Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Rosh Hashanah Torah and Haftorah thoughts


First day Torah reading:
Three episodes related in this torah portion.  1. God remembers שרה and יצחק is born.  2. שרה convinces אברהם to banish הגר and ישמאל, subsequently God sees the suffering of ישמאל and responds to הגר’s prayer to save ישמאל.  3. אברהם and אבימלך make a deal over disputed land and then are able to live in peace together. 
What is the connection in today’s torah reading which contains these three seemingly separate stories to ראש השנה? 
The torah tells us to follow in God’s ways, and that our actions should emulate God at all times.  Just as God has compassion on people so should we, and just as God is forgiving, so should we be.  Today’s torah portion is teaching us an expansive version of forgiveness which relates to how we treat all people. 
It begins with the famous ה' פקד את שרה, God remembered Sarah.  On ראש השנה we want God to remember us and answer our prayers just like he did for שרה.  This is the simplest form of forgiveness, the righteous person who hasn’t necessarily done anything wrong.
In the next story we see ישמאל as a child dying of thirst.  And God hears his mother’s call and saves them.  The midrash says that the angels said to God, how can you save this child, his descendants will be enemies of your children Israel someday, and God’s answer is as the verse says, that God judges people, באשר הוא שם, in the way he is in the moment.  We too should learn how to be forgiving and expansive in our relationships even when we are afraid for the future, to act Godly is to always give someone the benefit of the doubt. 
It’s one thing to say that God can judge people the way they are today, but can we act the same way, don’t we need to protect ourselves?
The last story is an example of this type of behavior by אברהם.  אבימלך or someone connected to him had done wrong to אברהם and buried the wells that אברהם had dug, nevertheless, אברהם was willing to reconcile with him and make a new deal for the future.  And the last verse of today’s torah reading says that אברהם dwelled in the land of the philistines for many years.  He was able to live in peace, even though common sense might have told him not to trust אבימלך.
Human nature will tell us to protect ourselves at all costs, to only trust those that are close to us, and to not associate with those who have hurt us in the past or might hurt us in the future.  Today’s torah reading is giving us an example of radically different way to live.  Rather than narrowing the potential relationships for us to have, acting Godly is to always seek new ways to associate with strangers and pursue forgiveness as a way of life, even to those who have wronged us in the past.
Not that we all need to always act in ways that can possibly come back to hurt us, but this torah reading is such a powerful challenge for us to consider on a day when we are begging God to forgive us and continue his relationship with us in the coming year.

Haftorah:
In the haftorah portion read today is the story about how Hannah, a barren woman, prayed for God to give her a child.  She longed to be a mother with all of her heart and soul for so long, and had spent so many years barren, a woman of unanswered prayers.  After her husband told her that he had given up hope of their prayers being answered her longing reached new heights.  She went to the temple and there, with all of her heart and soul issued a prayer which has become the paradigm of all jewish prayers.  She was the first person to actually say the prayers of her heart, to move her lips.  Her fervor was so intense that the high priest almost threw her out thinking that she was drunk.  Eventually God did hear her prayers, she was given a son and that son was Samuel, one of the greatest of prophets in Jewish history.
I think we read this haftorah today, on a day dedicated to prayer, not to try to inspire us to pray like Hannah so that God will answer our prayers, but to give us something to grasp on to.  Hannah was one of the most righteous women of all time, and the son born to her as a result of her prayer became one of the greatest leaders the Jewish people would ever know.  It’s not realistic for us to pray just like her.  But we should at least yearn to pray like her.  On Rosh Hashanah, we should feel a longing to be able to pray like Hannah.  Hopefully, that longing will inspire us to reach the heights of prayer that each of us is capable of. 


Second day Torah reading:
This morning’s torah reading is one of the most famous portions of the entire torah.  This portion is called “עקידת יצחק,” the binding of Isaac.  The story begins with a statement in the Torah that God wanted to test Abraham again, so he tells Abraham to take his beloved son Yitzchak to a mountain and prepare him for a ritual slaughter.  Abraham of course does this, and only at the point where he had his knife in hand and was about to follow through does an angel command Abraham to not actually follow through with the deed. 
One element of this story that is focused on in so much of western literature is Abraham’s commitment to God that he was even willing to kill his son when commanded to do so. 
There is a lot less attention payed to Isaac in this story.  Yet, Isaac’s identity and life are defined by this moment.  Later in Genesis, when Isaac’s son Jacob is referring to the God of his father he doesn’t use the word God, instead he refers to the Fear of Isaac, פחד יצחק.  There is no question that this episode would have caused anyone, Isaac included, significant psychological trauma.  And yet, Isaac does not waver in his dedication to God.  One of Isaac’s main contributions is that he re-dug the wells his father Abraham had dug, which is understood by our tradition to mean that Abraham had started the work of spreading monotheistic spirituality and Isaac followed in his footsteps exactly. 
Isaac’s fear was something he took with him and defined his religious perspective, but it didn’t cause in him anger towards God or his father, he turned it into a great spiritual strength. 
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we are realizing that no matter how much we pray, no matter how sincere and heartfelt our requests to God are, we may still unfortunately (חס ושלום) experience misfortune in the coming year.  Isaac is a model of the ultimate acceptance of what happens to us in life.  Nothing is too much for us to handle, we may not have control over what happens to us, but this story is reminding us that we have control over how we respond.

Haftorah:
To me the Haftorah of the second day is a comforting one.  The haftorah describes God’s love for us as an eternal love.  An unconditional love, we should realize that this day is not only about fear and forgiveness.  But it is about the most intimate of relationships.  The relationship between the Jewish people and God in our tradition is often compared to that between and husband and wife.  Rosh Hashanah is when we are closest to God and God is closest to us.  The haftorah is like the and they lived happily ever after part of a fairy tale.  It talks about the rebuilding of the nation, celebration for the renewal of a people, and an ultimate redemption.
One of the most powerful lines from the haftorah is בבכי יבאו ובתחנונים אובילם, with weeping they will come and through supplications I will bring them.  The Rav in an essay on the high holidays says about this line, “the ultimate redemption of Israel is the return of Israel to God, and this return will be accompanied by weeping.  When the Jews will come to the recognition that they are internally and eternally bound to their creator, that under no conditions can they separate, only then will the complete redemption take place. 
This is what our experience and celebration on Rosh Hashanah, we weep in prayer, but this prayer brings us close to God.  We celebrate the creation of the world on Rosh Hashanah and our desire to be close to God in hopes that we and the whole world will find redemption this year.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Parshat Netzavim-Vayelech


The book, The Perfect Mile, by Neil Bascomb tells the story of Roger Bannister, three athletes who committed themselves to breaking the four-minute mile.  Bascomb writes:

All three runners endured thousands of hours of training to shape their bodies and minds. They ran more miles in a year than many of us walk in a lifetime. They spent a large part of their youth struggling for breath. They trained week after week to the point of collapse, all to shave off a second, maybe two, during a mile race—the time it takes to snap one's fingers and register the sound. They understood that life was somehow different for them. If they weren't training or racing or gathering the will required for these efforts, they were trying not to think about training or racing at all.
Each of them describes the attempt to push oneself beyond the ordinary, to make changes in their lifestyles in order to better themselves and in doing so they felt that they had achieved something unique and extraordinarily satisfying.
What does it mean to be human?  How are human beings different than all other living things?  When asked this question, I think that many of us would answer, “Free will.”  It’s the fact that Human beings have the ability to exercise choice.  We do not make important life decisions based on instinct, we have the ability to use critical thinking, to weigh evidence, and gather data before making a decision. But let me ask you something?  How many times have you done something that you knew you shouldn’t do, but you just couldn’t help it?  Or how many times have you failed to do something that you really should have done?  Where is our free will in these situations? 
Furthermore, research has shown that both hereditary and environmental factors will not just influence a person’s likelihood to act in a certain way, but they can actually predict how an individual will act in a given situation.  What about choice?This week’s Parsha has an important lesson with regard to free will.  At the end of Parshat Nitzavim 30:19, we have the words: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse, choose life!” ובחרת בחיים! 
When we think about it, why do we need to be told to choose life and blessing?  The choice seems pretty obvious, there doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all.   Who in their right mind would choose death over life or curse over blessing.  We shouldn’t need to be told to choose life. Nevertheless, the torah tells us to choose life.  I believe the Torah tells us this for a reason.   Because when it comes to expressing our free will, it needs to be an active and conscious process.  Where we come from, our personal history and experiences no doubt have an impact on how we will react in any given situation, but it cannot dictate the way that we will act.  Our actions need not be predetermined.  We all have the ability to change!
As we go into Rosh Hashanah, we should realize that this is exactly what teshuva is really about.  It’s about being able to make changes in our lives.  The word teshuva literally means to return.  Return involves a certain degree of change.  When we make difficult changes, we are acting with free will.  We are choosing how to live, and this time of year our choice, just like it says in the Parsha, is to choose life.  So much of what we pray for on Rosh Hashanah is life.  We ask God to inscribe us in the book of life; we add the word חיים [life] to blessings in the amidah between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  When we prepare ourselves for the High Holidays, the Teshuva we are doing is an introspection on what do we want out of our lives in the coming year and how are we going to achieve that. We’re not just praying for a higher quantity of life, we are prayer for a higher quality of life!
Choosing life, while it might be obvious, is not always easy.  Choosing life means becoming aware of the things that we know that we really want to implement in our lives but don’t.  Choosing life means taking a step back from our routine and reevaluating.  
In the recent issue of the Reform Judaism magazine there was an article called, “my frum week.”  The article is about a young woman who is a student at Yale university who decided she was going to try being as frum as she could.  She was going to try living like an Orthodox Jew for a week.  Every day she got up early for minyan, went to minyan in the afternoon for mincha and Ma’ariv, made blessings before and after she ate, she dressed differently, basically she felt like for that week her whole life had changed.  Making the change gave her insight into her own life and Judaism based on her experience of these mitzvoth she hadn’t previously experienced.  I’d like to share with you one of her observations in her own words:
The new level of observance I experienced during frum week also gave me a different way of connecting to God. Previously I believed that some undercurrent of Divinity was in the world around me; to experience it I simply needed to enter the world with open eyes and wait for God’s presence to appear to me. During frum week, each action I took was a forced pause of mindfulness of the Divine, an awareness that my every deed was meant to advance me toward God, regardless of how I was feeling at that moment. 
One of the most important aspects of being an observant Jew is the way in which everything we do has the potential to be a movement towards God.  But this experience doesn’t just happen.  It has to be something that we choose, we need to exert our free will to make changes in our lives that can sometimes seem inconvenient to use before we get used to that change.  But the point of it all is that it connects us to our maker. 
Rosh Hashanah is the time of year when we remind ourselves that we are human, we are not just automatons; we are capable of making changes.  To some extent we are products of our environments and surroundings, but we always have a choice on how we are going to exist in that space. 
                This week is when we really begin the High Holidays.  Tonight we are going to start saying selichot, and we will say them every day until Rosh Hashanah begins.  Because the work that we hope to accomplish on Rosh Hashanah has to start beforehand, meaningful change does not come in an instant.  Let’s make this week our frum week.  Whatever it is that you do, figure out a plan on how you will do something additional this week.  Take the time to consider how this mitzvah will help with the overall mitzvah of teshuvah.  Perhaps it is to say blessings before and/or after you eat coming, maybe it’s to pray more at home or even to come to shul for minyan this week.  Go visit an elderly friend, give food to the homeless, or make a hospital visit. Let us all choose to do something extra this week as an expression of our free will and our desire to choose life.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Parshat Ki Tavo


This week’s Parsha begins with the commandment for the Jewish farmer during the times that the Temple stood to bring his first fruits to the Temple as an offering.   Part of this ritual was the requirement of the person bringing their fruits to recite something called, וידוי מעשר, the Ma’aser confession.  The text of this statement (which is also part of the haggadah liturgy read at the Seder on Passover)begins:

(Lavan) the Aramean wanted to destroy my Father, afterwards he went down to Egypt and became a great, powerful, and populous nation there… (Deuteronomy 26:5)

What I find fascinating about this statement is the way in which the statement begins, with the words, “my father.”  One could argue that it is specifically talking about Jacob, which is why it refers to a singular father.  But the statement continues and tells more of the story of Jewish history, about what happened to the Jews in Egypt, and how God took them out of Egypt, all things that didn’t happen to Jacob himself.  So I’m left with the impression the, “my father,” in this statement is referring to the ancestors of the Jewish people.  

The reason I find this statement to be fascinating is because it is a powerful statement about where we look towards guidance and our relationship in the world.  A father has an incredible potential to make an impression on his child’s perspective on pretty much everything in the world, and the way in which the child will choose to act in the world based on that perspective.  When the Jewish farmer who would recite this statement in a Temple ritual said, “my father,” he was making a statement of the relationship he has with Jewish history and Judaism.  The lesson here is not only for the Jewish farmer during the times that this ritual was observed, it’s for all time.  How many of us seriously look towards Judaism as a guide for how we see everything in the world and how we choose to behave as a result?

Parshat Ki Tavo


This week’s Parsha begins with the commandment for the Jewish farmer during the times that the Temple stood to bring his first fruits to the Temple as an offering.   Part of this ritual was the requirement of the person bringing their fruits to recite something called, וידוי מעשר, the Ma’aser confession.  The text of this statement (which is also part of the haggadah liturgy read at the Seder on Passover)begins:

(Lavan) the Aramean wanted to destroy my Father, afterwards he went down to Egypt and became a great, powerful, and populous nation there… (Deuteronomy 26:5)

What I find fascinating about this statement is the way in which the statement begins, with the words, “my father.”  One could argue that it is specifically talking about Jacob, which is why it refers to a singular father.  But the statement continues and tells more of the story of Jewish history, about what happened to the Jews in Egypt, and how God took them out of Egypt, all things that didn’t happen to Jacob himself.  So I’m left with the impression the, “my father,” in this statement is referring to the ancestors of the Jewish people.  

The reason I find this statement to be fascinating is because it is a powerful statement about where we look towards guidance and our relationship in the world.  A father has an incredible potential to make an impression on his child’s perspective on pretty much everything in the world, and the way in which the child will choose to act in the world based on that perspective.  When the Jewish farmer who would recite this statement in a Temple ritual said, “my father,” he was making a statement of the relationship he has with Jewish history and Judaism.  The lesson here is not only for the Jewish farmer during the times that this ritual was observed, it’s for all time.  How many of us seriously look towards Judaism as a guide for how we see everything in the world and how we choose to behave as a result?