A New You

Last Rosh Hashanah

Rachid Halihal, member of our High Holidays musical team, conducting a Shabbat song in Arabic.

Dear friends,

Are you sick of yourself?  

Do you find yourself longing for a different internal conversation? An altered set of familiar emotional responses, anxieties, habits? An unfamiliar way of listening, speaking, sharing, relating, desiring, thinking, seeing? New jokes, fresh stories, unexpected instincts? 

For a limited time, this fall TJT* promises to help you transform into A NEW PERSON. Someone you never were.  

Wear your body in a new way. 

Experience your mind shifting. 

Sing a truly new song. 

*TJT =The Jewish Tradition 

This is the late-night infomercial version of what the great Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik called Teshuvah, or repentance. The Days of Awe, or the Ten Days of Teshuvah, for which we are currently in pre-season action, offer us a rare chance to create a new version of ourselves. Soloveitchik writes: 

“Repentance is an act of creation – self-creation. The severing of one’s psychic identity with one’s previous “I,” and the creation of a new “I,” possessor of a new consciousness, a new heart and spirit, different desires, longings, goals – this is the meaning of that repentance compounded of regret over the past and resolve for the future.” 

When we examine our actions critically the process of honest exploration can already lead us to step out of ourselves. When that happens, we open a door that can lead us to act differently, to see things from other perspectives, to new modes of behavior. When we then resolve to improve, we offer ourselves a new path. A new way to experience, receive, and act. 

Maybe we will only get to be someone else for a brief second. Maybe just for Yom Kippur. Maybe we’ll get the whole ten days leading up to it. But maybe, if we put in the work, and find the opening, we will, “through teshuvah,” as Soloveitchik wrote, “create” - each of us for ourselves and all of us together - our “own I.” 

Yesterday I met with Rachid Halihal, the master oud player from Morocco who will make music with us throughout these High Holidays. Rachid described a project he worked on for years, in which he would invite people from different countries, backgrounds and religions to make music together. Some were professional musicians, others had never sung or made music in front of others. There were children, seniors and everyone in between, blind people, seeing people, folks of all types. He would ask them to leave their identities, their politics, their beliefs at the door, and step into the music, where the language is that of the human heart, of sound, of listening and responding, of rhythm and melody. Rachid would work with each group, until they were ready to perform.  

Above is a video of one such performance, of a traditional Mizrachi Shabbat song, Ki Eshmera Shabbat, here sung in translation into Arabic. 

This evening at 6:30, Please join two of our leading musicians and me this evening at First Presbyterian Church (5th Ave and 12th street in Manhattan) for a special Shabbat of slichot, the pre-High Holidays songs and hymns of repentance that are also sung at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. If you’re ready to find that new you, it might be waiting for you there. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Open That Window

Last Rosh Hashanah

Dear friends,

Like a switch that’s been clicked, the season of opening windows has arrived in New York. The heat isn’t bouncing off the sidewalks, the AC is relaxing, the sweet disruption of summer abates. This week, in a moment of internal combustion I opened the window for some air. I got more than I bargained for. A car drove by slowly, blasting an Israeli religious pop song (yes, that’s a genre!).

“Even in the hiddenness within the hiddenness the Blessed Holy One exists.
Behind the difficult things you are going through too - I stand.“

Of course the song from back home would jump at me through the open window to the Brooklyn streets.

The following morning I opened up the Tanach, or Old Testament randomly, looking for some guidance. On the page in front of me are the dying words of the prophet Elisha, known for his ability to return the dead back to life:

״פתח חלון לקדם״
“Open the window to Kedem.”

Kedem is a rich word. In ancient times it meant the east. Now means the ancient. And can also be understood as “the time before.” Open a window to the ancient, the prophet urges, to the east, the land of the ancestors, to the rising sun, or here on the east coast, to the ocean.

That’s an apt description of the month of Elul, our time of opening the heart before the new year, which we’re currently in. We can work on opening that window to the ancient on our own, but it’s easier in company. During the next few weeks we have some fun opportunities to do that through our pre-high holidays chevrutahs, or learning groups. You’re all welcome to join them, or even jump in for one night if that’s what you can pull off.

Learning with these beautiful teachers, who each in their own way teeter on the verge of the deep, is a one of a kind experience.

The chevrutah on Martin Buber’s book Meetings will be led by a finely balanced father-son act. Jim Ponet, rabbi, poet, intentional madman will be joined by his philosopher son, Dr. David Ponet who has the impressive talent of clothing the visceral in the language of the mind. Together they will bring us into Buber’s world of I-Thou relationships, and through Buber’s stories help us understand “the secret of the smile that has been lost,” which Buber identified on Theodore Hertzl’s mother’s lips the one time they met.

Michael Posnick, theater director turned Buddhist teacher and preacher of the “eyn sof” will work with us on the ever-elusive task of listening to ourselves. Through a range of texts from different traditions, and meditation exercises, Michael will ask us the simple question: Who is listening?

Our musical leaders, Yonatan Gutfeld and Dana Herz will bring us together to sing some of the songs we will sing these High Holidays. There’s nothing better to combat loneliness and anxiety than singing together. Let yourself sing and you’ll have fun. (They'll also be there to lead music  next Friday evening for Shabbat at First Presbytarian Church.)

Ori Aguila is a death doula, artist and Jeweler who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from her indigenous roots into a conversation around the life-affirming practice of holding space for death.

Finally, the wonderful Elana Ponet has been mining the bible and midrash’s stories about women, and bringing them into our conversations at the Shul for over two years now. Elana will invite us to hear these feminine voices from within our sadly patriarchal tradition.

All the info for these opportunities can be found HERE.

Let’s crack open that window.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

The Foodie Challenge

Foodie in training

Dear friends,

It’s all about food at the end of the day. All the big concepts, the word of God, four thousand years of history, Holocausts and survival, all of it boils down to what we eat or don’t eat. Matzah, latkes, cheese cake, Hamantaschen, challah, round challah, fish head, fish tail, matzah balls, brisket, apples and honey, dried fruit, first fruits, brisket, salt water, hard boiled egg, peas, chicken wing, chicken soup, orange, leek tart, spinach tart, blintzes, wine, grape juice, jelly donuts, merengue, dates with butter, manicotti, Jachnun, celery, Haroset; these are some of the foods I’ve eaten ritualistically in Jewish settings. Every single one has its time and place, and most carry a specific meaning as well.

Rosh Hashanah (coming up in just 3 weeks!) is that rare holiday that omits the first two parts of “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” It goes straight to the table without pretending to live elsewhere. Everyone is familiar with apples and honey, but the opening of the Jewish year is a culinary celebration of symbols and flavors that goes far beyond honey for a sweet new year. At my grandmother in law, Sheila’s, an Egyptian Jewish household, the feast begins with wine (after the daily sunset Scotch of course), moves on to leek tart, spinach tart, peas, fish head, fish body, pomegranate seeds, and finally apples and honey. And challah (round if possible). And then dinner. Each of the pre dinner foods has its own blessing, related to something we wish upon ourselves this year.

Sheila didn’t make up any of these blessings or foods. They’ve come down the generations as the family moved from Syria to Lebanon to Palestine, Egypt the US and Canada. Each of them has a specific symbolism to match the blessing it is meant to evoke. The pomegranate seeds, for example imply fruitfulness. Each fruit has hundreds of beautiful, red seeds. The head of the fish is for leadership - “may you be like a head, not a tail.” The rest of the fish is because the head is gross, and for fertility. The round challah is for wholeness. The peas, those little green nuggets are for money. And so on and so forth.

Some of you were at the beautiful Queens County Farm two years back for our Rosh Hashanah service during which the news broke about Justice Ginsburg’s - her memory is a blessing - passing. I still remember her name called out during Kaddish, and tears. If you were there you might also remember a certain saffron honey cake concocted by a certain tall, handsome Yemenite, who explained the intricacies of the symbolism of this cake, and why the 108 strands of saffron he used in the cake represent the exact blessing that we need this year. I remember the sweet taste of the cake better than the explanation, but the year that followed indeed carried the elegant, sweet grace of those saffron strands, despite its challenges.

This Rosh Hashanah we are going to kick the year off with food. After our evening service, once we’ve taken in some sweet music and set some intentions for the holiday season, we will flex our community’s creative culinary muscles. I invite you all to the following challenge: Come up with a dish that symbolizes the very blessing we need this year. It could be a brand new concoction, a riff on a traditional dish, or even a traditional family dish that you think embodies our current need. Prepare it. Bring it in on the 25th and share it with the rest of us. If you're game to take on this challenge, let Susan know at susan@newshul.org.

Let’s start the year off just like our ancestors have taught us, as weird spiritual foodies.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Two Musical Greats and a Prophet

A choir in front of Penn Station

Dear friends,

In 1951, the iconic composer John Cage famously visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death."

Cage realized that there is in fact no such thing as silence.

Elijah the prophet seems to have learned a similar lesson in a visit to a different chamber, the cave on “Horev, the mountain of God.” In the silence of the cave he was able to hear some words:

“Come out, and stand on the mountain before the LORD.”
And lo, the LORD passed by. There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind—an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake—fire; but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire—the thin sound of perfect silence.

When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his mantle about his face and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then a voice addressed him: “Why are you here, Elijah?”

Silence often asks us that question. That’s what can be so uncomfortable about it. But it can also simply be enough.

Rocker Nick Cave recently expressed that duality like this:

Each day I pray into the silence. I pray to all of them. All of them who are not here. Into this emptiness, I pour all my desire and want and need, and in time this absence becomes potent and alive and activated with a promise. This promise that sits inside the silence is beauty enough. This promise, right now, is amazement enough. This promise, right now, is God enough. This promise, right now, is as much as we can bear.

After his visit to the anechoic chamber Cage composed what he considered to be his most important piece, which came to be known as 4’33”. It’s been performed countless times in arrangements ranging from solo piano to a full orchestra. Each time it sounded eerily alike, but very different.

Listen to one of those performances below.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Before I Came to Be

The primordial view from Mount Champlain, Maine earlier this summer (photo Ezzy Shulman)

Dear friends,

The last weeks of summer are a primordial state of mind. Summer has happened. The year is over, but the next one has yet to begin. We yawn our way through the yawn-like days waiting to be reborn, thrown back into the world. In the meantime, we might catch a minute of sweetness here and there as happy hour keeps getting a few minutes earlier each day. 

In one of those amorphous moments of sweetness this week I got to read a 13th century poem with a few of you, which describes the time before we existed. 

טֶרֶם הֱיוֹתִי חַסְדְּךָ בָאִָני 
הַשָּׂם לְיֵשׁ איִן וְהִמְצִיאָנִי  

She who makes something out of nothing, 
She conceived me 
Her kindness came to me 
Before I came to be. 

It’s tempting to hear in this a poem about a mother. That is probably your humble translator’s fault. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, the Paytan who penned the words was likely thinking about God. The period of time in question is probably not the 9 months of pregnancy, or even the months or years before it, but the unquantifiable, primordial end of the summer of the never-ending cycle of being and dying. “Before I came to be,” we learn, is a time of chesed, enduring love, ever-present kindness.  

The early Kabbalists also tended to talk about primordial, pre-creation moments as sweet, or sublime. In Sefer Yetzira, the most ancient of the Kabbalistic books we find the following description of primordial chochmah, or wisdom: 

“a pure and completely unalloyed light of life, inscribed and sealed in the splendor of the supreme vault, which is called The Naught, devoid of any notion.” 

Before wisdom came to be it was not pieces of thought, ideas floating around with no form. It was a completely thought-free light. This sounds right to me. Most of the meaningful insights about my life come from a place of quiet, rather than from a place of busy internal conversation. Inhabiting such a place of quiet is a rare gift, a moment of chesed, out of which further gifts sometimes come. 

In the 12th century in Provence, the practice of Kabbalah began to take its first baby steps toward becoming. Still close to its primordial time, these early Kabbalists seem to retain a memory or instinct for what that primordiality is about, and how it relates to them. In his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, the greatest Kabbalist of his generation, known as Isaac the blind wrote:
“All things return to the root of their true being.”
Isaac reflects the time before existence back onto the time after it. If “before I came to be” is a root of who or what we will become, it is the same space we will return to after we cease to be; a space of chesed, loving kindness, of sweet, pure quiet. 

The High Holidays, and Yom Kippur in particular invite us into that type of space. There, grudges, anger, disappointment, self criticism make no sense, while forgiveness becomes a no-brainer. Ibn Gabirol ends his poem going back to the beginning: 

How could I ever conceal my sin from You? 
Even before I came to be 
Your kindness came to me. 

Whether he’s talking to his mother or his god, the primordial intimacy makes holding onto any negativity mute. 

As this summer rolls away from us, let’s try to enjoy the sweet, empty spaces of pre and post-existence it offers us, before we’re swept into another year of being. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Remorse Without Shame

Dear friends,

The rabbis in the Talmud are big on accountability. But I'm not sure how they would feel about some of our current societal methods of holding people accountable for their actions. Public shaming, or what they called "taking the color out of another's face in public," is like murder, they hold. Following a nuance in a verse from Leviticus they hold that while we are obligated to reprove our fellow people when they act wrongly, we must do so in such a way that we don't drive them to commit further wrongs. "Make sure to reprove your fellow person, so that you do not carry their sin." (Leviticus 19:17) Not the sin they have already committed, expound the rabbis, but the one you might drive them to by publicly shaming them.

Their instinct recognizes the danger of shame. We all have experienced it. How the understanding that we did something wrong - hurt someone we didn't want to hurt, expressed a position that is offensive to some, let our tongue or body slip in an embarrassing way - spreads through our bodies and drives us to entrench our position and lash out. When we follow the feeling of shame we often end up in violence.

My wife, Erika, who works in the field of Restorative Justice has long been working on the transformation of shame within contexts of harm. Instead of shame, remorse. This week she published a piece on public apologies which analyzes Will Smith's apology to Chris Rock, and the way he spoke about shame. It holds some keys to how we might think about apologizing to those we've harmed, as the season of forgiveness approaches. I thought it apt to share it with you. And thankfully, she agreed! Read her piece HERE.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Perfectly Broken

Ger The Stranger By Ghiora Aharoni as presented on Mount Olives in Jerusalem

Dear friends,

On the night of the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av some decades ago, my parents made their way through the streets of west Jerusalem, entered through the walls of the old city and walked down to the Western Wall. My mother was carrying her ripe, pregnant belly around as they joined the multitudes of Jews who came to sing Kinnot, sad songs of abandonment and despair, and hear the words of the most broken of biblical books, Lamentations. Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple thousands of years ago, as well as multiple more recent horrors that came upon our people, draws many to the only piece of that temple that still stands. Shortly after my parents got back to their apartment in Rechavia, as the legend goes, contractions began, and a few hours later I was in mother’s arms. 

I have always been comfortable with the simultaneous presence of joy and sadness. There are times when I can’t make them apart. Things like breaking the glass at the wedding, or Mourners Kaddish at every prayer service make perfect sense to me.  I sometimes think my parents’ nighttime trip to the Kotel on the night of my birth has to do with that.  Certainly, having a (Hebrew) birthday on a fast day can drive that point home. 

The Israeli reality I grew up in was similarly drenched in both joy and sadness, beauty and ugliness, wonder and fear, idealism and cynicism. West Jerusalem in the eighties was a safe and warm place, where kids played soccer in the street, climbed fruit trees to eat their apricots, figs or mulberries, and rode their bikes on the streets on Yom Kippur. But there were knife attacks by terrorists, my father fighting in wars, soldiers just older than my brother dying regularly. Those deaths held within them the most tremendous pain and a perfect beauty. I remember the gorgeous, sad songs sung at Memorial Day ceremonies every year that would bring me to tears as the alumni of the school stood in uniform looking like beauty itself. That little boy felt the dead and their family’s sacrifice as ultimate love: perfect, unbreakable and entirely demolishing. And he knew that soon his brother would wear that uniform, and shortly after so would he. 

As soon as I completed my military service, I left all that behind. I moved to New York and joined a pacifist theatre company. The idealism from my childhood, that of the quest for peace, the belief in the goodness of the state, or any state for that matter, was gone. Ultimate sacrifice no longer seemed beautiful.  What took its place were the people I knew who were looking at the world soberly, seeing its horrors and brokenness, and diving in to take a stand against them. The greatest example of this for me was always the activists working in the West Bank to try and help poor Palestinians from being kicked off their lands by settlers and the army. While most of the country had gotten tired of caring and stopped looking east, or worse, these few knew exactly what was going on, and despite their miniscule chances of success they doggedly persisted in going out there and doing the right thing. My experiences in places like the South Hebron Hills have been some of the most horrifying and the most gratifying of my life. 

Most days I have a strange double feeling. I feel the goodness of humanity slipping between our fingers like melted ice, and I feel love and friendship constantly exhibiting themselves.  

Tonight the 9th of Av will begin, and it will be that rare occasion when my Hebrew birthday is not marred by wailing and fasting. Shabbat trumps any sad day, and we’re taught to enjoy ourselves and rest. But when the postponed fast will begin tomorrow evening I will take the day to mourn the destruction, the stupidity, the nastiness; I will allow myself to wallow in sadness. I will remember that many of those Palestinian villages I tried to help keep in place have been removed, that Ukraine is burning and millions of refugees walk the earth, that much of what our great feminist teachers have taught us has been unlearned, that this country is broken at the bone. Despair, my father taught me, is its own kind of freedom. 

Jerusalem means “we will see wholeness.”  May we find the strength to look straight at the brokenness and see it for what it is. And may that remind us of all that is whole in us and in the world, and give us the courage to make that wholeness appear in front of our eyes. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

The Tree in the Midst

By Susan Weinstein

Dear friends,

You’re coming home from work or from running around town. Your mind is busy. Your heart full of concerns. You unlock the door to your apartment and are about to step in. Your eye catches sight of the Mezuzah on the doorpost. You remember the first word in the scroll inside of it: Shma, Listen! You pause to fulfill the commandment, to change gears before entering a new space, to walk into your house with your mind, not just your body.  

When a friend described this to me yesterday it struck me as a good example of the mental transformation described in Psalm 27. How do we get from the state of mind in verse 2: 

 בִּקְרֹ֤ב עָלַ֨י ׀ מְרֵעִים֮ לֶאֱכֹ֢ל אֶת־בְּשָׂ֫רִ֥י צָרַ֣י וְאֹיְבַ֣י לִ֑י הֵ֖מָּה כָשְׁל֣וּ וְנָפָֽלוּ׃  

When the bad angels 
Crowd close over me 
To eat my flesh 
My constrainers, 
My enemies 
They fail And fall. 

To that in verse 6: 

וְעַתָּ֨ה יָר֪וּם רֹאשִׁ֡י עַ֤ל אֹיְבַ֬י סְֽבִיבוֹתַ֗י וְאֶזְבְּחָ֣ה בְ֭אׇהֳלוֹ זִבְחֵ֣י תְרוּעָ֑ה אָשִׁ֥ירָה וַ֝אֲזַמְּרָ֗ה לַֽיהֹוָֽה׃  

In that moment 
My head will rise 
High above my surrounding enemies 
I will gift Her 
Beautiful sacrifices of sound 
Poetry and song to YHVH 

The 16th century kabbalist Moshe Alsheich illuminates the phrase My constrainers, My enemies: 

צרי ואויבי הם צרי ואויבי הנפש 

My constrainers and my enemies are the constrainers and enemies of the soul. 

The question, then is an internal one: How can I change my inner world from a state of fear and anxiety into one of confidence and peace? 

Two possibilities surface in my search for an answer, one available, immediate and short-lived, and the other demands work and time but can be offer a much longer stay in the state of peace.  

The quick option appears in the following Hassidic teaching: 

"It is written (in Genesis): “The tree in the midst of the garden.” Whenever a person prays, they should think that they are in the garden of paradise, where there is no envy and no lust and no pride, and they will surely be safe from distraction. But how can they think in this way, since they know that they are in this world and among people they are acquainted with? This is how: When a person studies or prays with reverence and devoutness begotten of love, and remembers that nothing is void of God, but that everything is filled with life granted by the Creator, then, in all they see, they see the living power of the Creator and hear Her living voice. That is the meaning of the words: “The tree of life in the midst of the garden.”  

In that moment of pause before entering the house, or any such moment of pause, one can step out of their mind with its temporary anxieties, and step, temporarily into eternity, into sound, into the reality of the natural world. We are certainly still in the world around us, but we become a tree in a garden rather than a lunatic in the city.  

Hard as that may sound, the deeper option is harder. Alsheich writes: 

The constrainers and enemies of the soul are the destroyers that were born out of my faulty acts. “My” denotes that they are mine. And the point is that whoever commits a wrongful act, creates along with it a corrupting force. However, the one who returns from them with love can transform those misdeeds into meritorious gifts, and the prosecutors become defense attorneys and lovers. Then how could they “eat my flesh?” Therefore, the verse continues: “they fail and fall.”  

The more foundational way to shift our state of mind, Alsheich explains, involves the work of transformation and repentance. It’s not just the world that is oppressing us, our oppression is related to the way we behave in the world. Our job is to find those places where we are straying from the path of goodness.  

“Anxiety is engendered by straying from the right course,” wrote Harav Kook. “Through penitence inspired by love even this damage can be turned into a source of good.” 

Ultimately though, the short path to transcendence and the long one are connected. Penitence begins with stopping, witnessing, observing yourself. If we don’t step out of ourselves to take a look, we will never be able to change our behavior. We will be stuck in our minds, seeing the same enemies and constrainers coming to eat our flesh, or treat us unfairly, or take what is ours, and we will never be able to enjoy the feeling of watching them fail, disintegrate or if we’re very, very lucky transform into our defenders and lovers. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Faces and Obsessions

The Ark of the synagogue in Avignon, France, with the verse from Psalm 19:

Dear friends, 

Thank you for all the well wishes for my Covid bout. It was so sweet to get all that love. And it worked!

One thing Covid didn’t cure me of, is my continuing obsession with Psalm 27. In the Kabbalistic poem Yedid Nefesh, which we often sing to welcome Shabbat, there’s talk of a love-sickness that reminds me of this poetic obsession:

Hadur na’eh Ziv ha’olam,
nafshi cholat ahavatach

The world shines
With sparkling beauty:
My soul is sick with Your love.

I try and imagine what the content is of this soul’s love sickness. What do we yearn for so deeply? What might the pain of longing for God manifest as? What exactly is this incurable malady that the poet asks relief from week after week? Is it a form of depression? Alienation? Meaninglessness? Heartbreak with the state of the world? 

A hint might be found in the following line of Yedid Nefesh:

Ana el na refa na la
Behar'ot la noam zivach

Please, god, heal her
Show her it can shine sweet and soft.

To me this request for relief reads false. The real desire is to be in the longing, not to actualize it. With another person actualization might be a worthy goal. With God, however, the actualization lies in the seeking, in the desire, in the obsession. The lovesickness, what the Hassidic rabbis call Dveykus, or cleaving, is the desired state of being for Jews. In that sense, my obsession with Psalm 27 is a great example of my soul’s lovesickness for God.

Over and over I cleave to the questions the verses raise.

Lecha amar libi bakshu panay
Et panecha Adonai avakesh

My heart speaks Your words: Seek My face.
I seek Your face, Adonai.

What does it mean to seek the face of God? What is the heart doing in this process? Is the communication between me and God taking place there, within the realm of the heart, or is there, as the verse seems to suggest, an urging by the wordless heart to communicate with the All through words and actions? We do, after all speak to God in the second person. Atah - You, we say whenever we mouth a blessing or a prayer. There is, that implies, another entity to communicate with, a being of sorts, with something like a face, an energy to be in dialogue with. “Don’t objectify me,” seems to be the cry coming from God to our hearts through the words of the poet: "Seek My face."

it is a real encounter we are after. Don’t content yourself with seeing God from afar, like a bear sighting or a glimpse of a rare bird. No, the face implies a true meeting. On the face of it (sorry!) this sounds impossible. Torah tells us explicitly that only one person ever saw God face to face, and that is Moses. None of the prophets, priests, rabbis, sages, teachers, mystics achieved this. No one other than Moses ever had a face to face with God, and even Moses when he asked to see God’s face was only allowed a glimpse of his behind. So why would we bother to “Seek God’s face?”

Maimonides explains the verse from Exodus: “My face shall not be seen,”ופני לא יֵרָאו" like this:

אמיתת מציאותי כמות שהיא לא תושג

The truth of My presence as it is shall not be reached.

Seeing the face of God according to Maimonides means understanding the full truth of the reality of God. There is an objective reality to God that cannot be understood by a human being.

BUT! That does not, and must not preclude a subjective, partial experiencing of God, universe, transcendent self. A momentary understanding of one aspect of the All is possible. The heart that tells us to find God’s face is not actually sending us on an impossible mission. It is reminding us of our never ending personal mission to remain in the mode of the searching traveler.

The Hebrew word for face, panim is plural. When we are told, seek My face, we are in fact told to seek My faces. Find the one of the infinite faces that you can find today.

We are taught:
There are seventy faces to the Torah.
No matter how wise, knowledgable or transcendent, we can’t get all of them at once. What we can do is flip them around again and again.

הפוך בה והפוך בה
Flip her over and flip her again
We’re told about Torah.
That is the seeking of Her face.

Don’t find God: find your God, the God of this moment in your life, the God of your obsession, of your current confusion, of your momentary need, of your quiet place, of your search.

Your heart desires a face to face meeting. Will you seek out one of Mine?

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Psalm 27

by Itamar Dotan Katz

Dear parents, 

Last week I laid out some thoughts about how our poets of old pointed us toward a quiet that can transcend even the most difficult moments. At the heart of these is Psalm 27, attributed to King David. Here are two very different renditions of the Psalm, along with the original Hebrew text. The first version stays very close to the Hebrew, and the second is not quite a translation, more an expression of what I see as the main idea behind the Psalm, using elements from many different lines in the text.

27

For David

Yhvh is my light
My salvation
Who should I fear?

Yhvh is the fortress of my life
Why be scared?

When the bad angels
Crowd close
Above me
To eat my flesh
My constrainers
And betrayers
They fail
And fall.

If an army sets up camp to attack me
My heart will not stir.
If a war breaks out to destroy me
On this I count:

I ask only one thing of YHVH,
One request only:
To sit in the house of YHVH
Every day of my life
To see the sweetness
To visit the abode of the All.
She will make me invisible
When they come looking for me
Tuck me into her Sukkah,
She will hide me
In the folds of Her tent
In the bedrock of the mountain
She will raise me high and mighty

In that moment
My head will rise
High above my surrounding enemies

In that tent
I will gift Her
Beautiful sacrifices of sound
Poetry and song to YHVH

Can You Hear me
When my voice rushes out to find you?
Grace me with an answer.
My heart screams for You: Find me!
You said:
Seek My Face
So why do you hide it?
Don’t turn your back
Quit snorting your nose in rage.
Have you forgotten you’re my partner? My help?
Don’t abandon me
Don’t leave me
You God of my salvation
My father and mother have left me
And YHVH picked me up

Point me to Your path
Lead me down straight, open road
To escape those who would
Narrow it to meaninglessness.
Don’t let their souls swallow mine
Liars are testifying against me already
Puffing up the consuming breath of violence

If I didn’t believe
I’d see Your goodness
In the land of the living…….

Hope toward YHVH;
Strengthen that brave heart of yours
And hope toward YHVH.

There is a Place

There is place called Salvation
Where words flip and drop
And sounds bubble up from the depths
Where noises fall slowly
To the ocean floor of our ears.
There poems drip off of lips
Like a silent rain drop
From a wet leaf
And sirens ring like bronze gongs
In hearts beating calmly
As they move
Squid-like
Toward the lovers call
“Find me!”
“I’m here
Beside you.”

Where your enemies feasted on your flesh
Nothing remains but the silence
They lovingly left behind.

A young tree moves ever slowly
Toward the light
A stalactite grows
Drippingly toward the floor
Of the cave
Where a creature of war
Sits still waiting
For peace to come
Had I not known this place existed…..
Had I not known this place exists…..
Had I not known this Land of Living Beings…..

"I hear it,” she hears,
“Your sacrifice of sound is now complete.”
 

לְדָוִ֨ד ׀ יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ אוֹרִ֣י וְ֭יִשְׁעִי מִמִּ֣י אִירָ֑א יְהֹוָ֥ה מָעוֹז־חַ֝יַּ֗י מִמִּ֥י אֶפְחָֽד׃

בִּקְרֹ֤ב עָלַ֨י ׀ מְרֵעִים֮ לֶאֱכֹ֢ל אֶת־בְּשָׂ֫רִ֥י צָרַ֣י וְאֹיְבַ֣י לִ֑י הֵ֖מָּה כָשְׁל֣וּ וְנָפָֽלוּ׃

אִם־תַּחֲנֶ֬ה עָלַ֨י ׀ מַחֲנֶה֮ לֹא־יִירָ֢א לִ֫בִּ֥י אִם־תָּק֣וּם עָ֭לַי מִלְחָמָ֑ה בְּ֝זֹ֗את אֲנִ֣י בוֹטֵֽחַ׃

אַחַ֤ת ׀ שָׁאַ֣לְתִּי מֵֽאֵת־יְהֹוָה֮ אוֹתָ֢הּ אֲבַ֫קֵּ֥שׁ שִׁבְתִּ֣י בְּבֵית־יְ֭הֹוָה כׇּל־יְמֵ֣י חַיַּ֑י לַחֲז֥וֹת בְּנֹעַם־יְ֝הֹוָ֗ה וּלְבַקֵּ֥ר בְּהֵֽיכָלֽוֹ׃

כִּ֤י יִצְפְּנֵ֨נִי ׀ בְּסֻכֹּה֮ בְּי֢וֹם רָ֫עָ֥ה יַ֭סְתִּרֵנִי בְּסֵ֣תֶר אׇהֳל֑וֹ בְּ֝צ֗וּר יְרוֹמְמֵֽנִי׃

וְעַתָּ֨ה יָר֪וּם רֹאשִׁ֡י עַ֤ל אֹיְבַ֬י סְֽבִיבוֹתַ֗י וְאֶזְבְּחָ֣ה בְ֭אׇהֳלוֹ זִבְחֵ֣י תְרוּעָ֑ה אָשִׁ֥ירָה וַ֝אֲזַמְּרָ֗ה לַֽיהֹוָֽה׃

שְׁמַע־יְהֹוָ֖ה קוֹלִ֥י אֶקְרָ֗א וְחׇנֵּ֥נִי וַֽעֲנֵֽנִי׃

לְךָ֤ ׀ אָמַ֣ר לִ֭בִּי בַּקְּשׁ֣וּ פָנָ֑י אֶת־פָּנֶ֖יךָ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֲבַקֵּֽשׁ׃

אַל־תַּסְתֵּ֬ר פָּנֶ֨יךָ ׀ מִמֶּנִּי֮ אַ֥ל תַּט־בְּאַ֗ף עַ֫בְדֶּ֥ךָ עֶזְרָתִ֥י הָיִ֑יתָ אַֽל־תִּטְּשֵׁ֥נִי וְאַל־תַּ֝עַזְבֵ֗נִי אֱלֹהֵ֥י יִשְׁעִֽי׃

כִּֽי־אָבִ֣י וְאִמִּ֣י עֲזָב֑וּנִי וַֽיהֹוָ֣ה יַאַסְפֵֽנִי׃

ה֤וֹרֵ֥נִי יְהֹוָ֗ה דַּ֫רְכֶּ֥ךָ וּ֭נְחֵנִי בְּאֹ֣רַח מִישׁ֑וֹר לְ֝מַ֗עַן שֽׁוֹרְרָֽי׃

אַֽל־תִּ֭תְּנֵנִי בְּנֶ֣פֶשׁ צָרָ֑י כִּ֥י קָמוּ־בִ֥י עֵדֵי־שֶׁ֝֗קֶר וִיפֵ֥חַ חָמָֽס׃

לׅׄוּׅׄלֵׅ֗ׄאׅׄ הֶ֭אֱמַנְתִּי לִרְא֥וֹת בְּֽטוּב־יְהֹוָ֗ה בְּאֶ֣רֶץ חַיִּֽים׃

קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְ֫הֹוָ֥ה חֲ֭זַק וְיַאֲמֵ֣ץ לִבֶּ֑ךָ וְ֝קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְהֹוָֽה׃

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A Place Beyond Noise

At the rally in Washington Square Park last Friday

Dear parents, 

Imagine you had the ability to put the world on mute. You could keep watching it, moving through it, taking it in. But it is less noisy, less erratic and intrusive, less demanding of your attention. Imagine your world had fewer words: words, these miraculous entities, carriers of our heart’s intentions, relievers of our loneliness, diamonds of our mind: how many worthless words do you hear yourself or others utter in a day? How many degradations of the miraculous capacity per hour? Imagine there were less as you moved about through your muted world. Imagine that for half an hour, or ten minutes or one, you tried less to find the right words and instead you looked for the right lack of words, or noises, or even thoughts.

There is a famous moment of silence in Exodus. Moses’ two nephews have just died in the tabernacle for offering “a strange fire to YHVH,” and he attempts to comfort his brother with words. בקרובי אקדש, Moses says, “I am sanctified through those near to me.” God’s love, like ours, burns. We don’t know whether Aaron hears his brother. It’s possible that his world has already been muted by grief. All the Torah tells us is this: וידום אהרון
"and Aaron went silent."

At the moment when words made the least sense, be they true words or false, Aaron went silent.

Our world can go mute. It does. It will.

Our mind can go mute. It also will.

But it doesn’t have to happen only in moments of profound grief.

The psalmist describes the early morning as a time when we can mute our world.

בוקר אערוך לך ואצפה.

In the morning I prepare myself for You, and anticipate.

Another Psalm expresses it differently:

דום ליהוה והתחולל לו.
Be still in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him;

The word here translated as "wait patiently", Hitcholel, comes from the root חלל, denoting empty space. It might more accurately be translated: "empty yourself." The Kabbalists understood God's creation taking place through the act of self-contraction. By making space new things naturally come. In a similar way, our day, the time of our creation, might begin with Hitcholel - emptying ourselves.

At Kabbalat Shabbat this year we have been singing the medieval piyyut, Shachar Avakeshcha, I seek You at Dawn. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, who wrote the poem centuries ago in Spain must have understood that seeking god, seeking silence, seeking peace, are types of waiting, emptying, sitting around. Who is he seeking at dawn? צורי ומשגבי, "My rock, who raises me up" above and over the noise to a place of muted watching, of stillness, of peace.

Psalm 27 describes such a transcendence that is available to each of us even in the midst of that busy internal strife we might call War. It is a psalm that we traditionally read daily during the month of Elul, when we are in war with ourselves as we prepare for the High Holidays. But this past week my internal battles led me to it time and again. I worked on memorizing the Hebrew text, studying it, translating it, translating it again, thinking about it on the train and in the streets and at home. When on Friday morning we got the news about the Supreme Court I immediately turned in my brokenness to Psalm 27. I took my Shofar down to Washington Square Park. With the transcendent, prayerful vibe of hordes of protesters around me, and the ancient lines running through my mind I blew that wordless prayer through the ram's horn, and felt its steady sound drain the moment of all of it.

Next week I will offer you two versions of Psalm 27. One that stays very close to the Hebrew, clinging to it like a mother, and another that sets itself free and swims away into the open ocean. In the meantime I wish you a Shabbat of rising above the noise inside and out.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

The Next Generation

Dear parents, 

Last week was the last class of the year at the School for Creative Judaism, the New Shul’s Hebrew school partner. Each year we have an annual theme, and this year’s was the Year of the Peacemakers, wherein students learned about activists for peace and justice from all stages of Jewish history. We ended our year in an action in a park in Brooklyn, in which the students became the peacemakers. Here’s the note I sent parents with my little summary of this special year of learning: 

“Because our history taught us to care for strangers!” 

“Because the Torah tells us to protect the vulnerable!” 

“Because we will all need help one day!” 

These were some of the answers students gave when I asked them why we are talking about the Fair Pay for Home Care campaign at Jewish school. After a year of learning about activists and peacemakers from across Jewish history,  at our Shavuot celebration in Cobble Hill we met one from the present. Judi Williams, who works for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice told kids and parents that thousands of elderly and disabled people in NY state can’t find a home-care worker because the pay is as low as $10 per hour. They can’t afford to do this work under those conditions. She described the work the activists put in to pass a law in Albany that would raise it to $25 per hour, and how after the law passed Governor Hochul refused to add it to the budget, so the campaign continues. “God commands us in The Torah to protect the dignity of every human being,” she said, adding: “Justice justice you must pursue!” We decided there and then that we would end the school year with an action in support of the campaign.  

Learning the stories and ideas of all of the peacemakers the students encountered this year -  from biblical types like Aaron the High Priest and the Prophet Isaiah through Talmudic feminists like Brurya, vegetarianism touting rabbis like Israel’s first chief rabbi, Harav Kook and all the way up to modern heroes like Ruth Bader Ginsburg - prepared your children to take in the struggles of contemporary activists here in NYC. The context of millennia of Jews fighting for the rights of the poor and the vulnerable in the name of the Torah made encountering today’s Jewish activists make sense. Whether they were hearing about a Brooklyn Trans activist/artist who grew up a Hassidic boy,  about an American-born Reform rabbi fighting for the rights of Bedouin Palestinians in the Occupied Territories or a young woman working to secure dignified living for the elderly or disabled in NY state , the kids understood that Jews stand up to injustice as part of our spiritual DNA. 

At the action last week, watching parents and kids canvassing to spread the word about the home-care workers as they carried signs with verses from the Talmud, I felt proud of your little peacemakers, and hopeful for the future. “Hu ya’aseh shalom aleynu” as we sing in our prayers, “God will bring peace upon us,” may actually come true quicker than we thought with this next generation of Peacemakers. 

Mazal tov to all of the amazing B’nai Mitzvah of 5782 at The New Shul, each of which did a mitzvah project to make the world a slightly better place: 

Zeke Cohen 

Matan Shulman 

Rami Hertzig 

Willow Mintz 

Luca Assante 

Alice Lewin 

Sajid Cohen 

Sadie Gordon 

Naomi Robinson-Pasher 

Kaitlyn Carroll 

Emmy (Paley) DiClerico 

Anna Donovan 

Thank you for giving us the joy of working with your kids this year. We are already planning for next year’s theme, the Year of the Storytellers.  

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Jews and Juneteenth

Dear friends,

A conversion candidate asked me recently what to expect as a Black Jew in New York City. What, he implied, is the current state of the racism and exoticizing of African American Jews in Jewish America? 

The first story that came to mind is a hard one. Yehudah Webster, an African American Jewish activist and leader, was returning a Torah scroll he had rented for a Bar Mitzvah that he led. He was attacked in Crown Heights by a group of Chassidic Jews who assumed he was stealing it. They surrounded his car and was saved when the police protected him and enabled him to escape. 

The second story was less toxic, but still disturbing. It involved a Black woman who came for several months to an Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn. Each time she’d come she’d receive smiles and questions. People were curious how she learned about the synagogue, where she learned Hebrew. Some would comment that they were impressed with her proficiency in prayer. No one ever did anything especially offensive, but the line between curiosity and suspicion was always present. The questions never stopped, so she moved on to another community.  

“I can’t think of one Jew of color I know who has not had a racist experience in the Jewish community.” Rabbi Sandra Lawson, a Jew of Color, was quoted in Haaretz saying. “Some are horrible, like being denied entry or being kicked out by law enforcement officers or security that act as gatekeepers. Or some are questioning why you’re here: ‘How come you’re Jewish?’” 

The percentage of Jews of color in the overall Jewish American community is growing. Researchers have estimated that close to 1 in 7 American Jews are Jews of Color. That’s double what the estimates were ten years ago. If we’re going to provide a warm, loving spiritual home to Black Jews, we need to work quickly for change within the Jewish community.  

As we come upon Juneteenth, we would do well to turn our attention to the challenges that American Jews of Color face even in progressive Jewish spaces, and what we can do to ease those challenges.  

We should remember that there are around one million Jews of Color in this country, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone when one shows up at a synagogue, when he speaks Hebrew, when she knows the prayers, when they know more bible than many of us. We should remember that like the rest of us, Jews of Color come from a wide range of religious backgrounds. Some grew up in a traditional Jewish household, some in a secular home, some in a Christian or Muslim or a-religious environment and converted, others who have not converted. We should keep in mind that that African Jewry, with which many African American Jews are connected, includes some of our people's oldest Jewish communities, some of which carry on ancient traditions that most Jews no longer keep. We have a lot to learn about ourselves from many of them, and we’re here to welcome all who want to worship and be in community with us. 

One thing communities like ours can do toward making Jews of Color feel welcome is to take an active role as allies in the movement for Black liberation. At the Shul we’ve done this in a number of ways this year. Here are two things you could do that build on the relationships we’ve built this year: 

Last November I joined dozens of other local faith leaders in a public letter calling for shutting down the jail complex on Rikers Island. As you may know, 6 people have died there this year already, and 16 in 2021, in the custody of our city. The system we live in in this country is responsible for the conditions which drove many of them to find themselves there. The fact that we are incapable of keeping them safe as they wait for months and sometimes years at a time for their trials is a stain that we need to rid ourselves of fast. If you’d like to join this campaign you can register for the next meeting HERE. (and let us know if you’d like to represent the Shul there.) 

A few weeks ago, our BLM chevrutah led the wonderful Shabbat inspired by Black Women’s Blueprint. Since then, we have been raising money for this wonderful organization. Thank you to all of you who have already contributed. The funds we raise will help build the organization’s new center for healing, reconciliation, and environmental and reproductive justice in upstate New York. There are still a few more days left in our drive, and we invite those of you who have not participated to join us. 

This week I hung out with Alexander, a nine-month-old Black boy living in Greenwich Village with his white-presenting Jewish mother and white non-Jewish father. I pray that Alexander and all young Jews of Color will always feel free to embrace his Jewish tradition in whichever way he’d like it to manifest, that his embrace is always reciprocated, and that he experiences his faith world as a place to which he can always come home. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Hanging On What

Dear friends,

On Rosh Hashanah we say that the Earth is תלוי על בלימה, a poetic phrase meaning something like hanging on nothingness, suspended in air, sitting on a void. The first word, תלוי means hanging or dependent. The second word על means on. The third word, בלימה is actually composed of two words: בלי - meaning without, and מה - meaning what. So the world, we repeat repeatedly on its birthday, is hanging on without what. Its continued existence is as miraculous as its inception. 

The same can be said of any Shul, synagogue, or Jewish community. There is a contradiction at the heart of the enterprise, which is exacerbated in this time and place: A connection to the ancient in a country founded on newness; A celebration of identity inside a melting pot; A community in a city where community is close to impossible to maintain. 

The New Shul is an even more extreme example of “hanging on nothingness.” We don’t only contain the contradictions inherent to any Shul, but we do it without the foundation of belonging to a formal Jewish denomination. We insist on doing the Jewish thing like no one has done it before.  In order to connect with the generations before us we create new rituals founded on ancient principles. We maintain that a Shul is a place of art, ideas, justice, and those are the channels through which the traditional ideas can flow. We refuse to let the ancient remain in the ancient, nor the contemporary in the contemporary. Instead, we look to bring the ancient into the contemporary, and the now into the tradition of our ancestors. We offer a community to people to whom gathering weekly for services, like previous generations did, is too often, and many of whom gather only once or twice a year.  

So what actually keeps this impossible contradiction alive? 

One of the answers became apparent on Wednesday evening when ten Shul members gathered for what might not sound so exciting, but in this case it was. I’m talking about the Va’ad meeting, the board of the Shul. Our board is made up of volunteers who are excited to be a part of this grand experiment called The New Shul and steer this amorphous entity to keep it alive and thriving. 

The Hebrew word for Board is Va’ad. It comes from a complex three-letter root, ו-ע-ד, which normally means coming together, meeting or uniting. But it’s related to an almost identical root, י-ע-ד, which denotes heading somewhere, destination, purpose, and the same root can also mean “to witness.” When you put these together you get a group of people coming together to witness each other as they move in unison toward a particular purpose.  

There were several exciting things that went down at this meeting. First, there was a reckoning with whether or not the members of the Va’ad have been doing enough. People spoke about the purpose of the va’ad, and with wisdom and honesty typical to each one, they expressed their ideas about where they’ve been doing less than enough, and their commitment to doing and giving more. When you take into consideration how busy these people are, and how long many of them have already been on the va’ad, the generosity of spirit was moving. 

The next extraordinary event was when David Schoenberger, who has been the President of the Va’ad for the past three years announced that he was ready to step down. “My arms are tired,” he said in Moses-like fashion. David, as we all knew has been volunteering long hours with generous heart and determined mind to keep this ship afloat through the choppy waters of the last few years.  He held it up not only with his arms.  

David’s announcement could have triggered anxiety. Instead, the gratitude we all felt toward him gave way to another extraordinary moment, in which Judy Minor offered to step up and take his place and was voted in unanimously. Judy is a natural, no-nonsense leader who is passionate about the Shul and devoted to its core principles. I’ve had the good fortune to put together the Kumah Festival with her the last two years, and Susan and me are incredibly excited to work with her and the Va’ad on writing the next chapter in the unlikely life of this Shul. 

For those of you who have been on boards, you will know that a board meeting isn’t always such an exciting prospect. But when the people on it are wonderful, the care and purpose in their presence emerges, and moments like took place this week happen. Community is held together by invisible strings. And also by the volunteer work of people in the community.  

Thank you to the members of the Va’ad: Barry Adler, Ricki Long, Rob Milam, David Rosenberg, Jessica Slote and Gregg Shatan. 

Thank you to David Schoenberger for your incredible service of love over the past three years. 

And thank you and Mazal Tov to Judy Minor for taking on the role of the President of the Va’ad.  

Let’s keep making the impossible happen. 

Shabbat shalom, and I hope to see you tomorrow morning at First Pres at Emmy's Bat Mitzvah.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Translating Forward

Dear friends,

I wake up from an intense dream. I go over its details in my mind. I’m full of the ramifications of this dream: psychological, emotional, spiritual. I turn to a loved one or friend and begin describing it. Their attention fades quickly. They humor me by listening to the end and summarize it in a word: “Anxiety.” Or “Fear.” Or “Weird.” I am left alone with the emotions I was entirely unable to translate.  

Writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri writes in her most recent book about “the supremely disorienting act of translating myself.” She means writing something in one language and then translating it into another. But the act of translating ourselves is one that we engage in daily. With each person we speak differently, so that they will be able to hear us. So that we will feel understood. Or sometimes we give up and keep our inner world to ourselves. 

King David, the 10th century BCE Hebrew poet was good at translating his inner world into song. His poems, which we call Psalms are expressions of his most intimate and vulnerable thoughts. He speaks them to his God, and through his relationship to that God, human beings ever since have deepened their relationships to their own God. It didn’t matter that the vast majority of them did not speak the same language as David. Nor did it matter that they practiced a different religion altogether. This might tell us something about the place where different faiths, cultures and philosophies meet. His poems have been read consistently by a large portion of humanity ever since they were written. 

Many of us, however, have trouble connecting to these poems nowadays. Something isn’t coming through. The fact that the poems are addressed to God makes it difficult for many of us who don’t believe in God, or don’t relate to the way the bible describes God to connect to them. The world is so different now than it was then, we think to ourselves, what does any of this have to do with me?  

And then there’s the killer: the translations. 

Have mercy upon me, O God, 
as befits Your faithfulness; 
in keeping with Your abundant compassion, 
blot out my transgressions. 

We look at the words and feel nothing, or maybe we feel tired. We see nothing alive. We remember the boredom of our religious school education. We rebel against the patriarchy, against punitive authority and disempowering institutions, against the death of spirit, and stop reading. David’s relationship with what he called “El Khai,” “a living God” is not even a memory. It’s forgotten, or worse, mocked. 

I am lucky on that front. First of all, I speak Hebrew, and can read him in the original. I also was given tools from an early age that help study a biblical text, such as where to find commentary, how to mine biblical Hebrew and how to imagine my way into a biblical poem. Armed with those tools I spent seven years studying the entire Book of Psalms. What I found was the open heart of an extraordinarily communicative poetic giant, that expressed my fears, discontents, ideas and dreams in ways I could never do myself. Through the act of study, I managed to translate antiquated Hebrew into something valuable to me. 

I still, however, felt alone with the poetry. I couldn’t communicate what I experienced in them to anyone but my study partners, with whom I was mining the texts. I felt a strong to desire to try to communicate them to others. And so I began working on translating a number of Psalms into an English I hoped would manage to cut through both the linguistic and the philosophical barriers between 21st century New Yorkers and the Psalms.

You remember that line up above? Have mercy on me etc.? Read it one more time and then see what I did with it in my translation of Psalm 51: 

Treat me kindly, Lover

Lay my head on your breast

Melt my guilt like ice.

Believe it or not, I think that this version – for us today - is much closer to what David meant when three thousand years ago he wrote:  

חׇנֵּ֣נִי אֱלֹהִ֣ים כְּחַסְדֶּ֑ךָ כְּרֹ֥ב רַ֝חֲמֶ֗יךָ מְחֵ֣ה פְשָׁעָֽי׃ 

Of course, it’s different than the original in many ways. But, as Jhumpa Lahiri writes: 

“What one writes in any given language typically remains as is, but translation pushes it to become otherwise.” This is what it means when we say we are receiving the Torah. We are translating it forward, taking it on and playing with it in our mouths, hearts and minds. 

Tomorrow evening, when we gather to mark what happened at the foot of that mountain all those thousands of years ago, I am excited to have the opportunity to share with you some of these rather interpretive translations. I’m even more excited that the poems will be read by two wonderful actors, Maria Silverman and Martin Rekhaus, and accompanied musically by Frank London and Yonatan Gutfeld. After the poetry you’re invited to stay for part or all of our Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the traditional all night study session on the night of Shavuot (our version is far less traditional though...). We will be joined by several wonderful teachers, who will deepen our understanding of what it means to listen, to speak and to translate. These include Dr. Lizzie Berne DeGear, Rabbi Jim Ponet, Michael Posnick and Elana Ponet. And if you stay long enough into the night I’m hoping we might even work on studying and translating a psalm together. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

The Bells We Need

From the Kaddish, by Joey Weisenberg. For the kids and their teachers z"l.

Dear friends,

The question is how do we respond to such a devastating week? One answer is: with a bell. (If you have one nearby grab it, it might come in handy.) 

A few weeks ago, I spent a couple days on a Zen monastery in the Catskills. Every time a bell sounds there, everything stops. Conversations pause, movement, thoughts, chewing. Instead, people breathe. We can practice that useful, grounding Zen way during the next few minutes. 

B e l l 

That’s only part of the answer, but if we can do that it can protect us from the spiraling emotions and fears. It can remind us that our lives are right here where we are and not over there, in the headlines. It can remind us to look around and see what is in front of us, to listen to what’s around us and to know that the leaves are still growing on the trees and the cabs are still speeding around the city even if most of them are now called Ubers. 

Yesterday I met with a young Trans person thinking about their upcoming B Mitzvah. They were trying to make sense of taking on this ancient tradition whose holy book commands the execution of homosexuals and the harsh punishment of cross dressers. Part of our job as Jews, I told them, is to define which parts of the Torah may have come from a divine source that cuts through time, and which came from a limited human source. This is what it means when we say that we were given the Torah. “But why is it in there,” they ask. Because the Torah represents reality, not just the ideal. So, things like that must be in there. When we accept the Torah we accept reality, we say yes to life with all its faults. 

B e l l  

The bell, like the Torah is about both acceptance and the fight. 

When the Temple was destroyed 2000 years ago our tradition adapted by radically transforming Jewish practice. No more single place of gathering. No more pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year. And most importantly, no more animal or harvest sacrifices. Instead of sacrifices came prayers.  

In the morning prayers, after the early morning reciting of the verses detailing the sacrificial service in the Temple, we find the following sentence: 

“May it be Your will that the speaking of these words be accepted by You as if we offered the daily sacrifice at its proper time, its right place and according to rule.” 

I always considered this move the salvation of Judaism, when it turned from the concrete to the abstract, from place to time, from physicality to spirit. It democratized the entire practice, wresting it out of the hands of the priests and into the interpreting bodies and minds of the people. But this week, when I watched Steve Kerr respond to the horrific mass murder in Texas, I saw it differently. 

“No more moments of silence,” he said, and I wondered: where is the sacrifice? Where is my sacrifice, the concrete action, the stepping out of my life to solve a problem that keeps getting closer and closer, that could steal the greatest gift I have, my life and the life of those I love? What am I giving up for sanity, for justice, for safety, for community? What happened to the sacrifices we are commanded to give every day, every holiday, every year? 

My instinct to understand modern sacrifice as action is another piece of that radical first century transformation: 

"Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai once was walking with his disciple Rabbi Joshua near Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Joshua looked at the Temple ruins and said: “Alas for us! The place which atoned for the sins of the people Israel through the ritual of animal sacrifice lies in ruins!” Then Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: “Be not grieved, my son. There is another way of gaining atonement even though the Temple is destroyed. We must now gain atonement through deeds of loving-kindness.” For it is written: “Loving-kindness I desire, not sacrifice.” (Hosea 6:6)” 

B e l l 

In the final poem of the Book of Psalms, in the line before last, we hear two types of bells: 

הַלְל֥וּהוּ בְצִלְצְלֵי־שָׁ֑מַע הַֽ֝לְל֗וּהוּ בְּֽצִלְצְלֵ֥י תְרוּעָֽה׃  

Praise Her with resounding bells; 
praise Her with loud-clashing bells. 

What’s translated here as “resounding” is the Hebrew word Shama, like Sh'ma – to hear. Bells of hearing. This is the first type of bell we need. The one that brings us into the present and reminds us that what is happening in the world is simply human beings being themselves. Nothing unique about it. Like the buzzing of the flies. 

What’s translated as “loud-clashing” is the Hebrew word T'ruah – loud cries. This is a word often associated with battle, the call of the warriors as they run into the battle field, or the cries of jubilation that welcome them after a victory. It is a sound related to action, to doing what needs to be done despite the danger, despair and pain. This is Hemingway’s bell that tells us: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

These are the two bells we need. Let’s find our center this Shabbat, and then let’s get to work. 

B e l l  

Before I sign off I want to make sure you know you are all invited to our final night of the Kumah Festival on Shavuot night, June 4th on a rooftop in Chelsea. It will be a special evening of re-interpreted Psalms, wonderful music, learning and wine. All the info HERE. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A Love Poem to the Soil

The Jordan Valley. Photo by David Shulman

Dear friends,

The South Indian spiritual sensation Sadhguru drove his motorcycle across the border from Jordan this week and made his way to Tel Aviv. He’s on tour to Save the Soil of the Earth, most of which has been degraded in dangerous ways, in a kind of offshoot of the climate crisis. He probably didn’t know that he arrived in Israel during the week when Jews are reading Parashat Behar, the Torah’s great love poem to the land, the soil, the earth itself. 

It begins with Shmita, the seventh year, where (as we learned so beautifully from Liz Aeschlimann at our Shabbat a couple weeks ago), the land itself gets a rest: 

“When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of יהוה.  

Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of יהוה: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.  

You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land.  

But you may eat whatever the land during its sabbath will produce—you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all its yield.” 

For farmers, following the laws of Shmita without the legal tricks the rabbis came up with to keep them from bankruptcy is not easy. But not following them is even more dangerous: 

“Exile comes to the world for idolatry, for sexual sins and for bloodshed, and for [transgressing the commandment of] the [year of the] release of the land.” (Pirkei Avot 2) 

It’s simple mathematics. Let the land rest and you can live off of it. Don’t, and you’ll be pushed off of it. 

Next week’s Parashah we includes this: 

“And you I will scatter among the nations, and I will unsheath the sword against you. Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.  

Then shall the land make up for its sabbath years throughout the time that it is desolate and you are in the land of your enemies; then shall the land rest and make up for its sabbath years.  

Throughout the time that it is desolate, it shall observe the rest that it did not observe in your sabbath years while you were dwelling upon it.” 

The math couldn’t be clearer. The next part of the Parashah holds a more complex mathematical formula that is even more radical: 

“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years.  

Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land - and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.” 

Every fifty years we are commanded not only to let the land rest in a stricter way than the seventh year, but also to relinquish whichever land purchases were made during that time. Real estate should not be tied to place, but to time: 

“In buying from your neighbor, you shall deduct only for the number of years since the jubilee; and in selling to you, that person shall charge you only for the remaining crop years:  

the more such years, the higher the price you pay; the fewer such years, the lower the price; for what is being sold to you is a number of harvests.” 

There should be no such thing as ownership of land. A private beach, a private forest, a private waterfall – these are fantasies that should not hold standing in our reality. Even the notion of borders that keep certain people out of a piece of land denotes a type of collective ownership, which is, simply put, false. Our participation is such falsehood is a sin. “Those that preserve hollow lies,” said Jonah, “forsake their own mercy.”  

The underlying principle of our relationship with land comes in the final climax of this redemptive poem of radical, impossible love: 

כִּי־לִ֖י הָאָ֑רֶץ כִּֽי־גֵרִ֧ים וְתוֹשָׁבִ֛ים אַתֶּ֖ם עִמָּדִֽי 

“For the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.” 

The land does not belong to us. What is ours is temporary. The notion that we actually own anything is an expression of false pride. The Medieval Jewish commentator Rabbenu Bahya explains our stranger-resident-ness like this: “Don’t consider yourselves the main point.”  

Observing these laws strictly is impractical. Letting them guide our way, however, is a gift that will help us be truly free, along with everyone else living on this soiled earth. As the Zohar says: “This is Torah, which is called Freedom. And that means the freedom of everyone and everything.”  

Shabbat shalom, 

P.S.
One way to actualize these ideas is to support our fundraiser for Black Women's Blueprint.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Jewish Detachment

By Itamar Dotan Katz

Dear friends,

Non-Attachment is generally considered a Buddhist notion. Jews tend to attach themselves to creatures and objects, then cling to them, and if possible, eat them. That’s why it was surprising to me to discover that several different important medieval Jewish thinkers espoused the aspiration toward what they called “Prishut.” It was even more surprising to discover that when looked at closely, prishut should not be translated, as it often is, as abstinence, but as detachment.  

The book I’ve been studying, Hamaspik Le’ovdey Hashem, strangely translated as The Guide to Serving God was written in Judeo-Arabic in Egypt in the year 1230 by Rabbeynu Avraham Ben Harambam, Maimonides’ son. In his guide R’ Avraham details each of the positive characteristics that will help connect a person with their God. To those of us less connected to the God paradigm, we might say these are the things that help bring us in contact with truth, goodness, peace, purpose; with our innermost self. This time of year, when we are counting each day of the Omer, is considered a time of preparation to receive the Torah on the final, 50th day of the Omer, the holiday of Shavuot. R’ Avraham’s list of positive characteristics could serve us well as a guide to examine how we are doing with these each one: Rachmanut – mercy, Nedivut – generosity, Arichut Apayim – forgiveness, Anavah – humility, Bitachon – security or strong faith, Histapkoot – contentment (with what you have), Prishut – detachment. 

It’s certainly an interesting list, and each one is worth investigating. I’ll attempt to give over a sense of what he means by Prishut, since I was surprised to find myself agreeing with him that it can serve as a deep gift to each of us and to the world. If we can all muster some Prishut I think we will be much more prepared to receive the Torah in a few weeks. 

R’ Avraham opens with a general philosophical statement:  

“The physical world is a big wall separating the servant from her master.” There is a problem with physicality, he posits. 

"Whoever is running after the vanities of this world, and desires to own them, such as money, property or honor, and who lusts for its pleasures, such as eating, drinking and sex etc, this person is wasting his time trying to get the physicality of these things and their uses, and his thoughts are anxious about them.... This type of person tends to be tired. Their dreams are filled with what they’re anxious about. They wake up at night and think about how to get the things they want. They take a break during the and find themselves thinking back at what they used to do and what they might do in the future..... If they get what they want, they either hide it away like misers or they spend all their time figuring out the many details of how exactly they're going to spend it.” 

Those who are too focused on these physical things, says the rabbi, waste their time away in anxiety and an endless loop of meaninglessness. “הקץ לדברי רוח” said Job, “The end to matters of spirit.” 

The one practicing Prishut, on the other hand “her heart is not occupied with the worries of the world, and she has space to contemplate the things that bring her closer to her purpose, and her hours are free from fatigue and hard labor because she uses them to work on what brings her closer to God, and what is necessary for living in this world, such as 'bread to eat and clothes to wear.'” 

You’re beginning to see why my study partner Michael and I preferred to translate it as detachment. There is a freedom that prishut can offer us, to be with what is beautiful and good with no guilt about the fact that we are there and not with the problems of the world. There are even those times in which we manage to allow ourselves out of our own problems and agonies, and escape into the open meadows of good feelings.   

But this type of detachment is not disengaged. It’s not the detachment of monks or hermits, but of those living and moving through the world. The word Prishut comes from the same word as perush, or interpretation. In Torah study, a parshan, or interpreter must go into the text, sift through the various meanings that seem to be calling out from it, find the heart of the matter and bring it back out to pass on to others. That is the act of Torah study, and the act of being a part of this world. R' Avraham writes:

“The principle of detachment is that it comes from the heart, meaning that the heart is detached from the love of this world and distancing itself from it.” 

Remember that when R’ Avraham uses the phrase “the world,” he means the physical rushing buzz of meaninglessness that is constantly calling out for our attention. The essence of the detachment is the ability to stay above that, while living an earthly life. This is an engaged detachment, which includes the mercy, forgiveness, generosity, faith and contentment that he laid out in previous chapters. It is the difference between the fear of something happening, and the dissipation of that fear when that very thing takes place. We could live in the fear and anxiety, or we could try to imagine what we're afraid of in concrete terms, and more often than not we will find the fear is illogical. It reminds me of my father describing feeling most free when he is arrested for civil disobedience when he’s out protecting Palestinian farmers from violent settler thugs.  The arrest relieves him of the anxiety, and he feels at one with his purpose.

Perhaps the clearest indication of what this engaged detachment is comes in the sub-chapter called The Signs of True Detachment: 

“In order to properly assess this matter you must notice how you feel about those physical things that you do not have, as well as your joy when they do finally arrive. If you find that what you were lacking from the things of this world doesn’t change your inner world, and you’re not worried about not having them, and you’re not anxious to acquire new ones – know that your detachment is true.” 

If you were waiting for that Amazon package to arrive, and going crazy with anticipation or annoyance, checked the delivery status 6 times, and felt wronged by not having it – you're not doing too well. And if when it arrived you got very excited, stopped everything you’re doing and felt the giddy joy of the fulfillment of what you deserve – you're also not doing so well. But if you ordered what you ordered and lived without it at peace, and felt pleased but not all that different when you opened the box – well then you’re doing great! It’s sign that you are closer to contentment, to peace, to the truth of the transitory nature of life and death, to the acceptance of this world for all its beauty and horror, to the generosity of nature and the sweetness of being a human being, to the understanding that we call needs aren't always such, to the eyn-sof, the never ending never beginning essence of it all. That’s where we want to be when we accept the Torah, and its teachings of action, justice and love. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

On the Difficulty of Rest

Dear friends,

I’ve been exhausted all week. No amount of sleep seems to be enough. Nor caffeine. Until Monday morning I was full of energy, the house felt alive and filled with hope. As the news of the leaked draft began to sink in, so did my energy sap. The atmosphere seemed to cloud. A great feminist I know was reported to have admitted to feeling like her life was a waste. I ask a friend “how are you” and the description of the state of the world that comes in response cuts through me. And I can’t seem to find any rest. 

Maybe this just isn’t the time to rest. Maybe this is the time to get down to DC, or further south where women’s rights over their bodies are already under serious attack or go out into the streets to make some noise.  

Or maybe it’s a good moment to imagine how difficult it is for people with real threats to their freedom, those who live with ongoing oppression, disenfranchisement and fear to rest. I, after all am a New York City, white-presenting, straight middle-class man. Though the issue is personal to me and my family, as I’ve expressed to you before, the threat to me is theoretical, philosophical, improbable to impact me and my body. And yet I can’t seem to rest this week. I can imagine being a woman, this week and always, and the impact that fact might have on my ability to rest. I can imagine being Trans or gay or gender non-conforming and how that might impact my ability to rest. I can imagine being black, or Muslim or Ukranian or Palestinian or carrying multiple categories of oppression, and how that might impact my ability to rest. The anger, despair, sadness, confusion and fear that oppression creates must impact a person’s relationship with rest.  

I can relate to the black feminist icon Florynce Kennedy’s words: “dying is really the only chance we'll get to rest.” 

And yet, we are commanded to rest. Over and over by penalty of death. Don’t work on Shabbat. Rest. Relax. Enjoy. How might we do that today? 

We might do well to take in Audre Lorde’s words:  

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” 

Shabbat is the gift of obligatory rest. It wrests us from our minds, our frustrations, our madness and rage and commands us to rest. Shabbat, Lorde teaches us, is political warfare. 

That’s what we will be doing this evening, in the painfully timely and deeply exciting Kumah event organized and led by women in the community and dealing in large part with bodily autonomy and the notion of rest. There will be many inspiring women playing a part, including poet Erica Wright, community organizer and chaplain Liz Aeschlimann, midwife Sylvie Blaustein and singer Judi Williams. And we be honored by the presence of the women who lead Black Women’s Blueprint, the organization that inspired the event. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Time To Rise Up

Dear friends,

Today, the day on which Jews around the world commemorate the Holocaust, is the day on which our spring festival, The Kumah Festival opens. We didn't intend to do this, but when the plans aligned in this way we felt it was a better plan than we could have come up with ourselves. What does one do with the act of remembering such a darker than dark time? What does one do with the broken shards of their history? With the broken pieces of her soul? Our answer this year is to to come together in an art studio to take in the work of a Jewish artist whose main material is the most fragile of all, glass.

In Talmudic fashion, artist Ghiora Aharoni views shattering as the beginning of creation. The Brachot tractate tells us what it means when something breaks in a dream. 

"One who sees eggs in a dream, it is a sign that his request is pending. If one saw that the eggs broke, it is a sign that his request has already been granted, as that which was hidden inside the shell was revealed. The same is true of nuts, cucumbers, glass vessels, and anything similarly fragile that broke in his dream, it is a sign that his request was granted."

Breaking, the rabbis imply, is the release of energy of good things to come, like the breaking of the glass at a wedding. 

That doesn't mean we let go of the brokenness. Like the Hebrews carried the broken tablets around the desert, Ghiora includes any shards of glass that broke during the artistic process in the final sculpture in what he calls a Geniza, or a sacred trash container (which is also, of course made of glass). But that Geniza is not necessarily painful, but an increaser of joy. One of his sculptures, which we will see this evening, is inscribed Genizat Sasson, A Geniza of Joy. Jewish history, even Jewish life as a whole might be boiled down to the ability to contain these two opposites, through the act of creativity in the shadow of death.

The following event in the Jewish calendar can be seen as a type of mirror image of this idea. Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day is, on the face of it a happy day. It wants to be about life and strength. But in the 21st century it can't do that without carrying deep and troubling complexities. We know that with all the incredible things happening there,1948 was the beginning of a continuing catastrophe for the Palestinian people, that Judaism and nationalism fused there since in sometimes scary ways, that Israelis live with fear, and that the Jewish State is a battleground for what being Jewish stands for. 

One of the now classic films about the Israeli occupation, which many consider to be the core of the problem there is Ra'anan Alexandrovitch's The Law in These Parts. Through interviews with supreme court justices, politicians and military leaders, the film is an in depth examination of the legal system in the Occupied Territories. Our Kumah event to mark Yom Ha'atzmaut will be a discussion around this film with a person who embodies the triangle of faith-art-politics that the festival is devoted to. Professor David Kretzmer is a religious Jew, whose faith drove him to be a founding member of several of the most important human rights organizations in Israel, including the Centre for Human Rights, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and B'Tselem. His writing played a crucial part in the creation of the movie, and led to some of the questions posed to the justices in the film. Professor Kretzmer teaches a class on the film every year at Hebrew University. Sign up HERE to get the link to watch the movie before Sunday, and then to join our conversation via Zoom.

Two days later The New Shul is proud to join with dozens of Arab, Jewish and international organizations as sponsors of the Joint Israeli Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony. 

The Joint Memorial Ceremony is the largest Israeli-Palestinian peace event in history. Last year 300,000 people participated in the live broadcast event and over one million people streamed it afterwards. It has become a focal point for the entire peace community. Nearly every peace-building NGO in the region participates in some way, and we are proud to be sponsors of the Ceremony this year! It has a profound impact on everyone involved in or witnessing the event.

The Joint Ceremony sets the foundation for widespread cultural change by shifting public opinion on a mass scale. Joining together to mourn each other’s pain challenges the status quo, setting the foundation to build a new reality based on mutual respect, dignity and equality.

Kumah means Rise Up, and that is what we believe these events will help us do. I hope you all can join us in these glass-breaking events. It's time to release the spring's energy of healing, newness and hope.

For more information and to register go HERE.
And to register for the Joint Ceremony go HERE.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha