Face פנים

Dear friends,

We seem to have fixed our issue with Medium, so everyone should be able to open the letter without a problem. I love getting your thoughts and comments, so please continue to send them to me, or to respond in the comments section on Medium. And please send us any feedback about the experience reading it there.

The letter is about French philosopher Levinas' notion of the face. It begins like this:

Emmanuel Levinas explains it like this: when we see another’s face, we are commanded “Thou shalt not murder.”

The sixth of the Ten Commandments, which we read this Shabbat, is unnecessary since it is written on the face of anyone you allow yourself to see. The process unfolds as follows: we walk around the world in complete self-absorption, following the totally natural way of human beings, which is to say selfish desire. If anything or anyone comes in the way of fulfilling our desires, we find a way around it, through it, dispensing of it as we see fit. It is the way of all creatures and we are no different. One thing can come in the way of our selfishness, and that is encountering another’s face. At that moment an immediate psychic transformation occurs. Over and Against our human instinct we rise. Thou shalt not murder, we are commanded, and with it an understanding of other people and an acknowledgement of their reality. Suddenly we know we are not alone in the universe.

Why does the face hold such transformative power?

The Hebrew word for face is panim. It is the same root, almost the very same spelling, of the word for inside, pnim. After playing in the snow I told my boys בואו ניכנס פנימה, let’s go pnima, inside, or toward the interior. The English verb To face something, means to look at it. “Face your partner,” an acting teacher might say, meaning stand opposite them and look at them. “Face your history,” an BLM activist might demand, meaning stare at it, see it clearly for what it is.

In Hebrew the same verb, to face, or lehafnim means to internalize. “Atah batzava achshav, Tafnim!” An IDF sergeant might have said to a rebellious 18 year old in basic training: “You’re in the army now, internalize it!” Meaning, understand it deeply within your body so that you may change your behavior.

In Hebrew the face is a revealer of the inside of a person. When we see a face, we see the person, like in a soul-x-ray machine. We don’t actually see the face when we are looking properly, but what is behind it: the uniqueness, the struggle, the story, the spirit that is behind the skin, flesh and bones that make up that face.

When we bless our kids on Shabbat with the words Yisa Adonai panav elekha, May Adonai turn her face toward you, we do not mean God’s physical face, but the inside of God, the heart and force and spiritual make up of divinity, of world-ness, of reality, of time, place and action, of Truth.

Moses, Torah tells us, was the only one to ever see that - to see God face to face. But we have the ability to see something arguably far more beautiful: the face of a fellow traveler, of a loved one, of a teacher, of a stranger, and a friend.

One gift the pandemic gave us, which like the Israelites in the desert, we complain about quite often, is the focus that Zoom and other virtual meeting spots place on people’s faces. Lets try to remember that this week when we FaceTime with our people for the thousandth time since last March. May we continue to practice the ability to see each other’s faces — on and off our screens — and the oceans they reveal.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

The Hallelujah Tree

Dear Friends,

Smack in the middle of Prospect Park stands a majestic tree with dozens of dancing arms and an enormous protective lump jutting out at eyes’ height. Its chunky roots sprawl out and cover the area beneath its trees all around its fat trunk, far too wide to hug. I’m not the only one attracted to it, which is evident by the dollops of paint in different colors that people have left on that protective lump, in the way that is done to holy trees in India, or the Jerusalem mountains. It’s been there for a while, probably eighty or ninety years according to a ranger I met there once, who also explained that the lump is a scar, evidence of a disease that overtook the tree, forcing it to grow the lump over the sickness.

When my third son, Manu was a baby most mornings would begin with a run in the park to this special tree. He would look out from his stroller at the lake, the trees, the sky, the ducks, geese and seagulls, hearing his father sing his morning prayers. Then the stroller would stop, Manu would be pulled out from his stroller, and be walked around the big tree to the sounds of this strange and beautiful Hebrew word: Halleluyah. His little hands would touch the tree. As he grew, his little voice would utter a syllable or two: Ha, or lu, or luya. Halleluyah was one of his earliest words. It meant Tree.

Nowadays Manu goes to daycare, so I don’t make it as often to the tree. It’s not as fun without him. But on Tu Bishvat, the New Year for Trees, I go. Two years ago I asked the tree what it would like for its birthday. It sent me on a Don Quixotian mission: “Reach out to the ultra-orthodox community,” she said, “and see if you can find allies who would begin a culture shift there away from using the immense amount of plastic utensils that they waste.” The strict demands of Kosher laws often lead them to rely and enormous amounts of disposables. So I wrote some letters, spoke to a few people, and ultimately failed that herculean task.

Yesterday, Tu Bishvat, I received a different message. With the recent news of the ice in the arctic shrinking at incredible speed, the Amazon forests raped and burned, Australia, California, all the disasters of the past year, I expected a dire call to action. I was surprised:

“Inspire change through the appreciation of the beauty that is,” said the tree, “rather than the threat of beauty lost.” She quoted scripture:

“עבדו את יי בשמחה, Worship God with happiness.”

I looked around at the surrounding forest, the birds flying from branch to branch, the semi-frozen lake, the people walking by with their dogs. Trees, I thought, are the embodiment of the word local. They live what is in front of them and around them, not what is beyond. Suck in the water from the earth, absorb the sun from the sky, be in the stillness, sway in the wind.

We have learned a thing or two about what local means in this pandemic. Perhaps we have more to learn. Perhaps we can still practice being in our place more, seeing the tree across the street, the bird on the windowsill, the sunlight, the falling snow. Perhaps this summer we might make it out to Bear Mountain, or Harriman, or to one of our local beaches. Perhaps we might even make it out to our local natural spots this winter, or make an extra walk to the Hudson, Central Park, or around the neighborhood in a way that allows us to absorb the beauty we live with, and to experience that fleeting sensation: happiness. And perhaps that happiness, if we can find it, will give us the encouragement we need to work with hope for this planet that we live in, and love.

“Then,” as our Shabbat prayers tell us, “all the trees of the forest will sing with joy.” And us along with them.

HALLELUYAH!

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Come to Pharaoh

Dear friends,

When the prophet Haggai returned to Israel from the exile in Babylon, much like we seem to have returned home this week, he found the Jews depressed, “each person rushing to their own home,” with no eyes for others, or for the rebuilding of the temple for which they returned. He gathered the Jews in front of the ruins of the temple and said: “Today is the day the Temple was erected!” The prophet could sense the tremendous potential for rebirth in the air, which the people had no clue about. “The seed is still in the barn, not even planted. You see no grapes on the vine, no figs, pomegranates or olives on the trees, yet they are coming: the blessings start today.”

This week’s Parasha is called Bo, meaning “come!” Where should we come to, you might ask, “el Par’oh,” to Pharaoh. That’s right, come to Pharaoh, says God to Moses, as if that’s where God is. Or maybe it is?

We’ve heard this verb before. Noah was told: Bo el hateva, come to the ark, which the commentators understand as: enter the ark. So “come to Pharaoh” is an invitation to enter Pharaoh, where God sits waiting. What?!?! That doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

Well, it does to me, but that’s because I spent ten years immersing myself in Pharaoh, as I wrote and later performed a play that tells the exodus story from his perspective. God said “come to Pharaoh,” and I did. Guess what I discovered? Like the rabbis suggest, I found the worst of myself: the deepest denial, the darkest blindness, the most foundational lack of empathy, the stubbornest inability to learn.
Come, says the voice, come into that.

Not sure you want to go there? Well, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?

Bad? Ok. The bad news is you’re already there… The Hebrew verb Bo, with its various grammatical formulations is a masterpiece of time travel. We are taught in the Talmud: מתוך שלא לשמה בא לשמה, Out of a good deed done for the wrong reasons, come good deeds done for the right ones. In other words, doing something good begrudgingly, or for selfish reasons will lead us to do them for the right reasons. The seed of the unselfish act of goodness often lies in the selfish one. Coming means “in formation.”

One more grammatical example: the world to come, olam haba. The Hebrew is more honest than the English. That world is not “to come,” at some theoretical later point in time. Rather, it is Ba, coming. In a sense it’s already here, as my middle age body reminds me most days. The sun has come in biblical Hebrew means it has set, which means it’s on its way back, basically already here.

In Hebrew everything that is coming is already there. You might as well come to Pharaoh, since you’re already there.

Ready for the good news?

We don’t always notice the good things going on. Our eyes have a way of seeing what they were taught to see.

When I came to Pharaoh I didn’t only find the worst of myself, but also the best: complete belief in human abilities, total excitement about divinity, the most honest form of generosity. I found love. I found brokenness. And I also found deep, painful flaws in Moses, his God, and the entire monotheistic enterprise, all of which give me important insights into who I am, who we are, and who we want to be. When the pandemic is over I plan to remount this play (it was scheduled to open in March 2020….), and then you’ll hopefully get a better grasp of what I am laying out rather tersely here. But one thing we can agree on already I hope, my friends, is that there is a lot coming our way, and much of it is good. Let us come to the places we see as light and find the darkness. Let us come to the places we see as dark and find the light. Let us know that the seeds of good things to come have been planted, many of them by us, whether we feel them or not.

I hope to see you this evening at 6pm for kabbalat shabbat, where we will continue thinking about seeds in preparation for Tu Bishvat.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Not So Passive Resistance

Dear friends,

James Meredith walked into the campus of University of Mississippi in 1962 escorted by three jeeps full of soldiers, the first African American student there. As a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement one might expect Meredith to support MLK’s vision of nonviolent resistance. In her book, Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman describes an afternoon in Meredith’s Jackson, MS home, in which she discovers a very different attitude toward resistance. She writes:

His goal in 1962 was not to integrate the University of Mississippi, which he viewed as a minor and timid objective, but to “physically and psychologically shatter the system of white supremacy in Mississippi and eventually all of America, with the awesome force of the United States military machine.”

This week, as I prepare for our event with Neiman on Sunday, and with much of the country seeming to punch back against the racist uprising, I find Meredith’s voice compelling. In our Torah portion, Va’era, the oppressor faces chance after chance to relent. When he doesn’t there is no workers strike, no march, no vigil, but a violent strike at the heart of Egypt. Seven plagues in total this week, beginning with turning water – the source of life, and the residing place of God in ancient Egypt, into blood – the expression of death.

Of all the myriad of attitudes toward violence that our tradition voices, “turn the other cheek” is hard to find.

This week a hero of mine died. His name was Ezra Nawi and he was a Jerusalemite plumber, Iraqi Jew, openly gay, lively and colorful man who spent the last twenty years of his life protecting the impoverished Palestinian inhabitants of the South Hebron Hills region from their heartless oppressors. If you’ve ever visited that part of Palestine you would know that the reality of life here is one reminiscent of both Apartheid South Africa and the segregated American south. When no one else in the Israeli left knew what to do about situations like this one, Ezra followed his feet out into the villages, where people live in natural desert caves, tents or shacks. He got to know people, speaking to them in his mother’s Arabic. He would spend his days visiting one village and another, helping them with what they needed. Often this involved accompanying them to their fields, wells or schools. Sometimes it meant arranging legal or medical assistance, getting supplies through checkpoints, and other tasks that a person of privilege can do in these types of environments. Over the years he taught a generation of activists how to do the work, which often involves dangerous situations, arrest and vilification.

Shortly after I first met Ezra, and joining him occasionally on his daily trips from Jerusalem, Nissim Mossek,a documentary filmmaker started coming along as well. This week I found myself watching pieces of Citizen Nawi, the film Nissim made about Ezra (which you can view HERE). Ezra’s non-violent philosophy is on glorious display. It’s not meek. It’s not silent. It can be aggressive, taunting, questioning. This often got him in trouble. Scene after scene shows Ezra employing tactics of passive resistance in the least passive way imaginable: speaking, disobeying, laying out the truth of people’s suffering and cruelty.

Ezra Z"l was not a religious Jew, except that he embodied the tradition so much more deeply than the so-called religious settlers he was so often in conflict with. Verses like הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת עֲמִיתֶךָ , “Reprove your neighbor, Rebuke him!” were self-evident to him. The last time I visited him, a year ago, he showed me the T shirt he had made and worn that day in a protest. It read: Why are there no Ashkenazis in the Border Police? למה אין אשכנזים במגב? Speaking directly to his fellow Mizrachi Jews, who are sent to the front lines to perform some of the ugliest tasks, he pointed to a reality of racism still present in Israeli society, that is pitting Jewish Arab speakers against non-Jewish Arabs. It’s not a question that will win new friends, it isn’t soft, but it’s true, and takes courageous people like Nawi and Meredith to express.

Perhaps Ezra’s attitude is valuable to us in this moment. The combination of creating meaningful relationships with those in need as the basis for change, with speaking directly and truthfully to those we view as acting out the vision of the oppressors; perhaps this combination might help us understand our task today, this Martin Luther King weekend. In any case we have to remember that MLK's vision requires action and courage, and is designed to remind us not of our weakness, but of our power.

I know Susan Neiman will help us define both our role and our power Sunday at 11:00am.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

When my soul folds over me

Dear friends,

Many things are true today that seemed like dreams a week ago. We are in a state of vulnerability and potentiality. We have been confronted with beautiful and terrifying realities. What do we do? Who do we trust? This evening’s kabbalat Shabbat will give us an opportunity to come together, take a breath, smile, and then talk about the meaning and content of faith, in general, and in this moment in particular.

This week’s Torah portion takes us beyond the primordial faith world of the Book of Genesis. No more Abrahams with their uncrackable belief in and adherence to God. From here on we will be in a world filled with doubt. Moses knows God is real. He sees him in the flames of the bush. But he doesn’t want to do what God tells him. He knows people won’t believe him, neither Hebrews nor Egyptians. He begins the great task of his life reluctantly, with not only a heavy mouth and a heavy tongue, as he describes himself to God, but also a with a heavy heart. Yet he goes.

The Haftarah describes a similar first encounter between the prophet Jeremaiah and God:

God: Before you were formed in the womb I knew you, and before you came out of the womb I dedicated you to be a prophet for all nations.
Jeremaiah: Ummmm…. I’m a just a kid and I can’t even speak properly.
God: Why don’t you start with a prophecy of doom and destruction?

Jeremaiah also reluctantly begins his life task. But the first prophecy begins not with anger, but with love:

זָכַ֤רְתִּי לָךְ֙ חֶ֣סֶד נְעוּרַ֔יִךְ אַהֲבַ֖ת כְּלוּלֹתָ֑יִךְ לֶכְתֵּ֤ךְ אַחֲרַי֙ בַּמִּדְבָּ֔ר בְּאֶ֖רֶץ לֹ֥א זְרוּעָֽה׃

“I remember the kindness of your youth, the love you exuded like a young bride, the way you followed me into the desert, to unplanted lands.”

Faith drives us. It moves us to act. And yet we often experience it as fleeting. There and then gone, present and hiding, working behind the scenes of consciousness, and then at times not even there, we feel. Jeremaiah seems to me to describe it here as a memory we live with. Jonah seems to see it more as an act of sudden remembrance, when he cries out from the whale:

When my soul folds over me
I remember Adonai
And my prayer goes to You.

Faith is something Jonah remembers in moments like the ones we are in, times when we feel ourselves to be in the belly of a whale, our souls folding over us.

Jonah’s faith has a name: Adonai. It is what moves him to run away, and then to fulfill his task. This evening, amidst the songs, the light and the wine, I hope we will try and think together on what or who we might say our faith is directed at, how it drives us, whether we carry it inside us like a memory Jeremaiah style, if it’s like a switch that turns on in unusual moments like it is for Jonah, or if we experience its mysterious force as something entirely different. Hope to see you at 6pm.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

May this year bring....

Dear friends,

The new slate is here. Hallelujah!

May this year bring health.
May this year bring peace.
May this year bring new shoots in place of those that withered.
May this year bring us together.
May this year bring motivation to act for good.
May this year bring new ideas.
May this year bring a sharpening of minds.
May this year bring a softening of hearts.
May this year bring new sights.
May this year bring better listening.
May this year bring sweet smells.
May this year bring far away flavors.
May this year bring awareness to ourselves.
May this year bring caring for others.
May this year bring acceptance of our limitations.
May this year bring rejection of the barriers to our imaginations.
May this year bring honest accounting.
May this year bring forgiveness.
May this year bring crisp concentration.
May this year bring clean intentions.
May this year bring alignment.
May this year bring unexpected transformation.
May this year bring learning, learning, learning.
May this year bring the memory of creation.
May this year bring forgetfulness of our oppressions.
May this year bring righteous anger.
May this year bring gratuitous love.
May this year bring the lies to float visibly upon the truth like oil on water.
May this year bring a vast spaciousness.
May this year bring comfort in the narrow spots.
May this year bring us out into the world.
May this year bring us home.

And may we look back at 2020 and see that all of these are true for it too.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Three Types of Silence

Dear friends,

I love it when I get to stay in New York, for Christmas. Not because of the Chinese food (although if you haven’t been to the Sechuan restaurants in Queens Chinatown you should go), but because of the quiet. You can finally hear the city breathe. So I offer reflections on three types of silence.

The first I’ll call inevitable silence. This is the silence of the dead, at times experienced by human beings, when we cannot speak. This happens to Joseph’s brothers in this weeks parasha, when he reveals himself to them. For a long time they are speechless. They can’t even move. Actually the Hebrew word for silence, Dmamah also implies no movement. Finally they are able to hug him, and after that to speak again.

Aaron the High priest had what might be such a moment when he found out his two sons were killed by God for offering “a strange fire” in the tabernacle. Although in his case one is left wondering whether when the text says “And Aaron was silent,” (again with the same word, which implies stillness), it is the silence in the face of his sons’ death, or in the face of his brother’s strangely philosophical statement that followed the deaths: “This is what the LORD meant when He said: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.” Is Aaron stunned into silence, or is he biting his tongue at his brother’s inability to be silent with him?

Which brings us to the second type of silence we can call bad silence. We are human beings and our natural state is to make noise. When we see something we love we make noise. When we see something horrific we are supposed to make noise but sometimes don’t. Rabbi Joachim Prinz, rabbi of Berlin in the 30’s famously said at the March on Washington: "bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.” It is likely that you haven’t heard about the police killing of Andre Hill on Tuesday in Ohio. It’s even less likely that you have been out in the streets making noise about yet another African American shot by a police officer that clearly has been trained to kill.

“Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal,” said James Baldwin, “I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago.”

Our chevrutah on Learning From the Germans by Susan Neiman began this week (join us for the next meeting January 7th), in which we are learning how the Germans transformed themselves from a nation that was shamefully silent, then perhaps inevitably silent, and finally not at all silent about their past.
The third type of silence is a desirable one, a good silence, which I’ll call the silence of God. “What is it that stands higher than words?” asked Saint Francis of Assisi: “Action. What is it that stands higher than action? Silence.”

Often our greatest moments are when we find that silence that is always there at the heart of existence. Like hearing the breath of the city on Christmas. The Book of Kings describes God as silence:

“And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire the sound of perfect silence.”

That’s often the process of how we find that still silence.
Out of that silence something new can emerge:

Find silence in Adonai, be still; and let the dance begin, sang the psalmists so many years ago.

Wishing us all some good, still silence this year. May it lead to new beginnings, and the right kind of noise.

Shabbat shalom, and happy Christmas,
Rabbi Misha

Why wrap a gift?

Dear friends,

Manu, almost four, is the world’s greatest gift receiver. Hannukah was beautiful this year in large part thanks to his joy and gratitude at whatever was in the terribly wrapped gifts he received after candle lighting. This may sound trivial, that a four-year old is happy to receive a gift. It’s not. It’s actually a complex and often difficult experience both for kids and adults.

At our lovely Hannukah celebration last Sunday I read If Not Higher, a story By the great Yiddish writer I.L Peretz. It tells the story of the rabbi of Nemirov who would disappear every morning during the month of Elul, and his congregation speculated that he went up to heaven to plead on their behalf. A visitor to the town, determined to find out where the rabbi is going every morning follows him one morning as he wakes up before dawn, dresses in peasant clothing, cuts down a tree in the forest and chops up the wood, and then knocks on the door of a poor, old widow. Putting on a peasant accent he offers her cheap wood, insists that she can pay him back another time, even scolds her for having little faith in God when she says she will never have money to pay him. He lights her fire to warm her house and leaves.

It’s a simple folk story, which as the good ones can do, left me thinking on it all week. The greatness of the rabbi lies not in the act of tzedakah itself, warming up the woman’s home, but in the way he wraps the act in a costume that allows her to accept it. Like us, she has trouble accepting gifts. She has pride, doubts about her character perhaps, knowledge of others in harsher conditions maybe, which make her prefer to sit in the cold than to accept an act of kindness. The rabbi knows this, and puts in the time and effort to make his gesture appear transactional.

We might place this type of charity on the third highest level of tzedakah according to Maimonedes: Donations when the donor is aware to whom the charity is being given, but the recipient is unaware of the source. But Maimonedes does not have a category that fits this case exactly, since the widow is made to not consider the gift a gift, nor know the true identity of the giver, although she thinks she does.

I recall a line from the High Holidays Piyyut, El Nora Alila that Rabbi Jim and me translated as follows:

Awesome trickster, wild giver
Help us see that we’re forgiven
At last receive what we’ve been given.

We receive a lot from a lot of sources. Mikol Melamday Hiskalti, I have been made wiser by all of my teachers, says the Talmud, pointing to the gifting powers of a far greater pool of people than the one we call teachers, and one might say the category extends beyond human beings, or even beyond gods. Anything can be a gift, but it is often incumbent upon the giver to wrap it properly. Matanah, Hebrew for gift, traces back to Matan Torah, the giving or gifting of the Torah. This rather tricky gift, rejected at first by the masses bowing to the shining gold of the calf, was then rewrapped in a new word – oraita, meaning light, as the Torah is called in Aramaic.

This morning I was brought to a halt by the suggestion that even death could be experienced as a type of gift, if we define it in a particular way: “Death is the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks,” wrote BJ Miller, a hospice and palliative medicine physician in the NY Times, in piece called What is Death? Love, gratitude, appreciation of our lives, the doctor suggests, can come wrapped in death. Or perhaps we might say that life is a gift wrapped in death. Maybe that's what Shakespeare meant when in his final play he wrote: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Now that the Hanukah gifts have been unwrapped, let us try to accept those we’ve received, figure out the best wrapping for those to whom we want to give, and work on accepting the gifts and the wrappings that are handed our way.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Tolstoy was a Maccabee

Dear friends,

On Sunday we will gather to light candles and talk about sources of light. Some of you have shared photos, videos or words on these sources of light in your lives. This Hannukah I find myself lit by an unexpected source.

Last week I found myself reading Leo Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness. (Read it Here) I was sucked into this story of hideousness and redemption, based on a true story of a peasant who sinks deeper and deeper into real sinfulness (by real I mean not between him and God in some judgmental version of morality, but between him and others). Never have I read a better illumination of the Talmudic maxim: עבירה גוררת עבירה, one transgression carries the next in tow. Nor have I seen the road to hell be squashed so quickly.

I hadn’t known Tolstoy as a playwright, so I kept going. I found an unfinished play of his, never performed, forbidden in Russia, published posthumously called The Light that Shines in the Darkness. It’s a semi-autobiographical play about a deeply religious wealthy man who hates the church, the state and the army, and wants nothing else but to give up his estate and give it over to its rightful owners, the poor who have actually worked the land his entire life. (read it here)

This led me to his essays, What is Art?, Letters to Mahatma Ghandi, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and others, all of which portray a powerful, compassionate, non-violent vision driven by deep religious conviction, upon which Ghandi and MLK built their struggles. Tolstoy, as it turns out, was a Maccabee: a warrior for the shining light of people being allowed to be who they truly are. Here are some of his words that echo in this season of darkness and light:

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has outgrown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity. I believe that such a time has now arrived — not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of life which has for centuries occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the solution will evidently not be favorable to the outlived law of violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the nature of man.

Looking forward to seeing you at 4pm on Sunday.
Chag sameach and Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Light Tonight

Dear friends,

This evening’s shabbat will be dedicated to the question of light. We will be joined by my friend and teacher, Ghiora Aharoni, who in his exquisite artwork, as well as in his architecture designs uses light as an element of the whole, sometimes appearing as the mind of the piece, other times its heart, and at times painting the rest of the work without calling attention to itself. One of his recent works, which now lives at the Vatican is a concealer of light. Ghiora created a piece of art to guard and contain an ancient scroll of Tikkunei Hazohar, the additions to the main book of Kabbalah, the Zohar, which we might translate as “The book whose light cannot be contained.”

We will also be joined by another friend, Jeff Casper, who swims in the light of the Zohar often, and whose practice of Kabbalah focuses on healing, and it is through that angle that he sees light.

Rabbi Ponet will also be there. Most of you know by now that his most apparent feature is his flaming mind, or heart, and his ability to allow it shine outwards through words.

So yes, the world is as dark as ever, 3000 people are dying every day in this country from the virus, and one of the city’s greatest Jazz clubs, The Jazz Standard is shutting down along with thousands of other beloved businesses, and the sun seems to set before lunchtime, all of which allows us to see the light coming. “The sun is coming,” “בא השמש” means sunset in ancient Hebrew. When the light is disappearing, in other words, that means it’s on its way.

And yes, it’s almost Hanukkah, the holiday of refusing to succumb to darkness, of insisting on adding light, of putting light by our windows so everyone will see it, and know it exists, and has existed forever and will always exist regardless of what we see or do not see, of performing the act of lighting lights so that we know in our own bodies and beings that in the darkness we are light, no matter how absurd that may sound inside our dark and cluttered minds.

But even with all those words, we still do not really know what light is.

Ponet muses:
"We know it as the source of life, as Dylan Thomas put it, "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." We hear it in God's first spoken words in Genesis, "Let there be light," a light that preceded sunlight, and in Dylan Thomas's equation of dying as an extinguishing of the light: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Light, the physicists say, is physical, though they know not if it be wave or particle, energy or matter."

Whatever the hell it is, it’s coming for us tonight. “Rise up my light, for your light has come,” as it does every shabbat.

Hope to see you at 6 this evening.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A rock is more than a rock

Dear friends,

Pope Francis, in his beautiful Thanksgiving offering, invited us to use this moment of “stoppage,” as he called it, to dream big. He quotes Holderlin: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” As we have sensed from the start, this pandemic, with its horrors and difficulties is an opportunity to rethink, re-imagine, re-see the world for what it is and what it can be.

This week’s parasha, Vayetze is ripe for dreaming big.

It begins in danger. Jacob’s brother Esau wants to kill him. His mother sends him away. Alone in the middle of nowhere, he lays his head down on a rock and falls asleep. He dreams as big a dream as one can dream.

“…and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the LORD stood beside him, and said: "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac... thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

The dream is so big that it includes the spiritual reality of the world, the far future of the physical world and the purpose one should strive toward in life. But that is just the starting point. As we are learning in our chevrutah, the text invites us to dream further into it. The commentators show us how it’s done. Rashi:

“The stones began quarrelling with one another. One said, “Upon me let this righteous man rest his head”, and another said “Upon me let him rest it”. Whereupon the Holy One, blessed be He, straightway made them into one stone!”

Chizkuni picks it up from there:

This stone was the one known in later generations as the even shetiyah, symbolising the navel of the globe. A mystical stone at the site where the Holy Ark had stood in the Holy of Holies during the first Temple. This stone, if removed, would expose a hole going down to the center of the earth. It is supposed to have served G-d as the first piece of solid material of what would be the globe on which we live.

I have seen this stone. It now sits in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Until it was closed to non-Muslims following Israeli politicians’ forceful provocations, I used to go up and see this amazing, large, flat rock. You could imagine how the whole world could be established on it. What was more amazing was how these ancient dreams became a reality for the millions of people who would come see it and gain strength and faith and wonder from it, and the billions who would dream up its beauty in their imaginations.

Temple Mount, where the rock stands, is a perfect example of the place of danger, which is where the saving power grows. These are energies that often live together.

If we can take Pope Francis’ calling right now in this moment, our dreams will manifest. A rock, I learned, is much more than just a rock. A dream can be far more real than reality.

How does that happen? The Talmud explains how human beings easily turn dreams into reality. Join us Wednesday at 4pm for chevrutah to learn about it.

Shabbat shalom, with rocks and dreams of gratitude,
Rabbi Misha

Don't You Know?

Dear friends,

Certain mystical moments happened this week.

In the Niggunim chevrutah one of the singers described a moment of cognition, or awareness to a different realm, that was induced by the physical aspects of singing, the air moving through her diaphragm, the sound vibrations through her throat and out. “Did that happen to any of you,” she asked.

In the Vayetze chevrutah a question arose: are angels to be understood as creatures internal to our individual psyches, or as people we encounter in the world? In the ensuing conversation the angels wouldn’t stop moving, until it became clear that they were now the other faces on the screen. “How scary is this place,” the text cried. “What was that,” we asked, and the angels answered: “God’s here, don't you know?”

In a Talmud chevrutah we learned about the wall of iron between us and God that was established when the temple was destroyed. “Iron rusts when touched by water,” one said. “Like water is one person’s face to another,” quoted another. “So seeing your faces rusts away that wall,” concluded the third.

I’m sitting with a bar mitzvah student at an outdoor café to discuss the Ten Commandments. He orders a grilled cheese with bacon.
“In front of your rabbi?” I ask.
“Yes,” he answers proudly.
“Then say the blessing.”
“Hamotzi!“
“What’s religion for,” I ask.
“To give hope to the hopeless,” he says.
“The rivers all flow to the sea and the sea is never filled,” I quote, “there is no purpose to anything under the sun.”
“Well that’s liberating.”
“Maybe, but if it’s true,” I ask, “then why not murder?”
“Because your insignificant life is just as significant as theirs.”

Each of these experiences were moments of transcendence, produced by coming together with others around, well… Torah.

The Zohar’s expounding of this week’s parasha includes the following:
“Within Torah abide all supernal, sealed mysteries, ungraspable. Within Torah abide all supernal matters, revealed and unrevealed. Within Torah abide all things above and below. All things of this world, all things of the world that is coming abide within Torah – yet no one perceives or knows them, so it is written: Who can express the mighty acts of YHVH or declare all his praise?”

One of the greatest unknowables is how interactions between different human beings can produce such extraordinary experiences. I hope you’ll join us this evening at our Shabbat service for some human interaction. We’ll have some Torah, some Hafiz, some music and a very special guest from Afghanistan. Maybe it’ll turn mystical. Who knows?

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Make Like Dust

Dear friends,

When I ask God
He says Yes

You may vanish.

And just like that
I become

One with the astonishing
Blue envelope of music.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks died last week. His voice, one of compassion, purpose and intellect has accompanied me and many others in recent years. When teachers in my school are struggling with a student’s B Mitzvah parasha I will often send them to Rabbi Sacks’ website to read his words on it, because he had an impressive ability to speak to many minds at the same time, from the religiously oriented to the secular. The rabbis taught us that one mustn’t speak a word that cannot be heard or understood by the recipient. Whatever language you speak, Rabbi Sacks could speak it. In this moment of terrible division, his voice is important. I recommend checking out his Ted Talk about listening to those who see things differently than us.

About this week’s parasha, in which both Sarah And Abraham die, he wrote:
"To understand a death, we have to understand a life."
Dying well, as both Abraham and Sarah are described doing, and living well go together. Both involve an acceptance of external circumstances along with an unbreakable connection to your inner sense of self, or what Sacks called being needed by God.

This week in our Vayetze chevrutah we began studying the biblical telling of Jacob’s departure into the world, and his dream of the ladder. We paused on one phrase in God’s promise to Jacob in the dream:
“Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth…”
It seems to imply that we all want to be like the dust of the earth. Is that so? Do you?
I mean, we know we will one day go back to dust, but why do we need a divine promise of our inevitable end?

Toward the end of the Amidah there is a curious phrase about dust:
“Venafshi ka’afar lakol tihyeh.”
“May my soul be like dust for all.”
Several times a day we ask to be like dust. I’ve been very close to this prayer for years now and finally yesterday I managed to come up with a way of explaining it through a short imagination exercise:

Imagine the wind blowing over a hill. It raises the dust from the ground. Now the dust is moving around the air in the sunlight. It moves to and fro with no control. It has no desire of its own to reach any particular place, no need or motivation: it has no resistance but simply rides the wind. Now imagine yourself as a speck of dust moving in the breeze over that hill.

Pleasant, no?

Living and dying, Rabbi Sacks suggests, combine a dust-like mentality with a sense of self, of right and wrong, of responsibility.
“What makes a life satisfying is not external but internal, a sense of purpose, mission, being called, summoned, of starting something that would be continued by those who come after,” he wrote.
It is about doing our work and surrendering their results, about knowing, like Jacob, that each one of us is chosen to be here, and at the same time allowing ourselves to ride, to be a part of the winds of the time in which we live, the world as it appears, the sweetness and the brutality and the grace.

Next Shabbat we will be joined by Nilab Nusrat, an Afghan woman living in the US, whose trying and inspiring life journey will, I’m sure, resonate with these thoughts inspired by Rabbi Sacks Z”l.

Oh, and the poem at the top is by a local poet by the name of Cynthia Cruz.

A shabbat of peace to you all,
Rabbi Misha

Over

Dear friends,

In My Big Fat Greek Wedding you may remember the father who likes to show how everything goes back to the Greeks. My teacher, Rabbi Neiburg loves to that with the Hebrew language, showing (often unconvincingly, but always joyfully) how words in English trace back to Hebrew. I thought of him this morning when contemplating the word “over,” as in “It’s over!” “It’s never over!” “Is this over?” And other such exclamations and questions.

We are Hebrews, Ivrim, and Abraham is called Ha’Ivri, The Hebrew. Rashi explains: Ivri, who came from over the river. The root of the word, עבר, means to pass, like Abraham and Sarah, and later Moses and the rest of us crossed the desert and the Jordan river to come into Israel. To be a Hebrew, a Jew means to be one who crossed over, one who came from over yonder, an immigrant in either body or mind. Ivri and Over are pretty close, much like we use it today when we say to pass over, go over, move over.

But there are other ways to understand what “Hebrew” means. Avar also means the past. In that sense, an Ivri is one who lives in the past. Jews definitely like to pasture in ancient fields. Even when we pray for renewal we sing “renew our days like those of old.” Over and past are definitely close.

There are two understandings of this word, so central to our collective self-definition, which relate to God. During the High Holidays we praised God who “Ma’avir ashmoteynu midey shana”, passes away our misdeeds every year, or in other words, forgives. An Ivri in that sense is a forgiver. Forgiveness lies at the root of Hebrew-ness, like we might say in English: “I’m over it.” On the flip side we find divine wrath, from the very same root, called Evra. From this angle, a Hebrew could be one who sees injustice or negative behavior and is enraged. Perhaps these two contradictory notions are actually part of the same system. If we express the rage, or the outrage we can then, perhaps, forgive. And that process is something embedded in being a Hebrew.

My instinct this week brings me back to Rashi, with a slight adjustment. It is not that Abraham “came from over there," but that he was in many regards a crosser-over as a permanent state of mind. He is, like us, over, a person living in transition. This world, we are told, is a hallway. From where and to where we are not sure. When Abraham is called Ivri for the first time in the Torah we know he was coming from Ur-Kasdim, the place where light appears as a bunch of demons. He had not yet found his footing in Canaan, which we know will one day be called Yisrael, where humans wrestle God.

This time of limbo that we are in will end. But it is a Hebrew time, a time of transition, a heightened version of the rest of our lives, which will lead to another version of itself. When will it be over? Will we ever properly rest? That is a question we will discuss this evening with Rabbi Ponet.

I hope you’ll join us at 6pm this evening. I think we can all use some coming together, some music, some joined Hebrew-ness.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Ancestral Super-Powers

Dear friends,

My pre-election angst was ripped apart the other night when I learned about the killing of Walter Wallace Jr. by the Philadelphia police. This week’s Parasha helped me cope with the fact of the ongoing injustices, which will continue regardless of the outcome of the election.

In it we are introduced to our first ancestor, Abraham, and to his one super-power, the ability to believe, the driving force behind his actions in the world. We read about his covenant with God; a covenant sealed in blood on Abraham’s part, and fire on God’s, known as the Covenant of Parts. I'll try and relay the story.

Abraham, here still called Abram, is now an old man, childless and living in a strange new land. When God appears to him with promises of great rewards, he is confused:

What can you possibly give me? I’m here walking alone and useless with no one to inherit what I have.
The one who will inherit you will come from your guts, God says. Flesh of your flesh.

Before Abram can say a word God takes him outside.

Look up at the sky, he is told, and count the stars. Can you do it? Your seed will be that numerous.

Imagine being told at age 90, after a lifetime of attempts at conceiving, that you will have a child. Imagine being told today that all 545 children who were separated at the border from their parents, and the government has no idea where these parents are, will all be reunited with their families. Imagine hearing a voice saying “One day the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” (That’s MLK’s voice in the March on Washington)
And now imagine believing that voice.

And Abram believed God.
I am the God who brought you here, God continues, so that your seed will be at home in this land.

It is at this point that Abram asks a simple question, which produces this covenant of fire and blood:

How can I know that is true?

Imagine that when you answered that way to the voice promising you miracles, it said this:

Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”

Or in our language this may be more like: Skip work for three days. Instead go to Philadelphia and protest the injustice. And then take another three days and fly to Guatemala and try and locate the parents of one of these children. And then take another three days and spend them at the soup kitchen around the block from your apartment.

How can you know that the promise will come true? God’s answer: Take action. Make a sacrifice.
Abram does it. He slaughters and skins the animals.

He brought them to God and cut them in two, down the middle, and placed each piece opposite the other;

For a while nothing happens. Abram falls asleep and has a terrible nightmare. He sees people suffering, destruction, a great darkness. The road to the fulfillment of the promise will be long, he is told. 400 years of slavery. But it will end.

When he wakes up it is nighttime, and it is smokey. A torch of fire is moving between the split pieces of the sacrifices. And Abram knows that the covenant is sealed.

May we have the strength to believe in the promise of a place that feels like home for all of us, and the motivation to work to make it so.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Pre-Election Prophecies

Dear friends,

“Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted,
I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise,
your foundations with lapis lazuli.
I will make your battlements of rubies,
your gates of sparkling jewels,
and all your walls of precious stones.
All your children will be learned in the ways of The Presence
and great will be their peace.
In righteousness you will be established:
Tyranny will be far from you;
you will have nothing to fear.”

Some weeks the Haftarah reads like the very promise we need. Isaiah still speaks our language:

“For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with deep compassion I will bring you back.
In a surge of anger
I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting kindness
I will have compassion on you,”

The Talmud asks how long this moment of abandonment of mercy lasts.
“God’s anger lasts a moment. And how long is a moment? One fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eighth of an hour, that is a moment.”
What feels like years to us is pretty short in the divine clock.

The prophetic promise continues:

“Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.”

The Kabbalist poet Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, who wrote Lekha Dodi, which we will sing this evening, took Isaiah’s words and reconstructed them as a reason why we shouldn’t be afraid:

Don't be ashamed! Don't be abashed!
Why be depressed? Why be upset?
In you my poor people will be sheltered
And she shall be rebuilt - the city on her hill!

Though we feel small, weak, helpless in the face of the scary world around us, we actually have the capacity to be the shelter of the oppressed, and that in turn will revive the city as a whole.
Like most of his fellow prophets, Isaiah did not sit around waiting for redemption to happen on its own. What appears to us like a horror could in fact be a calling to the gate of a new time of reconciliation. When the BLM protests began in the spring I found myself at an interfaith vigil. An African American pastor spoke some simple words that have stayed in my heart:
How mighty is God!
It’s a sentence spoken not in New Shul language. We might say: The way this time unfolded - with the terrible death and sickness, the isolation and sadness, the sirens booming, and then suddenly the protests, the renewed call for justice, the ability of the country and ourselves to listen and to act - the way it all went down, as if by design is crazy. We don’t really know what is going on.
Maybe Isaiah does when he sings:

“Though the mountains be shaken
and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken
nor will my covenant of peace falter.”

I look forward to bringing in Shabbat with you all this evening at 6:30.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha