Studying Torah

Dear friends,

The Talmud tells us of a few actions for which a person gets blessed not only in this world but also beyond: “Honoring one’s father and mother; The performance of righteous deeds; And the making of peace between a person and his friend;”

There is one action, though that is equivalent to all of them put together: “studying Torah.” For us at TNS Torah is a broad category. It includes literature, philosophy, music, theology, art and working for justice. Our Chevrutah offerings this year give a taste of both the breadth and depth of what we mean by Torah study at TNS. These are opportunities for introspection and exploration led by some of the great minds of our community, each one shedding a different light on the idea of mindful return. Some of them are in person and others via Zoom. I hope you can join us for some of these exciting study groups.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

What is Mindfulness?

Dear friends,

We have called our theme this year the Year of Mindful Return, in hopes that we will be able to together form the right frame of mind to rejoin the world after this strange pandemic time. While many of us have a sense of what mindfulness is, we are influenced in our thinking about by new-agey notions of this originally Buddhist term. I thought it is important to take a moment to look at what mindfulness is in the Buddhist tradition, so that we can then look for the similarities and differences with similar Jewish notions, and contemporary ideas. Luckily, my brother, Tari (Eviatar) is the incoming Chair of the Department of Religions at Hebrew University, and a scholar of Buddhist philosophy who has written and thought about mindfulness for a couple decades. We sat down in the kitchen of my temporary abode in Tel Aviv to study Nehemiah and talk mindfulness, and taped some of our conversation for you all.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

Don't Fast, Eat Sweets

The Mukhtar of the Beduin village Dir A-Tin and Rabbi Arik Ascherman on Tisha B'Av

Dear friends,

The great disaster has finally passed. The people can gather once again. New leaders have emerged, new thinkers, new poets, new attitudes. They come together in the streets to see what the ancient wisdom has to offer. The language of the ancestors is chanted. Those who understand the words explain them to those who don’t. The dancers move their bodies to express the secrets hidden in the depths of the words. The musicians blow their horns and strum their lyres, grasping at the truths conveyed. The priests speak the people’s language, uncovering the layers of the ever-present past.

A feeling of gratitude overwhelms the crowd. We survived. Tears begin to well. They hear the words of the Torah and all they can do is cry. Despite everything, there is love. After all, we are loved.

The emotions are strong, for this love feels unwarranted, free, a love-gift in lieu of punishment. The poet speaks:

We deserve
what has befallen us
and worse.

Our ancestors lived lives of privilege.
Gifts came their way and they
Wolfed them up
Like pigs.
When they brought suffering on themselves they
Cried, repented, and
Repeated their offenses.
As soon as they were comfortable
They returned
To entitled ways.

And we are sad reflections of them.

She points to one eye:
עיני, My eye,
She points the other:
עיני, My eye,
She touches her tears:
ירדה מים, Drips water.

We pause our description of the 5th century BC scene in Jerusalem described by the biblical leader, Nehemiah to imagine a different brokenness. It was Tisha B’Av this past Sunday, the day we mourn the destruction of Jerusalem, and the temple. I spent the day with Rabbi Arik Ascherman and his flock moving from one spot of destruction to another. Taybe, Dir A Tin, Humsa, places where simple people are being forced out of already desolate places in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason other than some bizarrely cruel instinct of domination. It was at Dir A-Tin, a tiny Beduin outpost in the Jordan valley where Rav Arik invited me to chant the second chapter of the Book of Lamentations, where we read these verses:

עיני עיני ירדה מים אין לי מנחם

My eye
My eye
Drips water
There is no one
to comfort me.

שִׁפְכִ֤י כַמַּ֙יִם֙ לִבֵּ֔ךְ נֹ֖כַח פְּנֵ֣י אֲדֹנָ֑י

Pour your heart out
Like water
In front of the
Vacant face of 
Your broken
God.

Over and over during the course of the day I heard the same message: we are inflicting brokenness upon ourselves. We returned to Zion after a disaster, just like Nehemiah, and are allowing our comfort to consume our sense of gratitude.

In the evening the fast ended, and I was with my family by the Mediterranean as the sun set on beautiful Tel Aviv, new Zion that it is, the first Hebrew city to be built in millennia. There I could hear Nehemiah’s answer to the tears, the self-criticism, the brokenness of his flock.

He stops the poet and speaks to the weepers:

Don’t mourn.
No more tears today.
Instead go
Eat some sweets
Drink something delicious
Send a meal to those have none -
For today is a day that belongs to our God of hope.
So release your sadness.
Let the care of your friend,
Your God
Be your fortress of peace,
and love.
(Nehemiah 8)

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

On the Richness of Complexity

Dear friends,

“I was lying there in the coffin with Ben Zakai,” Danny opens, “and they drove those swords through the coffin to make sure we were dead.” Danny, whose family built the first streets of Tel Aviv, tells me how after he was smuggled out of Jerusalem in the first century with Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai in a coffin, they came in front of the Roman ruler. “The governor offered him a wish. Ben Zakkai asked for Yavneh, a small town where the Jews could restart their lives after the Romans destroy Jerusalem. I just kept my mouth shut. That’s how the Jews survived.” 

We’re in what’s left of the Palestinian village of Susya, which looks like what Abraham and Sarah’s dwelling must have looked like: a rocky enclave in the desert with sheep pens and hot, vast beauty all around. Five Israeli activists, my father, my son and me are having tea with Azam, who miraculously still lives in his hut with his family and his animals despite two decades of violence, home demolitions and harassment. Matan’s Bar Mitzvah is coming up, so his grandfather is showing him a piece of his life; the landscapes of the South Hebron Hills, the villagers he’s been helping for years, the incredible people who show up in these circles, the work that he says allows him to continue living in this country. 

Between cups of sweet spiced black tea, in the shade of his sukkah, Azam agrees to recite one of his poems. In an Arabic thicker than earth he sings of a white goat with patches of black around her eyes. “I raised her like she was my daughter, fed her milk as if I were her mother.” He pauses to tell us that he improvised this poem while visiting his sick mother, and it’s long because she kept asking for more rhyming couplets. He recites how the goat walked behind him one day and butted her head into his back bringing him to his knees, a betrayal he couldn’t take. “You don’t forgive the betrayer,” his mother had insisted. But Azam is a gentle man, and you can tell that he can’t help but forgive this rebellious she-goat.  

We thank Azam, and he us for the support, and move on to the next village, Rakiz, a few hills to the east. This is a harder story, which Matan heard during the car ride from Jerusalem. The army showed up at the request of the settlers early in the morning of January 1st. They entered the house of one of the impoverished families of Rakiz. After a series of humiliations, they set their eyes on the family’s generator, a prize possession in this part of the West Bank, where only Jewish settlements are connected to the electric grid. The family couldn’t take it, so they tried to stop them, and called the neighbors over to help. Twenty-year-old Haroun and his father came right away. In the ensuing struggle over the generator, he will get shot in the neck by a soldier. The family will have to bust through two military checkpoints to get him to the hospital in time to save his life. Now Haroun, paralyzed and with a tube in his throat, accompanied by his mother, Farsi are in a hospital in Tel Aviv. 

We are in Rakiz for a solidarity visit with Haroun’s father and siblings. When explaining the purpose of the trip to Matan, my dad told him that often he goes out to help the people of South Hebron in more active ways, to protect them, harvest with them. Today we are just going to be with them, and that is incredibly important. “In just coming to be with them, to witness, you are giving them a lot.” 

We are invited into a spacious and cool cave, with mattresses and rugs laid out. The family had moved into the cave after the army demolished their hut that stood above it. Haroun’s blue-eyed siblings serve us tea. His father, Abu Haroun tells Matan in Arabic that they have a horse outside. He offers him a ride. Matan is confused. “Tchaf,” he is asked. “Are you scared?” I translate and Matan accepts the offer.

The three of us exit the cave and go into the animal pens. Abu Haroun picks up my large child with his big arms and places him bare back on the horse. “Tchaf,” he asks again. Matan shakes his head and Abu Haroun lets out a laugh. After the ride the three of us gather in front of the farm-animals' cave. Goats, ducks and donkeys roam. Muhammad, the younger son is in there too, directing little tiny goats to their mother’s teets. “When were they born,” I manage to ask in some form of broken Arabic. “ Usbu’en,” Abu Haroun replies, “two weeks.” “Mabruk,” I wish him. “Hamdulilah,” he smiles. We stand there quietly. “Mut’asef,” I say. “I’m sorry, about your son.” “It’s hard,” he tells me, wiping away a tear. And he speaks of God and what is and what must be. “Ilhamdulilah,” he summarizes, “praise belongs to God.”

In the cave, a Facetime conversation with the hospital. Erela, the activist from a kibbutz in the Negev who organized the visit is speaking with Farsi. They speak daily, often several times a day. When she isn’t in Palestine Erela helps people through crisis situations. As more tea and pita is passed around Erela and I talk religion. She is not what people around here call religious. But she is far more religious than most of them in her attitude toward life.  

“When a person approaches me for help,” she says, “I tell them that they’ve lost the key to the Aron Kodesh, the ark. Now I’m the Shammes, the caretaker of the synagogue. I don’t know where their key is, and I tell them that. But I know where to look, down in the basement, or under the chairs.”  

This land is rich, like Azam’s Arabic. The soil and the air have a similar abundant consistency, as do the experiences you have. 

The other night Matan and me went out to watch the final of the Euro Cup soccer tournament. Several hundred people were gathered outdoors in what during Ottoman times was the central Jerusalem train station to cheer England and Italy on the big screen. We found ourselves standing in a little enclave smushed between England fans with red markings on their faces and Italy fans with loud horns. They looked just like one another these two crowds. But quickly we understood that the Italy fans were Palestinian, and the England fans were Jews. Just a month ago there were violent clashes in the streets. Now here we all were laughing and cheering, nobody hiding their language, their accent, their identity. When Italy finally won in a dramatic penalty shootout, the young Palestinians pulled out their dumbek, stood up on the tables and danced with their horns, as the Jewish café owner blasted the Italian classic “Volare,” and we all sang along. 

Co-existence is happening. In the doctor’s office I went to a few days ago the entire medical staff were Arabs. There is a real culture of living together in this country, even amidst the fanaticism and the fighting. It’s a simple thing, really, an anti-political mode that has emerged out of a place that drives political consciousness deep into every child’s experience before they reach kindergarten. It’s not politics, it’s reality.  

Or one piece of it. When I met some Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem this week, a generation older than the dancing Italy fans, they were not in the co-existence mode. “It’s more complicated now,” they explained, “we are fighting normalization.” They have been abandoned yet again by the Arab world with the Abraham Accords. They’ve been left to their fate during Covid, with their occupier having vaccinated more of its people than any other country but given them almost no vaccines (only Palestinian citizens of Israel have been vaccinated). They are angry with good cause. So to many Palestinians co-existence means accepting an unacceptable reality. 

Abu Haroun walks us up the hill to our cars. He shows us the hut on the opposite side of the mountain where the incident took place. We pass by a small pen where his rabbit lives. Her eyes are shining. I come closer and see that they are blue. “Everyone here has blue eyes,” I say. Abu Haroun smiles. 

As we walk, Danny shares one more story. “The Kotzker Rebbe once told his disciples he’s going to search for the truth. He closed himself in his study and didn’t come out. The disciples would put a plate of food under the door and he’d return it empty. This went on for twenty years. When he finally came out the few disciples that were still waiting for him eagerly asked him what he found. ‘Nothing,’ said the Rebbe, ‘only lies.’ Danny looks at me. “Now that’s a rabbi who could maybe lure me back into a synagogue. Maybe.” 

In the car driving back to Jerusalem through the gorgeous desert landscape my father says to his grandson: “Matani, these mountains, what color are they?” “Brown, yellow,” answers the young man. “You know, in the late afternoon something unusual happens to them. They turn purple. Real purple.” We pick up some purple plums from a farmer on the side of the road, and eat them as we drive home to Jerusalem. 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha 

Dreaming Jerusalem

Dear friends,

It’s after midnight here in Jerusalem. Manu, my four-year-old just fell asleep. Ezzy, 8, just walked out of his room, “Can’t sleep.” Matan, 13 has a few more sudoku puzzles to finish before he can close his eyes. Today he napped five or six times, since last night he didn’t sleep more than an hour. A couple times he stood up from his bed, spoke to me from within his dream, walked to the other room and back to his, lay back down. Last night I walked out into the street with Manu around 2am. I wanted to show him the stars so his body might understand it’s nighttime. The yellow streetlights were too bright. I gave up and made us a snack. Around 4am he closed his eyes. By then Ezzy was up again. Erika walked out of the bedroom. I crashed.  

You might diagnose us all with jet lag. I ascribe it to something else. The psalms put it this way: 

בְּשׁוּב יְהוָה אֶת-שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן הָיִינו כְּחֹלְמִים 

When YHVH returns us to Zion we become dreamers. 

Sometimes the pshat, the simple meaning of the verse, is deeper than the drash, the expounding.  

That’s how I spent the last 30 hours since we landed. Walking the streets of my childhood and the rooms of my parents’ house unsure if I’m asleep or awake. The dry air of the Jerusalem summer, the smell of dusty pine and cypress trees, the baking sun, the feeling that this city hasn’t changed at all since I was last here, before the pandemic began.  

One extra-sweet dream was a waking one (I think). I stared for long minutes at the yellow-orange light of the early evening sun ricocheting off the leaves of the giant Eucalyptus tree down the street. I hadn’t seen that color in a long time. I was reminded of a stage lighting class I took in undergrad, in which the teacher asked us about a quality of light that we know from a specific place. That color of light, a hazy shade of dark yellow is reserved for the holy city and its trees in the hour when the day wanes.  

"עֲשָׂרָה קַבִּין יֹפִי יָרְדוּ לָעוֹלָם, תִּשְׁעָה נָטְלָה יְרוּשָׁלַיִם וְאֶחָד כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ" 

“Ten measures of beauty were bestowed upon the world,” the Babylonian Talmud teaches. “Nine were taken by Jerusalem and one by the rest of the world.” 

That dream-like color has got to be one of those nine measures. 

The beauty is enhanced by the effort to come. Like every return to Zion throughout the ages, this one felt improbable, unlikely to come through, difficult, trying. Nor does the difficulty end once you get off the plane. Not in places that are in touch with reality like this one. Things here are made of stone. Even love can feel like rock here in the underbelly of the world. 

I hope this letter is not a dream. In case it is, please send it back my way in the morning. In the meantime, I’m going to try and get Ezzy back to sleep. 

Wishing you a shabbat full of dreams and light. 

יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה מִצִּיּוֹן עֹשֵׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ 

God sends blessings from Zion. He’s still making the sky and the land. 

Rabbi Misha 

Wrestling with the Sh'ma

Dear friends,

There are six Hebrew words that almost all Jews, no matter how rebellious, ignorant or God-hating know: 
Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad. 
We’ve heard or spoken this line almost every time we’ve been to a synagogue. Some of us have heard our grandmothers instinctively exclaim the first two words of the phrase whenever they hear something scary. Some of us love the ritual of closing or covering our eyes when we speak the words. Lots of us know that it appears in the morning prayer, the evening prayer, the prayer before we go to sleep and other places in the prayer book. Many of us know the translation of the phrase: Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. None of us, however, are attuned to the full range of meanings and associations this phrase offers.

The Jews are a people like all others, which is to say in large part nasty, foolish and shallow. The decision to place this verse as the centerpiece of our prayer-life, however, was the opposite; Generous, wise and deep. I’d like to attempt to convey something of the expansiveness of this verse and a few of the echoes and meanings contained within each of its Hebrew words.

Like any piece of Torah, this verse contains the meaning that the reader gives it. One example of this is the final word in the phrase, echad. The word means “one,” and yet most translations will render the final two words, Adonai Echad: “The Lord alone,” rendering the verse in its entirety as an affirmation of the singularity of God. Our God, the Jewish God, it suggests — is the only true God. A different translation flips the meaning: Adonai echad: God is one. Translating it this way does away with any separation at all, between this god and others, between Jews and gentiles, between us and them, between me and you, and puts us all as part of the same oneness; if God is one then all is one since god is all. I’m presenting it as a translation issue, but it’s not exactly that, but rather a choice that each reader makes as they speak the words.

Let’s back up to the beginning of the phrase.

Sh’ma means “listen” or “hear.” In other places in Torah it means “understand.” Whichever meaning you choose, the first word of the verse demands we pay attention.

Yisrael means Israel. In the first couplet, Sh’ma Yisrael — “Hear O Israel,” we Israelites are called upon to listen, to pay attention. But the word Yisrael has a context that we are reminded of whenever we say it. It is the name given to Jacob by the angel when they are done wrestling. The angel says to Jacob: “Your name will be Israel, for you have wrestled with God and humans, and were not beaten.” Israel means wrestling. Sh’ma Yisrael means “Hear Oh wrestler,” a call which not only shows compassion for each of us — I know you are struggling — but also suggests a way out of the prison of our present struggle — nonetheless I ask you to open your ears. We can speak these words of empathy and encouragement to ourselves as we say them, and know that God, or the universe tells us the same.

The one word that appears twice, Adonai, the third and fifth word, is beyond loaded. The four letters יהוה, YHVH are unpronounceable, strange, beautiful to look at. They are the heart of the phrase, and probably the heart of everything. They are an impossible — as well as an impossibly easy — (mis)conjugation of the Hebrew verb “to be,” which includes in it all three tenses: Hayah means was, Hoveh means is, Yihyeh means will be. All three are visibly and meaningfully present in יהוה. God, here being described or expressed, is being-in-time that is as elastic and timeless as it is sharp and coherent.

When we say Adonai Eloheynu, “YHVH is our god” we are saying that Being, Is-ness, time itself as well as its opposite — that is our god. We are attaching ourselves to the past and the future in the only time available to us, the present moment.

The fourth word, Eloheynu, means “our God.” Elohim, here appearing with the ending nu, meaning ours, is the generic word in Hebrew for god. The interesting thing about it is that although we are all about this notion of the one god, grammatically speaking this word is plural. Any Hebrew noun ending in “im” is plural. God in Hebrew means gods. Eloheynu, despite its grammar is never translated “our gods,” but “our god.” But we mustn’t forget that it carries within it the memory of a multiplicity of gods, all of which are, in this verse at least, ours. They are our gods, which although are too many to count, we count them all in the same category: god.

Now we have made our way back to the final phrase: Adonai echad. “God is one.” We began, as a conversion candidate taught me this week, with a duality: Israel, the wrestler wrestling with the angel, with god, with another person. Next we acknowledged multiplicity in the grammar of eloheynu, our god/s. And now we finally come home to echad. YHVH; this time-essence which allows us to be, which connects us with all that is, which reminds us that we will not be forever in this form of our wrestling selves; YHVH is one. And we are a part of that oneness and will forever be all the way back to the beginning of time. This does not, in my view mean that that duality does not exist, nor that multiplicity is a fabrication. All three mindsets are true. We are wrestlers, all of us, at love and war with another. We are also the children of an endless multiplicity of lights and sounds and experiences and people and universes and gods. And ultimately we come to rest in the One.

I invite you to speak this phrase, or whisper it slowly, to contemplate it, meditate upon it, to examine its contradictions, its meaning for you or lack thereof. To pray it. And I would be very interested to hear what you discover. If you are so inclined, please write to me and share your thoughts on this strange and wondrous verse of poetry.

Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad

Listen O wrestler, Being is our god/s, Being is One.

Shabbat shalom and happy Fourth of July weekend,

Rabbi Misha

Who Needs Some Heschel?

Dear friends,

“Man is the playground for the unpredictable emergence and multiplication of needs.”

These words of Abraham Joshua Heschel echoed as I looked at my pile of laundry this morning and wondered at the tremendous amount of clothes I own. In the bible a set of clothes was one of a person’s most valuable possessions.

“We usually fail to discern between authentic and artificial needs” Heschel continues, “and, misjudging a whim for an aspiration, we are thrown into ugly tensions.”

Reading the Book of Nechemiah this afternoon I found myself wondering about the connection between what we consider our needs, and the emergence of the Pandemic. This Fifth century BC waiter prays to God day and night, confessing “the sins that we, the children of Israel have sinned to You; I sinned, and so did the house of my father.” Even though the destruction of Jerusalem and the exiling of Jews from Judea took place before Nechemiah was born, still he asks what he and his people are doing to perpetuate this disaster. I find this inspiring. A disaster that happened to the Jews because of geo-political events largely beyond their weak, little kingdom’s control, is seen as an opportunity to self-examine. This has something to do with what Heschel calls “needs as spiritual opportunities.”

In this moment, when the pandemic seems to be easing off, maybe we can ask ourselves what we did to move our world into the space in which such a thing took place. Maybe we can contemplate our relationship with needs, which the pandemic called into question.

“We cannot make our judgements, decisions and directions for action dependent upon our needs,” says Heschel. What an incredible, radical and baffling statement! If we can’t make judgements based on what people need, what are we supposed to base those judgments on?! Heschel calls on us to dissociate ourselves from what we consider to be our needs, and instead base our actions on something far deeper and more elusive.

“To understand the problem of needs, we must face the problem of man, the subject of needs.”

We have to understand ourselves in order to distinguish between our authentic and artificial needs. Our perceived needs also help us understand ourselves by producing a variety of human tendencies: anger, anxiety, frustration, distraction.

A few days ago I was visited by a dead man with a message for his needy, anxious and often angry family. He said:

שְׂמַח בָּחוּר בְּיַלְדוּתֶיךָ וִיטִיבְךָ לִבְּךָ בִּימֵי בְחוּרוֹתֶיךָ וְהַלֵּךְ בְּדַרְכֵי לִבְּךָ וּבְמַרְאֵי עֵינֶיךָ וְדָע כִּי עַל־כׇּל־אֵלֶּה יְבִיאֲךָ הָאֱלֹהִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט׃ וְהָסֵר כַּעַס מִלִּבֶּךָ וְהַעֲבֵר רָעָה מִבְּשָׂרֶךָ כִּי־הַיַּלְדוּת וְהַשַּׁחֲרוּת הָבֶל׃

“Be happy, kid in your childhood,
And your heart will be good to you as you grow older.
Walk in the ways of your heart,
And follow what your eyes show you,
And know that these are the things for which you will be judged.

So remove anger from your heart,
And push nastiness away from your body;
Childhood and adulthood both pass like a breath.”
(Ecclesiastes 11:9–10)

Needs should be examined in a long lens and put in line with our hearts and our experiences in the world. Next time you become conscious of a need, try Heschel’s test. Ask yourself: “Is God in need with me?”

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha

One Year

Dear friends,

A year ago, a stranger gave me a gift I still carry in my pocket most days. On one side of the little wooden coin is written: It is not your duty to complete the work. On the other: But neither are you free to desist from it.
I received this coin with the quote from the Mishnah in front of a church in Hudson, NY at the end of an interfaith vigil for black lives, just a few days after I jumped onto this happy bandwagon called The New Shul. As this first year with you all draws to a close, I find myself more often thinking ahead to the next one, but also taking stock of what we did this year.

We did a lot.

Almost as soon as Zach said goodbye we dove into learning. A dozen Chevrutahs (pronounced in these parts Shevrootah:) or learning pods on a variety of ideas, issues and questions were flooded by dozens of learning-hungry New Shulers and their friends, family and random people they told about the project. For me this was an opportunity to connect with many of you who I’d never met, and also to introduce you to some of my teachers. The powerful response to the chevrutahs confirmed my hunch about this place: This is a group of smart people interested in thinking, searching, discovering what the ancient is doing in their world, their mind, their soul.

When High Holidays came around we dove into reality head first: some of us were in person at the farm, some were on the screen when we all learned together on Rosh Hashanah eve that RBG z”l had died. This wasn’t going to be an easy year. But as the rest of the Days of Awe unfolded, with the help of the music, the body, the breath and the incredible participation of the members of several chevrutot, we arrived at that beautiful sunny afternoon in Queens for Neilah, the final prayer of Yom Kippur with hope in our hearts.

There was no shortage of memorable moments in the virtual months that followed. To name just a few, praying with Nilab, our friend from Women for Afghan women and hearing her story, spontaneous prayers of thanksgiving from members after the election, getting immersed in Talmud, Zohar and art in the Torah study on Jacob’s ladder, getting drunk with y’all as we read the Book of Esther on Purim and admitting to the kids that parents only pretend to know what we're doing, hearing Susan Neiman tell us that as a Jew she feels more comfortable living in Berlin than in Tel Aviv or Atlanta, sharing with each other artifacts left to us by friends and family who have passed, and so many more heart shaking moments.

When spring came around we threw ourselves into the Kumah Festival. The entire community seemed involved in one way or another in what felt to me like a transformative undertaking. 33 artists, activists and thinkers from within the community and without turned our attention to the spaces in which our faith world, our creativity and our action for justice come together. During the festival we created a forward-looking, truth-seeking attitude toward central Jewish questions like the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine and brought other issues like BLM, identity politics and food justice into the context of Jewishness. For 7 weeks we listened, watched, asked questions, worked to prepare ourselves to receive the Torah, which we did to the ecstatic sound of horns on Shavuot.

We survived this year. We grew. We sprouted new leaves. We began to see who we might become.

I’m already in preparation for the High Holidays. We are going to build on what we did last year as we step into the new in-person post-Covid reality. We will have a series of Chevrutot once again in the weeks leading into High Holidays. We are building an extraordinary musical team. And I can’t wait to find time to get to know all of you face to face.

I very much hope you can join me next Friday evening for the final Kabbalat Shabbat of this extraordinary year, where we will hear from some of the people who made this year so sweet, with all the challenges it brought.

Thank you for such a strange and beautiful year, for being on this wondrous journey with me. I look forward to continuing this sacred work with you all.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

What We Owe

Dear friends,

A couple weeks ago at his Bar Mitzvah, Henry asked us the following question: Do we owe God anything for passing over the firstborn of our ancestors on the night God killed the firstborn Egyptians. It’s a provocative question, but a curious one. First of all, while some of us take this story to be true, it’s far from a piece of history. The idea that we would owe anyone anything based on a story seems tenuous until you look at the myriad of fictions we base our lives upon. There are borders we agree upon simply because we’ve etched them into our consciousness, things we are allowed and not allowed to do because of laws dating back tens and sometimes hundreds of years. If you’ve ever been to a court of law anywhere in the world you will have seen a high drama of various people playing different roles, all accepting the entirely made-up structures at play, which carry very real consequences. As Jews we also created stories that reach back into time to find a frame for our years, months and days, as well as our sense of identity.

So okay Henry, maybe we could owe something based on a mythical story of ours, real or not.

Secondly though, I wonder about the notion of owing God anything whatsoever. Some of us don’t even believe in God. How could we owe something to an entity we’re not even sure exists?! This one I find easier to answer. Whether God put us here or not, whether God is the one who protected our ancestors ancient and more recent or not, we are here. Gratitude, appreciation, a sense that we have been given this life, these are natural human tendencies. We have certain responsibilities as human beings. We receive and we give back. Call it God or life or what you will, we have a life and have to make something out of it. We owe it to something or someone.

So okay Henry, we do owe God, as you called it, something.

Third comes the complexity of the specific incident Henry defined, the firstborn sons that were spared in Egypt. For me the story lives more in the drash than the pshat, in the expounding than in the simple understanding. It is a metaphor of how my life happens, an echo of moments of fear and salvation in my past and future, a miracle of survival that replays itself over and over in my personal and collective history. In that sense it happened to me, and therefore of course I do owe a debt of gratitude to God for that event.

So okay Henry, for me the answer is yes. But what is it that we owe exactly?

For this the Torah has an answer, which we find in this week’s parasha.

“Every firstborn in Israel, whether human or animal, is mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set them apart for myself.”

We owe God our firstborn children. Luckily, within months of that deadly night God changed the terms of the deal.

“And I have taken the Levites in place of all the firstborn sons in Israel.”

Instead of the first born of our people (most of whom can be pretty sinful and kvetchy) God took the Levites. The Levites were the temple poets and musicians.

In order to understand what that meant for the Levites back then and what it might mean for us today let’s take a look at a surprisingly poetic verse fragment from the parasha:

כִּי֩ נְתֻנִ֨ים נְתֻנִ֥ים הֵ֙מָּה֙ לִ֔י

“For given given are they to me.”

That’s not a typo. It’s meant to express different ways in which the Levites are given to God. Rashi explains: “Given to carry, given to sing.” These are the two responsibilities of the Levites. They carry the tabernacle from place to place and they sing.

The 15th century Italian commentator Sforno has a different take on it.

“Given by themselves, for they gave themselves of their own volition to My work, and given by the children of Israel who provide the means for the sustenance of the Levites with their offerings, so that My work will be done by all through their participation.”

What God wants in return for saving our firstborns is that we all participate in carrying our temple around, and in song. God wants us to find creative ways to keep this tradition moving from place to place and generation to generation. And just as importantly, God wants art, music, poetry. We owe God art. We owe God poets. We owe God singing. We owe God the sustenance of a small but dedicated group of people who will keep our boat floating along on the sea of song and change.

Please join us this evening at 6pm for a levitical Kabbalat Shabbat with poetry and music.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

The Right Word

Dear friends,

Before I offer some words of Torah as reflections on the last week, I’d like to thank you all for bringing such wonderful energy to the Kumah Festival. It was amazing to see so many of you at the pier last Sunday, and to get your warm responses, your attention and your spirit through the Zoom screens over the last seven weeks. I’m so grateful to all of the many talented participants and curators, to Susan, Maia and Judy who formed this festival with me and gave it life. Of the many incredible moments in the festival, one that stands out is watching people of a huge range of ages attach their prayers of fabric to Suzanne Tick’s vertical loom. Many of you brought family heirlooms cut into strips, cloths that belonged to or were made by grandparents, parents, loved ones. Some brought fabric from happy moments like birthday parties, others wrote onto the fabrics names of people who were killed in the latest round of violence in the holy land, or prayers for the planet and the city. The communal piece of art that Suzanne offered us expresses the heart of what we were getting at in this festival: that our deepest questions, fears and yearnings can be weaved together as a thing of beauty, that we have the capacity to transform our garbage into a worthy offering to God or universe, that art can be the communal action through which we overcome despair. For those of you who couldn’t be with us on Sunday, we are hoping to bring back the loom in the future and offer more opportunities to add prayers of fabric to it.

During these last 11 days of fighting I have found myself turning to the Book of Psalms. I was looking for emotional support, for insight into the nature of humanity, for echoes of the eternal in the current turbulence, for the poetry of justice. The verses that made me stop, reread, wonder, were those dealing with speech and silence, like these from Psalm 38:

וַאֲנִ֣י כְ֭חֵרֵשׁ לֹ֣א אֶשְׁמָ֑ע וּ֝כְאִלֵּ֗ם לֹ֣א יִפְתַּח־פִּֽיו׃
וָאֱהִ֗י כְּ֭אִישׁ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־שֹׁמֵ֑עַ וְאֵ֥ין בְּ֝פִ֗יו תּוֹכָחֽוֹת׃

I am like the deaf, who cannot hear,
like the mute, who cannot speak;
I have become like one who does not hear,
whose mouth can offer no rebuke.

When David writes these lines he is in a deeply troubled state. All around him he sees wickedness. Emotionally he is broken. Voices are coming at him from all directions to do this and feel that. Instead of standing and acting against the wickedness, of answering the violent challenges, he falls into silence.

כִּֽי־לְךָ֣ יְהוָ֣ה הוֹחָ֑לְתִּי אַתָּ֥ה תַ֝עֲנֶ֗ה אֲדֹנָ֥י אֱלֹהָֽי׃

Adonai, I wait for you; you will answer, Adonai my God.

This is not a typical request from David to God. David relies on God for strength, but he knows he is the actor in the world, not God. But in this case he wants God to speak for him.

How does one speak about the horrors of the world? How does a person choose the right words, the appropriate ideas, the voice that will express the totality of the situation, not just one small piece of it? How can you know the utterances that will be useful toward bringing the terror to an end? ‘It is beyond me, God,’ he says, ‘You do the speaking!’

Despite the pull toward silence I found myself immersed in the desperate noise this week. I spent more time on Facebook than ever before. I posted articles and thoughts, engaged in conversations with people back home and here in the US (including some of you), argued, supported, listened, searched.

Don’t get me wrong, I have had a clear opinion of what this was about the whole time. I expressed some of that to you when this started. And still the strongest pull, the wisest choice usually seemed to be silence. סייג לחכמה שתיקה said our sages, “silence is a fence around wisdom.” But how could we allow ourselves to disengage, to allow wickedness to thrive?

The outside world is a mirror of the internal. War is an expression of our mind. Speaking the right words to others is as hard as speaking the right words to ourselves.

The Sons of Korach, whose poetry also appears in the Psalms had the following to say:

הַרְפּוּ וּדְעוּ כִּי אָנֹכִי אֱלֹהִים

Let go and know that I am God.

The word Harpoo, which I translated as “let go” can be understood in various ways. Many translate it “Be still.” The ceasefire that was thankfully announced yesterday might lead us to translate the word simply as “Stop” or “Cease.” To me there is a letting go that happened yesterday, and a letting go that we’ve been working on all week. A letting go of our certainty, of our narratives, of our frustrations, of our need to win unwinnable arguments or battles through inflicting decisive blows on our adversaries. All week has been a struggle to accept again that our life-long work to improve the world has not changed it in the ways we wanted it to change. Something else, another force, another intelligence is at play, and it goes so far beyond our ability, so far beyond our comprehension, so far beyond our words.

When we let go, in the silence, the no-space of the pause, we can sometimes allow the right word to come to our lips.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

It's All Torah

Dear friends,

Sunday evening we will gather to celebrate Shavuot, the culminating event of our Kumah Festival. The events in Israel/Palestine can be seen as a shadow over the celebration, which they no doubt are, but they can also be seen as an enhancement of our task: to receive the Torah.

Torah is a thing of beauty, a piece of divinity, a crystalized gem of justice. It is also ugly, human and morally wrong. Accepting the Torah is accepting life itself with all its beauty, complexity and horror.

In the Brachot tractate of the Talmud we find the following comic story:

Rav Kahana entered and lay beneath his teacher, Rav’s bed. He heard Rav chatting and laughing with his wife and having relations with her. Rav Kahana said to Rav: Your mouth is like one who has never seen a cooked dish! (meaning your behavior is lustful) Rav said to him: Kahana, you are here? Get out of here! This is no way to behave. Rav Kahana said to him: It is Torah, and I must learn.

A similar story relates Rabbi Akiva following his teacher into the bathroom and observing the intricacies of his defecation practice, and then reporting to his students what he learned from it. When they challenge his impertinence, Akiva gives the same answer: It is Torah, and I must learn.

Torah is life, and life is not always pretty. Receiving the Torah is accepting the gift of life with everything that comes with it. Many Israelis will be doing it in bomb shelters. Palestinians in Gaza marked Eid Al Fitr yesterday in their homes, or in the rubble of what was their home. This is humanity, which points to the enormity of our task.

Our task lies in our ability to enter the truth of human reality, to see it, to know it, and from within that knowledge to transcend it. “Now that my eye has seen you,” says Job to God toward the end of the Book, “I am at ease with the human condition.” He could only accept God once he looked Him squarely in the eye. Then he was able to transcend.

Our gathering by the water on Sunday (6pm at Pier 45) will help us transcend. We will see one another in person after many long months (!). We will hear beautiful live music from three amazing musicians, Mike McGinnis, Frank London and Tripp Dudley. We will watch a dance performance by the incredible Davalois Fearon, who we met earlier in the festival. We will attach our fabric-prayers to Suzanne Tick’s vertical loom, and create our own Wailing Wall of art. And we will undress the Torah and sing with her sing her song of life.

Bring your kids, friends, and strips of fabric - this will be special.

I can’t wait to see you all in person on the pier.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Stop the Fighting

Dear friends, 

My nieces and nephews hear the sounds of rockets falling. My parents, walking or driving along, hear the alarms, and either rush into the entrance room of some building, or lie down on the ground with their heads covering their heads. Thank God I’m past the age when my friends are at the Gaza border, awaiting orders to invade. I am filled with fear for those I love in Israel. 

I have never been to Gaza, nor do I have friends there. But my heart goes out to the people there, I fear for them, pray for them, call my representatives primarily on their behalf. They suffer the worst burden of this conflict. They are in the gravest danger.  

In this war, my Palestinian friends in Israel are in danger too. Not only from the rockets from Gaza, but from Jewish fanatics. Before the rockets and the bombs were beatings of Arabs and other provocations perpetrated by right wing organizations supported by the government. In my hometown, Jerusalem, there were nightly attacks on Arabs for weeks. Those led to terrible retaliations and riots, including on Temple Mount, where the Israeli police shot stun grenades into Al Aqsa Mosque, the holiest Muslim site in the holy land. That was a (preventable) point of no-return. All this leaves us not only with a war in Gaza, but with the biggest confrontation between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel in decades. Today many were injured in these confrontations, and one Jew and one Muslim were beaten to death by mobs. 

Less than a month ago, on Israeli Independence Day, I shared with you the terrifying thought that because we happen to live in that rare historical period when a Jewish state exists, we have no choice but to take part in its story. I hate to come at you so soon after, when you are probably still chewing on that suggestion, but I still believe that to be true. As Mordechai says to Esther: 

“Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place... And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” 

You and I are in the king’s house. We are in the United States of America. If anyone has any power over the one agent who has control of Israel/Palestine, the Israeli government, it’s our government. We should not remain silent. We should demand that our representatives do everything in their power to stop this violence by restraining the Israeli government. If you are concerned for the safety of Israelis as I am, know that we are privileged to live in a period when Israeli military response is not in danger. The residents of Gaza, Israel and the West Bank are in danger. So what’s on us is to call our representatives, to come out to the streets, to post and yell and pray in all the ways we know how - that Israel restrain itself, that the violence stop.  

Obviously Hamas must restrain itself too. Obviously, the Israeli government does not function in a vacuum. Obviously, there is plenty of blame to go around. But I tell you this from the depths of my conviction: my family and friends’ survival in Israel depends on the American demand for restraint.  

There is a lot more to say about what led to this situation. We will talk about it more in the coming months. But for now there is one prayer, one call that I have: Stop the fighting now. 

Perhaps more importantly, if you have friends or family in Israel/Palestine - check in on them, send them your love. Let them know you’re thinking about them. And if you would like to speak with me about this painful situation please do reach out. 

With love and prayers for a quick end to the fighting,
Rabbi Misha 

Reclaiming Redemption

Dear friends,

Before I share some thoughts about our exciting evening planned, and the politics of food in Judaism, I would like to acknowledge the terrible tragedy that took place last night in the Galilee. At least 45 people lost their lives and dozens more were injured when they came to celebrate the holiday of Lag Ba'Omer at the grave site of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. The grave is one of the most special, I dare even say holy places I have visited, and the scene there on Lag Ba'Omer is electrifying. It is not for nothing that it attracts so many thousands of people each year. Yehi Zichram baruch, their memory be a blessing, and we pray for the healing of those injured.

This week I share a piece of a longer paper I wrote a few years ago that tries to dig and find what lies beneath Kosher laws. Enjoy.
 

The moment I truly grasped the meaning of the phrase “Do not cook a baby goat in its mother’s milk” was during my son, Ezzy’s infancy. Being in the continuous presence of breast feeding, with all the love and sustenance it exudes, clarified to me what the Torah is talking about here. A baby is given life by his mother’s milk; Physical life through the milk itself, and spiritual life through the comfort and love she receives from her mother, as expressed in the act of breast feeding. The milk is not only a symbol of the physical life, but of love; of the miraculous nature of our bodies, gifts of the divine, and the miraculous nature of our souls, who can but give gifts of love. It is the unification of divine and human love, which is the only food any baby mammal can live on. The Hebrew word דוד means both lover, and the breast of a woman. The word שדי refers either to God’s most intense name, her innermost essence — or it can mean “my breasts.”

The Torah knows us well. It understands that just like we may use something for the obvious purpose it was intended to perform, we may also use it otherwise. We may, in fact, use this life-giving force on which babies depend to kill them. And then eat that baby soaked in the substance we turned from sustainer to killer. We may, through our תאווה, or unchecked desire, turn the life and love into death and hate. Not only could we mindlessly destroy the love that brings together God and humanity, but we could do so by subjugating the life force to the purpose of death.

This poetic verse fragment, out of which flowed the most elaborate section of Jewish law, captures humanity’s incredible capabilities when it comes to cruelty. We are capable of a mindlessness that erases all wrong, of a twisted sadism that requires creativity and inventiveness, of acts of deep horror, which we claim to do in the name of God or goodness, of ignoring and burying our instincts toward decency under the thickest layers of excuses, all the while maintaining our high opinion not only of ourselves but even of our actions. This fragment comes to reflect these capabilities back to us, so that we draw a line in the sand between inflicting pain, and inflicting unspeakable pain. In Judaism, the fragment tells us, cruelty is not always forbidden. Excess cruelty always is.

This evening, as part of the Kumah Festival we will be gathering to think on our relationship with the food we eat. With leaders in the field of food justice and food ritual we will seek a mindfulness with regards to what goes into our bodies. This mindfulness is at the heart of the Torah’s demand on our kitchens. Join us tonight at 8pm for a musical, thought-provoking evening of ritual pickling. Don’t forget a cabbage!

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha
PS
Link to share this letter HERE.

In Its Mother's Milk

Dear friends,

Before I share some thoughts about our exciting evening planned, and the politics of food in Judaism, I would like to acknowledge the terrible tragedy that took place last night in the Galilee. At least 45 people lost their lives and dozens more were injured when they came to celebrate the holiday of Lag Ba'Omer at the grave site of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. The grave is one of the most special, I dare even say holy places I have visited, and the scene there on Lag Ba'Omer is electrifying. It is not for nothing that it attracts so many thousands of people each year. Yehi Zichram baruch, their memory be a blessing, and we pray for the healing of those injured.

This week I share a piece of a longer paper I wrote a few years ago that tries to dig and find what lies beneath Kosher laws. Enjoy.
 

The moment I truly grasped the meaning of the phrase “Do not cook a baby goat in its mother’s milk” was during my son, Ezzy’s infancy. Being in the continuous presence of breast feeding, with all the love and sustenance it exudes, clarified to me what the Torah is talking about here. A baby is given life by his mother’s milk; Physical life through the milk itself, and spiritual life through the comfort and love she receives from her mother, as expressed in the act of breast feeding. The milk is not only a symbol of the physical life, but of love; of the miraculous nature of our bodies, gifts of the divine, and the miraculous nature of our souls, who can but give gifts of love. It is the unification of divine and human love, which is the only food any baby mammal can live on. The Hebrew word דוד means both lover, and the breast of a woman. The word שדי refers either to God’s most intense name, her innermost essence — or it can mean “my breasts.”

The Torah knows us well. It understands that just like we may use something for the obvious purpose it was intended to perform, we may also use it otherwise. We may, in fact, use this life-giving force on which babies depend to kill them. And then eat that baby soaked in the substance we turned from sustainer to killer. We may, through our תאווה, or unchecked desire, turn the life and love into death and hate. Not only could we mindlessly destroy the love that brings together God and humanity, but we could do so by subjugating the life force to the purpose of death.

This poetic verse fragment, out of which flowed the most elaborate section of Jewish law, captures humanity’s incredible capabilities when it comes to cruelty. We are capable of a mindlessness that erases all wrong, of a twisted sadism that requires creativity and inventiveness, of acts of deep horror, which we claim to do in the name of God or goodness, of ignoring and burying our instincts toward decency under the thickest layers of excuses, all the while maintaining our high opinion not only of ourselves but even of our actions. This fragment comes to reflect these capabilities back to us, so that we draw a line in the sand between inflicting pain, and inflicting unspeakable pain. In Judaism, the fragment tells us, cruelty is not always forbidden. Excess cruelty always is.

This evening, as part of the Kumah Festival we will be gathering to think on our relationship with the food we eat. With leaders in the field of food justice and food ritual we will seek a mindfulness with regards to what goes into our bodies. This mindfulness is at the heart of the Torah’s demand on our kitchens. Join us tonight at 8pm for a musical, thought-provoking evening of ritual pickling. Don’t forget a cabbage!

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha
PS
Link to share this letter HERE.

Prayers of the Floyd Family

Dear friends,

The Floyd family, and the events of this week have filled my mind with beautiful questions about the nature of prayer. I watched many different family members react to the verdict, and every one of them spoke about prayer. George’s brother, Philonese was described as sitting in the courtroom throughout the entire trial “in prayer.” Another brother, Terrence said: "I believe because of prayer, we got the verdict we wanted.” Speaking about prayer, a cousin of George’s said that over the last year the family was flooded by so much love coming their way that she doesn’t know whether she will see such love again in her lifetime. These are three very different attitudes toward prayer, each of which invites contemplation on what we mean when we use the word.

Of all of the powerful moments, though, perhaps the strongest was watching the Floyd family pray together, led by Reverend Sharpton. Before the words emerged, the Reverend had the family and close friends link arms, as if to say prayer is a physical uniting of people. It begins in the body, and continues so long as the bodies are united, so long as our bodies are praying. The family then lowered their heads, and remained in that position until the prayer was completed. One of the lines of prayer Sharpton spoke was also of a physical nature:

“We believe in a god who can even get through the cracks in a jury room.”

Jews have different ways of physicalizing prayer. We cover our eyes with our hands at times, wear a Talit, wrap ourselves in Tefilin. We stand still, we bow low, we dance three steps back and three steps forward. Outside of the traditional houses of prayer we “pray with our feet” at marches and rallies (Heschel). We “praise the great name through dance.” (Psalms) We “Love God with all your heart, with your entire body, and with everything you’ve got.” (Deuteronomy)

Rabbi Akiva was begged by his students to stop resisting the Romans who were torturing him to death. He told them his whole life he had been waiting for the opportunity to fulfill the commandment to “love God with your entire body,” and now he has that opportunity. His body is said to have expired as he uttered the word “Echad”, “One,” which ends the Shma: Adonai Echad, God is one.

I wonder whether George Floyd was praying in his last minutes. The very physical words he spoke: “I can’t breathe,” have since become a powerful prayer that has moved millions to take their bodies out to the streets to demand justice.

This evening’s Kumah Festival gathering will expand and explore many of these themes. Bringing together two dancers and a trumpet player, we will touch upon how the body interacts with the world of spirit and of justice through dance. Davalois Fearon will share excerpts from a dance piece about her nephew who died of asthma due to medical and environmental racial disparities. Famed trumpeter Frank London will express breath and prayer through his horn. And Sarah Chien will dance live a Shabbat prayer at the close of this momentous week.

We can’t quite link arms, but we can link screens, eyes and minds.
I hope you’ll join us tonight at 8pm.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

PS
Link to share this letter HERE.

Hopeless Hope

Dear friends,

Something extraordinary happened this week. 280,000 people gathered from across the universe, most of them from Israel and Palestine, to mourn those killed on both sides of the conflict. The joint Israeli Palestinian memorial ceremony, hosted by Combatants for Peace and the Bereaved Parents Forum, and sponsored by dozens of organizations including The New Shul, is laying the ground for a different future. In a time when most Israelis are vaccinated and almost no Palestinians are, the ability of people to transform a day of mourning those the other side have killed into a day of affirming our unity in the face of massive pressure to conform filled me with new energy. Thanks to this event I find myself unusually hopeful on this week of the 73rd anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. This despite any hope for a solution or even an improvement in the situation there any time soon.

Activism is a funny business. It often involves an ongoing sense of failure. In the Israeli left (what remains of it) that sense is acute and un-ignorable. Here in the US too, when we see another video of a black man killed by police, and then the same week one of 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot with his hands in the air, we feel the despair, the failure of our attempts. But the fruits of one’s actions can, like a fig from a freshly planted fruit, take 70 years or more to appear. In the meantime, we look for a different kind of fruit. One that can be found within our actions themselves.

My father, David Shulman, who we will have the privilege of listening to and asking questions of this Saturday morning at our third Kumah Festival event, has spent much of his life deep in the endlessly thankless world of Israeli-Palestinian activism. Amazingly though, and anyone who has been in the West Bank on some Quixotian mission knows this well, the work is also endlessly rewarding. How could that be?

In his book, Freedom and Despair, he quotes Wittgenstein:

“...it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant..... There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself.”

In working for good we have to divorce ourselves from the result of our action, and instead do it because it is the right thing to do. This sounds like a contradiction. Why do it if it won’t amount to anything? This is the question that leaves the skeptic, the depressed person, the doubter in bed. Sometimes it leaves me in bed. I write about activism today, but what is activism if not a metaphor for any action we take in the world? I come to pray and hear that question – Why do it if it won’t amount to anything? I come to write a play, or sing a song, or teach or read or exercise or write an email, and many times that question creeps up - Why do it if it won’t amount to anything?

Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah teaches the concept of “Lishma,” or “for its own sake.” Torah that we do for its own sake, divorced from what will or won’t come out of it, taught Rabbi Meir, ends up bringing the greatest rewards. Anything we manage to do for no other reason but to do it, is the greatest type of action. Despair, my father teaches, can help us act in that way:

 “...speaking of the ground for action I think it’s time to reclaim despair, which is as good a ground as any and better than most. Since the results are not the point, despair has a role to play. One despairs: the wickedness is all too present and effective, we cannot stem the tide with our bodies or our words, we confront a faceless system embodied in the faces of the soldiers and bureaucrats and settlers that we meet on the hills. I recommend despair as a place to start. It is in the nature of acting, of doing the right thing, that despair recedes at least for a moment, and its place is taken by something else: hopeless hope for example. Those who work these furrows know that hope is not contingent. Sometimes the worse things get, the more hope there is, for hope is an act of the deeper self, or the freer part of the person, what some would call a spiritual act.”

We have no control over the way the world behaves. We cannot see the results of our actions. Let us allow these truths to free us to behave in all the best ways we can.  Then we might be filled with an endless supply of hopeless hope, which has the power to move us to keep doing God’s work for the simple reason that we know it to be good.

I’m excited to see you tomorrow morning at 10am.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

PS. Here's the link to share this letter.

Praising God on the Train Tracks

Dear friends,

This Sunday, as part of the Kumah Festival we will be commemorating Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place today. In an event that will search for a way to acknowledge and mourn the past while leading us toward a new, forward looking relationship with memory. It will be an extraordinary coming together of artists, survivors and activists, centering around a personal story of redemption, even joy of one of our community members at a unique, theatrical commemorative event in Poland for her family members, some of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

A few years ago I was in Germany and Poland for a fellowship, and thought deeply about the relationship between light and sadness, between pleasure and suffering, between my body here in the present, and my mind traveling back to the past. I share with you this rather personal piece I published about the hardest day I had during that trip. It's longer than my usual letters to you, but attempts to dig into some of the questions and complexities we will be exploring this Sunday. Please read it HERE.

The memory of the dead, our tradition reminds us, is a blessing.

Rabbi Misha

Rise Up Moroccan Style

Dear friends,

Tomorrow night we begin a seven-week journey that will attempt to lead us from doubt to acceptance, from possibility to actuality, from the Red Sea to Mount Sinai. We begin our Kumah Festival learning from the former black slaves of Morocco how to transform their Boulila, their chains, into Hamdulillah, praise, through music.

Gnawa, the musical form we will enjoy a concert of, is a mystical Moroccan Muslim tradition, with roots in the pre-Islamic faiths of the Sub-Sahara, where the black slaves were taken from beginning in the 11th century. Like the slaves in our country, their song was their refuge and their offering, rising to the heavens like smoke from an altar. When our ancestors emerged onto the other side of the Sea of Reeds they broke into song:

My song to Yah is my strength
In it I am redeemed.

They must have been singing their way through 400 years of slavery before that as well. Otherwise, how could they have known that in music a person can find redemption, regardless of their circumstances? Singing can do that in part because it demands honesty. Like the Blues, Gnawa music expresses sadness, difficulty, rage. It brings us in touch with reality as it is. It’s through that straight look at who and what we are that the beauty and the gratitude can emerge.

Out of the narrows I cried out: Yah!
She answered me with wide open space.

The music then opens up into celebration, which will be our main mode tomorrow.

Mimuna, the Post Passover celebration of the Jews of Morocco takes fear and mistrust and flips it on its head. The tradition is said to have begun in the 18th century, when the Muslim neighbors of the Jews would bring them platters of leavened food and sweets as soon as the holiday was finished. They would eat and sing together in a joint celebration of brotherhood. Today we are in the narrows of distrust between Jews and their Arab neighbors, so we will take a page from the Moroccans and bring together Jews and Muslims, Hebrew and Arabic, new and old to make music. The ensemble, which includes Grammy-nominated, award-winning musicians, will combine traditional Muslim Gnawa songs to Allah with devotional songs by Moroccan Jews and verses from the Psalms. I’ve gotten some sneak previews of the music. It’s transportive, beautiful, meditative, invigorating.

Kumah means Rise Up in Hebrew (and the similar Kumu means the same thing in Arabic). The Kumah Festival is devoted to the overlapping spaces between faith, art and politics, three realms in which we often need help to find the energy to rise. I’m sure our musicians, Ran, Eden, Eran and Samir will start us off on the right foot to begin our march from the lip of the sea toward the great mountain of God.

Please invite one and all to join us — and if you can, bring a pair of headphones or a Bluetooth connection to a speaker to enhance the experience. And if you haven’t already, please complete the two-second registration form.

Shabbat shalom, and see you tomorrow night at 7:30!

Rabbi Misha

PS. If you'd like to pass this on here's the link to the letter on Medium.

What's this Freedom For?

Dear friends,

We have some live virtual theater coming our way tonight, so I’ll begin with a line from a play:

PHARAOH: When you finally get this freedom, Moses, what are you going to do with it?

That line from my play, Pharaoh (that's him in the picture above) which was scheduled to open a year ago, keeps coming back to me these pre-Passover days. We are used to thinking about this holiday as a story of slavery to freedom. The deeper story though, might be about after freedom is achieved. The reading of the Shma, said three times a day, ends with the following statement:

אני יי אלוהיכם אשר הוצאתי אתכם מארץ מצרים להיות לכם לאלוהים

I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God.

We did not come out of Egypt for the sake of being a free people, but for the sake of being God’s people. We are not, as Hatikvah the Israeli national anthem puts it, Am Chofshi, a free nation, but Avdey Hashem, Slaves of God, as Rabbi Yehudah Halevi put it.

What’s interesting about this is the notion of being freed in order to be a slave of God is that to some people it is the saddest, most convoluted and dark expression of freedom, while to others it implies the only true purpose, infused with total and complete liberation. Personally, I suffer from split personality on this one. Sometimes I abhor the notion, reject it and deny that it is has anything to do with the truth. Other times I yearn for it, pray for it and work hard to make it a reality.

It hinges, of course on the meaning of this word, God. If God is ultimately the LORD, as appears in many biblical translations, if it is the ultimate authority, mascot of the patriarchy, punisher of deviants, confiner of what we eat, who we befriend and how we think, then none of us at TNS want to be a slave of God. If, however God is יהוה, being in all tenses which we can sometimes forget ourselves to, the boundless, indivisible source of all, the Kol Dmamah Dakah, sound of perfect silence, which transcends our lives and deaths, the wind and the care and the pleasure and the coming together: well hey, sign me up to be a slave to that.

In other words, God is both total freedom and total limitation, depending on your perspective. Whatever we land on, Passover is an opportunity to look for a way to be with and in the infinite, the true. We invite Kol dichfin and kol ditzrich, all who are hungry and all who are in need, without differentiating between one person and another. We invite the parts of ourselves that are hungry, needy, ill at ease to join the table and sit comfortably in the momentary expression of the eternal.

It is likely that we were given our freedom for the sake of celebrating Passover; to enjoy being alive, to feel the love of those we are with, to ask questions and contemplate what is, to sing what is known as the Hallel Mitzri – the Egyptian Praise Session, to know that even when we feel like things are missing, Dayenu, our cup overflows.

When we meet this evening at 6pm we will, however be taking a serious look into the opposite of all of this, the vision of freedom offered by The Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition as brilliantly elaborated by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1879. We must look at the lies of freedom in order to get free. We must see the frighteningly compelling manipulation that is presented to us by the world and ourselves in order to rid ourselves of it, before we celebrate the Passover.
For this purpose we will be gathering this evening to witness and discuss a short play, using only the words of Dostoevsky, performed by an incredibly skilled and experienced actor named Jon Huberth, and directed by the equally talented and celebrated theater director, Michael Posnick.
I can’t wait.

I hope you can all join us at 6pm for an evening that will include some prayers and music, but will focus primarily on this excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov.

Wishing you all a happy, peaceful, Passover. May we all find the pleasures of freedom and use them to be slaves of all the right things.

Shabbat shalom and chag sameach,
Rabbi Misha

PS. If you'd like to pass this on here's the link to the letter on Medium.

A Crime of Cosmic Proportions

Dear friends,
I’m excited to share a pre-Passover video with you all. But first a short response to this week’s sad events.

With Passover around the corner we hear the call of freedom. This week’s parasha, Vayikra begins with Moses hearing God’s call. We heard one this week coming out of Georgia and echoing around the country. Of the many statements issued on the violence, the one that resonated most with me was of a local theater called The Tank. I adapt their statement and share it here:

The New Shul stands in solidarity with the Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community and condemns the recent alarming incidents of hate and violence, and the ongoing culture of white supremacy and silence that has led to them. Now is the time for those of us who are non-AAPI to examine our own complicity in this culture, find ways to amplify and lift up voices who are graciously teaching in this moment, participate in trainings so we might do more, march and donate.

To our AAPI members and friends,
we commit to doing better.

Our tradition attempts to set us up for moments like these, so that we might succeed in doing the right thing. One of the ways we do that is by talking about the many facets of freedom. This year at the School for Creative Judaism, where TNS children learn Hebrew and Judaism, the annual theme is the Year of the Philosophers. We might be the only Hebrew school in the entire world to have a philosopher in residence, our very own David Ponet. So I took the opportunity to invite David to a philosophical conversation about freedom, Passover and some Jewish philosophers who have illuminated the topic.

The video attempts to speak to people of various ages, so if you have kids get them some matzah and grape juice or some type of snack and see if they have good answers to the questions posed. There are some suggested instructions for eating, drinking and discussing embedded into the video, which will be fun for everyone.

Please send me any reflections or answers to the questions you come up with. David and I are excited to hear your thoughts.

Two final things: Shabbat Ohr will be this evening at 6pm with Rabbi Nicole Fix.

Next Friday evening we will have a pre-Passover Dostoevskian Shabbat get together in which we will do a bit less praying, and more freedom reading together of pieces from Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, one of modern literature’s greatest challenges to our traditional understanding of the concept of freedom. Invite your friends!

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha