The Flotilla: Actual aid to Gaza or reinforcing mistaken impressions?

Here's a great video that puts the flotilla hubbub in perspective, courtesy of the IDF:

Thursday Kavvanah, 6/30/2011 - Tefillin: Where the Physical Meets the Spiritual

In the daily binding of tefillin, the physical and the metaphorical align. We recite the in the first paragraph of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:8):

וּקְשַׁרְתָּם לְאוֹת, עַל-יָדֶךָ; וְהָיוּ לְטֹטָפֹת, בֵּין עֵינֶיךָ
Uqshartam le-ot al yadekha, vehayu letotafot bein einekha
Bind them as a sign on your arm, and wear them as frontlets between your eyes

Never mind that we don't know what "totafot" (here translated as "frontlets") are. Perhaps the words of the Torah are to be taken literally, as an instruction to actually attach these words to our arms and foreheads. Or perhaps the image simply suggests the devotion of mind and hand, i.e. thought and deed.

Regardless, the tefillin that we wear in the morning remain with you all day, long after they are physically removed. This sign of devotion to the Torah begins with the concrete and continues metaphorically all day, a unity of the spiritual and physical.

Tuesday Kavvanah, 6/28/11 - Completing God's Vision

In Psalm 145, usually known by its introductory moniker, Ashrei, we find a familiar line that is as much praise of God as it ia a challenge to humanity. It's the line that begins with the letter peh (this psalm is an aleph-betical acrostic):

פּוֹתֵחַ אֶת-יָדֶךָ; וּמַשְׂבִּיעַ לְכָל-חַי רָצוֹן.
Poteah et yadekha, umasbi'a lekhol hai ratzon.
You open Your hand, and satisfy the needs of every living thing. (Psalm 145:16)

Like many tefillot, this line should be understood as more of an idealized vision of what could be, rather than reflecting reality. As we all know, not everybody gets what they need in this world, food or otherwise. There are hungry, needy people among both the faithful and the non-believers.

Some have the custom when reciting this line of opening their hands, palms facing upwards, to physically illustrate this tefillah. Or perhaps it's a way of indicating our part of the vision, as if to say, my hands are open; please fill me and all the rest of humanity to satisfaction.

Regardless, the reality on the ground is that this vision is incomplete - God cannot fulfill the expressed desire alone; we must partner with God to make it happen.

Live from Tel Aviv Beach

There is really no time that I feel as overwhelmingly happy as when I land at Ben Gurion Airport. I'm not a clapper - the spontaneous applause that always breaks out when the plane touches down does not draw me in. But walking with my suitcase from baggage pickup out into the arrival hall is always a big thrill. A short time later, armed with my first kafeh hafukh (the distinctly Israeli cousin of cappucino) and a rented Daihatsu, I saunter forth onto the highway with rinnah (joyous song) in my heart and Reshet Gimmel (the only radio station that plays exclusively Hebrew-language music) on the stereo.

The beach is, of course, gorgeous at night. Looking out over the water, I see slowly=moving lights in the distance - Jewish guardians of this corner of the Mediterranean perhaps, or maybe the merchant marine hauling bananas to European markets. Mellow Israeli music floats out from the bar, and as I nurse a half-liter (of Stella Artois, unfortunately; the only Goldstar in sight is the label on the stein), I consider and reconsider the wonder that is the Jewish state.

I belong here; these are my people. I am reminded of the sentiment in Joel Engel's well-known art song, "Shenei Mikhtavim" (Two Letters), featuring the lyrics of Avigdor Hameiri:

לא אזוז מפה לעד!
Lo azuz mipo la-ad!
I will not move from here forever!

Of course, I'm returning to galut (the Diaspora) on Thursday night. But the yearning of 2000 years remains with me always. These are my people; I belong here.

Turning off for Shabbat

Jennifer Bleyer, freelance journalist and founder / former editor of Heeb Magazine, writes in the current issue of Tablet about powering down for Shabbat, and how her and devoutly secular husband learned to love the holiness of the seventh day.

Her tale echos the experience that I spoke about this past Yom Kippur, referring to Judith Shulevitz's book, The Sabbath World, and The Sabbath Manifesto as well. Enjoy!

Shavua tov.

Thursday Kavvanah, 6/16/2011 - Just Say Yes!

Parashat Shelah Lekha, which we are reading this week, features the tale of the twelve "spies" sent by Moses to check out the land of Israel while the Israelites are still wandering in the desert.

Ten of the twelve return with a bad report: the inhabitants of the land are fierce giants, and they would surely overwhelm the Israelites. Two of them, Joshua and Caleb, are optimists who declare that the Israelites should march into the land and take it. The storyline of the Tanakh (Hebrew bible) goes with the optimists; Joshua himself leads the people into the land.

No matter how bleak the future may look, no matter how many declare a particular task impossible, there is always a chance that the glass may be at least half full. It is always a good idea to listen to life's naysayers, just so that you might have the opportunity to prove them wrong. Say yes!

Wednesday Kavvanah, 6/15/2011 - Morning Redemption

I have never been a morning person, but I must admit that on most days I am grateful to be awake.

Every morning we recite Shirat HaYam, the song that the Israelites sang upon reaching the other side of the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 15:1):

אָשִׁירָה לַיהוָה כִּי-גָאֹה גָּאָה, סוּס וְרֹכְבוֹ רָמָה בַיָּם.
Ashira ladonai ki ga-oh ga-ah, sus verokhevo ramah vayam.
I will sing to God, for He has triumphed gloriously; the horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea.

The point is one of gratitude for redemption; every morning we acknowledge the story of the parting of the sea, as if we have just crossed it ourselves. And to our ancestors, making it through the night was not unlike crossing the sea; redemption comes every morning.

There are those of us today who might see redemption as surviving the day rather than the night, so one might just as easily recite Shirat HaYam in the evening. Which would you prefer?

Tuesday Kavvanah, 6/14/2011 - The Goals of Tefillah

What are the goals of tefillah / prayer? Why do we set aside time to recite ancient Hebrew liturgical formulas?

Here are some possible answers:

- to connect with oneself
- to connect with the others around us
- to identify with fellow Jews, our history and tradition
- to be comforted in the context of a loss
- to fulfill our obligation to daily prayer

For me, the goal is connection, and I find that I cannot do this properly if I do not set aside special time for it; 40 minutes in the morning pays off over the rest of the day.

But your answer is within you.

Beha'alotekha 5771 - Finding a New Narrative For Peace in the Middle East

When I was living in Israel in 1999, pursuing my own version of the Zionist dream, I spent a couple of weeks as a volunteer at a kibbutz, namely Qevutzat Kinneret. I worked several different jobs there: bagging and harvesting bananas, working the dishwasher with a Russian immigrant named Sasha who could barely speak Hebrew, much less English, and beekeeping. That's right, I spent two days working with the beekeeper, harvesting honey.

The beekeeper’s name was Noga Ben-Tziyyon, and her family was among the founding members of the kibbutz. Noga had been taking care of the beehives for many years, and she was fearless. We were all wrapped up in protective gear, completely sealed off, but Noga would occasionally take off her gloves and reach into an open hive to see if she could locate the queen. She told me that she was frequently stung, and she did not really notice. Sometimes, however, there were scorpions hiding in the hives. “Once,” she said, “I was stung by a scorpion. And that hurt.”

Anyway, we chatted quite a bit in Hebrew while we were driving around from hive to hive. She told me that her parents had immigrated from Russia to Palestine in the 1920s. “And do you know why they came?” she asked me. I did not. “Biglal ha-tziyyonut.” Because of Zionism, she said, soft and proud.

What she was saying was that her family did not come here because they were fleeing pogroms, Nazis, oppressive Arab regimes, poverty, or anything else. They came to fulfill an ideological dream, the dream that Theodor Herzl urged us to realize: Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is not a dream. They were pioneers who built the Jewish homeland, by coming to work the land.

This tale might have once been called a story. Nowadays, you might label it a “narrative.” This is a word that pops up a lot lately regarding Israel, in the context of the conflicting narratives of Israel and the Palestinians. We’ll come back to that.

The narrative that Noga Ben-Tziyyon shared with the ½ million Jews who were in Israel prior to World War II is slightly different from Herzl’s. As a journalist covering the Dreyfus affair, Herzl crafted a vision of political Zionism which sought a Jewish homeland that would solve the problem of anti-Semitism.

Noga’s narrative, however, was that of Ahad Ha’am, who sought to solve a different problem of European Jewry, that of assimilation. Ahad Ha’am’s vision was to forge a new culture in Palestine, one that focused on national Jewish consciousness, the Hebrew language, and Jewish creativity and would therefore serve as a merkaz ruhani, a spiritual center of world Jewry.

The experience of Noga's generation of olim (immigrants to Israel) was quite different from that of my father-in-law, Ervin Hoenig. Ervin survived Auschwitz and arrived in Israel during the War of Independence, where he was handed a gun and sent off to fight with the Palmach. His experience in Israel was that those who had made aliyah before the Holocaust often looked down their noses at the generation of survivors, and asked them, “What’s wrong with you? Why didn't you fight back? Why did you go like lambs to the slaughter?”

And yet, that has become the dominant narrative about the building the State of Israel: that the Jewish State rose from the ashes of Auschwitz. People have told me about how back in the day in Israel, you could get on a public bus and see numbers tattooed on many arms.

Yes, it is true that many Shoah survivors came to Israel after the war. But just as many came from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Libya, and so forth; many of those Jews were refugees who were forced out of their countries. This is yet a third Israeli narrative.

Nonetheless, we reinforce the Sho'ah-based narrative over and over, and I do not think that this is ideal; the rebuilding of Israel in our time was already well in progress before World War II. While the Sho'ah certainly contributed to the establishment of the State of Israel, and in particular the UN vote on the partition plan of 1947, the wheels of statehood were in motion far before this. It is all too easy to forget this part of the story.

For example, a few weeks ago, five of our graduating seniors returned from the March of the Living. This is, in fact, a wonderful annual program that has been taking place since 1988. Right after Pesah, nearly 10,000 high school juniors and seniors spent one week in Poland (including Yom Hasho'ah / Holocaust Remembrance Day) and one week in Israel (including Yom Ha-atzma'ut / Israel’s Independence Day). The young adults who participated spoke at the Youth House two weeks ago about their strengthened Jewish identity and their deep connection with Israel. Any program that does this so successfully is tremendously valuable.

But the overarching theme of March of the Living is that the destruction of European Jewry led to the establishment of the State of Israel, when the reality is much more complex. No teen program spends a week in Morocco or Iraq or even Odessa and then a week in Israel.

The difference between a story and a narrative is that narratives usually come with agendas, and they can be dangerous. One narrative usually excludes another.

When President Obama addressed the Muslim world at Cairo University two years ago, what did he invoke as the primary Jewish claim to the land of Israel?

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust... Six million Jews were killed -- more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

Although I credit Mr. Obama for asking the Arab world to lay off the Holocaust denial and the spreading of malicious lies about Jews, he did the State of Israel a disservice by pointing only to the history of anti-Semitism and not to the centuries of attachment to our ancestral homeland, the millennia of longing, Hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim, the hope of 2000 years. We have been yearning to return to Israel since the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Beit HaMiqdash, the Temple in Jerusalem.

Nowadays, we are hearing more about the Palestinian narrative. For example, here’s Mr. Obama again in Cairo, immediately after he invoked the Shoah:

“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”

You might have heard about Palestinian commemorations of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) that they have publicized as the flip-side of Yom Ha-Atzma'ut, Israel's Independence Day. I had not heard of it before 7 or 8 years ago. And a new term entered the fray this week, one that I had never heard before this year: Naksa, or “setback,” which is now being used to describe the Arab take on the Six-Day War. June 5, 1967 was the day of the setback.

Last Sunday, June 5th, the same day that 200 of us from Temple Israel were proudly marching along Fifth Avenue in celebration of Israel, the Syrian government allowed hundreds of protesters to try to breach the Israeli border in the Golan. The IDF warned them in Arabic not to do so, then shot in the air, then shot at their feet when they continued to advance. Now, we all know this to be a cynical attempt by the Assad government to distract from the fact that they are killing their own people who are engaged in active rebellion. Regardless, this was how they commemorated the Naksa, the setback. The number of casualties is disputed, of course; also disputed is whether or not protesters were armed. Nonetheless, people died, and Israel looks like the bad guy once again.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are engaged in a war of narratives, a verbal war which has real casualties on both sides.

Here is the problem: if we are going to get anywhere in resolving the ongoing conflict within and around Israel, we must change the narrative. Because as it stands now, we are not winning this war of words.

The overarching message of the Arab Spring is this: that the status quo of the 20th century has changed. What has enabled the Tunisian people, the Egyptian people, and the Yemeni people to throw off the yokes of their tyrannical rulers? The prevailing narrative has changed. The word on the street no longer reflected the words of the ruling parties.

And there is now a sense of urgency. The Palestinian unity government has pledged to unilaterally declare statehood through a UN resolution in September. Ladies and gentlemen, they have the votes in the UN. And if it comes to that, it will only further isolate Israel.

We need to change the narrative. Theirs and ours. The time has come. And better to be pro-active, like Ahad Ha’am’s response to assimilation, then re-active, like Herzl’s response to anti-Semitism.

We read today in Parashat Beha’alotekha the line that we sing every time we take the Torah out (Numbers 10:35):

וַיְהִי בִּנְסֹעַ הָאָרֹן, וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה: קוּמָה יְהוָה, וְיָפֻצוּ אֹיְבֶיךָ
Vayhi binsoa’ ha-aron, vayomer Moshe:
Qumah Adonai, veyafutzu oyevekha

When the ark traveled, Moses would say,
“Rise up, God, and let Your enemies be scattered.”

The ancient rabbis asked, “who are God’s enemies?” Midrash Sifre tells us that those who hate Israel, who hate the Jews, are the enemies of God. And we know that there are people who hate us, who want to kill us.

But there is more to the story. The enemies of God and Israel, in my mind, are the rejectionists on both sides; they reject peace because they are committed to their own narratives. Hamas and their supporters deny the right of Israel to exist, and therefore reject peace. Those within Israel and without who claim that we have no partners for peace are also rejectionists. One need only consider the Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Initiative, put forward in 2002 and 2009, to see that there are potential partners for peace.

Now is the time for those in power to show true leadership; we need a new narrative, one that unifies. This will not be easy, as there are both bees and scorpions in these hives.

Noga Ben-Tziyyon’s parents did not immigrate to Israel to displace anybody, or at the behest of the colonial powers. They came because Israel is the home of the Jews, and the merkaz ruhani, the spiritual center of world Jewry. Let’s not forget that story. And we have the power to guarantee it forever. All we have to do is change the narrative, try to ignore the bee stings, and scatter the scorpions.

Shabbat shalom.

And thanks to Rabbi Kate Palley for the tamtzit.

Shavuot 5771 - Plugged In to the Torah

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Wednesday morning, June 8, 2011.)

Have you been on the New York City subway lately? You might have noticed that a hefty percentage of your fellow travelers have earphones tucked into their ears. What they are listening to one can only guess. Classical music? Classic rock? Hip hop? Reggae? Or maybe NPR podcasts (my personal favorite)? Regardless of what we listen to, many of us are plugged in.

Two weeks ago Cantor Frieder and I were at the annual Cantors Assembly convention in Toronto, and one of the featured speakers was Dr. Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. (For those of you who do not know, JTS is the primary teaching institution of the Conservative movement, and includes the rabbinical school where Rabbi Stecker and I were both ordained, and the cantorial school where I was invested as cantor and where our own hazzan teaches, and taught me as well.)

Speaking to a room full of hazzanim, Dr. Eisen spoke about the importance of making tefillot / words of prayer meaningful to our congregations. He suggested the following image, which I really love: When we engage in tefillah, when we pray, we should all be wearing stereo headphones. In one ear, we would hear the sounds of tefillah: the liturgy, the nusah, the congregational melodies. In the other ear, we would hear a running commentary: the meanings, structure, themes, history, development, choreography, everything that goes into making a prayerful experience valuable and attainable.

Of course, Dr. Eisen did not mean this literally. He did not suggest investing in the electronic infrastructure such that we can all be plugged-in during services. On the contrary: his idea is to equip everybody with the knowledge that will enable them to fully participate as if they were wearing these theoretical headphones. That is, to teach tefillah. To teach the context, the understanding, and not just the words and the melodies. To arm each of us in the pews with the tools to gather spiritual meaning from this central act that we do together as a Jewish community.

Let’s face it: tefillah is not easy. And don’t think it’s just us: there’s a very telling quote in the Talmud Yerushalmi, when four rabbis (R. Hiyya, R. Bun bar Hiyya, Shemuel, and R. Matnaya) collectively lament their inability to concentrate during tefillot. One admits that during his whole life, he only found true kavvanah / intent once. Another says that he counts chicks while praying (and he meant baby chickens, not attractive members of the opposite sex). Another says he counts layers of stones. The last one admits that he gives credit to his head, which knows when to bow by itself.

Point is, these ancient rabbis, who were immersed in learning, had difficulty focusing. All the more so for us, whose heads are filled with far more distractions than were found in the ancient world.

As Dr. Eisen reminded us, “our movement is defined primarily by synagogues; synagogues are defined primarily by worship services.” As such, it should be our goal as a community to make the tefillah / prayer experience meaningful. Otherwise, our synagogues will be the spiritually empty shells that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel mourned in an oft-quoted address to Conservative rabbis in 1953:

“The fire has gone out of our worship. It is cold, stiff, and dead... Yes, the edifices are growing. Yet, worship is decaying. Has the temple become the graveyard where prayer is buried?”

And then Heschel takes to task the rabbis and cantors of the American synagogue:

“There are many who labor in the vineyard of oratory; but who knows how to pray, or how to inspire others to pray. There are many who can execute and display magnificent fireworks; but who knows how to kindle a spark in the darkness of a soul?”

Dr. Eisen thinks that Heschel was too harsh; that the reality lies somewhere between services that are deeply meaningful and moving and Rabbi Heschel’s bleak emptiness of tefillah by proxy in stunning buildings led by brilliant clergy.

Nonetheless, the critique is valid. Tefillah is hard. And, let’s face it, are we indeed equipped with the knowledge streaming from those imaginary headphones? Are we tuned in to what’s going on on the page, in our hearts, in our minds, and on the bimah?

The giving and receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai is depicted as a having been something like a wedding. God asks the people if they will accept the mitzvot / commandments, and the Israelites respond with, “Na’aseh venishma,” we will do and we will listen. What better way is there to commemorate this holiday by re-dedicating ourselves to the pursuit of meaningful prayer, to the pursuit of tapping into our spirituality.

We here at Temple Israel are prepared to offer you some help and guidance with that. We can build those figurative headphones. ($6 Million Man reference: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology...”) We already have opportunities in place, like the Havurah tefillah discussion that happens every 2nd and 4th Shabbat of each month, one-half hour before the Havurah service in the Multi-Purpose room. My discussion-based service, The Whys and Wherefores of Shabbat Morning Tefillot, met this past Shabbat, and will be resuming again in the fall; this is an opportunity to dig further into the words that we recite. As those who attended this service found, every word in tefillah contains multiple layers of meaning; every sentence has depth and breadth.

Dr. Eisen further suggested that every service include a devar tefillah, a brief note about meaning or connection that we can find in tefillah. Rabbi Stecker and I now regularly give kavvanot at weekday morning minyanim; you can read mine on my blog, where I post new ones usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes Wednesdays.

But I actually did not want to limit my discussion today to tefillah. Actually, the story is much greater than that.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, when I suggested in this space the Five Pillars of Judaism, ours is a complicated tradition. It’s not easy to learn. Even those who are very serious, dedicated and learned continue to learn throughout their lives. That’s how much material there is. As I often point out to families that attend the Bar/Bat Mitzvah Family Workshop that I run a couple of times a year, the Jewish bookshelf contains many, many volumes of collected knowledge spanning at least 3000 years. In rabbinical school, I learned the equivalent of just a few of them. I continue to learn, and we all should do so as well.

The greater message that Dr. Eisen mentioned in Toronto was the following: that we need to transform our congregations from places where people come to drop off their kids for Hebrew school or celebrate semahot or listen to a High Holiday sermon, to communities where we all strive after the Torah, where we cling to its words, where we dig deeper into the Jewish bookshelf to uncover the treasures found within.

Temple Israel, after all, is not a “temple.” It is a beit kenesset, a gathering place. The Greek word, “synagogue,” means exactly that. Yes, we gather to pray here. But more often, we gather to learn. And we need to learn more.

And even with all this learning, you will undoubtedly still find kavannah / intention elusive, like the four Palestinian rabbis. But you will also derive new comfort and power in exploring and parsing Jewish text with friends old and new. And it will be gratifying just to be “in the know,” to be able to answer questions about your own religion and heritage.

That is, in fact, the message of Shavuot. Let’s not just wear the headphones during tefillot, but all the time.

Maybe some of you saw the article in the New York Times magazine a few weeks ago entitled, “Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?” The article graphed statistics that compared level of education and income against religion. And, no big surprise here, Jews came out on top; only the Hindus have more advanced degrees, but the Jews make more money, on average.

Frankly, the article made me a wee bit uncomfortable; in the wake of our fellow tribesmen, high-profile thief Bernie Madoff and the banker and philanderer Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Jews really do not need any more publicity that invokes traditional stereotypes. But the author did say the following, which I think is quite telling: “Some of the income differences probably stem from culture. Some faiths place great importance on formal education.”

Judaism, Jewish life, and Jewish culture have always valued learning. We have always been plugged into education. In the wake of the Enlightenment, those of us who opened up to secular studies focused some of that traditional inclination to learn in areas other than the Torah.

It is time, my friends, for the pendulum to swing back.

I will conclude with a few words from Pirqei Avot, the tractate of the Mishnah which is simply saturated with the rabbinic imperative to learn the words of Jewish tradition (Avot 2:15):

רבי יוסי אומר:... התקן עצמך ללמוד תורה, שאינה ירושה לך

Rabbi Yose taught: ...
Perfect yourself in the study of Torah -
It will not come to you by inheritance.

That is, don’t wait for the Torah to come to you, just because it is our yerushah, our inheritance. Get plugged in, now.

We commemorate today the giving of the Torah. And not just the Torah, but the entirety of Jewish learning, which includes that most central of Jewish activities, tefillah. Tefillah is learning; learning is tefillah. And that’s just the beginning.

Let’s turn Temple Israel into a learning community. That is our heritage, and it is also our future.

Tuesday Kavvanah, 6/7/2011 - Torah is still coming from Mt. Sinai

On this Erev Shavuot, as we prepare to commemorate the receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, it behooves us to consider our relationship with the body of knowledge that we refer to as "Torah." As modern, thinking people, equipped with critical studies and a healthy skepticism, our connection to the Torah is clearly different from what it might have been for our ancestors. Some of the questions we might think about today are:

What does the Torah mean to us today?
Is it our national story, the tale of the people of Israel?
Is it a set of laws that define our interactions with others?
Is it a guideline for our understanding of God?

Meanwhile, consider the following from Pirqei Avot (6:2):

אמר רבי יהושע בן לוי
בכל יום ויום בת קול יוצאת מהר חורב ומכרזת ואומרת
אוי להם לבריות מעלבונה של תורה

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi taught:
Every day a heavenly voice is heard from Mt. Horeb [i.e. Sinai] proclaiming:
"Woe to those creatures who have contempt for Torah."

What is striking about this is not the dire statement about those who reject the Torah, but that the voice continues to echo from Mt. Sinai. The words of Torah are still filtering down to us; all we have to do is listen.

Thursday Kavvanah, 6/2/2011 - Stereophonic tefillot

Tuesday's kavvanah pointed to the obligation to take action; echoing Dr. Arnold Eisen's words to the Cantors Assembly, being Jewish means to do something, and that is our role in this world.

But all the moreso, to be Jewish means to learn. Dr. Eisen created a wonderful image for the roomful of cantors about the ideal tefillah (prayer) situation: stereo headphones. That is, in one ear, the participant in a service should hear the prayers themselves, the ancient liturgy, the Hebrew formulas and melodies that constitute tefillah. In the other ear, s/he would hear the history, the context, the development, the structure, and all the things that make tefillot leap off the page and into reality.

Simply reciting the words is not enough; we have to be engaged with them as well. Dr. Eisen's image is not a literal one. His point is, rather, that those who come to pray need to be properly equipped, or the words are just words, the melody is just singing. And that's not tefillah.

We need to be committed to davening in stereo.

Wednesday Kavvanah, 6/1/11 - O Jerusalem, Undivided

On this Yom Yerushalayim / Jerusalem Day, I offer more of a wish than a kavvanah:

I belong to the seemingly ever-shrinking pool of diaspora Zionists who are committed to the peace process, or what's left of it. I remain unfazed by the recent Obama/Netanyahu dustup, and still committed to the idea of a two-state solution.

However, I could never countenance a re-divided Jerusalem. I hope that the powers that be will work hard to find a creative solution that will allow Jerusalem to remain intact and yet accessible to all.