Click and Clack and the Shabbat Project

I was very surprised and saddened a few weeks back to hear that Tom Magliozzi passed away at the age of 77. Tom and his brother Ray were the hosts of the long-running show “Car Talk” on NPR. For the benefit of those who were not familiar with the show, it was ostensibly about car repair - people called in to ask questions about their cars - Tom and Ray were expert mechanics, both alumni of MIT who had opted to work in car repair rather than the corporate world. But inevitably the advice that was dispensed, in their humorous, irreverent, Boston-inflected style was more often about the relationship issues of the callers than about the cars themselves. Car Talk was really only a pretext to get to the really important stuff.

Tom had a warm, inviting, and frankly quite infectious laugh, and for every hour-long episode of Car Talk, the listener would probably have heard Tom laughing for a good 20-plus minutes in aggregate. That laugh just sucked you in. It simply grabbed you by the ears and pulled you into the conversation. Everybody listening to Car Talk, whether or not they had any interest in cars or car repair, felt like they were a part of the conversation.

The ability to welcome callers and listeners into a conversation about people and their relationships using the “bait” of car problems is really a very clever idea. And really, it’s a nice model for how a synagogue should function. Let me illustrate this in the context of a recent community-wide success, the Great Neck Shabbat Project.

Ostensibly, the major goal of the Shabbat Project was to involve as many members of the community into a Shabbat experience. We did that. By providing a full complement of activities, targeted to a wide range of people and interests, by personally inviting everybody to participate through various means, including direct, individual outreach, we welcomed many more people into our midst than would ordinarily participate on an average Shabbat. There were close to 1,000 people (women and men!) at the challah workshop at Leonard’s on Thursday evening. There were 600 people at Shabbat dinner at Temple Israel on Friday night. There were more than 150 at the Camp Shabbat service for 5th and 6th graders and their families on Shabbat morning. There were 200 people for se’udah shelisheet, the third Shabbat meal on Saturday afternoon. And hundreds attended the concert Saturday night, preceded by a havdalah service led by rabbis and laypeople from across the ideological and ethnic spectrum of Jewish Great Neck. And there was even more.

 

But the real accomplishment was not the very impressive numbers. The actual intent of the Shabbat Project, as it is with everything we do at Temple Israel, was to create and nurture relationships among members of the community, and between us and God. And we did that, too - by providing multiple forums for people representing different subsets of our community to rub elbows; by creating an environment in which many were sharing Shabbat together openly, and on a grand scale; by hosting discussions on parenting and being a Jewish college student and our own personal journeys within Judaism.

So while we did not have Tom Magliozzi’s inviting laughter, we did have members of our community reaching out directly to others to raise the Shabbat bar, and although we did not talk about cars, we did talk about Shabbat as a platform to deepen our relationships. The results were tremendous in terms of community building and social capital. Kol hakavod to all who made it happen! (And may Tom’s memory be for a blessing.)

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, November 20, 2014.)

Reaching Higher in West Egg: The Great Gatsby Meets the Nazirite

When I was offered the job of Assistant Rabbi at Temple Israel six short years ago, I figured I should do a little research about Great Neck. So I re-read The Great Gatsby. As you may know, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in Great Neck in the 1920s, and the place that he identifies as “West Egg” is our peninsula, somewhat less fashionable than “East Egg,” or Port Washington.

OK, so you might say that Fitzgerald’s tragic tale of love and loss among wealthy, young gentiles in the Jazz Age might not be a good indicator of what I might experience in the Great Neck of the 21st century. And you would be right. Except that what Jay Gatsby ultimately teaches us about that particular place and time is both placeless and timeless, and still applies to all of us.

You would have had to have been living in a cave to have missed the promotional messages for the new 3-D film version of The Great Gatsby, the fourth time it has been turned into a major motion picture. It cost over $100 million dollars to make, with a sizeable advertising budget to match. I have not yet seen it, but I have read a few reviews. In particular, I read Maureen Dowd’s piece in the Times Sunday Review two weekends ago, in which she reminded us that the book’s title is, in fact, ironic: Gatsby is not “Great.” Rich, yes. Mysterious, yes. Throws fabulous parties, indeed. But not great.  Dowd cites a conversation with Leon Wieseltier, long-time literary editor of The New Republic, in which he takes to task all of the Gatsby films for succumbing to excessive focus on the gloss of Gatsby:

 “... people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald’s title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize.”

I’m not going to spoil the story for those who have not read it, but the essential message conveyed by this great American novel is that money cannot buy you friends, love, or happiness. This new version of the film, according to Dowd, misses the point by emphasizing the big parties, with dramatic choreography and over-the-top, splashy scenes that convey more skin-deep theatrics than emotional depth. (One has to wonder why a tale of socialites in the Roaring Twenties needs to be in 3-D.)

And that seems to be exactly the problem that we face right now as a society: where is the emotional depth? Today, West Egg is decked out in flash: fancy cars, gorgeous homes, the most wonderful devices to emerge from Silicon Valley, superb schools and parks and synagogues. And many, many beautiful people and fantastic parties. But is it possible that something is missing in our lives?

Last weekend, I went with a group of Temple Israel families to Camp Ramah in the Berkshires for the Vav Class Family Retreat. This was a pilot program, the first try at what we are planning to make an annual feature of our Religious School program.

The accommodations are spartan. It rained most of the day on Saturday. The food was, as you might imagine coming from a camp kitchen, tasty but simple. And wherever we were outside, we were surrounded by swarms of gnats. (They did not bite, but they were REALLY annoying.)

But in less than two days’ time, we built relationships. Between tefillot / family-friendly services and meals and free time, between the discussions and games and the minhah service that included a nature walk, the bonding that we shared as we fulfilled the Shabbat potential for menuhah / rest and oneg / enjoyment, we fashioned community from the grass roots. This is what Judaism should do. This is what synagogues are for.

Youth House Director Danny Mishkin, Director of Education Rabbi Amy Roth and I led a series of discussions and activities. On Shabbat afternoon, I was sitting with the parents discussing ways to cultivate gratitude in our children. We read some material from Dr. Wendy Mogel’s book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, and some sources from Pirqei Avot, including the following:

איזה הוא עשיר? השמח בחלקו.

Eizeh hu ashir? Hasameah behelqo.

Who is rich? The one who is happy with his portion. (Avot 4:1)

and

אל תסתכל בקנקן, אלא במה שיש בו.

Al tistaqel baqanqan, ela bemah sheyesh bo.

Do not look at the flask, but rather what is inside it. (Avot 4:26)

These passages are among several in Pirqei Avot that help to refocus our attention away from externalities to what is really important, and to separate needs from wants. The discussion was valuable, but not as powerful for the participants as I had hoped. As we were concluding, the skies opened up and it started to rain, so we continued to sit in the camp library and chat. The conversation innocently morphed into a discussion of how to get children to focus less on their smartphones, and to set limits on their use. We shared advice, swapped stories, and it was clear to me that this was a concern that was high on everyone’s mind, and all were invested in the conversation. It occurred to me that this was not the kind of discussion that  happens easily today; we were nearly 20 adults talking about parenting, uninterrupted by our own electronic devices because we had all opted to preserve the sanctity of Shabbat by leaving them off. It was beautiful, and powerful, and profoundly helpful.

On Sunday morning, as we were preparing to leave, we shared a final moment together on the waterfront. Standing on the edge of a lovely lake fenced in by rolling hills, we sang a song or two, and processed the weekend experience together. One of the participants observed that ultimately, the material features of the retreat - the rooms, the food, the bugs, the rain - did not matter at all. What mattered was the time spent together, bonding, schmoozing, drinking instant coffee and playing basketball. And so the simplicity of the experience added to its success in building connections between us all.

Unlike some varieties of Christianity or Buddhism, Judaism does not highlight asceticism. On the contrary, the Torah and the Talmud teach us that God gave us this world so that we might enjoy its fruits. We read, for example, in the Talmud Yerushalmi (Sotah 3:4):

Who is a pious fool? He who sees a ripe fig and says, “[Instead of enjoying it myself], I will give it to the first person I meet.”

The apex of Jewish spirituality is not to deny oneself, but to take pleasure in God’s Creation, albeit with a berakhah, an acknowledgment of God’s role in bringing us that ripe fig. The same is true for all other physical pleasures.

And most of us here in contemporary West Egg are fortunate to live well and appreciate God’s gifts to us. As long as our monetary gains are not ill-begotten, wealth is a blessing.

But we should not forget that comfort should be enjoyed with proper perspective. Material wealth has limits. Yes, having enough money makes certain things easier. It guarantees good access to education and health care, and of course allows for eating well and travel and leisure and so forth.

But what can creature comforts not do? They cannot fill the voids in our souls. They cannot bring joy in the context of loss and suffering. They cannot help us be better people. And they cannot bring people together in a way that connects them to each other meaningfully.

God has created a world in which everyone can be wealthy if he or she learns to appreciate the most essential gifts, those that can only be accessed through relationships with those whom we love, and with the Divine.

All of this brings me to the subject from Parashat Naso that our bar mitzvah boy raised earlier, that of the nazir. As the Torah describes, a man or a woman may become a nazir by taking a vow not to drink any alcoholic beverage, or to cut one’s hair, or to be exposed to tum’ah, impurity, by contact with a dead body.

The nazir lived a slightly more austere life than his/her fellow Israelites. It is worth pointing out that two of the most important heroes of the prophetic books, Samuel and Samson, are nazirim, and it seems that the source of their power - in the case of the former, his ability to communicate with God, and for the latter, his great physical strength - is their nazirite vow.

The suggestion is that living without certain indulgences (i.e. personal grooming and cocktails) might yield a higher form of existence.

In general, Judaism does not embrace austerity. But sometimes denying ourselves certain pleasures helps raise us up.

How do we achieve repentance on Yom Kippur? Why does our calendar identify six additional fast days throughout the year, with other optional personal fasts available to us at any time? Why do we take upon ourselves the hardship of avoiding the five species of hametz (and for some of us, many other things) during Pesah? Why does our tradition teach us to move out of our comfortable homes into the sukkah, where there are no marble countertops or fancy bathroom fixtures (or even bathrooms) during the festival of Sukkot?

The very act of self-denial, of setting limits for ourselves, is thought to stir God’s compassion. We can be cleansed through simplicity, and even occasionally through outright hardship. Going without helps to put us in a more open, spiritual state, that gives clarity and context to our lives. These traditions suggest that introspection may be achieved through humility. Simplicity helps to serve as a magnifying glass into our souls, and puts us back in touch with God’s Creation.

Jay Gatsby made the mistake of thinking that in order to win back Daisy Buchanan, all he needed was lots of money. But he was wrong. And the lesson that we should all take away from Gatsby, and from the nazir, is that over-the-top parties and lush material possessions are to be enjoyed, but the real substance of life is not to be found there.

The Torah’s description of the nazir is followed immediately by Birkat Kohanim, the blessing that the kohanim / priests would make over the rest of the Israelites in the Temple in Jerusalem:

יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה, וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ.

יָאֵר יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ.

יִשָּׂא יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם.

Yevarekhekha Adonai veyishmerekha
Ya’er Adonai panav eilekha viyhuneka
Yisa Adonai panav eilekha veyasem lekha shalom

May God bless you and keep you;
May God cause God’s face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
May God lift up God’s face to you and grant you peace.

The midrashic collection Sifre tells us that the light of God’s face, identified in the second line, represents wisdom and Torah, which, unlike material goods, can never be taken from you. I would add love and companionship to the contents of this light.  Taking a cue both from Fitzgerald and from the nazir, the things that we really need can be realized only in the context of family and community; they are the truly valuable fruits of Creation. 

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, May 18, 2013.) 

Or LaYehudim: Why a Lunch & Learn Program For Great Neck North High School Students Violates Jewish and American Principles - Tetzaveh 5773

In the spirit of Purim, a story:

Once upon a time a powerful Emperor of the Rising Sun advertised for a new Chief Samurai. After a year, only three applied for the job: a Japanese, a Chinese and a Jewish Samurai.

"Demonstrate your skills!" commanded the Emperor.

The Japanese samurai stepped forward, opened a tiny box and released a fly. He drew his samurai sword and *Swish!* the fly fell to the floor, neatly divided in two!

"What a feat!" said the Emperor. "Number Two Samurai, show me what you do."

The Chinese samurai smiled confidently, stepped forward and opened a tiny box, releasing a fly. He drew his samurai sword and * Swish! * Swish! * The fly fell to the floor neatly quartered.

"That is skill!" nodded the Emperor. "How are you going to top that, Number three Samurai?"

The Jewish samurai, Obi-wan Cohen, stepped forward, opened a tiny box releasing one fly, drew his samurai sword and *Swoooooosh! * flourished his sword so mightily that a gust of wind blew through the room.

But the fly was still buzzing around!

In disappointment, the Emperor said, "What kind of skill is that? The fly isn't even dead."

"Dead?!" replied the Jewish Samurai. "Dead is easy. Circumcision... THAT takes skill!"

***

We trade in symbols. It is through outward appearances - how we dress, where we shop, where we go to synagogue, whether or not we are still buzzing around - that we are most readily judged. Symbols are shortcuts - they are the means by which we most readily understand and focus life. They help us see what we cannot easily see.

Q: What is the most well-known symbol of Jewish life?
A: The Magen David, the star / shield of David.

Q: What should it be?
A: The Ner Tamid / Eternal Light.

 

Why?

Well, for one thing, scholars tell us that the Magen David has only been in wide use by the Jews for about 1000 years or so. That’s really not so far back, in Jewish time. But the Ner Tamid, the constantly-burning lamp that is described in Parashat Tetzaveh as part of the accoutrements of the mishkan (tabernacle), is as ancient as the Israelite nation. (Of course, we cannot really put a date on that, but let’s say that it’s at least 2500 years old, and perhaps quite a bit older.)

Another reason is that while the Magen David symbolizes protection by God (perhaps deriving from Psalm 18, wherein God is described as a magen, a shield), the Ner Tamid represents the light that the Jews cast into the world, illuminating the dark places and bringing knowledge and righteousness to everybody. It declares that as Jews, we should be “Or LaGoyim,” a light unto the nations (reading with Isaiah 60:3):

וְהָֽלְכ֥וּ גוֹיִ֖ם לְאוֹרֵ֑ךְ וּמְלָכִ֖ים לְנֹ֥גַהּ זַרְחֵֽךְ׃

Vehalekhu goyim le’orekh, umlakhim lenogah zarhekh.
Nations shall walk at your light, and kings at the brightness of your rising.

But the Ner Tamid also suggests that we should be “Or LaYehudim,” a light unto ourselves, the Jews, to remind us to be the best people that we can be; to focus our energies not only on spreading the light of our Torah, but also the enlightenment that comes from uniting the best of ancient teachings, contemporary wisdom, and good judgment for the benefit of society at large. It is in the context of these last three points that I feel the need to discuss recent events in Great Neck.

You may be familiar with the brouhaha surrounding a free “lunch and learn” program offered by a synagogue close to Great Neck North High School. For the benefit of those who have not heard, let me recap:

Students at Great Neck North are allowed off-campus during their 40-minute lunch period, and many leave to purchase food in nearby restaurants. It has recently come to light that a synagogue that is conveniently located on Middle Neck Road, Torah Ohr Congregation, has been offering a free kosher lunch to students to encourage them to come in and listen to lectures by the congregation’s rabbi, Rabbi Avraham Kohan.

The school district has asked Rabbi Kohan to require that children attending have a written permission slip from their parents, and to desist until that matter is resolved. Rabbi Kohan has not agreed to do so. The principal of GNN, Bernard Kaplan, sent a letter to all school parents about this at the end of January, and Torah Ohr took their case to Agudath Israel, the umbrella organization for the Haredi community, and to the ADL, and as a result Principal Kaplan was persuaded to apologize for his letter, which he did in a subsequent letter. (It should be noted that the principle of separation of church and state prevents a school district from targeting any religious institution for praise or criticism. Because of the open-campus policy, it seems that Torah Ohr is operating within the law.)

A number of newspaper articles about the lunch & learn debate have appeared in the last two weeks, citing frustrated school administrators and irate parents on both sides of the issue.

What Rabbi Kohan is doing is apparently legal. However, I do not think it that it meets the “benefit of society at-large” standard that I mentioned earlier. They have been asked by the school district to at least require parental permission to participate, something which I think that they would want, so that parents can feel more comfortable knowing what their students are doing during lunch.

I have heard that, in a related case, Principal Kaplan recently asked a US Army recruiter to cease approaching students on lunch break at Dunkin’ Donuts, and the recruiter complied. My guess is that Rabbi Kohan sees himself as bringing Or LaYehudim, light to the Jews, by teaching his version of the Torah at all costs, bravely standing up to more civic-minded critics, that is, progressive Jews like us.

Let’s face it. There is a part of me, as a Conservative rabbi, that is envious of Rabbi Kohan’s lunch & learn program. I wish that 40 teenagers were coming to Temple Israel for lunch, with their parents’ blessing, and that they were learning the Torah with me and Rabbi Stecker, using all the modern, rational tools that we do. I wish that those kids, a portion of whom I know to be members of Temple Israel, who celebrated benei mitzvah on this bimah, who were my students, I wish they were enrolled at the Youth House, participating in all of the wonderful, open, inspiring programming that we offer.

But here is the difficulty that I cannot get past. It’s the symbols - the indicators of that which we cannot see. First, we know from news accounts that boys and girls are separated during these lunch & learn events: girls are invited on Tuesdays, and boys on Thursday and Friday. This also implies to me that they think that girls are only entitled to half as much Torah as boys are. This is deeply troubling, suggesting that these learning sessions violate everything for which we at Temple Israel stand.

Second, that this congregation has flouted the requests of the school district is also of great concern. This symbol suggests that Torah Ohr cares little for American society and values, and for the very principle of the separation of church and state that enables them to continue to function. And that makes me even more concerned about what indeed Rabbi Kohan may be teaching them, if not in words than at least by example. 

What are these kids learning during their “free” lunches? Are they teaching them that the way that their parents practice Judaism is insufficient? That their homes are not kosher enough? That the only way to be a “good” Jew is to reject the observance patterns of your family? Perhaps this is why Rabbi Kohan does not want parental consent; perhaps he would rather encourage these kids to violate the fundamental mitzvah of kibbud av ve'em, honoring your mother and father.

I hear stories all the time of families right here in Great Neck that are being torn apart because of right-wing rabbis who are sowing these very divisive ideas. I do not know if this particular rabbi is of that ilk, but failing to comply with the school district’s simple requests sends the clear message that their teachings are more important than what your parents or teachers tell you.

But the third symbol, and perhaps the most valent, is the open question of responsibility. These are children, minors who are living in their parents’ homes. When they leave campus during lunchtime, who is responsible? Who is in loco parentis? If the school district is indeed responsible for these children during lunchtime (as I suspect it is), then they are neglecting enforcement of the principle of church-state separation by providing unsupervised time in which Rabbi Kohan may cajole them with free lunch and indoctrination; Torah Ohr is as much at fault by stepping into a responsibility void that should be left unmolested by religious organizations.

This is not a case of “proselytizing” (an unfortunate word choice in Principal Kaplan’s first letter), since the students in question are already Jewish (I have been told that they do not allow non-Jews to attend). And it is a trap to see this as a case of Jew vs. Jew – progressive Jews pitted against Orthodox Jews. Rather, this is a case of a religious organization taking advantage of a loophole in the responsibility gap promoted by the open campus policy. The same concerns would be raised if a Christian group were targeting Christian students, or a Muslim group, and so on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we stand for a Judaism that is open, non-judgmental, and firmly based in tradition. Temple Israel is a place where all are welcome and nobody will be told that their religious practice is wrong or insufficient. Furthermore, we are committed to Judaism, to modernity, and to American ideals. We are indebted to the separation of church and state, obligated to uphold it, and committed to respectful interaction with other institutions, religious, secular, and governmental.

No teenager should be discouraged from Jewish learning. But as a parent with a child in the Great Neck school system, I would certainly not want my child learning at a place that would lure her in without my consent. And I would wager a fair bet that if Rabbi Kohan had a child in public high school, he would be more than a little incensed if the Conservative synagogue across the street were doing the very thing that he is doing.

Tonight, when we read Megillat Esther, we will say the following (Esther 8:16), which you might also recognize from the havdalah liturgy:

לַיְּהוּדִים, הָיְתָה אוֹרָה וְשִׂמְחָה, וְשָׂשֹׂן, וִיקָר.

Layyehudim hayta orah vesimhah vesasson viyqar.
For the Jews, there was light, happiness, joy, and honor.

The enlightenment that was afforded to us in our victory over the forces of darkness in the tale of Esther reminds us that we must remain vigilant. Our Ner Tamid continues to remind us of our need to cast light inside and outside the Jewish world as we support, as our Prayer for the Country puts it, “the ideals and free institutions that are the pride and glory of our country.”

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 2/23/2013.)