Rabbi’s Reflections

Limnot Yamaynu - HH 2023

Rabbi Deborah J. Brin When I was a kid, I had this idea that life was a conveyor belt and you got on it in nursery school and got off of it after High School, College or Graduate School. And then you eventually found your way in the world, work that paid well enough to live and eventually meaningful work, and hopefully life with intimate others; best friends, chosen family, a partner or spouse and perhaps children. It seemed to me it was like a conveyor belt that was at a set speed that you couldn’t change. I remember an episode of “I Love Lucy” with Lucy and Ethel standing at a conveyor belt in a candy factory. They were supposed to be packaging the chocolates and then the candy started coming faster than they could package them so they started eating them and stuffing them into their apron pockets. The conveyor belt of life, as it were, can be unrelenting. Life on life’s terms, the way it unfolds for each one of us has delightful things, wonderful things, amazing things and also hard challenges that are just built into being alive. There is a verse from Psalm 23 that helps us deal with life on life’s terms, especially when the going gets rough. Verse 4 says, “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for You are with me”. The Hebrew for “shadow of death” is a compound word that can simply mean “dark shadows” or “thick darkness” or even “dark destruction”. We could say that the verse means: even though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will not be afraid because You are with me. My friend and colleague, Rabbi Min Kantrowitz, likes to remind people that in order to have a shadow, there must also be light. That light can be thought of as hope, or inspiration or the Presence of the Divine. Some of us have trouble with the idea of God, and referring back to the psalm, of not being afraid because God is with us. Most of us are atheists in the true sense of the word. So, what is an atheist? When the letter ‘a’ precedes a word of Greek or Latin origin, it is a prefix of negation. In other words, an atheist is someone who does not believe in a God who is a Supernatural Being who created the universe and intervenes in it. Those of us who reject the idea of God as a Supernatural Being are not alone. We are inheritors of the philosophical legacy of giants like Baruch Spinoza, Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Baruch Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam, part of a prominent Sephardic family. He was a brilliant philosopher who, at the age of 24, was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam due to his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous acts”. We don’t actually know what Spinoza did or said, though the writings that he began publishing soon after certainly give us clues. Spinoza was one of the first people to say that the Torah was not handed down from God to Moses but was written by human beings over a period of time and then edited. If that wasn’t radical enough in the 1600’s, he also rejected the traditional idea that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is a Supernatural Being that created the world, revealed the Torah to us, chose us to be His People, hardened the heart of Pharaoh or split the Reed Sea for us. Spinoza was influenced by many other thinkers. Descartes who lived in France during Spinoza’s lifetime was a major influence. Spinoza’s theology is wrapped in the scholarly philosophical language of his time and can be quite challenging to read and understand. Spinoza believed that God and Nature are the same. He thoroughly rejected Descartes’ dualism, the idea that the world is made up of mind and matter. Instead, he claimed that the universe is made up of both spiritual and physical elements and that they are one and the same. This is the basic idea of pantheism, that All is God; that God is the totality of Existence. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, was raised in a traditional household with the idea of a Supernatural God that created the Universe, revealed the Torah and its laws to us at Mt. Sinai, and who can and does intervene in human history. Over time, Kaplan rejected these ideas about God. Kaplan died at the age of 102 in 1983. Even though he was an observant, ortho- practic Jew, he thought about God differently. He rejected the idea of God as an Almighty Omniscient and Omnipotent Person or Being. He thought about God as a Force or Process that operates within the Universe and is the Source of meaning, holiness and justice. It is because of this Force or Process that we strive to make the world a better place for everyone. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, was a Lubavitcher Hasid who traced his mystical lineage back to the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism. Zalman taught us that everything is God. Ayn Od Milvado. All is God and God is All. The Hebrew phrase: Ayn Od Milvado, אֵ֥ין ע֖וֹד מִלְּבַדּֽו, literally means there is no other God than God. God is God alone. This comes from the Book of Deuteronomy. The full verse, Dt. 4:35 says: “Adonai is God, there is no other. Ki Adonai hu ha-Elohim, ein od milvado”. כִּ֥י יְהֹוָ֖ה ה֣וּא הָאֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ין ע֖וֹד מִלְּבַדּֽוֹ The Hassids gave the Biblical text a twist. All is God. There is nothing besides God. Zalman, and Heschel both spoke of “theotropism”. It is a theological adaptation of a botanical term that describes the movement that plants make in response to the directionality of the sun. This is called ‘heliotropism’. Sunflowers show us this most readily, as they move to face the sun during the course of the day. Theotropism is a term that refers to how human beings turn toward God the way that sunflowers turn toward the sun. We move, we change, we grow and our ideas about God change and grow with us. The word “God” is a linguistic place holder to describe the indescribable, to “eff the ineffable”. The mystery of life itself. That which is greater than us and way beyond us, the Source of Life. The Force or Process operating in the Universe. Divinity, sacredness, mystery. The All-ness of What Is. That which is way beyond us, the “not me” that truly is at the Center of the Universe, the spark of which we hold in our souls. As life unfolds for each of us, wonderful, delightful and amazing things happen to us and for us. And, life also has its difficulties, hard and tragic events do take place. Fear casts a huge shadow. When we are in the shadow, in the dark place, we tend to turn away from God, from the Source, Life Force or Process within the Universe. We shut down. We disconnect. Fear is rampant these days. There is plenty to be afraid of within our world today. Even though we are walking in dark times the Source of Light & Life in the Universe is always there, we are always a part of it, and we can turn toward it and lean on it in times of trouble and distress. “Even though I walk through a valley of deep darkness, I will not be afraid because You are with me.” There is another verse from psalms that I would like to explore. Psalm 90:12 Teach us to count our days that we may obtain a wise heart. לִמְנ֣וֹת יָ֭מֵינוּ כֵּ֣ן הוֹדַ֑ע וְ֝נָבִ֗א לְבַ֣ב חׇכְמָֽה Other translations say, “teach us to treasure each day”, and Reb Zalman’s translation is: “Make us aware enough to treasure our days; a wise heart brings vision”. It is very hard for us to be aware and alive and conscious in the present moment. Even though it is all that we have, all that there is, our minds wander backwards to the past and fly forwards into the unknown future. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” Right now, this exact moment in time is all that we actually have. Each of these singular moments are gathered into hours, and those hours create days, and each 24-hour period adds up to weeks, months and years, until the measure of our lives is fulfilled. We can’t change what happened in the past. We do think about the past and what we have done or what others have done to us. Sometimes we get into an endless cognitive loop about the past, and perhaps we get angry about it or are filled with resentment. On High Holy Days, we do think about the past and try to recognize when and where we have messed up, and acknowledge that we do have behavior patterns that need to change. We can’t go backwards and change what actually happened, but we can move forward with new behaviors, new perspectives and new attitudes. It takes work and effort and persistence to make those changes. We can make amends for our own misdeeds. Forgiveness goes along with making amends. We need to forgive ourselves, and we need to forgive others. Sometimes we don’t want to forgive the person or people who have hurt us physically or emotionally. Hanging onto that anger, pain and resentment doesn’t hurt them, it hurts us. Forgiving those who hurt us is for our own sake. Zalman, in his book Age-ing to Sage-ing said, “One of the most powerful tools we have to reformat the template of our being is forgiveness . . . when I refuse to forgive someone . . . [I] incarcerate [them] in a prison that I construct from the bricks and mortar of a hardened heart . . . I must spend as much time in prison as the prisoner I am guarding . . . From this point of view, bearing a grudge is very “costly” because long-held feelings of anger, resentment, and fear drain my energy and imprison my vitality and creativity.” Teach us to treasure each day, to stay in this moment as best we can, is a very challenging concept and a wonderful spiritual practice. Reb Zalman taught us to say as many “shehechiyanus” as possible in a day. It is the prayer of the moment where we thank God for keeping us alive, and sustaining us and bringing us alive to celebrate this very moment. When we have a Shehechiyanu consciousness, as Zalman would say, it is a way of allowing ourselves to be present in this exact moment. And, since wandering away from this awareness is inevitable, saying the Shehechiyanu is a way to find our way back to the present moment. When something wonderful happens or you see something beautiful, being able to eat when you are hungry, hearing good news, or wearing a new piece of clothing, say a shehechiyanu in your head. It is a wonderful and short prayer to learn by heart, and if you don’t know it you can say to yourself something like “oh, wow, this is great”. Being in the moment is very hard to do, and we fall away from that awareness regularly and often throughout the day. It is especially difficult if we read newspapers, listen to the news on the radio or watch the reporting on the television. Our world right now is very broken. Climate change is wreaking havoc all over the world. Fires, floods, tornados, hurricanes, droughts that dry up rivers and lakes. In the United States our society has become imbued with bullying, divisiveness, deliberate deception, intimidation, harassment, fragmentation and lack of trust within our citizenry, polarization among all of our elected officials, from the school boards to the Congress. Our democracy is fragile. Will the next presidential elections prove that our democracy is resilient or will we find ourselves with a demagogue for president? The bulwark, the barricade against all of this brokenness is connection between people and community. Helping one another, celebrating with each other and working on projects together all are ways to weave one another into our lives and strengthen our communities of choice. Here at Nahalat Shalom we are a group of diverse people with shared values who want to be a part of a Jewish community. We gather together to celebrate one another, to celebrate shabbat and holidays, to learn together, to teach our children, and to work toward justice and tikkun olam, fixing the world. Whenever we gather for an event or a service, we strengthen our bonds with one another and we strengthen our community. The Mourner’s Kaddish is recited every time we gather together for a service, no matter what time of day it is or whether it is a weekday or holiday or shabbat. Usually the Mourner’s Kaddish is recited in a sad and somber tone. The words though are at a disjunct to that somber tone. The basic message of the kaddish is: we need help making the world a better place; hurry up and help us fix it and bring peace to the world. Hurry up and make this world a better world, right now. That is the line that I would like to focus on in the Kaddish: speedily and in the near future. Ba-agalah uvizman kareev בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב. In our lifetimes. Don’t delay. We are waiting for you, the Life Force of the Universe, the urgent, pushing, creative Life Force to fix things. Make it better. In the Aramaic it is “take up your Kingship, start ruling again”; v’yamlich malchutay וְיַמְלִיךְ מַלְכוּתֵהּ. Most of us reject the idea that God is a Ruling Sovereign. So, we can, in Mordecai Kaplan’s words, “transvalue” that concept. We can flip it a bit so that we are pleading to find a way to get people to come to their senses so that we can fix this broken world that we live in. Fix the injustices, the oppression, the political toxicity and antagonism, and get people all on board to understand that we need to work together. The whole world needs to learn how to work together to save life on this planet, to save the planet herself. Zalman used to talk about Gaia Consciousness. We need to be much more focused on healing the earth herself, healing our atmosphere and healing our oceans. The Mourner’s Kaddish says ok, we need that to happen now and soon. Make it happen in our day, in our lifetime. And at the end of the Kaddish, the word “shalom” comes three times. Shalom is way more than the idea of peace as the cessation of hostilities. Shalom means completeness, wholeness, balance and integrity. We are asking for peace, praying for peace, urging all of the Forces in the Universe to align themselves so that balance, integrity and wholeness happens in our lifetimes. Another prayer that is in every prayer service is the Aleinu prayer. We call it the “aleinu” because that is the very first word of the prayer. The word ‘aleinu’ means “it is upon us”. The text goes on to say that it is upon us to praise the Source of Life in the Universe. To Praise the Source of Awe and Wonder and Mystery, the Ground of Being. To praise that which we don’t understand but know is way beyond us. To praise that which is beyond us, that which sustains us, that which allowed life on this planet to come into being. There is something greater than any of us or all of us. It is upon us to praise that greatness and to help make the world be a better place. Praise can be hard. How do we praise God when we are atheists? Ira Eisenstein, Mordecai Kaplan’s son-in-law taught: “we can be thankful FOR, without being thankful TO.” We can acclaim, applaud, appreciate and be thankful for life and existence itself without being thankful to the God of our Ancestors. We can extol the wonders, and the amazing moments of our lives and the awareness that comes when we are inside each moment. It isn’t all rainbows and cotton candy. We know that the external world seems to going to hell in a hand basket. We know that things are terribly off. In this environment it is easy for our internal worlds, the dwelling of our deepest most personal selves, to be stressed out and disturbed. The dark shadows outside and inside us makes it pretty difficult to walk through life with a sense of hope that change will come. We need things to change for the better. We need to remember that even in the hard times things can be ok. That’s perhaps the source of the Jewish sense of humor. When things get tough, we laugh, we make jokes, and we relieve the tension with humor. There is a Yiddish saying, “to a worm living in a horseradish root, the whole world is horseradish”. Right now, our world seems like horseradish to all of us. Of course, there is another Yiddish saying about horseradish: “when a worm lives in horseradish, it thinks there is nothing sweeter”. It is time for us to figure out how to sweeten the world in our own eyes so that we don’t take on the spiritual toxicity of fear, anger and resentment. Aleinu – it is upon us, each one of us, to take control of the moment so that we are able to be as loving, kind, compassionate, and patient as possible in each moment. When we forget, and move away from the moment and get caught up in the drek of life, we need to remember to find those shehechiyanu moments so that we can move closer to who we really want to be, and how we want to behave every day in this life. Let us continue to dip our apples in honey and to sweeten our world.