Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

The Elul Love Your Neighbor Study Challenge

Dear Friends:

This Shabbat is the first day of Rosh Chodesh Elul, the new moon marking one month before Rosh Hashanah. I want to invite all of you into a challenge with me: the Elul Love Your Neighbor Study Challenge.

Part of the process of teshuvah (returning, redirecting ourselves) is studying what the Torah says about relationships between people and our responsibilities in the world. One of the unique ways the Jewish community can reshape the world in the new year is by bringing into action our teachings about compassion and justice.
 
What better way to start doing both of those things than to study this month a verse that is at the literal center of the Torah: וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ V’ahavta l’ray’acha kamocha “Love your neighbor as yourself”
 
The tradition of Jewish commentary on this phrase, each word within it, and its context in the Torah make clear that this is not some vague and gooey teaching. Rather, it opens up a set of challenges and questions that we have to figure out how to apply in our personal lives and as citizens.
 
The challenge:
I would like to study this verse during the month of Elul, between now and Rosh Hashanah, with at least 75 people. I hope many will be people who don’t already usually study Torah.
 
When and How:
If you are interested in hosting a study salon at your home, or setting up some study time with me for yourself or a small group at the synagogue or another place, contact me as soon as possible! Or, come to one of these ready-made opportunities:
 
Love Your Neighbor Café (coffee, tea, etc are on me!)
Thursday, Aug. 16 10:00-11:00 a.m. A&E Coffee Roasters, 135 Rte 101A, Amherst
Friday, Aug. 17 10:30-11:30 a.m. Buckley’s Bakery and Café, 436 Daniel Webster Hwy, Merrimack
Wednesday, Aug. 22 1:00-2:00 p.m. The Village Bean, 33 Indian Rock Rd (Rte 111), Windham
Tuesday, Aug. 28 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Riverwalk Café, 35 Railroad Square, Nashua
 
Lunch Hour Torah – call in or participate by video through the web
12:00-1:00 p.m. Aug. 14, 22, or 30
Just click https://zoom.us/j/5530075723 or call (929) 436-2866 or (669) 900 6833, use meeting ID 553 007 5723

Beit Midrash In-Depth Study Session – 2 Hours of Torah (With Snacks)
6:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday, August 16 and Tuesday, August 28
at Temple Beth Abraham (20 minute interlude for minyan at 7:30 p.m.)
 
I hope this sparks many conversations. I know I will learn a lot through this learning together, about ethics and relationships and even politics, and we will figure out ways to share what we learn. I'll post updates on how far we are toward the surface goal of the challenge, and include a small taste of the topic in my regular Elul e-blasts.

May this be a step toward a Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet New Year!

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov, a good new month,
Rabbi Jon

Reverend King and the Rabbis -- Fifty Years Later

My D'var Torah of April 7, 2018:

Fifty years ago last month, ten days before he was assassinated, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared before the national convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the annual gathering of Conservative rabbis. It turned out to be Rev. King’s last interview. He was greeted, for the first time in his life he said, by the singing of “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew -- Anu nitgaber. Deep in my heart, I do believe -- the rabbis sang: Ani ma’amin be’emunah shlaymah, nitgaber b’vo hayom.

Rev. King was introduced by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Indeed, he was supposed to be just a few weeks later at Heschel’s house for the Seder. Questions had been gathered from the convention, and they were presented to Rev. King by Rabbi Everett Gendler, who had been the catalyst for Heschel’s own now-famous participation in the Selma march five years earlier. Listen to what the questions were about:

• the president of the United States
• extremist vs. more moderate approaches to social change, and which do Blacks support on the whole
• what integration really would look like, politically and economically
• the relationship between racism and poverty
• anti-Semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric in the Black community
• and finally -- what one thing would Rev. King most want the rabbis and their communities to do right now, beyond what they called “simple tutoring and palliative efforts”

Fifty years after Rev. King was taken from us, and we are still asking the same questions.

I don’t think that in and of itself means that we are stuck in the same place, that we have not moved in fifty years. As the arc of history moves toward justice, in fits and starts and slides backward, there are always certain running themes, questions of values and basic truths about society and ethics, and we should keep asking them, return to them. That’s what our weekly Shabbat gatherings are for -- to figure out the timeless questions beneath the news of the week, so we can ask them and apply some answers in the week to come.

But there is no question that a great leader and a great religious teacher was stolen from us in Memphis fifty years ago, at the age of 39. I call him Rev. King and not Dr. King because he was a teacher about the prophets and the ethics of the Bible to Jews as well as Christians. His core teachings are important to share, to label and present on many occasions. They have depth and they have significance because he was not only steeped in faith, steeped in the prophets, but also steeped in the detail work of a movement and of politics. So Rev. King’s Torah is a kind of steel sharpened and polished not like the Talmud envisions by argument among scholars, but by the test of the world and its Pharaohs.

The Rev. King who spoke to the Rabbinical Assembly fifty years ago was sober and somber, more so than the King who spoke at the Lincoln Memorial so famously. Where 1963 was a year of protest and demonstrations, organized by a pretty united civil rights leadership -- 1968 was a year with violence and riots, controlled by factions or by no one. There was no talk of dreams before the Rabbinical Assembly that day; the goal was harder to see in a single focus. But the enduring truth of the man and the consistency of his teachings were still there, and I want to tell you what we should be learning right now from that Rev. King.

There was a quote from the prophets that he frequently invoked, from the book of Amos: “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (5:34). It’s not just beautiful poetry, or just one of any number of exhortations to justice and righteousness in the Bible.

To the ancient Israelites and their prophets, water could be one of two things. It could be rain, scarce and inconsistent, whose every drop had to be caught and channeled, or gathered in cisterns, in a hard fight against nature. Or it could be a never-stopping river, fed from the mountains or from deep within the earth; or the waves of the vast sea -- the most natural and easy and dependable thing in the world.

Some people believe that justice is against human nature and the nature of society. Plenty of people and plenty of thinkers. Rev. King believed that justice and righteousness were built into the world, that in the nature of things they simply flow and gush as simply as gravity, rush into every corner to give it life. That’s a proclamation of faith. That’s not a description of a reality -- it was the opposite of the reality he was fighting against. But Rev King’s fundamental lesson was that justice simply is the true nature of the world, no matter what we see. It takes a deep faith to hold onto that, it took a deep faith for him to hold onto that despite all he had experienced and seen.

And these same words of Amos were also his view of power -- that there is a natural power of justice that cannot be matched by any opponent or any earthly power.

This verse, in fact, comes at the end of a passage in which Amos describes the hard work that oppressors have to do, the labor they have to go through to twist justice, to feast on bribes, to look away from the poor and drive them out from their communities. And the hard work that it takes to present yourself as religious before God, bringing sacrifices and organizing celebrations, when you are the author of so much injustice. Amos is saying: this is unnatural. The power it takes to do these things is a wearying power, a deadening power, a power that spends itself and takes us away from each other and away from the divine.

“Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Rev. King was teaching us about power. First of all, we need to think in terms of power, of acting powerfully and creating real power, because righteousness needs to feel and to be experienced like a mighty stream. Power is not a dirty word. He asked us to believe in the power available to those who will be just and link arms together, to roll ahead and stream forward mightily.

In front of the rabbis that day, Rev. King talked about the upcoming Poor People’s March, and talked about power:

I can’t see the answer in riots. On the other hand, I can’t see the answer in tender supplications for justice. I see the answer in an alternative to both of these, and that is militant non-violence that is massive enough, that is attention-getting enough to dramatize the problems, that will be as attention-getting as a riot... And this is what we hope to do in Washington through our movement.

And he pointed out to the rabbis their power, the prophetic power of their pulpits:

...the religious community, being the chief moral guardian of the over-all community should really take the primary responsibility in dealing with this problem of racism, which is largely attitudinal.

It is time for us to claim this power that we have, as religious leaders and religious people. This should be the easiest kind of power, the power of our speech and the clarity of words that distinguish what it just from what is unjust.

In front of the rabbis, Rev. King was in one of the toughest times of his life and his work. He was embattled within his community, and it was an angry time and a fearful time. And Rev. King can teach us something about anger and fear. And I think again that it was the prophet Amos that he was drawing from, because Amos was at times an angry prophet.

Rev. King taught and spoke in a way that addressed power, anger and fear from the vantage point of faith, and particularly the vantage point of love.

Anger on its own is destructive and divisive, and violent. Anger with love is simply a station on the path to jsutice. Anger with love, Rev. King taught by his words and his actions, anger with love is indignation. That becomes fuel for righteousness and for service. And somewhere along that way, anger is transformed even into joy and into song. And then comes another phase of anger, but it is again just a station, through love, on the way to righteousness and service.

The prophet Amos began in fear -- he compared himself to someone reacting to the roar of a nearby lion. But he transformed that into a message about the cleansing waters of justice, and into a message of love, challenging love.

In front of the rabbis, Rev. King talked about anger unmoored from faith and love in both the Nixon campaign and the Black Power leadership. Today we see of course that same kind of anger and fear unmoored from any faith and any love, in the president and the destructive part of his following, and in too many leaders of the protest movements as well.

We need to look at our own anger and fear, and channel it back through faith, into love and commitment and service.

Justice, power, fear, anger -- Rev. King’s teachings about all of these are a roadmap we need for today. We need first of all to see the justice issues behind the suffering of people in our country, in our city and region. To say it straight and simple -- a city with pockets of affluence and pockets of poverty like ours is not a just city.

We need to believe, even so,that justice is how God’s creation is built, that it is the nature of justice to flow like a mighty stream.

When we are angry at those who deny the possibility of a just society, or who argue that the steps of change are not realistic, we need to transform that anger into love and service to those who are suffering.

And we need to believe that success will come from power rooted in nonviolence, in true words magnified by prophetic voices and mass presence and mass action -- the truest real power in the world.

Deep in my heart, I do believe . אֲנִי מַאֲמִין בֶּאֱמוּנָה שְׁלֵמָה  Ani ma’amin be-emunah shlaymah. There is so much yet to do, and so much yet that we can do, to repair and heal our society. We were privileged, as Jews and as rabbis, to be partners so often with Rev. King,  and to have him speak directly to us. May we continue to learn from him, zichrono livracha, that his memory may bless us and through us bless many others.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

Pesach and Who We Are

My Temple Beth Abraham bulletin column before Pesach in 2015, still spot on!

Why do we care about what's in the past?  Why do beginnings interests us, whether it's the origins of the universe or the first lines of a book?We look to the beginning to give us the essence of the whole.  Origin stories are about identity and values.  Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, is the story of the origin of the Jewish nation.  And it doesn't disappoint.

We talk about being in Egypt – because who were are, are people who know how important a home is, and that you don't take that for granted.  We talk about being slaves – because we are defined by our identification with people who are oppressed and not free.

We talk about God fighting on our behalf against Pharaoh – because we were the lowest on the ladder, worth nothing, yet we were designated to carry a message of hope and possibility into the world.

When the world looks at the Jewish people, it looks in the mirror.  Our story reveals that there is Pharaoh in the world, and there is God.  Our origin is testament to the idea that the Mishnah teaches about the story of Pesach.  Mat'chil big'nut um'sayaym bish'vach – start with shame and end with glory.  On the road from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, through the desert toward Israel, we taught the world that no people and no person is too broken to be a vessel for divine wisdom and compassion.

That's all right there, at the start of Jewish history.  Almost everything else is commentary.  The stories we tell on Pesach are the seed, the Big Bang, the constitutional convention for the Jewish people and Judaism itself.

At our Seders, we talk about this and act it out.  For the rest of the week, we ingest it and digest it.

For a lot of people, the Seder is the big highlight and then there is a slog.  Eight days of matzah in various forms – crunched, spread on, microwaved with sauce and cheese, crumbled into kugel.

This year, think different.  First of all, think about difference itself.  Why is this week different from all other weeks?  We're sitting at work eating (making crumbs) different things from other people.  Give an answer when they ask:  Why are you doing that?  It's because of what happened to me when I and my people went out of Egypt.  It takes us a week to meditate on that, and we're using our bodies and not just our mouths and minds to sort out the meaning of it.

Second, don't get hung up on what a friend of mind calls the “Passover-industrial complex.”  Ditch the boxes of cake mix and dissolving noodles, and eat simple.

Matzah itself a simple food, while chametz (leavened food) represents human complexity and arrogance.  Did you know that according to the Torah, Pharaoh built his tyranny as a system of food production and distribution?  Eating fresh produce and simple dairy products cleanses our bodies, humbles our souls, and collapses the distance between us and God, the Source of sustenance.

Once again, the American Jewish World Service and Equal Exchange are partnering on Fair Trade chocolate, which you can find in our Sisterhood Gift Shop.  And don't forget tomatoes, which many American rabbis have adopted as our anti-slavery project.  Try to eat.... (I need to add a couple sentences here, doing a little research)

And don't forget, as we say at the Seder, “let all who are hungry come and eat.”  If you have a place at your Seder even now for someone who doesn't have one, let me know and I'll make the match.  And while we focus on our own food, please remember to give to organizations like the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter especially at this time of year.

Pesach connects with us high and low – in stories and how we reflect on them, in food and how our bodies process them.  There is a lot to chew on, in both senses!

Chag kasher v'samayach – Wishing you a joyful and kosher holy day,
Rabbi Jon

Purim -- Getting Out of Our Masks

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat, the Shabbat preceding Purim.

Max Friedman is a young member of our congregation. He recently graduated from George Washington University, but even before graduation Max was a digital entrepreneur. What makes me proud that he is part of our community is the way Max has channelled so much of his enterprise into tzedakah -- for instance his startup Givebutter, a fundraising platform that helps student organizations and nonprofits raise money online.

I mention Max today, though, because of an article he published in Fast Company about ten days ago. Max wrote this on Facebook when he shared the article:

"...two years ago there was an article that was written about me with the headline 'Is This GW Student the Next Mark Zuckerberg?'

"And while it was cool to be even remotely associated with Mark, it sparked something inside of me that I had never felt before - I felt like an imposter. I did nothing wrong, and I had nothing to do with the article aside from being featured in it, yet for some reason I could not shake off these feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and self-doubt. I thought the whole thing was a mistake.

"Since then, I've learned that there's actually a term for this; it's called Imposter Syndrome, and over 70% of people report being affected by it to some degree in their lives."

Max’s whole article is called, “How I Beat the Imposter Phenomenon as the Youngest Person in the Room.” He talks about how he handles carrying the burden of a label -- “The Next Mark Zuckerberg” -- a label that he didn’t ask for, that follows him or that he often has felt follows him when he walks into a room to pitch a potential customer or investor.

Another word for this kind of label, or the “Imposter Phenomenon” that goes with it, would be a mask. Something people see that is not real when they look at you, or me. Being seen with a mask on is the story of Esther, and it’s what we all enact on Purim.

A mask could well be a compliment -- “The Next Mark Zuckerberg”, “the greatest mom I know”, etc. -- but that mask leads to the imposter feeling of being seen in an undeserved way. And masks can of course be negative. We all know the judgments that people make based on how we look, the masks they attribute.

Masks come from the outside world, from the culture, or from assumptions people make when they don’t get to know us first. And we can create our own masks too when we don’t know what we really want to reveal, or when we want to show other people only what we think they will value or appreciate.

In the Megillah, Esther has not just one mask, but a series of masks placed on her. She is born as Hadassah, Hebrew for the myrtle tree, which is something whose essence you can’t really suppress -- the distinctive leaves, the aroma. 

But she gets turned into Esther, which is a pun on the Hebrew word הֶסְתֵר hester, which means hiddenness. Esther is the ethnically unidentified teenage beauty that Mordechai tells her to be. Then she is in the care of the king’s harem-meisters for months, as they cover her face with makeup and her whole body with lotions. Then she is the queen of an empire, but only as an ornament.

None of these Esthers are who Hadassah is. Though to tell the truth we have no idea, when the story begins, who Hadassah is. Neither did she, probably. That’s one reason we let ourselves take on masks from other people, or put them on ourselves. Masks come in ready-made models, and it’s easier to have one on sometimes, than to figure out exactly who I am, and then to figure out exactly how to show that.

But even when we present ourselves with a positive mask, and maybe especially when we do, we experience what Max Friedman calls “insecurity, anxiety, and self-doubt.” We can sense the gap, or we fear a gap, between the mask and the real face that we don’t want to show, or we don’t know how to show.

On Purim we deliberately put on a mask -- and then we take it off. Both together constitute the costume ritual of the holiday.

What can we learn about taking off our masks, getting out of imposter mode -- from Queen Esther, and from Max Friedman?

In his article, Max shares two lessons that he discovered, and to me they are also explanations of Esther.

Max’s first lesson is: “reframe ‘inexperience” as ‘gaining experience.’” For Max, that meant changing from the mask of “the next Mark Zuckerberg” back into "students working on a project...seeking advice.” This was an identity he and his collaborators could embrace, and as Max explains it, “we spun our inexperience into something forward-looking and true to ourselves.” Youth became not a mask, but a face, and an exciting one.

When Mordechai came back to Esther and told her that it was time to act like the queen, she did the same thing. Her first response was that she was an imposter queen -- the king doesn’t even want to see me. But soon, Esther  embraced both the fact that she wasn’t yet that kind of queen -- and that she would try to act as a true queen would for her people.

It wasn’t a simple matter of taking off her mask, because there wasn’t something for Esther to show yet. Only when she decided to serve her people, to step out for a higher purpose, would the mask really be off. Esther would be, to use Max’s words, “forward-looking, and true to herself.”

Max’s second lesson is: “use friendships as your foundation.” He talks about how hard it can be to find mentors who know you well enough to advise you about your work and your path -- but friends can do a lot of that. Max writes about the importance of his best friends and his parents, and says: “For me, imposter syndrome is most potent whenever I’m featured in a public setting–in the press, on a podcast, at an event, etc. I’ll often feel irrationally insecure and struggle with fits of self-doubt. In these moments, I always turn to my closest friends.”

Esther didn’t have friends -- that stretches the analogy a bit too far. She had to believe in her support system outside the palace: Mordechai encouraging her, people praying for her.

But the lesson from Max, at least, is that real friends help us get out of the mask. There is a gift that I give to many of our community’s kids when they are about to go to college. It’s a little handheld mirror. I say: This mirror shows you what you look like as the image of God. And if you can see yourself this way, you will find yourself becoming a true friend to others, the person who shows them what they look like not in their mask, but as the image of God in their own unique way.

When you take off a mask, we see your face. A mask is frozen -- that’s why it’s false, that’s why it makes us feel wrong. It highlights the uncomfortable difference between who you pretend to be and who you are at the moment. But a face moves. It expresses all our feelings, our happiness and disappointment with ourselves, our surprise and our pride as we learn and grow. Your face is how you show who you are and who you are becoming, and the gap between them isn’t embarrassing anymore, because we all wear that on our own faces.

Who you are and who you are becoming. From inexperience to gaining experience, not just in work but in relationships and tikkun olam. With friendships as a foundation. Notice the masks you put on -- we all do it. Then take it off, and show your face.

MLK's Letter From Birmingham Jail

"In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society..."

 

Reading Rev. Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" should be part of our annual recognition of MLK Day. It's one of the most important statements about religion in American history.

 

As a non-Christian, I have no trouble transposing all his church-specific references. (One of the people he was writing the letter in response to was a rabbi.) What would it mean for the Jewish people to be a thermostat that transforms the mores of society?

 

Read the entire letter here:

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

and here Rev. Dr. King reading it out loud here: 

http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/audio/630416001.mp3

New Page About Chanukkah

I just posted a whole page about Chanukkah (including why I'm spelling it that way....)

http://rabbijon.net/rabbijon/chanukkah.html

A Quick Idea For How To Get People To Talk at Your Seder

Here are my freedom quotes, including the ones in the video and more. It's a Word doc so you can edit it with more that you find. I printed it on cardstock so it would be a bit more like playing cards!

Proud to Be Jewish and Making a Difference in the World This Weekend

A quick check in before the last Tishrei holy days:

I am incredibly proud of our congregation, Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua. Yesterday we hosted Imam Muhammad Musri from Orlando, who was visiting the nearby mosque in Lowell, for a talk on the basics of Islam. At least sixty congregants attended. People asked questions about the faith and there was the beginning of conversation about Islam in the world and the U.S. today, and the role of its leaders here. We plan to follow up, with a visit by me to the local mosques to talk about Judaism, and now we know the nearest imam so we can continue these conversations and build relationships.

Big thanks to the Southern New Hampshire Jewish Men's Club for hosting a (calm!) candidate forum today with Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Gov. Maggie Hassan, running for Senate; Rep. Ann McLane Kuster and Jim Lawrence, running for Congress; Executive Councillors Chris Sununu and Colin Van Ostern, running for Governor.

As moderator, I mostly asked questions submitted by the 100 or so people in attendance, plus a few of my own. I got a commitment from both Sen. Ayotte and Gov. Hassan to meet with me and Rev. Allison Palm of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua on Thursday, Nov. 10. One day to rest after the election, but only one. They will meet us together, regardless of who wins their election. At the end of an acrimonious election at the national level, after which large minorities may doubt the new president, we will be talking about how to get active Democrats and Republicans to move forward with the fact of a new president, and to reach out personally to people they know in the other party in order to change the divisive climate starting right away.

 

 

Yom Kippur Sermon and Sukkot

I've posted my Yom Kippur sermon, a reflection related to the election year and my previous post. Also I have some material on the site here related to Sukkot, the festival that begins Sunday night. Chag Sameach!

Rosh Hashanah Sermons 5777

Here are my two Rosh Hashanah sermons from this week:

• 1st Day -- How Good Do I Have To Be?
• 2nd Day -- Hope In An Uncertain World