Akiva was an ignorant man. At age 40 he learned the aleph bet!!

Akiva did not give up and say he was too old.

Akiva did not give up and say it is too hard.

Akiva succeeded because he was determined.

Hillel was a poor man. He couldn’t even pay the entrance fee for the Yeshiva. He climbed on a roof just to poke his head into the skylight and hear words of Torah.

Hillel did not give up because he was broke.

Hillel did not get discouraged because life was hard.

Hillel succeeded because he wasn’t a quitter.

And that is the greatest hope of a Jewish father: that he has children who can assume this responsibility, to carry on a tradition, even though it can be tough at times.

To be determined.

To have courage.

And by the way, courage doesn’t mean that you aren’t being afraid. What courage means is that you continue to go on despite the fear.

Why Today's Miracle is So Sweet

Today, it is hard for me not to think about the challenges in my own family as we arrive here.

As you know, my grandfather perished in the Holocaust.

Bubby, my mother is a survivor of the Holocaust.

And my father Chaim, died in a car accident before I was born, and I am named after him.

It was a long road getting here.

And all of those tests do two things:

They make my aspirations as a Jewish father stronger. I want you to be firemen!!

But at the same time, it makes the miracle of today’s celebration sweeter.

13 years ago, a miracle occurred in the Jack D. Weiler Hospital in the Bronx.

Akiva Meir and Hillel Aryeh Steinmetz were born.

And your birth was not just a miracle for me, but for everybody in this room.

Because 3,800 years after Abraham and Sarah left on their mission

3,300 years after the Exodus and the giving of the Torah

and 60 years after the Shoah

There are still another generation of Jews being born. Two more Jewish firemen have arrived on the scene.

May God bless you, and may you give yiddishe nakhes to everyone in this room.

Mazel tov!

2008-09-10T10:51:00.003-04:00

Article About Blog + Apology

Hi! It's been a little while, yes. I've been busy, mostly with the wonderful Bar Mitzvah of my twin sons, Akiva and Hillel. (Who would have thought that a 900 person Bar Mitzvah could be so much work?!).

Anyway, I'll be back to blogging real soon, even with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur around the corner. (I will post some of my speech from the Bar Mitzvah in the near future.)

So, considering that I've neglected to update the blog in a month, you could imagine my embarrassment when Dave Gordon's wonderful article about this blog appeared in this week's CJN. It's like being featured in a jumbotron closeup at a sporting event, while you have a ketchup stain on your shirt.

But I will be back at blogging soon!!!

2008-07-29T12:36:00.003-04:00

Junk Food For the Soul

Nike. Hermes. Pepsi. Versace. Starbucks. Mercedes. Armani.

You know these names, and so do millions of people worldwide. They are examples of “brands”, trademarks used by manufacturers and designers to distinguish their goods. Today, brand names are a multi-billion dollar economic juggernaut that drives the global economy.

Brands may be great for business, but they’re bad for the soul. Brands used to be about quality and style, and a good brand meant a reliable high quality product. (And a brand that lost its reputation was mocked – I remember when a certain car company was ridiculed by the phrase Fix Or Repair Daily). But contemporary brands are more about image than about quality; the logo on the front of a polo shirt is a substitute for personal identity.

It’s usually wise to avoid judging a book by its cover (or as the Mishnah puts it, judge a wine by the bottle). But with brands, we are encouraged to believe that changing our cover will change our personality. Ad taglines imply that the brand’s image will become our own. If we drink Pepsi, we will “think young”, and if we buy an Apple computer we will “think different”. Nike sneakers announce that you are a proactive person who will “just do it”, and true love requires a diamond, because “a diamond is forever”. As Susan Fournier, a professor at Harvard Business School put it: "People look at brands as carriers of symbolic language and forget that a brand's first purpose is to close the sale."

Brands are junk food for the soul. The search for identity is a powerful spiritual force that encourages people to live meaningful lives. Even when man has all of his other needs met, he still needs to create a spiritual identity. As the prophet Amos says: “Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but a hunger to hear the words of God.”. A store bought brand identity substitutes ersatz meaning in place of spiritual depth.

The glamour and glitz of brands make them far more attractive than old fashioned spirituality. People contort themselves in order to own the Porsche or buy the Rolex. Among young upper middle class couples, there is what I call a “baby vs. BMW dilemma”. Should they have another child and live more modestly, or should they curtail their family in order to lease “the ultimate driving machine”?. In a materialistic, brand intoxicated culture, too many people choose BMW’s instead of babies. (Maybe babies just need to improve their brand image!)

Like junk food, brands are a tasty little pleasure when enjoyed in moderation. But like junk food, brands can replace a healthy spiritual identity with fashionable but hollow designer vanity.

And too many people have sold their souls for a logo.

2008-07-10T16:02:00.005-04:00

What Do You Have When You Have Nothing?

Natural disasters have dominated the news. In June there were the disastrous floods in the Midwest, and in July, wildfires ravaged Northern California. Thousands have watched their homes and possessions destroyed.

It is particularly painful to consider the fate of those who lived outside of flood or fire “range”, and were not insured. In a matter of hours, they watched the bulk of their assets disappear, along with their homes and communities. In natural disasters like these, lives are ravaged along with the countryside.

The question that nature forces upon the survivors of these catastrophes is simple: what do you have when you have nothing? It's a question that seems absurd at first; if you have lost everything, then you truly have nothing.

Actually, those of us who live comfortably are afraid of contemplating this question. We are driven more by a fear of loss than by any possibility of gain. (This has been demonstrated by the economist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in this area). If fear of loss is frightening, the thought of losing everything is terrifying and unthinkable.

In loss, the unfortunate victims have nothing, and feel like they are less than nothing. Indeed, the Midrash, refers to this sentiment in saying that “poverty is like death”. Faced with extreme losses, it feels like life is not worth living; indeed, Job, after suffering the loss of his family and his wealth, is urged by his wife to curse God and commit suicide.

But this is the wrong answer. Even when stripped of everything else, people still have their character. In times of extreme stress, a person still has the courage to cope with their circumstances, and the dignity to transcend their limitations. Although impoverished and homeless, man still holds the keys to his own character.

Character is our most precious possession. Little David, a shepherd boy armed only with a slingshot, can take on Goliath because he has something Goliath lacks: character. David’s weapons are courage and cunning; weapons like these are held in one’s heart, not in one’s hands.

Dreams are another priceless possession that can never be destroyed. No matter what a person’s situation, he can still pursue his dreams. And when the dispossessed pursue their dreams, they can change the world. The Prophet Zachariah describes the messiah as poor, and riding on a simple donkey. Zachariah’s words remind us that if you want to redeem the world, you need to hold on tight to your dreams, even in poverty and hardship.

Throughout history, many have faced the question of “what do you have when you have nothing?”. Some, like Job’s wife, have given the wrong answer, and given up. But those who continue to hold courageously onto their dreams have changed the world.

A few months ago, I visited the Museum of the Jewish Heritage in New York. On display was a special chuppah commissioned in the year 1946 by the Joint Distribution Committee. (a chuppah is a marriage canopy used in Jewish weddings). What made this chuppah unique was that it was for the use of Holocaust survivors who were marrying each other after surviving the war.

When I saw this chuppah, I was overwhelmed with emotion. How is it that people who had seen so much destruction, who had lost everything, could still get married? Isn’t it absurd to try again at life when you have nothing left? But I realized that these couples where not truly destitute and bereft; after all they had their dignity and their dreams, the most important possessions in the world. And it is these couples, with nothing else but each other, who went about rebuilding the Jewish world and succeeding beyond their wildest dreams.

These poor survivors, who had nothing in their hands, actually had everything they needed, tucked away in their hearts.