Protective Presence

Rabbi Arik Ascherman this Sunday in the Upper West Side

Dear friends, 

“I often think about our ancestors in Europe who would get pulled out of their homes in the middle of the night, or attacked in the streets of Germany, and imagine how different they would have felt if there were a non-Jew standing with them to protect them,” said Rabbi Arik Ascherman on Sunday morning. “I can’t promise you that we will prevent evacuations of villages,” he said, “but I can promise that we will be there physically with them, in the villages under threat, and in the courtrooms fighting for their rights.”

Rabbi Ascherman was laying out the heart of his current work in the West Bank, which he calls protective presence. It’s what my father did this week when he slept in the Jordan Valley village of Ras El 'Ain in case the nearby settlers would raid the village in the middle of the night, as they’ve done often recently. I did something similar a couple of years ago with Rav Arik, when we accompanied shepherds to the pasture and stood with them when the settler from the local outpost came to scare them and their sheep away. Just be there with them.  

This may seem remote, a hopeless struggle across the ocean in a part of the world turned more and more upside down every day. But the notion of protective presence is a spiritual stance that is germane to both the socio-political struggles ahead here in the US, and our day to day actions with those we love. Consider these words Rav Arik spoke: "Our job in this coming period is to protect those we can protect and prepare for the time when things will be better, so that when that comes - and it will - we can hit the ground running.”  I haven't heard a clearer definition of what our task will be in the coming years.

We will certainly need some heroes, like my neighbor Meghan who in 2018 couldn’t bear the news of the children separated from their parents at the border, so she flew to Texas and started working on uniting immigrant families. Her instinctive action became a grassroots organization of women called Immigrant Families Together, which united dozens of families. “We have proven you really can do something as one person and one collective of concerned people,” Julie Schwietert Collazo, the Executive Director of IFT proclaimed a couple of years in.  

But protective presence is a concept that far transcends the ups and downs of the political world. When Rav Arik talks about it, he leans on a tradition that sees physical presence in times of need and joy as qualitatively higher than other actions. These are political acts of tremendous power, human acts of the greatest import, and spiritual acts of the highest order.

In the morning prayers we find this paraphrasing of the Talmud: 

אֵלּוּ דְבָרִים שֶׁאָדָם אוֹכֵל פֵּרוֹתֵיהֶם בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה וְהַקֶּרֶן קַיֶּמֶת לוֹ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא. וְאֵלּוּ הֵן. כִּבּוּד אָב וָאֵם. וּגְמִילוּת חֲסָדִים. וְהַשְׁכָּמַת בֵּית הַמִּדְרָשׁ. שַׁחֲרִית וְעַרְבִית. וְהַכְנָסַת אוֹרְחִים. וּבִקּוּר חוֹלִים. וְהַכְנָסַת כַּלָּה. וּלְוָיַת הַמֵּת. וְעִיּוּן תְּפִלָּה. וַהֲבָאַת שָׁלוֹם בֵּין אָדָם לַחֲבֵרוֹ וּבֵין אִישׁ לְאִשְׁתּוֹ. וְתַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְּנֶגֶד כֻּלָּם. 

These are precepts, the fruits of which a person enjoys in this world, while the principal is preserved for them in the World-to-Come. They are: honoring father and mother, performing deeds of kindness, early attendance in the House of Study morning and evening, bringing guests into your home, visiting the sick, participating in a wedding, accompanying the dead to the grave, concentrating on the meaning of prayers, making peace between fellow people and between husband and wife— and the study of Torah is equal to them all. 

At least half of this list of transcendent deeds necessitates physical presence. When we visit the sick, our presence protects that person and aids their recovery. When we go to a wedding, our presence elevates the couple. When we attend a funeral, we are physically accompanying the body on its last journey, as well as protecting the mourners with our care and love, without which they would be in a far deeper state of despair.  

The Shechinah, the presence of God has protective powers. Perhaps even more so human presence.  

This week marked International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the signing of the UN’s Human Rights Declaration. Rabbi Ascherman, who for decades ran Rabbis for Human Rights, and today runs Torat Tzedek, The Torah of Justice, is a truly unique presence in our world. Despite the hordes of religious Jews like him who see Jewish people’s rights as qualitatively different than others’, he cannot but see the image of God in every person, and the ever-present light in our tradition calling out א-ח-ד, O-n-e.  It is that protective presence that shields his compassionate, forward-looking world view and allows him to keep maintaining his protective presence of Palestinians in the West Bank. Those of us lucky enough to know him continue to maintain our view of a compassionate, active Judaism, thanks to the presence of Rav Arik and others like him. 

This evening, at 6pm we will be gathering for Kabbalat Shabbat in Brooklyn (followed by dinner from Mimi’s Humus!). One of those transcendent acts I listed above was bringing peace between fellow people. Given how elusive peace feels in these times, I've invited my better half, Erika Sasson, to share a recent story from her work in peacemaking, which brought together two families in the aftermath of the death of a loved one. I hope you'll join us.  

May we bring our protective presence to the lives of those we love, and those who are in need.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Freedom and Exile

Hannah Arendt's final interview, 1973.

Dear friends, 

This week we concluded our deep and illuminating communal study of Diaspora, led by our philosopher in residence, Dr. David Ponet, in which we read texts by Jean Amery, George Steiner, Edward Said and Hannah Arendt. Since we were eager to share some of what we picked up , I put some questions to Dr. Ponet on the topic, and I am glad to share his reflections with you.

MS: Thank you David, for such a great series. What did you learn from these past five weeks of dealing with the question of Diaspora?

DP: I learned so much on so many dimensions. 1) that studying with other people is an enriching experience that itself constitutes a powerful salve against the feeling of diaspora to the extent diaspora is something negative that one wants to mitigate. 2) It's an incredibly rich topic that touches on the core of what it means to be a human in the world and forces us to ask how we should or want to live in the world. 3) that diaspora has its gifts and challenges and that the experience of diaspora attaches to so many peoples 4) that one cannot be in diaspora without some sense of home. 5) that diaspora is not limited to being literally inside or outside the homeland. I could go on....

MS: We were all struck by the universalist beauty of Palestinian thinker, Edward Said's essay Reflections on Exile. Do you think the Jewish sense of exile is unique?

DP: Good question. I want to say there is a Jewish sense of exile. We are an ancient people with a long history of exile and of relating to the exilic condition. "Next year in Jerusalem ' strikes me as foundational. I'm wary of saying unique because I only know what I know and only know the traditions I know but there is certainly a distinctly Jewish obsession with exile. We are hardly the only exiles, but we have our unique story and tradition and practice. 

MS: Like Said, Amery and Arendt were forced exiles. Amery survived Auschwitz, and Arendt a camp in France. When I read them I couldn't help but see the Jewish and Palestinian exile as mirroring realities.

DP: Of course there are differences in the historical accounts between Jews and Palestinians, but I think we do well to recognize how they mirror each other. Both Amery and Said are humanists. When Said talks about exile and Amery asks "How much home does a person need?" they are writing about the human condition. not the Jewish or Palestinian condition. Everyone needs some semblance of security, of trust in the world, some measure of home, in order to live.

MS: While we read a few thinkers, we kept coming back to Hannah Arendt. What's the pull so many of us have to her writing? Why is Arendt worth reading now?

DP: For so many reasons. Because she has insight into evil and its limitations. Because she lived through the worst forms of tyranny and totalitarianism and serves as a cogent warning to us about what we can do to avoid these freedom-destroying forces. Because in the darkness she finds light, reminds us that we can be free, that we can start new things, but that we must do this with other people, in concert with others, if we are to be free. Because when the world seems destined toward doom and gloom she rightfully asserts that the world of human affairs is a world defined by the emergence of infinitely improbable events - and that we may even be able to build a world that is habitable to humans.

MS: Arendt writes in What is Freedom:
"It is in the very nature of every new beginning
that it breaks into the world as an "infinite improbability," and yet
it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually
constitutes the very texture of everything we call real. Our whole existence rests, after all, on a chain of miracles, as it were the coming into being of the earth, the development of organic life on it, the evolution of mankind out of the animal species."

Can you explain how her ideas on freedom relate to diaspora?

DP: Freedom for Arendt turns on action, making appearances in the public domain with others, performing and creating new things (enterprises, polities, alliances, communities, etc.).  Public speech constitutes action for Arendt. The diaspora can be a place of profound possibility for freedom - where there is common space to act in concert with others and build something new. But diaspora is not one experience. It can also thwart any possibility for freedom if it's an exile that forces full retreat into the private or interior self. But similarly a homeland which cuts off the possibility of action, of natality, of beginning also stymies freedom.

MS: In that light Amery's question might shift from "how much home does a person need," to "How much is too much home?"
I hope we can find the balance between too much and not enough home, and maintain the freedom that allows us a sense of being at home in the universe. Thank you so much Dr. Ponet, and we look forward to your next chevrutah!

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

PS. if you'd like to read any of the essays mentioned above please reach out to Itamar. And a special thank you to Natalie Cohen for suggesting and helping us plan this chevrutah. 

Rabbi Misha

Eternal and Temporary Home

Our musical guest this evening, Kane Mathis

Dear friends, 

On Tuesday we brought Adam’s mother, Barbara to burial. Barbara was an extraordinary woman who lived fully and richly for 95 years. Though she traveled the globe once she was retired, reaching all seven continents, her home was always New York City. She was lucky in that regard. She was born, lived and died in the same city that was very much her home. 

Whenever I am at a Jewish funeral, one of the things I contemplate is when in the Jewish calendar this person passed. There often seems to be some cosmic resonance to it. My grandmother Riva z”l, for example, who told me that the most important moment in her life was when the Lubavitcher Rebbe looked into her eyes, died on his Yahrzeit.  

So, as we drove out to the cemetery in Long Island, I was conscious of the resonance of this week’s parashah, called Chayei Sarah, The Life of Sarah. The parashah begins with Sarah’s death at the ripe age of 127 and takes us through the family’s mourning process.  

Sarah’s husband, Abraham had led a very different life than Barbara z”l. He was born in one place, lived for a long period in a second, then moved countries, bopped around between Canaan and Egypt, and finally settled in Be’er Sheba in the south of Canaan. The first words that the Torah records coming out of his mouth after his wife’s death are: 

“I am a foreigner, a temporary sojourner.” 

גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י 

He speaks these words to the locals who have been living there their whole lives. It is his opening line in an exchange designed to turn him into a local through the act of purchasing a burial plot. The beginning of the end of moving around, of restlessness, of nomadic existence, is the purchase of a spot to bury his wife, which is large enough to later bury him too, and two generations further. This is the meaning of home.  

Death, Heschel taught us, is homecoming. We return to the Kaddish, to the ancient rituals and languages, to the earth from which we came. יהוה נתן יהוה לקח יהי שם יהוה מבורך, we say as the casket is lowered into the earth, “YHVH gave and YHVH took back, blessed be the name of YHVH.” We move on from this temporary life to what we sometimes call our “eternal home,” a home about which we know very little other than the fact that it is, at least in a certain sense, eternal.  

On Rosh Hashanah I asked the community Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paquda’s 1000 year old question to us: Have you accepted yet, your condition in this life as a Ger, a temporary sojourner? To Ibn Paquda, accepting this condition is not sad. It is, or can be the source of our happiness, of our empathy and therefore our connection with others, of our ability to enjoy our limited time. This condition is what drives people like Barbara z”l to travel the world and take in all that our incredible city has to offer.  

That ability to soak up the beauty of life is part of what Ibn Paquda called “preparing for death.” In his view, this preparation is the single most important thing a person can do. In a way, preparing for death is the greatest thing to do with one’s life. It encompasses making the most of your time, doing as much good as you can and living as close to truth is possible. But one aspect of this work is more straightforward: giving some thought to where and how you’d like to be buried, or what you imagine home might mean for your body after you’ve passed. Where and near whom would you like the vessel you inhabit, your body to come home to? 

On Tuesday, after the burial the family stayed by the gravesite for some time. They placed stones on the graves of other family members buried in that plot. They read the names on tombstones of other relatives they never met who were buried there. They stood in the gentle, fall sunshine together, talking, reminiscing. In that moment, by the ancestral family plot, in that cemetery that the Jews consecrated over a century ago, the shadow of death didn’t seem scary or ominous. It felt as natural as coming home. 

This evening we’re going to come home to our community for Shabbat. This last period has brought up for many of us a sense of alienation and foreignness from where we live. But although we may be temporary sojourners on this earth, we are at home here in New York, and our community is as New Yorker as a New Yorker can be. I hope you join me, Daphna, Yonatan, and our wonderful guest musician, Kane Mathis this evening at 6:30 for a sweet coming home to Shabbat. 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Two Types of Looking Back

Lot's Wife by Humberto Chugchilan

Dear friends, 

Remember that tender moment in the Torah when Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt? I’ve been thinking about it this week.  

On Tuesday evening I was lucky enough to see Hadestown on Broadway. Hadestown is a musical play on Greek mythology, which peaks in a tragic moment of looking back. Orpheus goes down to Hades to rescue his beloved, Eurydice. Hades lets them leave on the condition that she walk behind him through the perilous journey, and he never look back to check on her. They try. He fails, and she is doomed to a life in the underworld. 

On the way to the theater, I looked back – at the news, and was doomed to 24 hours in the underworld of my mind. I stopped reading American news since last Tuesday night, but I have yet to cure myself of my addiction to Israeli news. That’s where I learned that the next American Ambassador to Israel, as well as the administration’s special envoy are no doubt going to work to fulfill Trump’s promise to Miriam Adelson to annex the West Bank, and likely build a few Jewish settlements in Gaza along the way. I also got another update on what has now become an undeniable campaign of ethnic cleansing and starvation in Northern Gaza. What followed were 24 hours in the underworld, where it was crystal clear to me that under current circumstances, these American appointments are nails in the coffin of the place I grew up in as I know it. 

In this light, it became impossible to not see Hades, the dark seducer of souls to the safety of meaninglessness and despair, as one of his contemporary manifestations in the world. Tears flowed when Persephone said her time above ground was too short (she’s entitled to six months each year before she goes back down for the rest). More welled up when Eurydice signed her life over to Hades. And a little lake emerged when the one believer left, the god of music and spring, Orpheus let his love get the better of him and looked back to doom his beloved.

The truth is that I find myself entirely uninterested in the type of looking back and analyzing that that so many brilliant minds are currently engaged in around the elections. I am not interested right now in looking back to the past to learn how we ended up here. I am not interested in the punditry of this world. That, for me, right now is the meaningless, dangerous noise that turns me into a pillar of salt overlooking the Dead Sea.

But there is another type of looking back that I am interested in.

I do want to look back at the world to come, that world of truth that is captured in between the lines of the ancient books. I’m interested in looking back at the poetry of the prophets and their clues on how to be. I’m interested in looking back into the eyes of the homeless guy at the end of my block, and the line circling around the block of the food pantry at the church down the road. I’m interested jn looking back at the suffering faces of those thrown aside, trampled on and forgotten in every single country in the entire world. I’m interested in looking back at what is happening to people right now in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, to what is happening to women in Afghanistan and Iran and so many other countries, to pregnant women in Texas, to gay people in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia and other countries with a death penalty for homosexuality, to look back on humanity right now and open my heart to my brothers and sisters of all types with whom I share the earth.

The 16th century Italian rabbi Obadia Sforno explained the prohibition to look back at the burning of Sodom like this:

אל תביט אחריך. כי הרעה תתפשט עדיך כמהלכת אחריך ולא תזיקך אבל אם תתעכב להביט תדבק בך כמו שקרה לאשתו כאמרו ותהי נציב מלח:

Don’t look back, because the evil spreads toward you, as though she is marching behind you. However, she will not harm you unless you delay yourself by stopping and looking back. Then she will cling to you.

We have to be selective with what we look back on in order to protect ourselves from the sticky bad stuff lurking in our rear view mirror. We have to look back. The question is at what.

This Shabbat, let's look all the way back. Zecher lema'aseh bereshit, we say about Shabbat - a reminder of creation. Let's look far, far back to that time when light first came to be, and after it the sky, the mountains, the trees, the stars and the animals. And let's remember that sixth day too, when human beings first appeared, mirror images of the divine.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

A Time of Ingathering

Our students doing Tashlich in Prospect Park

Dear friends, 

Tuesday night at 11pm a Talmudic phrase flashed through my brain: 

בִּשְׁעַת הַמַּכְנִיסִין — פַּזֵּר. בִּשְׁעַת הַמְפַזְּרִים — כַּנֵּס. 

"At the time of gathering,  disseminate  At the time of dissemination, gather.” 
Brachot 63a

There are times of ingathering, and times of spreading out, times to go global and times to go local, times to influence others and times to enrich ourselves our close circles. This time, it struck me, is a time to come inside, study ourselves, be together, think together.   

Despite appearances, there is a real opportunity at hand.  

I’ll try and express something about that through this week’s incredibly apt Torah portion: 

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃ 

יהוה said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 

The literal message seems to be – move to Canada. But the Torah is not a literal messenger, and Jews have never treated it as just a literal history. When we treat the language of the Torah literally, we remove its life force. Similarly, when we stay on the surface of things happening in the world, seeing them only through the prism in which we’ve been staring at them (through our screens,) we beat the life force out of them.  

The rabbis help us infuse life into these words. Rashi offers: 

Go Forth (Lekh Lekha) in the Hebrew literally means “go for yourself” — it means go for your enjoyment and your benefit.  

Rashi suggests seeing the change commanded upon us in a positive light. We are not running. We are not reacting. We are not refugees. We are responding to the change by shedding old layers from our past and allowing ourselves to be curious about what new layers will appear. 

The 17th century Prague rabbi Kli Yakar has a slightly different translation than Rashi for Lekh Lekha. He understands it as “Go to you,” And writes: “Go to you, to your essence.“ 

Abraham is being commanded to go inwards and find a truer part of who he is. He is being sent to the place where appearances evaporate into what they really are. It is a land where the noise of this world quiets, and the sounds of the world of peace become audible. This land that Abraham is being sent to is not geographical. It’s a place that is accessible anywhere. It’s the holy land of the spirit, which he is being commanded to find.  

This is a time of gathering. Of coming into our communities and our selves, of learning and seeing anew, of finding new truths, new ways, new spirit, new braveries. 

I know this is not easy, and for many in our community will take a period of mourning. That is important, and can’t be skipped over. It was when I spent time with children on Wednesday that the task ahead became clear. These young people are powerful, sensitive smart beings who we can count on. They've got our backs and our futures. They're shrewd, and so many of them were politically born on Tuesday night. However, they need us to have their backs in this moment. They need to see us modeling living with purpose, strength and curiosity in the face of our anxieties and disappointments, much in the way we saw our parents and grandparents do. That is the challenge of this moment. 

Let us use this time of gathering to come together to support one another, learn and grow, so that when the moment comes for the Time of Dissemination – and that time is already on its way - we are ready and eager to jump into the world with all of our love and energy. 

Step 1 will be in a few hours at our two Shabbatot this evening in Brooklyn or Upper West Side. You can still join, and I really hope you will.

Shabbat shalom, Shabbat Menuchah, Shabbat Ahavah,
A Shabbat of peace, a shabbat of rest, a shabbat of love.

Rabbi Misha

What is Mine to Do

Logos in action

Dear friends, 

The world has gone mad. Human beings have abandoned morality. One person alone remains righteous and blameless. This person will save us from extinction. 

That’s not Gal Gadot. It’s the biblical account of Noah, which we read this Shabbat. Like an apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster, it sets us up to identify ourselves as the one person who still sees clearly despite everyone else’s lies and cruelty.  

וַיַּ֣רְא יְהֹוָ֔ה כִּ֥י רַבָּ֛ה רָעַ֥ת הָאָדָ֖ם בָּאָ֑רֶץ וְכׇל־יֵ֙צֶר֙ מַחְשְׁבֹ֣ת לִבּ֔וֹ רַ֥ק רַ֖ע כׇּל־הַיּֽוֹם׃  יהוה saw how great was human wickedness on earth—how every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time. 

נֹ֗חַ אִ֥ישׁ צַדִּ֛יק תָּמִ֥ים הָיָ֖ה בְּדֹֽרֹתָ֑יו  
“Noah was a righteous, innocent man in that generation.” 

The Italian Renaissance commentator, Sforno, who will be our focus in our weekly Torah class on Thursdays this fall, explains the words צַדִּ֛יק תָּמִ֥ים, righteous and innocent: 

Righteous – in action. 
Innocent – in thought. (Hebrew  - במושכלות) 

The Hebrew word, Tamim, translated here as innocent, implies wholeness and simplicity along with blamelessness. What Sforno points out about Noah is that his mind maintained a simple truthfulness, an ability to remain perfectly on point in ethical and intellectual matters which led his fellow humans astray. This is our constant work. 

How can we do that? 

An earlier Roman has a suggestion or two: 

“I do what is mine to do. The rest doesn’t disturb me. The rest in inanimate, or has no logos, or it wanders at random and has lost the road.” 
Meditations, Book Six, 22

Imagine voting for a candidate who speaks like that. 

Marcus Aurelios, the second century AD emperor of Rome, was, compared to other Roman emperors, as “righteous and innocent” as they came. Much of his Meditations are simple ways to maintain innocence, simplicity and goodness in a world filled with lies and madness.  

Reading Noach this week, with Tuesday upon us, reminds me of what might be the most important issue in this election, which has been all but forgotten these past months. A flood is upon us. There it is in Spain. In Florida. In North Carolina. It’s coming our way.  

The word Logos, which the emperor used above, is an ancient concept still used in philosophy. In this case it means something like the logical structure of the universe. There are rules that govern the natural world, and rules that govern the relationship between actions and results. The Torah expresses it like this: 

וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְהִנֵּ֣ה נִשְׁחָ֑תָה כִּֽי־הִשְׁחִ֧ית כּל בָּשָׂ֛ר אֶת־דַּרְכּ֖וֹ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃ {ס}          
God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth. 

Human moral corruption leads directly to the corruption of the earth itself.  

So what are we to do? How are we to save the planet in the blockbuster of our lives? 

“I do what is mine to do,” said Aurelios. I build my ark. Make the window in it according to the instructions. I send out that dove when its time, and see the rainbow appear out of the clouds. 

These next few days, let’s do what is ours to do, and may we be rewarded with the rainbow. 

Rabbi Misha

PS.
Heads up - next Friday we have two great Shabbat gatherings with prayer, music and food, one in the Upper West Side with Daphna and one in Brooklyn with me. Regardless of what happens on Tuesday I think it will feel good coming together, so we hope to see you there.

Rabbi Misha

Buddhist Reflections from a Soho Bookstore

Suzanne Tick led our community Mandala project 

Dear friends, 

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my brother, Tari, a Buddhism scholar from a mountain village near Jerusalem, whose been here for the last few weeks. He lives the incongruity of an inquisitive mind, a compassionate disposition, and a hippy community in the midst of a country dominated by notions of fixed identity, right wing policy and war. He has to somehow reconcile Buddhist ideas of emptiness, of the incredible power of the mind to create what we see and experience, of the tenuous nature of what we call reality, with the world around him. The Buddhist ideas guide him, and it’s been rubbing in on me, softening and loosening some of my stiff mental positioning. 

When I ask myself how this coming election could possibly be so close, I am reminded that my reality is as constructed as anyone else’s in this country. Tari described entering a bookstore in Soho and immediately getting swept away by the bountiful variety of thinkers on the shelves, thinkers of a different angle than he’s used to seeing in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Of course they are not one type of thought, and offer an array of views, but the book selections reflect a certain way of seeing the world, much like any newspaper reflects its world view by the way it defines what is happening in the world. That bookstore, he felt, created a world impenetrable to other worlds of thought. In the world of the Soho bookstore, people who experience a different world and therefore think differently make no sense whatsoever. They might as well be aliens. 

None of this denies the logic of the worldview created by, or perhaps reflected in this bookstore. It is very real.  

Today is Simchat Torah, the day on which we celebrate the Torah, as well as the day on which, according to the Jewish calendar the horrendous massacre took place in the south of Israel one year ago. The rabbis taught that there are “Seventy faces to the Torah.” By this they meant that different people see vastly different things in it, none of which are necessarily truer than the others. The Torah is a reflection that creates reality, much like the Soho bookstore. It is a very powerful mirror. 

This creative mirroring effect is expressed powerfully In the Sukkah tractate of the Talmud. In the end of days, the rabbis tell us, God will finally kill the Yetzer Hara, the evil inclination that lives in each of us. Both the righteous and the wicked will gather for the Yetzer Hara’s funeral, and both will weep. 

"For the righteous the evil inclination appears to them as a high mountain, and for the wicked it appears to them as a mere strand of hair. These weep and those weep. The righteous weep and say: How could we have been able to overcome so high a mountain? And the wicked weep and say: How could we have been unable to overcome this strand of hair? "

 We see different things in the same reality. This week for example, one sees a war against Hizballah terrorists in Lebanon, and another sees ethnic cleansing and murder in northern Gaza. So should this undo our convictions? Should we simply relax and let the world roll on in front of our eyes? 

The Talmud gives a clear “No!”  

"They said about Hillel the Elder that when he was rejoicing at the Celebration of the Sukkot he said this:
If I am here, everything is here; and if I am not here, who is here? "

If we deny the outlook that we carry, even knowing that it is only one part of a multi-faced reality, which we ourselves played a major part in creating, we essentially deny our own existence. If we’re here, with our own minds, bodies and hearts, we have no choice but to participate in this world. Otherwise we’ll be living in someone else’s world. If we can carry the awareness of other realities while we live our own deeply and fully, then we come close to the active, humble life that the both theTorah and the Buddha ask of us.

Shabbat shalom and Happy Simchat Torah,

Rabbi Misha

Gratitude

Daphna, Rabbi Misha, Rotem Levin and Osama Iliwat on Yom Kippur. Photo by Gili Getz

Dear friends, 

It’s like some kind of ancient spell. You say certain words, throw some ingredients into water, wear certain clothes and put your fist to your chest. And as your body empties, your ears, mind and heart open up and some transformation occurs. This year more than others I find myself changed from these holidays, opened up, refreshed, ready to live as best I can. I sit in my Sukkah with gratitude. 

What an incredible 10 days we had together. 

We began with Rabbi Jim’s poetic riff acknowledging how tough this past year was, and how difficult it is to feel like something ended when the war continues. Aviya came up to me after our first service of the year and asked what many were struggling with: How am I supposed to celebrate the new year in the midst of this war?  

The following morning by the river we sang The Times They Are A-Changin' amidst Shofar blasts, and marveled at our next generation chanting Torah (Cyrus! Barbara!) and performing a play of Jacob’s dream (Dov!).  

After the grownups moved on that day, there was a special moment with fifteen teens who stayed for Tashlich. Before we did Tashlich, I asked my nieces, Laila and Be’er who are visiting from Israel, to describe what the last year has looked like over there. They described waking up at 6am in a tent on the beach 10 miles north of Gaza on the morning of 10/7 to sirens, and the continued fear they lived with. The local teens shared with them the kind of things they’ve been seeing all year on social media, of families in Gaza and Lebanon crying for help. It was a real moment of balancing each other out by listening openly.  

On Kol Nidrei night everything was washed away by Dana’s singing and Saskia’s bass. But by nighttime, I felt a real Yom Kippur reckoning set in. I asked myself if I had mis-spoken, if my words that night about the occupation lacked precision, if the heaviness I felt in my heart was what the holiday was about, or if it’s about dispelling that heaviness; Is it about guilt or about forgiveness?  

The following morning the sweetness emerged rapidly though, in the form of twenty teens standing proudly in front of the community and chanting: “And you shall love!” Veahavta! That overwhelming sight gave us all so much naches, contentment, peace. From then on we were looking forward, not back. We sang the Mi Khamocha with Adeline, Lucy and Zoe. We listened to 14 year olds Emilio and Adeline chant Torah, we witnessed Amy chant Torah for the 20 somethingth year in a row, and we watched Chloe and Naomi perform Jacob and Esau’s reconciliation as a piece of ritual theater.  

When Osama and Rotem took the stage to tell us how they transformed from fighters to peace activists, we were ready for their message. “I learned that Judaism is a religion of love,” Osama, whose children deal with discrimination and harassment from religious Jews on an almost daily basis in the West Bank, told us. There was that moment, in which he paused, remained silent for several seconds, and finally said in Hebrew : Peace will yet come upon us, עוד יבוא שלום עלינו. That moment was what this day was invented for: knowing wrong, knowing change, knowing hope. (If you missed it HERE's the recording)

When the holiday came to close, after a raucous Neila party, it was especially moving to have the Shul’s co-founder, Holly Gewandter blow the shofar as she has done for most of the years that the Shul has been around - but this was the first year I experienced it in person. 25 years of making magic rose to the heavens like a prayer. When we took that gorgeous Mandala of flowers that Suzanne led us in creating, and shook it and blew it to the wind, we let go of our attachments and our obstacles, and invited new beauty into the world. 

Thank you all so much. Especially our ritual and musical team: Daphna, Yonatan, Dana, Saskia, Tripp, Arnan and Yuval, and to my closest partners on bringing this all to life: Susan, Itamar and Judy. Deep gratitude to everyone who helped, supported, chanted, read, led, organized, set up, tore down, taught, prayed and sang. 

I hope you all come by to volunteer tomorrow at the soup kitchen in honor of Sukkot. 

Happy Sukkot! 

Rabbi Misha

Suzanne Tick led our community Mandala project 

Excitement, Especially Now

Dear friends, 

This week I’ve been getting excited. Yes, the world rages on. The stupidity knows no bounds. One of the worst leaders we’ve known is speaking at the UN as I write. But a few gatherings with New Shul friends this week have reminded me that on Wednesday evening we get to bring together this unique band of seekers and find the best way to begin a new year.  

My excitement began, as it often does, with the music rehearsal. It’s not just that this group is incredibly talented, which it is. It’s not just that we’ve been making music together for a few years now, and find each other in the music so naturally. It’s not just that the songs themselves feel like coming home. It’s not just that if there’s one thing we need right now on the path to healing, it’s to sing. It’s that on a real level, we’re all friends, and we feel lucky to be doing this together. What a rare and marvelous combination of beauty and love. 

A couple days later I got the opportunity to spend some time with Ellen Gould, who along with Holly Gewandter created this Shul 25 years ago. She spoke about the transformative experience that the Shul’s meditation chevrutah has provided. The weekly meditation has helped her and her husband Daniel find peaceful ways to navigate sickness, troubles and distractions, and have given her a deep understanding of Jewish ideas she thought she’d never connect with. But what lies at the base of the experience are the powerful bonds with people in the group.  

Hearing Holly and Ellen describe the creativity that exploded in the Shul’s early days is exhilarating. Immersive theatrical rituals, finding new ways to transform prayer into art, sitting at downtown bars to dig into the nature of the universe.  It always reminds me what we’re doing - channeling all of the gorgeous Greenwich Village world of arts and ideas into this old tent, this singing shtetl, this group of friends who insist on keeping it real, relevant and full of love. 25 years strong! 

Finally, this week I had the good fortune to meet up with a few friends at Susan’s studio to study. We read pieces of a medieval text, as happens in little study groups. But as often happens when New Shulers get together to learn, something real took over. People shared out of a space of vulnerability, responded out of a place of listening and care, and asked questions that aren’t exercises in cleverness. We weren’t there to defend our positions, to protect the fortress of what we know, but to see things we haven’t been able to see, and to discover something new. In our search for understanding we found a place of trust. 

On Wednesday evening we come together to do all of this and more. Beyond the music and the ideas we have a couple special additions to the holidays this year. Three things I'm especially excited for: We're going to have not one, not two but three young people, recently B Mitzvahd chanting Torah, and another three performing short pieces of ritual theater. On Rosh Hashanah Tashlich, and then again on Yom Kippur afternoon we're going to hear from our recently minted Philosopher in Residence, Dr. David Ponet about two Twentieth century Jewish thinkers who are deeply illuminating about our times, Hannah Arendt and Jean Amery. And on Yom Kippur we will hear from incredible Israeli and Palestinian guest speakers, Osama Iliwat and Rotem Levin about their stories of transformation from men of war to peace activists in search of a new narrative for the Holy Land. 

A new year is dawning on our 25 year old tent. May the light of discovery shine upon us. May the light of friends and music bring us home. May the light we create warm this world.  

Let's begin again.
I can’t wait. 
(if you haven't signed up - let's go!)

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Ready to Begin

Shehecheyanu in Carroll Gardens

Dear friends, 

When you go to the theater there is one moment you can always count on to be beautiful, and that’s when the house lights go down on the crowd and the play is about to begin. It’s a moment of quiet anticipation, where it’s easy to feel present, where the excitement for what is coming is real. In the Jewish calendar, believe it or not, that’s the moment we’re in. 

What might this year bring?  

I admit, that’s a scary question. But this rather magical week that passed reminded me that it’s also an incredibly exciting one. 

What made this week magical is that, along with the frightful political events, I had the great fortune to experience three beautiful beginnings. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we opened each of the three Brooklyn branches of our Hebrew school, the School for Creative Judaism (with this Tuesday coming up in the Village!). Each opening was a sweet, happy gathering, overflowing with young wisdom, wonder and joy. It’s so easy to forget how centering hanging out with kids can be. 

“Where does light come from,” Arnan, our Senior Educator asked the kids in Windsor Terrace. Our annual theme at the School is the Year of the Artists, so one of our focuses will be light. 

“The sun!”  

“Only the sun?” Arnan was expecting this answer. 

The follow-up question opened the gates. Estella talked about the heart. Otto offered Shabbat candles. Jack spoke about encouraging one another. Suddenly we were all in a space of wonder. Where does light actually come from?  

In Clinton Hill when we sat down in our ma’agal (circle), we sang Sim Shalom, one of the daily prayers for peace, in which we ask:

ברכנו אבינו כולנו כאחד באור פניך
“bless us, one and all with the light emanating from Your face.”

Reflecting on the lack of peace in Israel and Palestine, among other places, Laila asked a simple question: "Why can’t they just share?" What was amazing about what ensued is that nobody answered with “it’s complicated.” Instead, kids, pre-teens, and adults thought together about the question. One suggested it’s the leadership’s fault. Another talked about fear. A third spoke about history. This is beginning. A true engagement with a real question in search of the light of understanding. 

In Carroll Gardens things got physical.  Instead of the Torah’s story of creation I shared with the group a Kabbalistic one, known as Shvirat Hakelim, The Breaking of the Vessels. When God wanted to create the world, She knew it has to be done with light. So, as a first step, God prepared ten vessels to hold the primordial light. When God poured the light into them, it didn’t go so well. Out of the ten vessels, only three survived. The other seven exploded into millions of pieces. Our job, according to the Kabbalists, is to collect the infinite shards of the vessels, so that we can hold the light. 

I never quite understood this story, so I asked the kids to physicalize it into a moving  statue. After each group performed their mini-plays, I asked them what they thought the story means. Alex said it’s how the stars are created. Misha Y. said it means God makes mistakes. “The world is ours to fix,” he announced. 

When we sang the Shehecheyanu with each branch, we all started jumping and clapping our hands. How lucky are we! We’re alive. We’re here. We’re ready to begin. 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

What's Time Well Spent?

Immersed in the kishkes of existence at the National Archaelogical Museum in Athens.

Dear friends, 

After ten days of probing, difficult questions, this morning’s Soul Math challenge quite literally cut to the chase. Excellent Jew that he was, Ibn Paquda offers an answer to the question of our purpose - in the form of another question: How much time are you wasting? 

Naturally, this brings up the question – what is wasted time, versus time well spent?  

Let’s start by negation: 

Last night I got home after a busy day around 11pm. I opened my laptop and sought to wind down by... checking the latest election polls. Yesterday’s Soul Math question was what we are doing that we think no one sees, which we are embarrassed about. Well, now you all know one way in which I completely throw into the garbage my precious time. How embarrassing for me.  

Why do I do it? I’m seeking confirmation of my biases. I’m seeking material for my mind to chew. I’m seeking to worry less. But am I? Looking at polls, if one is concerned about the state of the world, is a classic example of feeding one’s anxiety. It pulls me away from the nighttime all around me, the calming cycle of the moon and the stars and the trees outside my window, which offer the promise of continued peace, and into the meaningless noise of the present moment. 

A better hour was spent this morning talking to a member of the Shul’s Rabbinic Chavurah, cantor and teacher Yoni Kretzmer. I asked him what defines good use of time? 

YK: There’s a Talmudic argument between two rabbis about whether making a living is a proper use of time, which might help us dig into this. The Torah says: “Vehagita bo yomam valayla,” “Think about it (the Torah) day and night.” Rabbi Yishmael says that this proves that making a living is a great use of time, because we can easily think and study in the morning and the evening, so obviously we are being encouraged to work the rest of the day in between the two. 

Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakai says that’s silly, and what we are clearly being told by “day and night” is ALL the time! 

MS: So...Work on creating a life in which you can study while other people work. Oh, the patriarchy. The ultra-orthodox. White nationalism. 

YK: Not necessarily. Your friend Ibn Paquda offers a reading on Ben Zakai that focuses less on whether you work, but on your state of mind while you work. We have to work, he says, on bringing ourselves to a state in which even when we are working, we are doing it with the consciousness of our deeper purpose. 

MS: I see, so It’s not necessarily about how you use the time, but about the attitude you carry as you do whatever you’re doing. That reminds me of the way the mindfulness teachers talk about washing the dishes. 

YK: If your attitude toward the fact that you have to wash the dishes, go to work, take out the garbage, treat people fairly, is indignant, betraying a sense that it has nothing to do with what you’re supposed to be doing with your time, then all of those will feel like a burden. Take for example the following Mishnah from Pirkei Avot: 

“Whoever takes upon himself the yoke of the Torah, they remove from him the yoke of government and the yoke of worldly concerns, and whoever breaks off from himself the yoke of the Torah, they place upon him the yoke of government and the yoke of worldly concerns.”  

Ibn Paquda teaches that the yoke of Torah ceases to feel like a burden when you accept it. Likewise, it is only when you do not accept your work as part of your purpose in this world that it feels burdensome. 

MS: So, in order to spend our time well we have to let go of the resistance to whatever we’re engaged in. 

YK: It’s possible the Ibn Paquda might accept that formulation. For me it’s one step deeper though. I don’t think we’re meant to completely resolve our resistance. We have to accept that we’re human beings, and we’re designed to have different forces pulling us in different directions. 

MS: Work-study-pleasure-depth-Spanish soap operas. 

YK: The instinct to resolve the tension between what you want to do and what you should do, what is impossible and what is possible, only makes that existential tension unbearable – and then time is wasted. 

MS: When we fight against our portion in this life – including our very humanness - we suffer, and then we end up in front of the screen feeding our anxieties. 

YK: When you are immersed in the kishkes of existence, the internal battles of what to do, right and wrong, worthwhile and not, you’re okay. When you try and untangle that innate part of our lives, you’re not. 

MS: So an hour immersed in the kishkes of existence is one well spent. 

YK: Like this conversation. 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

The Jewish People?

Protesters in downtown Jerusalem, including my brother, this week. "A job in the government that costs the hostages' lives" and "Your conscience is dark"

Dear friends, 

In a famous exchange between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt following the publication of The Banality of Evil, Scholem accused Arendt of having no love for the Jewish people. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ some nation or collective,” Arendt answered. "The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love.” 

Arendt’s appealing response touches on a bigger and more difficult question, which my rabbi, Jim Ponet has been asking me and many others for years: what is the Jewish people, and does it really exist? In a political landscape in which different entities claim to speak for “the Jewish people,” and others say “not in my name,” Rabbi Ponet’s question comes to life.  

My friend and study partner, Yoni Kretzmer has at times suggested a radically different idea of what this people is, which follows a certain elitist strand of Medieval Jewish thinkers. Jews are those who truly follow the Torah. This would exclude vast numbers of so-called Jews, beginning with the ultra-nationalist thugs who blatantly profane every biblical law of decency to fellow human beings, even as they tout their religious garb. Jews, according to this strand of thought, are those who love others as themselves, and are committed to the constant self-examination and self-improvement that the Torah demands. According to this logic, the Jewish people, for example, could have nothing to do with a morally flawed institution such as a state, beyond perhaps being citizens of it if they happened to live in one. 

However attractive this view may seem at times, there is no doubt of its vanity. The Jewish people cannot be sanitized into some ideal. Like any person, it includes beauty and filth, wisdom and ignorance, peace and war. If I have an answer to Arendt, it is that a nation is very much like an individual person. What makes a friend a friend begins with the fact that you know them well. Like it or not, we, as Jews, know the Jews. We know the loud Jews and the quiet ones, the hateful ones and the incredible ones. We know which Jews we’re like, and which we’re not like, and which Jews we like and which we don’t. Some of us end up falling on the side of friendship with the Jewish people, and others on the side of discomfort and enmity. Most of us find a way to combine the two.

I write this in the context of our preparation for the High Holidays, and my inescapable feeling that the Jewish people, more than ever before, need to make Teshuvah. We – whoever that means – are in dire need of the elements of the Days of Awe: probing self-examination. A settling of confusion through the return to the fundamental value of care. Remembering that we will die and that could happen any time. A real attempt to see how deaf, dumb and blind we have been, and the consequences this wrought upon us. 

I cannot shake the thought that this Jewish people that we are a part of is in need of something new and different. A continuation feels insufficient. Even renewal feels like too soft a word. We need to begin again in some fundamental way, and we need to think deeply about what that means. 

On Tuesday I began posting the daily offerings of Soul-Math, or self-examination that Rabbi Bahyah Ibn Paquda wrote in the 11th century. So far he's asked us:
How often are you in touch with the miracle of the fact of your being alive – and of your still being alive?
What is the state of your relationship with your body?
What is the state of your relationship with your mind?
What is the state of your relationship with being Jewish?
These are great questions for each of us to ponder individually. Perhaps we should think about them on a national level as well. To paraphrase his questions to a national level: 
Maybe our national relationship with continued survival is all wrong?
Is something sick in our collective body?
Maybe we are feeding our collective mind garbage instead of nourishment?
Maybe we are misunderstanding what we mean when use the term “the Jewish people?” 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Soul Math

Tashlich on the East River last year.

Dear friends, 

In the final chapter of  the 11th century masterpiece, Duties of the Heart, Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paquda writes something surprising. The chapter is called The Gate of Love and is the climax of the journey through the previous nine gates, or chapters that preceded it. Love of God, as Ibn Paquda calls it, is the purpose toward which Observation, Trust, Detachment and all the other gates are set. Love is “the top of the staircase,” as he calls it. But, he warns, “whoever tries to reach it on its own will fail.” Love, he suggests, necessitates preparation. 

We called our High Holidays’ theme this year Begin Again, by which we mean that we will try to bring ourselves again to a place of love. Beginnings are love. They are intrinsically hopeful. But as Ibn Paquda points out, you can’t just say you’re going to be loving and do it. It takes time, patience and hard work to allow for the presence of love to be experienced, so that a new beginning can take place.  

In the Jewish tradition this work is called Teshuvah, a word which combines the two English words repentance and return. The self-examination embodied by the heavier word of the two, repentance, is the gate through which one need walk in order to experience the sweetness of the second word, return. We are welcome home, to the part of us that is all goodness and peace, only once we have looked seriously at our actions along the road – both collective and individual. 

In the eighth chapter of his book, שער חשבון הנפש, the Gate of Soul Math (or Accounting of the Soul), Ibn Paquda lays out 30 types of self-examination that can lead you to seeing the truth of your existence in such a way that allows a person to proceed in their actions in the world with total ease: “Then her soul will quiet, and her thoughts will rest from the worries of the world.” Each of these 30 types, or faces as he called them, offers a question to contemplate about where you’re at, where you’ve been and where you’re going. They range from simple questions about things you might take for granted, to probing asks about the reasons you act like you do. Some deal with your conscience, others with your priorities, some with your relationship with your body, others with how you treat your mind. Here he asks about your relationship with death, there about your attitude towards money. Throughout, Ibn Paquda gently implores you to seek a more harmonious and loving relationship with that elusive essence of yourself that he calls your Neshamah, or soul. 

This Wednesday the Hebrew month of Elul begins. Elul is a month-long preparation for the new year, an opportunity to self-examine on the path toward truth and love. This Elul I will follow Ibn Paquda’s 30 Faces of Soul-Math, offering a short video on Instagram each day with one of his wonderful questions. I’ll actually start on Tuesday, considered the first day of Elul even though it’s the last day of Av, since Elul only has 29 days. There’s some spiritual Jewish math for y’all to work out! 

If you don't follow us already, HERE's how you can do it!

I hope you’ll join me for this soul math journey.  

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Ithaka

Delphi, Greece

Dear friends, 

Ithaka
By Constantine Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Why Did She Descend?

Mipney Ma, a Hassidic niggun by Frank London

Dear friends, 

For a couple of weeks I couldn’t get this one Hasidic niggun out of my head:

מפני מה ירדה הנשמה?

Why did the neshamah fall so low?

מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתא

From a high roof to the bottom of a deep well.

I listened to Frank London’s beautiful version of the niggun, sang it and played it on my saxophone. I wondered why things have sunk so low. I’d think of the endless horror in Gaza, of the never-ending tribulations of my Israeli family and friends, of the horrors of this world we live in and the terrible state of affairs between people of different opinions in the US. Why? Mipney ma?

Then the niggun would come to its concluding C part, from the ancient wisdom:

ירידה לצורך עליה היא

It’s a descent for the purpose of going up!

The universe is not static. Everything is in motion. Oftentimes things go down and then up, up and then down. Why would we expect our experience to be any different? I would pray that this descent is part of a rising. That Frank’s cancer for which he’s being treated will be part of a rising up that will help him heal and grow. That from global warming we will learn simplicity, contentment with what we have. That out of this war will grow peace.

Yesterday a miracle happened. Despite terrible odds, flight cancellations, threats of an even worse war, despicable war-mongering provocations by the Israeli government and its morally bankrupt leader, my family managed to meet for a few days in Greece to celebrate my father’s 75th birthday. Thanks to the grace of god, ours and the many that populate this divine land, my parents, brothers and their families from in and around Jerusalem managed to get here. The long odds have certainly created a deep sense of gratitude in us. We are in a little moment of עליה, going high up.

May the current talks in Doha bring us further up, to a ceasefire. It is not lost on any of us that families in Gaza could never imagine such a reunion. For so many families it is no longer possible. Prayers can sometimes alter reality. Let us pray that a breakthrough is reached, and that this latest escalation was a descent for the purpose of going up. Hostages home, leadership change, reconstruction begin - not one more bomb. Let families reunite all over the land.

And may we see all of the descents of our souls turn into miraculous rising ups.

Why? Mipney ma? So we can experience the great gift.

Shabbat shalom with prayers of gratitude,

Rabbi Misha

Sunrise over Athens

Transforming Hate

Dear friends, 

a Meditation for Tisha B’Av.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A Prayer for Safety

Nachlaot, Jerusalem

Dear friends, 

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
    “May those who love you enjoy tranquility.
  And let there be peace within your walls.”
 For my family, for my friends
    I say, “Peace be within you.”
 For our home, for our hearts
    I ask, "Goodness direct you."
Psalms 122

שַׁאֲלוּ, שְׁלוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם;    יִשְׁלָיוּ, אֹהֲבָיִךְ.
 יְהִי-שָׁלוֹם בְּחֵילֵךְ;    שַׁלְוָה, בְּאַרְמְנוֹתָיִך
  לְמַעַן, אַחַי וְרֵעָי--    אֲדַבְּרָה-נָּא שָׁלוֹם בָּךְ.
  לְמַעַן, בֵּית-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ--    אֲבַקְשָׁה טוֹב לָךְ.

May Israelis be safe this Shabbat, as they wonder when the attack will begin. May Palestinians be safe this Jum'ah, as they try to avoid the next bombing. May they all be disentangled from the web their leaders have caught them in. And may all who love the holy city find rest.

Shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha

Soul Ancestor

The Tree and the Rock

Dear friends, 

As the world jumps up and down, throwing my heart around, grabbing at my attention with all its sparkling might,  I have been finding great comfort in returning to the unchanging, steady truth found in a 1000-year-old book. It was written in Arabic in the south of Spain by a person we know very little about. We’re not even sure how to pronounce his name, בחיי, which could be read Bahyey, Bahya, Behayai to name a few options. We know his family name was Ibn Paquda, the son of Paquda, and from an acrostic poem he left we know also that his father’s name was Yosef. We know he was a rabbi, and a Dayan, a judge in courts of Jewish law. And then we have his book, The Duties of the Heart, which is beloved canonical book that reveals to us more about his true self than any external details could reveal. It opens for us the gates to this beautiful man’s mind, heart and soul. 

The central premise of the book is that our precious time on earth should be divided between two types of duties: those of the limbs, which we complete with our bodies, and the duties of the heart. Yes, he says, there are 613 commandments in the Torah, which have been expounded and expanded in the Talmud into thousands of Jewish laws. But the constant calls of our conscience and heart, which remain unseen and hidden to others, the revealed laws of the tradition are just a small fraction of our purpose.  

The period in Jewish history when Ibn Paquda lived, when for a few hundred years in the Middle Ages the Jews were living in relative peace in Spain, was arguably the greatest time to be a Jew. The most important Jewish books of philosophy, theology, mysticism and poetry all come from there. You can feel in the writing the influences of the great Muslim thinkers, as well as the centrality of Plato and other Greek thinkers, of Andalusian music and spirit.  

Ibn Paquda’s book is an overflow of his time period. It is a socio-theological treatise of philosophical inquiry, whose surprising poetry combines mystical leanings with scientific knowledge. It offers the reader ten gates to walk through, in order to connect with and bring harmony to your soul; a guide to the neshamah to make good use of its time in life. 

Occasionally Ibn Paquda address the reader: אחי, he calls us, “my brother.” He offers us - his soul-siblings - loving encouragement on the path through the ten gates. The presence of the true self, this part of us that transcends time and place, is what gives you the sense that you know, really and truly, this generous ancestor whose heart stopped beating 904 years ago. 

After he completes his journey through the ten gates, (some of which I hope to write about in the coming weeks) ending, naturally, with love, he leaves us with several pages of Hebrew poetry. Two of these final pages are addressed directly to the soul. Here a few lines, hastily translated from the rhyming poem he addresses to his soul: 

נפשי. עוז תדרכי. וצורך ברכי. וחין לפניו תערכי. ושיחה לנגדו שפכי. והתעוררי משנתכי. והתבונני מקומכי. אי מזה באת ואנה תלכי: 

My soul,  
Find the courage to be strong, and bless your Rock.  
Direct yourself toward grace, and 
Pour your heart out.  
Wake up from your slumber 
and look around, 
Notice: you are here!  
Where have you come from?  
Where will you go? 

והחיים והמות אחים. שבתם יחד איש באחיו ידבקו. יתלכדו ולא יתפרדו. אחוזים בשתי קצות גשר רעוע. וכל ברואי תבל עוברים עליו. החיים מובאו והמות מוצאו. החיים בונה והמות סותר. החיים זורע והמות קוצר. החיים נוטע והמות עוקר. החיים מחביר והמות מפריד. החיים מחריז והמות מפזר. 

Life and death are brothers.  
They sit together, clinging to one another.  
Each of them holds an end of  
that rickety bridge  
which all creations walk over: its origin, life, its end, death.  
Life builds; death undoes. 
Life sows; death reaps. 
Life plants; death uproots.  
Life connects; death separates. 
Life rhymes; death scatters. 

בקשי צדק בקשי ענוה. אולי תסתרי ביום אף יי. וביום חרון אפו. ותזהירי כזהר הרקיע וכצאת השמש בגבורתו. ותזריח עליך שמש צדקה ומרפא בכנפיה. ועתה קומי לכי והתחנני לאדוניך. ושאי זמרה לאלהיך. 

Seek justice, seek humility,  
So you have a chance of surviving those days of wrath,  
So the gentle sun will shine its healing rays upon you.  
Now 
Stand up,  
Start walking.  
Make yourself a vessel of graciousness,  
and lift a song up  
Toward your god.  

Shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha

The Cultivation of Beauty

Dear friends, 

“Would you kill a baby chicken for a billion dollars?” This was the question Manu posed to me as part of our morning prayers today. My heavy-handed response that followed was a reflection of the troubling effect this week’s events had on my soul. “Do you know what a sin is,” I recall myself asking. “No,” said my seven-year-old. “Killing for the sake of killing is a good example of it.”

We still don’t know why Thomas Matthew Crooks pulled the trigger. But that fact is one of the most chilling pieces of this last week. At this point it appears as though there was no ideological drive. Evidence from his phone suggests that he may have been considering shooting Biden or Trump. Either one would do. If you haven’t read Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the Times this week, it’s worth it. She describes an online world where young men encourage one another to commit acts of violence for the sake of violence. This sad vacuousness of meaning and purpose, out of which this thinking emerges, is our greatest enemy. 

We see this despairing, dark attitude all over the world. It shouldn’t surprise you that this is the meaning of the biblical word Hamas, one of the world’s greatest examples of violence for the sake of violence. In the bible, a person of חמס (Hamas) is one whose worldview is violence. In this lawless world, this person thinks, violence is the only appropriate, even the holy way to act. It’s sad to witness many of my fellow Israelis fall down this same path. The rifle used to mean something very different to Jews than it does today. That’s true about Americans too, and many others. It has become in large part a symbol of the incurable, lonely emptiness of life.  

Isaiah’s prophetic sense could see that clearly when he said: 

“and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks.” 

My prayerful conversation with Manu took place in my parents in law’s gorgeous garden in Montreal. My father-in-law, Roby is a master gardener who spends much of the warm months (which now get very hot!) creating and tending his garden. Every year the flower arrangements are different. Perennials mix with annuals to create a dazzling corner of Eden.  

When Manu and I discussed what we’d like to say wow about this morning (our version of what the traditional prayers call praise), several different specific flowers nearby were mentioned, as well as the Apple tree over a bed of day lillies. When we were done, I told Roby that I’m thinking of writing about his garden as the antidote to the world’s ills. “That’s true,” he said, “but not looking at it – working in it.” 

It’s not enough just to see the ephemeral beauty. If we want to feel the beauty, we have to work on our garden. Thankfully, Shabbat is almost here, so for now we can just take it in with our eyes. But we better get our gardening gloves ready for Monday morning. 

Shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha

The Value of Surrender

Dear friends, 

In the upside down ways of the world, people want to win. “Total victory,” says one leader, "I didn’t lose, I won big,” says another. These are reflections of us and our battles with reality. An attitude that might be more attuned to the deeper truth of our existence is that the desire to win is a mis-formulation of the mind. Instead, we might consider the value of surrender. 

“The Gate of Surrender” is the title of the sixth chapter of Rabbi Bahyeh Ibn Pekuda’s eleventh century masterpiece, Duties of the Heart. Reading it is a balm to the ridiculous vanity of our times.  

Pekuda describes a person who acts with the value of surrender: “a soft tongue, a low voice, humility at a time of anger, not exacting revenge when one has the power to do so.” 

How different would our world be if we all acted with humility at times of anger? How different would our family lives be, our friendships, our relationships with our national and personal neighbors? 

Today, one of the worst sources of pride-infused certainty is religion. I guess things weren’t so different a thousand years ago, since the God-touting person’s destructive pride is what led Pakuda to write this chapter:  

“...arrogance in the acts devoted to G-d was found to seize the person more swiftly than any other potential damager. Its damage to these acts is so great that I deemed it pressing to discuss that which will distance arrogance from man, namely, surrender.” 

Of course, people spouting their righteous anger are not exclusively religious. As a matter of fact, when secular people speak passionately about the horrors they see in the world, and about the justice they fight for, they most often do it with the same religious fervor that people of faith do. Almost everyone these days seems to need to work hard against arrogance: 

“...to distance a person from the grandiose, from presumption, pride, haughtiness, thinking highly of oneself, desire for dominion over others, lust to control everything, coveting what is above one, and similar outgrowths of arrogance.” 

Surrendering to the deeper reality of our humanness helps. 

“One of the wise men would say on this matter: "I am amazed at how one who has passed through the pathway of urine and blood two times (once as semen, the other as a newborn) can be proud and haughty?" 

We could continue fighting death for as long as we want. We won’t win. We could continue fighting what is for as long as we want. We won’t win. Accepting this can make the work of improving the lives we live and the world we live in not only more pleasant, but also more effective.  

“...for one whom arrogance and pride have entered in him, the entire world and everything in it is not enough for his needs due to his inflated heart and due to his looking down with contempt on the portion allotted to him. But if he is humble, he does not consider himself as having any special merit, and so whatever he attains of the world's goods, he is satisfied with it for his sustenance and other needs. This will bring him peace of mind and minimize his anxiety. But for the arrogant - the entire world will not satisfy his lacking, due to the pride of his heart and arrogance, as the wise man said (Proverbs 13): "A righteous man eats and is full, but the stomach of the wicked never feels full." 

צַדִּיק אֹכֵל לְשֹׂבַע נַפְשׁוֹ וּבֶטֶן רְשָׁעִים תֶּחְסָר. 

If anything will lead us to victory it is surrender. I pray for acceptance, for gentleness, for the ability to move forward toward goodness with simplicity and truth. 

Shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha