Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Your Two Personal Assistants Toward the High Holy Days

This year I updated my usual re-post about Moshe and Yeshayahu, your "two personal spiritual assistants", and published it at the Times of Israel:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/your-two-personal-spiritual-assistants-toward-the-new-year/

Pitchers and Catchers, Candles and Circles, Rivers and Apples: How Rituals Will Really Help Us Approach This New Year

This is almost too good to be true: the beginning of the month of Av in the Jewish calendar this year coincided with opening day for Major League Baseball.

Usually around this time of year I show you this T-shirt based on an observation by Rabbi Morris Allen at my parents’ shul about the absolute parallels between the Jewish calendar and the baseball calendar. 

In all other years, pitchers and catchers report to training camps around Tu Bishevat, and spring training games begin around Purim. Which is for us the start of a warmup period too, with planning and preparation for Pesach, which generally coincides with baseball’s Opening Day!

On the T-shirt this part of a typical year is what here is called the “dog days of summer”, and it lines up with Tisha B’Av, the fast commemorating the destruction of the Batei Mikdash (the two Temples). In baseball this kicks off a hot and hard period of time leading to the pennant races for spots in the playoffs and the World Series. The climactic moments of the season in September and October coincide with the month of Tishrei and the High Holy Days. (Well, they did before the expanded playoffs!)

This year, time and the seasons have been disrupted, and summer isn’t what summer usually is for many of us. Even baseball has this compressed season -- the whole cycle from Opening Day through the champshiop will take place in three months from now to the end of October. And for us, our season of teshuvah, of reflection and renewal, begins now with the week of Tisha B’Av and this Shabbat called Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of Vision. 

This week and this Shabbat kick off two months of reflection that lead toward the big games, so to speak, the High Holy Days, when we judge how the past year went and think about our destiny in the new year. We think about being in exile and coming home. We spend a month, well into October, with the holy days through Sukkot and Simchat Torah.

Like in baseball, there’s a lot this year packed into three months. But baseball’s new Opening Day, just invented out of whole cloth, can remind us that time in a ritual sense is something we construct as communities, to help us do what would otherwise seem infinite and overwhelming. Without the calendar rhythms and rituals, it would be harder to stop and take note of our blessings. Without them we couldn’t step out of everything that’s driving us, to tell stories of our past, stories of challenges and resilience, stories of difficulty and hope.

Without the calendar in particular, we could easily be overwhelmed by the demands of staying alive and getting by, in a world that is enormous and throws so much at us.

My teachers at the Seminary, Rabbi Neil Gillman and Rabbi Joe Lukinsky, taught us what calendars and rituals do for human communities. They are how we fight for some order out of chaos, and how we build actual power to push some of the chaos away. Think about how many of our rituals take place at the moments when darkness begins. Our candles on Friday night and Saturday night, when we fight off the darkness where danger might lurk -- we refuse to retreat, we insist on saying I am standing, we are standing. In Jewish ritual, we choose those night times for our most messianic dreams -- when we step into Shabbat, the Taste of the World to come; when we step out of Shabbat in the first darkness of the week and summon Eliyahu, the prophet who tells us when redemption will arrive for the whole world.

Think about how many of our rituals are sitting in circles, or nowadays rectangular circles around tables, singing -- creating strength, covalent bonds between us, a binding chemistry that draws out the power in each other that is more than the sum of all our parts.

Our genius as human beings is ritual and calendar. These allow us to pull blessing and strength and resilience and connection out of the chaos that could be the world. otherwise Rituals are supposed to help us face what we are afraid of and make it safer to be afraid and handle fears, together with each other, together with the wisdom of our ancestors. Rituals let us tell stories not just about the past but about the future, the crazy audacious stories of a world so much more perfect thatn our own.

Rituals aren’t life, and they aren’t the only thing religion is supposed to be. They are where we find the energy pods, the wisdom pods, and the connecting bonds that we need to go out and live. Rituals and holy days are not for themselves -- they are for life,as a whole and we need them so we can live in this challenging time.

This year, we especially need those rituals. We will use them and wring us much as we can out of them in this particular season of this particular year. We need to consciously bring more of the rituals and more of the calendar rhythm, from this Opening Day of the beginning of Av all through the whole holy day season, Rosh Hashanah through Simchat Torah. We need to use all of it, because there is so much chaos and so much overwhelm in our worlds. As individuals, as households, as parents and schoolchildren, as citizens.

I want to help us this year make use of all the time of these three months coming, especially starting with Elul at the next new moon. And I want to help us make use of rituals that we sometimes just do superficially.

The four weeks of Elul leading up to Rosh Hashanah should include four deliberate check-ins. Maybe you’ll set aside four times for yourself to sit and reflect. Or meet four times with a group of people online or in a yard, twice to look back and twice to talk about hopes for the new year. Or maybe you commit to just getting to know a group better within the congregation, or learning something that might be valuable for your new year from a Jewish source. 

We will have the sweet apples and honey, so we can think about what is still sweet in our lives, what is fruitful, what has been generative this year that we forgot to notice. We can look at the seeds and think of what we planted, or who planted something inside us that has grown beautiful and nourishing to others. We can think about what might grow and what will be sweet even in this unique new year.

We have the shofar, blown every day of Elul and on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We will think about the shevarim blasts, the brokenness of our world and the things that broke apart for us in our lives, and how we want to see them put together again. We will think about the t’ruah blasts, the scattered details of our lives as we have learned how to do each little thing again in a new way. We will think about the t’kiah gedolah, the clear calls we still believe in and still want to hear, the ways we are whole, the summons to  where we want to be going.

We will have lakes and streams and oceans we can stand by, where we can toss away the things we badly want gone from our old year.

We will have the sukkah, the simple structure that challenges us to think about what protection is, what we really need in our material lives. By the time of Sukkot, we can hopefully think of ourselves as active builders of the new year.

All of these times and rituals will help us think about uncertainty and fears, and give us time to reflect and redirect -- and help us find the powers we still have, the wisdom we still have, the power and wisdom we can share with each other, all that power over the chaos of 2020 and 5780. Our rituals and our calendar will not be another demand added to an overwhelming list. They will make our lives easier, and help us turn our cries into songs.

We will have this new season through these months, from the new Opening Day we declare this week to the World Series of our holy days. One way or another -- together, online --  we will stand in circles as the sky becomes purple, and light our candles, and sing together,  so we can live well in a new year.

School Opening -- Ethical Idea #1

School-related ethical idea #1.

Whenever I have a lot on my plate and try to figure out what’s more important, one strategy I try to use is “2-for-1.” Which items on this list are both important once for themselves, and also valuable for what they enable me/my organization to do down the road?

So as I think about the urgent need to make the opening of school successful in all ways this fall, I thought of this 2-for-1 approach to deciding when, whether, and how to be with other people for, say, the next 6-8 weeks.

(This is very contextual. I live in New Hampshire, where the infection rate has been very low recently compared to the country as a whole. There are possibilities for the opening of schools here that don’t exist in many if not most other places in the U.S.)

Here is a four-part ethical maxim, first draft, a kind of emergency ethical order:

1. We will go out in public around people (in accordance with the recommended health/safety guidelines) if it is for something that could help our community learn how to open schools safely and successful for students, teachers, staff, and families.
2. We will share whatever we learn with those responsible for opening schools and with each other.
3. We will go out in public around people for something that is urgent for someone’s wellbeing (myself or someone else) and can’t be put off.
4. Otherwise, we will not go out where other people are even if it’s considered safe and permitted, because not being with other people is the surest way to block the spread of the virus, and every pathway blocked makes it more likely that schools can operate safely and successful in my community.

As an ethical approach, this puts care (including self-care) at the center and focuses our action on one of the top social solidarity issues at hand right now, which is schooling.

I should say that I am proposing this as a collective action. It doesn’t make much sense as an individual maxim; it wouldn’t hurt but it wouldn’t make that much impact. My whole point is to think about social solidarity, what we can all do for the public good

I am leading a synagogue, and this intrigues me because it gives a purpose for some of the things we are working on for in-person gathering. We focused first on care – stretching for funerals and shiva (mourning). Our outdoor, small group parking lot services have tested out procedures and refinements, and have yielded observations about what works and what doesn’t (for adults; no kids involved yet). What we learn as we plan and pilot for the Jewish high holy days in mid-September can be very valuable for schools in a number of ways.

In fact as I write this, I think about making this a kind of prayer/kavvanah/intention for any in-person gatherings we have: “Behold, I am here today for the sake of the children in our community, their parents, their teachers and all who support the education of our youth in every way.” This could itself be the test of an action right now – if one can make that statement one is about to do something worthwhile, and if one can’t make the statement one should reconsider.

Thoughts?

Rubik's Cubes and Cities of Refuge

This is my D'var Torah for Parashiyot Mattot-Mas'ei, on July 18, 2020.

This is a Rubik’s Cube:

The Rubik’s Cube starts all jumbled up, with random colors mixed together all over each side. The goal is to get every one of the six sides to be entirely one single color. This is tricky because whenever you move one thing toward one side, you move another thing off its place somewhere else. 

Sometimes it’s possible to work the Rubik’s Cube by solving a whole side and then moving on to the next one. Even if you do it this way, you still have to dislodge something from that side temporarily while you are fixing up another side. You have to make the perfect side imperfect again for a bit in the process of tackling another side of the cube. Everything is connected, so moving something into place also involves moving something out of place for a moment. If you’re really good, you can move it back.

I think of an ethical life as a Rubik’s Cube that is partially solved, maybe one or two or even four sides solved but others stubbornly not. Moral dilemmas are usually like this too. You have a number of ideas that make sense, several sides of the picture are solved, but the whole thing isn’t, and something is completely messed up elsewhere,. Part of what makes it right on this side is making it wrong on that side.

So we have a partially solved Rubik’s Cube in the parasha. It’s the case of the accidental killer and the city of refuge. The situation is that someone has killed another person -- God forbid, chas v’challilah -- and no one questions that A killed B. It might have been a flying axe blade, or even a push because A didn’t know B was there. It happened. That’s clear.

It’s also true that A is not an enemy to B. There’s no specific motivation anyone suggests, no grudge between them. This is attested by other people in a court. That side is clear.

There is the family of B, who have suffered a terrible loss. They are bereft, and they are considered by the Torah in its time to be justified in seeking the death of A. It’s more than understandable; things can’t just be let go. And tthe Torah believes that the community as a whole is in danger whenever blood is spilled and nothing is resolved. Members of thefamily of B are given the name of go’el ha-dam, “redeemer of blood” or “redeemer of life.” It’s sometimes translated as “avenger”, but in the Torah it’s not a negative name. They are considered to be standing up and acting for the value of life. Another side that’s clear.

There is a lot of clarity here, many sides of the ethical Rubik’s Cube lined up, but there is no way to get the last side in place. If A, the killer, is put to death, that’s an unjust punishment. If A pays money to the family of B, that is considered an insult to the life of B and the idea that human life is beyond all value. If nothing happens, that’s also not just and does not respect human life.

The Torah feels both that the family of B is entitled to try to kill A, and that A should not be killed.

So the Torah instructs the people to set up cities of refuge, arei miklat, where A can safely escape the family of B. There has to be a city in every region of the land and every region just outside the land where some of the tribes live. The cities are supervised by the Levi’im, a special group of leaders. Person A stays there until the death of the current kohen gadol, the high priest, and only then can go free.

Again God forbid that anyone be killed at the hand of another, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I have been trying to think about the law of ir miklat as a response to all the unsolved Rubik’s Cubes in our social life.  Situations where life and death have been at stake. Every motivation on each side is right, every suggestion for what to do is right at least in its own terms, but there is no picture as a whole that is right. Or at least it’s not as right as each of the pieces of it.

And in that situation the Torah institutes miklat -- refuge, shelter. It’s an end to killing, a suspension of the violence, and it’s not proposed as a solution. Everyone is frozen in their current imperfect situation, no one forgets what originally happened, and everyone is prevented from making it worse.

This doesn’t happen all by itself. The Levites are involved. They are leaders with a special spiritual role, who live not with their own tribes but linked across all the other tribes throughout the land. And the high priest is somehow involved. He is a leader whose job each year is to restore the community to spiritual balance, to cleanse the Temple and the community from all the wrongs that have happened in the past year every Yom Kippur.

Two of the life-and-death realities that are ongoing right now are the pandemic and the question of school in the fall, and the racial justice issues around policing and incarceration. Two really challenging Rubik’s Cubes. This week as I’ve had the parasha in mind I’ve been particularly attuned to how some sides are solved and clear, and yet the whole is not solved at all.

In my world as a parent, there are a whole bunch of statements that are clear about keeping students safe and keeping teachers safe, about the importance of learning and of schools for the overall wellbeing of kids and of families.... and yet it does not look anything like the Rubik’s Cube as a whole is any more solved than before. Some people think that it’s enough to solve one side and stop, and others think it’s enough to solve a different side.

Over the past two weeks, while criminal justice reform work in legislatures and agencies has not been the major news, we’ve had very visible conflicts in print and digital media, with statements about the importance of keeping the claims of people of color in the center, and with statements about the importance of open inquiry and critial investigation around proposed solutions. Some people think it’s enough to solve one side and stop, and other think it’s enough to solve a different side. The Rubik’s Cube as a whole looks very disarranged.

So what would the ir miklat, the city of refuge, look like today? I have been thinking that people are exhausted by the efforts of trying to solve even a single side, to reach some moral clarity on either of these issues. This exhaustion itself creates a heightened possibility that we will harm each other more, even by accident, that we will harm ourselves. A summertime ir miklat doesn’t require anyone to let go of the clarity they have achieved. It’s a pause, with a commitment to being careful, a promise not to make anything worse.

Just as each region in the land had its own city of refuge, maybe each ethical “region” where there is conflict and violence needs it own way and time of refuge right now.

Maybe we could take turns. I said in my e-mail yesterday that I think all of our educational leaders and all of our racial justice leaders and all of our police leader should take a week or two away, to find a city of refuge. I think we all deserve a miklat as well, a safe refuge for a time, because we’ve all been pried open and exposed for months now.

And I know I have been looking for Levi’im, for leaders to oversee these dilemmas who are especially grounded in service to us, and who connect the many tribe. I have been looking for the Kohen Gadol. A purifying figure or a purifying group, who are willing to put maybe not their lives at stake, but at least their reputations on the line. Leaders who will say: We know these things seem impossibly complex. But we want to be in this game; we want to solve these Rubik’s Cubes. We want people to stand around us and cheer us on. We don’t want fear of death and fear of killing and fear of harming to be all there is to say with certainty. We want to hope to be more certain, and we want to attack the Rubik’s Cube with creative problem solving, and we want people to value the magical things in our schools and our society, in every beautiful color. We want to be inspired, and we want to be inspiring.

We don’t know how to solve the Rubik’s Cube of racial justice yet, nor do we know how to solve the Rubik’s Cube of school this fall. We have a lot of sides worked out, but we aren’t going to get the rest of them by running ourselves past exhaustion, with times and places of refuge, guided by the right people.

You who have heard me speak know that slow down is not my usual message, and “just do a mitzvah and another and it will all work out” is not my philosophy. Miklat should be a very specific kind of pause. The Torah tells us every year to seek cities and places of refuge, starting in this mid-summer portion and over the nex six weeks. It will come up in the Torah every couple of weeks -- and then the Torah will say it’s time to head toward the promised land,. Time to finish wandering. But we can’t march if we don’t have the refuge we need. I hope you will find some in the next weeks, and I hope you’ll do your part to make sure other people find them too.

Giants, Not Grasshoppers -- Toward the Landscapes Just Ahead of Us

This is my D'var Torah from last Shabbat, June 20, Parashat Shlach L'cha.

This week in the book of Numbers, there is a beautiful project that Moshe is getting impatient to launch. In a nutshell: it’s about becoming a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, in a land flowing with milk and honey. Moshe is impatient in a good way, and his instinct about the moment is that the people have been sitting still for too long. A lot of study groups working on the laws and the institutions, the beginnings of complaining because the people are in limbo in the desert... So Moshe decides it’s time to move closer to moving by sending out the scouts, the m’raglim. From the Hebrew regel, the leg – there’s going to be movement, shoe leather. Not everyone at first, but while the people are sitting still there is going to be activity by some. Sounds a bit like us now, yes?

So how did this step go?

The land flowing with milk and honey, eretz zavat chalav ud’vash, is now also a land that devours its inhabitants, eretz ochelet yoshveha. And the kingdom of priests and the holy nation? Now it’s we saw giants, and we looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we came to look even to ourselves.

And as a result, the people went nowhere. For a whole generation.

What happened, and what can we learn from for our own moment?

I summarized Moshe’s big project in two parts -- there’s the land and there’s the group itself. The most important thing we can learn from the m’raglim is not their report about the land but their report about themselves. Read carefully – the ten negative scouts said good and bad things about the future ahead. Bounteous, but also impossible. What they said about themselves though was very clear: We are grasshoppers, not giants.

I want us to look at this so we can learn how we can be giants and not grasshoppers, across the many landscapes we are looking at now and looking ahead to right away and over the next six months.

When Moshe set up the mission for the twelve m’raglim, he structured it for them around a set of questions, and most of them were good, clipboard kind of questions. Observe and report what’s out there – what’s the soil like, the trees, the fruit, the cities? But he threw in one question that wasn’t like that. Tell about about the land, hatova hi im ra-ah – is the land good or is it bad?

What kind of question is that? God had already given promises about a good land over and over. Opening up that question opened up the possibility of coming back and saying the land is bad. And that colored everything. The ten m’raglim had the opening to say the land was bad because they were really reporting on a different issue: Are we good or are we bad.

Calev and Yehoshua were able to say the land is good, because they could also say: We are good. Calev said: Yachol nuchal la. We are capable, we are up to this.

The others said: the land is good, the land is bad, see it both ways -- but we are definitely grasshoppers, looking at giants.

Why grasshoppers? Why not ants or locusts? There’s almost no traditional commentary on the metaphor.

I think last year I asked my daughter Sarinah about this, who is of course the bug expert in my household. Between her teaching and some other research, here are some things I’ve learned about grasshoppers:

1. Grasshoppers aren’t discriminating about what they eat. They’ll eat pretty much everything, whether it’s nutritious or not for them.
2. Grasshoppers use up what’s right there and they have no relationship to what’s right nearby in the field. They hop – they flit from one place to another. They’ll go any distance from where they are and then eat whatever happens to be there.
3. They are obviously at home in the grass – they exist where the roots are shallow, they don’t try to be near anything whose stature is much more than their own. In fact they have evolved to basically look like grass.
4. On its own a single grasshopper behaves fine, but in groups they devour, they destroy.

So why did the ten m’raglim compare themselves to grasshoppers? It wasn’t just about size and strength, small grasshoppers compared to giant humans.

They were saying about themselves, and they were saying about all of Am Yisrael:

1. Like grasshoppers, we can’t focus – we’ll try anything whether it’s useful for us or not. We hop from one thing to another, one focus or mission or cause to the next.
2. Like grasshoppers, we don’t lift our eyes up enough – we’re content to be in a field where everything is small like us, where nothing reaches to the heavens. In the psalms grass is compared to the wicked, who are widespread and fast growing but shallow, while the righteous are like a palm tree – tall, not so many, but deeply rooted. They were saying: We’re grassy, not palmy.
3. Like grasshoppers, we don’t sink roots. Our commitments are not deep, we don’t take the time to make them deep or to trust one another to be deeply rooted.
4. Like grasshoppers, we don’t trust ourselves as a group to be capable of great things – we think if we try to act collectively we will be destructive.

What the ten m’raglim were saying is that they didn’t see themselves or the people as wise enough or capable enough to try big things without destroying in the process.

Giants, they thought – that would be someone else. Those huge Canaanites who look they had fallen out of the heavens, godlike in strength and stature. Pharoah was a giant. Giants are Avraham and Sarah, in our past but not our present. You Moshe aren’t a giant, and neither is anyone else we know or could even imagine right now.

But Calev knew different. The Torah says he had ruach acheret, a different spirit. Rabbi Zohar Atkins says actually he had two spirits. One spirit understood what the ten grasshopper-scouts experienced, he got it entirely. And one spirit that said no, the giants are us. A kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

And I know different too. I know that we are giants, we Jews of this time and place. And if we are not giants, it’s just that we aren’t giants yet.

The justice issues of our day – we can be giants.

The grasshopper view is that we will lack focus, we will approach them shallowly like the roots of grass, and we will destroy our own community in the process. There were giants of justice in the past, not in our current generation. But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, we can learn and act with depth, and we will in fact strengthen our own Jewish community in the process as we also strengthen America. I know this, because the people in our congregation who have already organized a prayer service and a resource list and a thoughtful committee and are grappling with how to talk within our Jewish community, they are acting like giants.

This pandemic, and how we will live through it by taking care of each other even though we don’t know if we have to do this for weeks or months still – we can be giants. The grasshopper view is that we lack focus. We do creative things for a bit and soon we’ll run out steam, or we will do it shallowly with e-mails only and just appear to be active. But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, on making sure every person in our community gets a phone call with regularity, and we can act with depth as we discover what people need in concrete ways or in emotional support.

And I know this, because there are people who are stepping up to make calls even though they have other commitments and are tired, and there are mental health professionals who are making their wisdom available to me and our leadership, and there are people generous in all kinds of ways, and these people are acting like giants.

The future of Jewish community and the synagogue, here and across America – we can be giants. The grasshopper view is that we lack focus, we try to do one thing that might appeal superficially and then another, and we don’t take the time to really root ourselves in a mission that we repeat over and over. The grasshopper view is that communities will just eat up an ever-diminishing set of resources and burn out our own leaders.

But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, because rabbis in the hundreds around the country have been organizing ourselves with focus on how not just to survive but how to innovate during the pandemic.  Talking to each other and creating new networks out of nothing. Look at us, you here this Shabbat morning, recreating community on the fly every single day and week. Wait till you meet Sarit, our newest team member, a thoughtful educator and a social entrepreneur - she is already starting to guide us and focus us. And in the months leading into and out of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I will show you how deep and how giant is Judaism as a response to this time we are in, and how many incredible teachers there are for you around this country.

We are not grasshoppers. If we are not yet giants, morally and spiritually, I am here to tell you we can be, if we decide to go into the new lands together. I’m going. The lands ahead of us, whether it’s the landscape of justice in America or the landscape of the pandemic or the landscape of synagogues – they are good lands. They are flowing with milk and honey. It’s no question whether they are good or bad – they are good. But if you don’t believe that yet, the lands are what they just are. Our job is to go into them now. Even when we have to do that while staying physically inside our homes. As Calev said: yachol nuchal lo – we are capable. Because, us -- we are a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Shabbat Shalom.