Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

5 Reasons To Take Your Kid Out of School for the High Holy Days

It is not easy to take a day off of school or work for the High Holy Days. As school pressures have become more demanding, even at younger ages, the decision about bringing children to services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur on a school day might be more difficult for a parent than ever before. In places like New Hampshire -- any place where there are few Jewish families in any school -- there can be a lot to navigate in terms of homework, tests, and after-school activities.

So here are five reasons to take your child out of school and bring them to services anyway!

1. It's amazing to see so many people taking time all at once to make ourselves and the world better.

This is the essence of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

It's one thing to say that each of us should always be trying to be a better person. It's another to see hundreds of people focused on that all at once.

We can show our children: Look how many people are working on bringing out the good in themselves and each other. It matters so much to them that a lot of them are taking off from work, and from school.

This is what being Jewish is all about.

2. So many Jews!

Especially outside of, say, Israel and New York, when do you see the Jewish community so big?

If you are a child in a place where your family is the only Jewish family around, or one of the only ones, you may not feel like you are part of something big and important. Being a minority can feel special. But seeing you're part of something bigger when you're Jewish is also special, and can make it easier all the times when being a minority is hard.

3. Shofar is really cool.

During Rosh Hashanah daytime services, and at the very end of Yom Kippur, the shofar (ram's horn) is sounded. On Rosh Hashanah, there is a specific order of blasts, long and short and very short and very long. It's really like nothing else we ever do in a service.

It's ancient and primal. The shofar itself is pretty exotic. In our synagogue, there are different looking shofars that our blowers use.

Plus, in a lot of synagogues, the kids are invited to come up really close even in a service where there are hundreds of people. You get the best seat.

Also, not to be sneezed at -- the Torah scroll. Not everyone gets to see it up close when it's open. But we have been copying it word for word for more than two thousand years, onto parchment scrolls.

4. Learning to be different

Coming out on a weekday to a religious service, and especially a Jewish one -- that's pretty countercultural. It's good to fly in the face of the culture of conformity and achievement, at least here and there.

It's good for our kids to learn that standing proud in your identity is important and not easy, but worthwhile if the cause matters. It can even feel good. Especially when you can tell your friends later about the shofar, or a Hebrew word.

Being different takes effort. You have to explain things about yourself and your culture, you have to know about your heritage. A lot of the work belongs to parents -- to be the ones to explain and advocate toward teachers and coaches. By the way, I (or whoever are the rabbi or Jewish leaders where you are) am right behind you, to equip you or to make calls on your behalf.

5. Hanging out

There's the service, and then there's not being in the service. Kids get to see other kids who are Jewish too and more or less their own age. But it's not Hebrew School, so they get to hang out and catch up and even connect with new kids.

There's always a couch or a room or some corner in the synagogue to find and claim. Kids get to make the place their own.

Behind almost any adult synagogue regular, or or almost any rabbi, there are stories and memories of what we did on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur when we weren't in the service.

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All that -- and you and your child or children will hopefully find services meaningful too -- words, teachings, songs and melodies.

So even if it's hard, and even if you yourself the parent have a lot of questions about what's going on and what it all means, think about coming to services on the High Holy Days and sharing this experience with your family.

Got any thoughts or reasons of your own? Leave them in the comments!

If you are in our area and don't already have a synagogue for the High Holy Days, we would love to have you at Beth Abraham. Click here to learn more or get in touch.

"How To Be President" Launches!

On Tuesday, July 2 we made some history with the first presidential candidate forum from "How To Be President." This is an initiative to add something that is missing to the presidential primary process. We hear all about issues and resumes, but rarely if ever about leadership reflections. No one forces candidates to talk about how they are preparing for this unique and un-preparable-for job. No one asks about holding the power of life and death, or maintaining one's self-confidence and ego in the face of constant failure and frustrations of one's power, or the role of humility when you are the leader of the free world.

We need the candidates to hear these questions constantly, so they know it's important to us that they answer them and that we won't trust them to be good leaders if they don't. We need to hear each other ask these questions, so we don't let each other settle for bad preparation and bad vetting.

Someone has to ask these questions. It should be journalists -- but they don't. So we have to model it and ask them to! You can ask questions yourself, like the ones listed here. You can attend our forums or watch them on YouTube.

Former U.S. Representative John Delaney was the first to accept our invitation. The video is here, with notes that point you toward the time in the video where he addresses each question.

My partners so far are Rev. Allison Palm of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, Rev. Sally Newhall of the Nashua Presbyterian Church, and Michael Reinke, Executive Director of the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter.

Okay -- here are all the things you can and should do:

• Read about the whole project
• Bookmark this page of questions -- have it open on your phone when you talk to a candidate
• Video them or record them or write something when you ask, and post it with #howtobepresident
• Like our Facebook page and share it on your own feed
• Subscribe to the YouTube channel
• Watch the videos and send them to others
• E-mail us so we can tell you about what is coming soon

Reflections on Leadership From This Week in the Torah

This is the sermon I gave three years ago, during the dog days of the 2016 election. But there is a lot here that still resonates, about the leaders that I crave. I'm going to work on the text I refer to there from the Slonimer Rebbe and probably teach more about it this Shabbat.

https://www.rabbijon.net/rabbijon/2016/07/thirsty-for-leadership.html

My Letter After Poway

This is the letter I wrote our congregation today.

Dear Friends:

Once again we are mourning and raging after an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue over the weekend. Lori Gilbert Kaye was a dedicated member of Chabad of Poway, and she was killed as she tried to protect Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who was injured. Almog Peretz and his 8-year-old niece Noya Dahan were also wounded. We pray for their healing, and for consolation for the Kaye family.

I have been and remain determined not to give any anti-Semite the victory they want in any way. They want to push us out of this society. They want us to be too afraid to gather in our places, or to live our lives as Jews out in the open. They want us to feel that we do not belong.

But it is they who do not belong. It is they who are being overwhelmed. Our mitzvot – the deeds that we do, our whole reason for being as the Jewish people – our mitzvot are simply and inevitably more powerful than their violence.

Our place in America is part of what America is all about. Every time an anti-Semite shows his or her face, ten or a hundred or a thousand of our friends and allies come to our side. Within hours after news of the shooting, our synagogue received messages from Christian pastors in our Greater Nashua community, and from the Islamic Center, which offered us any help we might need and sent a note to their entire congregation.

Tomorrow, Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., we gather at Rivier University as we do each year, to commemorate the Shoah (Holocaust) and learn something new about what happened, how people responded at the time, and how people have lived with purpose and hope after the Shoah. That will be our opportunity to be together after the Poway shooting. I urge you to come – with your pain and with your resolve, to comfort each other. To declare our unity and resilience as a Jewish community and a wider community in the face of anti-Semitism and hate. To honor the Shoah’s victims and survivors, and to keep learning its lessons for us today. Please invite people you know outside the Jewish community to come tomorrow as well.

We have spoken with officials at Rivier to go over security for the event, and there will be an extra security detail. Our own Security Committee has been working continually and is in the process of preparing an update for the congregation.

I have reached out with calls and messages of support on our behalf to Chabad of Poway and the other two synagogues in that community, as well as to the Krinsky family, who lead our own Chabad in Manchester.

We will not stop being who we are, even during a week like this. We are the people of the House of Avraham and Sarah who spread Torah and goodness into the world.

L’shalom,
Rabbi Jon

Seders Are Done, But Passover Isn't!

My column for the April 2019 bulletin for Temple Beth Abraham:

One way to experience Pesach (Passover) is: Two nights of Seder, followed by a week of matzah. Two nights of a unique happening – around a table, with people very familiar and/or new to you, part recitation and part roleplaying, with symbolic foods and special foods, detours for discussion, hopefully much singing. Then – a week of just figuring out how to eat.

In fact, Pesach is meant to be so much more expansive. A long, immersive experience of first-time freedom. The Seders are supposed to launch us into a week-long new year festival. We’re intended to continue to read and reflect on the meaning today of our people’s Exodus from Egypt. We’re meant to experience freedom as though these were our first free days and our first free steps.

The Seder scripts the very first steps, just as the Torah says our ancestors were guided step-by-step through the days leading up to and through the first Pesach. But part of freedom for them meant that they didn’t have a simple script for the next days, the first days as a free nation.

And it’s the same for us. It’s on us as Jews to define what those first days of freedom are going to be like. We have special food for the journey – matzah and other Kosher for-Passover things. What will we make out of our freedom?

In the Talmud, the sages Rav and Shmuel argue over what freedom essentially means. Shmuel says the story of the Exodus begins: “We were slaves in Egypt.” Rav says: “Long ago, our ancestors worshipped false gods.”

For Shmuel, the story culminates in the final escape from Pharaoh. For Rav, the story peaks when the Jews arrive at Mt. Sinai, to make a covenant and speak directly with God. Shmuel argues that the Exodus is primarily about physical and political oppression. So Pesach is a celebration of being freed from tyrants and tyrannies.

Rav argues that it’s about spiritual oppression, about being freed as well from the falsehoods of Egypt. So Pesach is about how we get ourselves to Mt. Sinai, how we decide to use our freedom.

This year, we need both a Shmuel perspective and a Rav perspective on our situation as Jews. We should use the whole of Pesach, not just the Seders, to reflect and learn about what it means to be free Jews today, and commit ourselves to some actions as a result.

In a Shmuel perspective, we need to reflect and learn about anti-Semitism, from the murders in Pittsburgh to the slanders of Rep. Omar. Here’s a book to read during Pesach, if not before: Anti-Semitism: Here and Now by Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt. Prof. Lipstadt is one of the most sought-out teachers and commentators on the matter. She is a Holocaust scholar, the central figure in a major trial in the U.K. about Holocaust denial, and someone up close to campus anti-Semitism from the left. Read her book or find her writings online.

And if you have been feeling paralyzed by reappearance of anti-Semitism in any or all of its forms – resolve to take some action. If you are within a group that needs to be called out, do that from the inside. If you can be an ambassador for Jews and Judaism, among people who might know very little, do that. Invite someone to services with you, or invite them to coffee with you and if you like with me.

In a Rav perspective, we should remember that true freedom has to be for something, toward something. Pick something new to learn about Judaism. Come to a class, engage with the weekly Torah reading online or with a study partner or with me. Get your own copy (or borrow a child’s copy!) of Rabbi Telushkin’s Book of Jewish Values. While you are eating your matzah, resolve on a way you can strengthen our own Jewish community. In a joyful way, through Shabbat meals or at services or celebrations. Or when we need each other the next time you see an announcement about a house of mourning.

And as you take your first steps from Pesach toward Mt. Sinai, think about the next mitzvah that your soul is begging to focus on. It could be some aspect of tzedakah (giving) or lashon ha-ra (gossip). Maybe you even want to partner up with someone to do it together – create the next Beth Abraham tzedakah collective, or buddy up on a gossip management project and check in each week!

Whatever you do – don’t let Pesach just be about something that happened more than 3000 years ago. Don’t let the days after the Seder slip away without savoring the first moments of freedom and responsibility, without noticing that the way you’ll notice every crumb of matzah in the seat cushions!

Wishing all of you a Zissen (Sweet) and Kosher Pesach,
Rabbi Jon