Ten Days, Two Countries, 34 Teenagers: A Physical and Spiritual Journey with the Youth House to Prague and Israel

Two and a half weeks ago, on a Tuesday evening in the Negev desert, I was encamped with 34 teenagers from our Youth House and seven other staff members at Khan HaShayarot, a Bedouin tent complex. (Well, OK, so it’s not really a Bedouin tent - it’s for tourist groups. But it’s staffed by actual Israeli Bedouin Arabs, and it really does consist of a bunch of large tents in the desert adjacent to a camel pen.) We had already eaten dinner and were preparing for a campfire with guitar and singing and s’mores, which, as we all know, are a traditional Bedouin campfire snack.

The time had come for us to recite ma’ariv, the evening service, and we created for the group a decidedly non-traditional tefillah experience. We lined them up as quietly as possible by the entrance to the camp, and then walked them one at a time out of the camp to a slight hill overlooking the camp. Each person was placed far enough from anyone else, to allow them to find their own quiet inner-space, distant enough from their friends so as to be able to hear the special silence one only hears in the desert.  There was some light from the camp below us, and the moon offered us a shadowy sense of the hills around.

Silently, we took in the desert scenery, and I reminded everybody that we are a people that came from the desert, and that prophecy - the Torah, the words of the Prophets - has always been channeled to us in the desert. We then faced north, towards Jerusalem, and recited the words of the Shema and the silent Amidah. After yet more silent reflection, we returned, one at a time, to the camp and the campfire.

Danny Mishkin, director of the Youth House, asked our teens at this point, before the s’mores, to write down a few words about the importance of being on a journey and how that related both to our trip to Prague and Israel and to being Jewish in general. We sat quietly, and everybody spent a few minutes writing in their bound siddurim, which we prepared specially for the trip, incorporating open space for journaling along the way.  

The thoughts expressed were striking. One of the participants wrote the following:

“Tonight was THE most memorable experience thus far. I have never felt as connected to God. Standing in the desert at night with the stars, praying as one group, singing Oseh Shalom made me tear up.”

Another connected the experience to the departure from Egypt:

“As I was walking to the top of the hill, I couldn’t help but think of the Jews leaving Egypt. We have always been a moving people… never fully at home until we received Eretz Yisrael.”

A third related the struggle for the modern State of Israel to the long Jewish journey of the soul:

“It is obvious that in Jewish history, things did not always come easy, such as the land of Israel itself. Endless days of travel breeded an unexpected but needed bond between Jews with the same end goal. By experiencing the same emotions of joy, sorrow, and by just achieving a general sense of what our people collectively had to go through just for the sake of a religion makes this bond unbreakable.”

You might make the case that the essential message of the Torah is that being Jewish is about the journey. Think about it: Noah is sent on a journey by boat that will guarantee a future for humanity (and Noah’s ark does not actually GO anywhere - it has no steering mechanism). Abraham is called upon to leave his father’s house and his homeland to go on a journey to an unknown place, which will some day be called Israel (after his grandson Jacob). Joseph is sent on an unwilling journey to Egypt, and then the rest of his family follows him. Moses is tasked with leading the Israelites on the ultimate journey of redemption: up out of slavery, and back to the land of Israel. And on and on.

It is the journey that defines us as Jews.  In this day and age, when we are free to choose our identities, free to opt into or out of our tradition, it is the experiences, the memories, that will inform who we want to be, whether being Jewish matters and how we want our Jewishness to manifest itself in everyday life.  

Our parashah today, Parashat Vayiqra, is also about an ancient aspect of the Jewish journey. As our bar mitzvah, Yoel, pointed out, it is about a series of essential sacrifices. But all the more so, as Yoel also argued, the sacrificial system that is laid out in the Torah and that was practiced by Israelites for nearly 1,000 years in the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, was only a point along the way to developing a much better system of accessing the Divine: tefillah, prayer. And he is in good company here. Maimonides, the 12th-century physician and commentator, one of the biggest names on the Jewish bookshelf, said the following about sacrifices in his philosophical work, Moreh Nevukhim, the Guide to the Perplexed:

“Sacrificial service is not the primary object, but rather supplications, prayers, and similar kinds of worship are nearer to the primary object.”

In other words, the Torah describes the sacrifices in detail. But that form of worship was not God’s ultimate plan for us. Maimonides, writing more than a millennium after the destruction of the Second Temple, believed that prayer was the higher goal. Sacrifice, after all, was limited; it only took place in the Temple, and was performed by an intermediary: the kohen, the priest, who took your sheep or ram and offered it up to God. “But,” Maimonides states, “prayer and supplication can be offered everywhere and by every person.”

So why did God give us all of these mitzvot if the higher goal was prayer? Because, said Maimonides, the Israelites needed to be weaned from the idolatrous ways of the Egyptians and the Canaanites in a way that did not challenge what they were familiar with too severely. God’s plan was that eventually we would offer the words of our hearts rather than the bounty of our flocks.

What we do today as Jews when we gather in synagogues, or when we offer berakhot before and after meals, or when we communicate with God alone, is the superior form of worship. The spiritual journey from sacrifice to prayer amounts to a democratization of our connection with God.

Vayiqra, ladies and gentlemen, is one leg of our spiritual journey. And we as a people, and as individuals, are on a constant journey. Every single one of us here.

Some of us might be aware of this - there are active seekers among us, looking for that next spiritual high, searching for meaning within and without. You know who you are.

Most of us, however, are probably not aware of our journeys. Our lives are complex - we are thinking about many things - the job, the family, the kids, the next vacation, or how am I going to make the next rent check, or how am I going to help my cousin who is battling drug addiction, or how on Earth am I going to broach the topic of end of life choices with my parents? We have too many things to worry about. Who has time to be concerned with our spiritual needs?

But we all have them. Jews and non-Jews. And, I think, Jews more than most, because, at least in the Diaspora, we have always been on the outside. We ask ourselves, what does it mean to be Jewish? How can I be both Jewish and American? Why should I care, and if I don’t care, what then is my relationship to this ancient tradition, handed to me by my parents and grandparents?

As Jews, we have always been on a journey, both physical and spiritual. The physical one was often forced upon us, and for our ancestors who suffered oppression and anti-Semitism wherever they went, it was this struggle that kept them Jewish. Today, in 21st century America, where our greatest enemy is indifference, we need to send ourselves on journeys to accomplish that task.

So where are we going? To quote the Hasidic Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav, “Kol mah she-ani nose’a, ani nose’a raq le-eretz Yisrael.” Everywhere I go, I am going to Eretz Yisrael. Not physically, but with every step, we are moving closer to Israel in spirit.

All the more so regarding the trip that we took with 34 Great Neck teens. The mind of the average high school student is in a bunch of different places at any given moment - they are thinking far more about all of the uncertainty and awkwardness of being a teenager: How will I fit in with this crowd or that? How can I convince my parents that I am more mature than they give me credit for? How do I balance school work with time for myself?

And our job was to cut through all of that classic teen stuff and help them along their spiritual journey. Because that is what visiting Israel is all about.

What made this trip work was not just Israel. It was not the combination of Israel and the Czech Republic, although that was really cool. It was not the tefillah, or the Kotel, or the desert, or the Bedouin tent, or the guide.

More than any of those things, it was the journey itself. It was voyaging together from here to there as we reflected on our experiences, as we sang and danced and welcomed the Shabbat on a Jerusalem rooftop. It was how we marveled at the tenacity and the tenuousness of the residents of the Terezin ghetto, who created a secret synagogue in a barn, as we sang in that synagogue Hannah Senesh’s famous poem Eli, Eli to remember them and their striving to connect with their faith under such conditions.

What made the trip successful was the internal journey, the spiritual traveling that took us not from New York to Prague to Tel Aviv via Amsterdam, but from the Diaspora of the mind to the Promised Land of the heart, from the cool distance of the teenage identity struggle to the close connection with our ancient religious and national heritage.

We did that. And the greater we, the we of this community, should be proud of that. You gave these kids a series of memories that they will carry with them for the balance of their lives, that will always serve to reconnect them to Jewish life. So kol hakavod!


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, March 8, 2014.)

Can't Get No Satisfaction? Become a Spiritual Immigrant - Behar/Behuqqotai 5772

When I was in my early twenties, I interviewed my maternal grandparents, Rose and Eddie Bass, aleihem hashalom.  They were born around 1912.  My grandfather was happy to tell his story, which was, ironically, not too happy – his father had left his sick mother in charge of five boys, and my grandfather was taken at age 3 by the State of Massachusetts and placed in a foster home with a Jewish farmer outside of Boston.  Gramps spoke very fondly about the Slotnick family who took him in, his years on the farm, his pet cats, driving cars as a teenager, and so forth.
 
My grandmother, however, who had immigrated to the United States from what is today the Ukraine at age 8, kept trying to back out of the interview. “Why do you want to hear this?” she said.  “We were poor, we were miserable, and the non-Jews were horrible to us.”  As far as she was concerned, there was nothing to tell about her childhood.  She was glad that she had left the old country, but life was hard in America as well.  She never looked back.  

And yet, when I asked her about her teenage years, about meeting my grandfather, she would light up for a moment and give me a charming memory: “All the boys were after me,” she said.  “I didn’t like Eddie at first, but he grew on me.”  They were married in 1936, during the Great Depression, and were together for 66 years before my grandmother passed away in 2002.

Their lives were hard, marked by poverty, loss, and suffering.  I recorded some truly astounding stories.  But they were happy with what little they had.  And whatever small successes they had in life they relished, perhaps because they were achieved with their own hands.
 
****
 
When we read the Torah this morning, there was an extended aliyah of curses. That's right, good 'ol fashioned biblical curses.  You know the sort – if you don't walk in the way of the Lord, your enemies will conquer your land and scatter you amongst the nations and you will be desolate and hungry and barren and so forth.

Amongst these curses is one that I think speaks to where we are today, one of the greatest curses of contemporary America.  “You shall eat and not be satisfied.”  (Lev. 26:26).  Ladies and gentlemen, thank God, we have more today to eat than any previous generation.  When my mother was growing up, if you didn’t finish what was on your plate, my grandmother went into panic mode.  By comparison, my children, thank God again, are surrounded by food, clothes, many, many gizmos that make a cacaphony of noises (such that Abba tries hard not to replace batteries when possible).  They have a warm, loving home, and lack nothing.

We “eat” better today, here and now, than in any previous generation.  And “eat” here is in quotes, because we are blessed with many kinds of abundance, many things that were unavailable to our grandparents:

How many of us...
… Have more vehicles than drivers in the household?
… Could donate half of what’s in our closets and still have plenty of clothes to wear?
… Have the luxury of free time for overseas vacations?
 
We are healthy and comfortable.  Barukh haShem.  And yet, we all know that no matter how much we have, there always seems to be something else that we want or “need”.

In 1965, a mere forty-four years after my grandmother immigrated to the United States, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones released a musical statement about satisfaction.  Mr. Jagger’s complaint was, as I'm sure you know, that he couldn't get any.  The song is a statement about class, about society, about wants vs. needs (and of course it's got a great beat and the kids can still dance to it).
 
Satisfaction has always been very hard to come by, but somehow, I think we are worse off in this regard than our grandparents were.  In this Goldene Medina (Yiddish for “Golden Land”) of plenty, satisfaction is in shorter supply than it ever was.  Perhaps this is an innate human reality.
 
Last week, Rabbi Stecker mentioned the opinion piece in the New York Times about the culture of outsourcing.  We don’t have the time to take care of all of the things that we used to do, so we pay somebody else to do them, and then must work more to pay for all of the things that we have outsourced.  For sure, today’s economy boasts hundreds of new types of employees -- life coaches, dating coaches, wedding planners, hired dancers for parties, wantologists (who help people determine what they really, really want) -- but what have we lost? The author of the article, Arlie Russell Hochschild, an emerita professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, observes the following:
 
“Focusing attention on the destination, we detach ourselves from the small — potentially meaningful — aspects of experience. Confining our sense of achievement to results, to the moment of purchase, so to speak, we unwittingly lose the pleasure of accomplishment, the joy of connecting to others and possibly, in the process, our faith in ourselves.”
 
We are so anxious about where we are going, says Dr. Hochschild, that we forget to enjoy where we are.  While we are busy farming out our daily tasks to professionals, the small successes of life go unnoticed, the holy moments unsavored, and the satisfaction of personal accomplishment unrealized.

Our grandparents had far fewer choices than we do.  Given that we are all pressed for time and faced with an inordinate number of options as to how to devote it, how do we find our way through life in such a way that maximizes our satisfaction?

This is, you might say, the 2012 reflex of the Rolling Stones’ very prescient question, nearly half a century ago.  

Well, I have an idea.  When the lack of satisfaction gets unbearable, it's time to leave. Emigrate.  Pick yourself up and move, spiritually, to a different place.

You can do it.  Some of us in this room are physical immigrants – some of us picked ourselves up and left our homes due to the various upheavals of the 20^th century – from Hitler's atrocities to Khomeini's revolution.  And those of us who are not immigrants are necessarily the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants.

But to immigrate spiritually is just as difficult, and yet there is a precedent in Jewish history: when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people immigrated spiritually from one way of worshiping God to another; our prayers today, specifically the Amidah but really all of them, replace the sacrifices that our ancestors offered in the Temple.  Instead of a priesthood offering the best of our flocks to God, we as individuals offer the best of our lips. Sometimes we in this building debate very subtle changes in what we do here in services; imagine replacing the whole system with something else entirely!

So how do you move to a place of satisfaction?  Maimonides, the most influential single rabbi in Jewish history, suggests the following:

צָרִיךְ הָאָדָם שֶׁיְּכַוַּן כָּל מַעֲשָׂיו, כֻּלָּם, כְּדֵי לֵידַע אֶת הַשֵּׁם בָּרוּךְ הוּא, בִּלְבָד; וְיִהְיֶה שִׁבְתּוֹ וְקוּמוֹ וְדִבּוּרוֹ, הַכֹּל לְעֻמַּת זֶה הַדָּבָר

A person should direct his heart and the totality of his behavior to one goal, becoming aware of God.  The way one rests, rises, and speaks should all be directed to this end. (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 3:2)

Maimonides gets even more specific: eating, sleeping, relationships, and every single action that we undertake should not be ONLY for the pleasure of doing so, but rather that all should serve the higher goal of making it possible for us to be holy vessels.  That is, we can and should take pleasure from our daily activities, but pleasure is not the end goal.  Judaism has never endorsed asceticism; on the contrary, it is a mitzvah to live well within a sacred framework.  But everything we do has a holy purpose: to make it possible to get in touch with God.  That is our bottom line, if you will.
 
This is spiritual immigration.  Maimonides wants us to re-orient our thinking, to make us conceive of our actions differently.  If we can successfully immigrate to this mode of thought, we have a much better chance of being satisfied, and to devote our energy to the Jewish values of learning, of repairing the world, of seeking peace between people, of treating each other respectfully in all our dealings.  
 
We need to think like spiritual immigrants.  We need to guard against the possibility that abundance, whatever form it takes, might breed apathy or discontent.  We need to stay “hungry” for challenge, for spiritual exploration, growth, and ongoing satisfaction.

My grandmother did not want to talk about her experiences, because she thought that her poor childhood reflected badly on her or made us uncomfortable.  As one who had come to this country to seek a better life, her perspective came from having found satisfaction in achievement.  That was the story that I wanted wanted her to tell me, and eventually she did.  Most of us do not face the physical challenges that she faced; we must therefore take up the spiritual challenge.

If we re-orient ourselves to focus on how to be holy vessels, to see our actions as serving this purpose, we might be able to manage successfully the challenge of want vs. need, and perhaps get some satisfaction.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, May 19, 2012.)

Making a Divine Space Within Ourselves - Thursday Kavvanah, 3/15/2012

This Shabbat we conclude the book of Shemot / Exodus with one of those film-quality special effects moments: the Israelites finish building the mishkan / tabernacle, and the Shekhinah (God's presence) moves in.

וַיְכַס הֶעָנָן אֶת-אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד; וּכְבוֹד יְהוָה מָלֵא אֶת-הַמִּשְׁכָּן
Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. (Ex. 40:34)

This is after many, many chapters of extensive description: the array of top-shelf materials, colors, craftsmen and careful design that make up God's instructions to build the mishkan, the portable sanctuary and altar for use while wandering in the desert.  It's not really a surprise that it works out well, but the five-verses account of the Shekhinah's taking up residence is staggering in its abruptness.  Pages and pages of seemingly small details are followed by a simple, matter-of-fact event.

The message here is as follows: if we want to court the Divine Presence in our own lives, we have to work very hard to create an appropriate space.  Our commitment to serious introspection and spiritual excavation on an ongoing basis opens us up.  As we approach Pesah, the festival that mandates physical and spiritual cleansing, perhaps this is a good time to focus on making that space available.

The Not-Exclusively-Spiritual Cleanse - Tuesday Kavvanah, 3/13/2012

I do not wish to alarm you, but I began shopping for Pesah yesterday, purchasing some basic items that I'm pretty sure I'll need in a month.  No matter that my house is still infested with hametz - we'll be taking care of that in short order.

Situated directly across the Jewish year from Yom Kippur, Pesah is something like a second shower on a humid summer day.  While the former holiday focuses entirely on cleansing the spirit, Pesah is as much about physical purification.  This is a time to eliminate the veteran products moldering in the back of the fridge, the sticky substances hanging out in the microwave and corrupting the shelves, and the crumbs that have multiplied under seat cushions and taken up residence in corners.

But the deeper item here is that, just as many other Jewish rituals require some sort of re-enactment of an ancient event, this cleaning is representative of something else.  Just as we clean our homes, so too do we purify our spirits.  With the renewal of spring comes the renewal of our souls.

There are only 24 more cleaning days until Pesah.  Get a move on!

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, 5/3/2011 - Giving praise where it's due

A synagogue must have a window. Why? So you will not be so consumed with spiritual engagement with the words of tefillah that you forget that there is a physical world outside.

At the end of shaharit (morning service) today, I suggested the following: we've just spent 40 minutes praising God. Judaism also emphasizes the concept of hakarat hatov, literally, recognition of that which is good; find a moment today to tell the people around you how much you love and appreciate them.

Shabbat HaGadol 5771 - Seeking Spiritual Purity Through Twitter

(Originally delivered on Shabbat morning at Temple Israel, April 16, 2011.)

This is one of the more frantic periods of the Jewish year, a time of scrubbing, cooking, preparing, searching, burning, and so forth. And then comes the parade of relatives, the fabulous dinners, the new Maxwell House haggadah (did anybody here find it?), birkat kohanim at Temple Israel, and of course the 2nd Night Seder downstairs led by yours truly, and then seven more days of gastronomic mediocrity.

But the spring cleaning mandated by Pesah is not just about cleaning. There is, I am certain, a higher purpose. And that purpose is what makes Judaism and Jewish life continue to speak to us, continue to draw people to synagogues such as this one, and will continue to make Conservative Judaism in particular a viable option in the future. American Jewry will always have a need for synagogues that are traditional yet open, non-judgmental, and non-coercive; places where they may seek meaning and holiness and yes, spiritual purity.

Before we address this, let’s take a moment to compare Pesah to another holiday, one that is almost precisely half a year away: Yom Kippur, about which we read in today's parashah, Aharei Mot. These two occasions stand in opposition to each other across the circle of months, and yet share so many traditions and objectives:

1. Both require forms of physical denial related to eating.

2. Both invoke themes of redemption.

3. There are purification customs that are common to both: some immerse themselves in a miqveh prior to both YK and Pesah; some wear the kittel, the traditional white garment that symbolizes purity, on both festivals.

4. Pesah begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, which is the first month of the year; Yom Kippur falls on the 10th day of Tishrei, which is the seventh month, but the first month that falls in the new year.

And so forth. Put another way, Pesah is the reflection of Yom Kippur. Call it Hag Ha-Aviv, the festival of spring, or Hag Ha-Herut, the festival of freedom, or even Hag Ha-Matzot, the festival of unleavened bread, but its deeper meaning may be found in the requirement to cleanse.

And that cleansing is not merely physical - it is also spiritual. The external requirement to clean thoroughly one’s home reflects an inner struggle for purification for internal spring cleaning as well.

Cleaning our homes, kashering our kitchens, these are all things over which we have real control. Our minds, our bodies, and our lives, sometimes less so. But going through the annual ritual in preparation for Pesah is something like the Stanislavski method for acting - the physical act elicits a certain emotional response.

On some level, I think, we all want to be pure. And we want our children, our parents, our friends to be pure as well.

But life is not pure; life is complicated and messy. Yes, there are happy moments: celebrations, holidays, small victories, and so forth. But there are unhappy, ugly moments as well. I don’t have to name them - we all know what they are. And no matter how happy we are, no matter how satisfying or complete or joyous one’s life is, we all eventually hit stumbling blocks. And those stumbling blocks are the sources of tum’ah, of spiritual impurity in our lives. Most of us want to be rid of that.

The eternal possibility of purity, of clean, unbesmirched souls in the face of so many opportunities for the opposite is one reason that many of us keep coming back to synagogue, keep participating in Jewish traditions. What are the three most-observed Jewish holidays? Attending a Pesah seder is the second (after lighting Hanukkah candles); the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000 indicated that two-thirds of us go to a seder annually, more than fast on Yom Kippur and more than three times as many of us who keep kosher at home.

These are three holidays that work well for American Jewry (unlike, say, Shabbat: only 28 percent of American Jews light Shabbat candles regularly, and fewer still attend synagogue on Shabbat). I’m not in a position to tease out all the possible reasons for this, but still it is unique that two of these top three have to do with spiritual cleansing.

We have, I think, a deep-seated desire to seek purity - clean hearts, clean minds, clean bodies.

* * *

Last Shabbat, we had about 150 visitors to our community. Teenagers and staff from all over Nassau County came to the USY Chazak Division Spring Kinnus (convention), which we held over at the Youth House. There were, over the course of the roughly 44 hours that they were here, a number of holy moments. Imagine 150 young Jewish women and men singing together the words of Qabbalat Shabbat, welcoming Shabbat in unison. Picture those same teenagers learning Jewish text together. If you listen, you might still hear the echoes of raucous Shabbat songs with ruah, with spirit, in the USY tradition.

USY is an institution that works, where the older kids lead the younger kids in tefillah, in learning, in doing. I was lurking in the back of the room, mostly unseen, which is really a true pleasure for a rabbi: to be in a room full of Jews and NOT be needed.

What was particularly inspiring, however, was the willingness of these children to lead each other - that there were high school students in the room that stepped forward to be in charge, Jewishly, to take the red heifer by the horns and forge ahead and make Judaism happen. On Sunday morning, decked out in tallitot and tefillin, we were treated to a Shaharit (morning) service that was seasoned with video snippets from the movie Shrek, arguably one of the most surreptitiously Jewish animated movies of recent years. Not my cup of tea, exactly, but it was outside the box, and the kids were captivated by tefillah.

Now, I’m not suggesting that teens are necessarily coming to USY events because they are in search of purity. (Actually, more likely it’s quite the opposite.) I am, however, pointing to the fact that USY works. It brings young people from Conservative communities together, and not just for social reasons.

We need to focus on what works. The need for purity, spiritual cleanliness may appeal to many of us. But it has to be available, it has to be accessible and understandable and delivered through simple, meaningful rituals. As one of my colleagues in the Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles has been stating publicly for some time now, what we promote has to fit on a bumper sticker.

Some of you might know that I recently started using Twitter. For those of you who are not familiar with this new medium, let me explain: you can post, or “tweet,” as frequently as you want, and people who are “following” you can read what you write. The catch is that a tweet cannot exceed 140 characters. So you have to be succinct, even to the detriment of proper grammar and spelling.

The guys who created Twitter understood that the future consists of many small chunks of data. I know I sound cynical, but I’m fairly certain that 140 characters is about the limit of what most people will willingly read without too much investment, in today’s world of infinite technological switchability.

I bring this to your attention because the popularity of Twitter is yet another sign that we are undergoing a major paradigm shift in how we relate to each other. Judaism, and in particular Conservative Judaism is subject to the same social trends as all of our other lifestyle choices. (And involvement in Jewish life is more of a choice than it has ever been.)

It is no coincidence that the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has just published a new strategic plan, one that defines the mission of our movement as follows:

• To transform and strengthen our kehillot (congregations) in their effort to:
o inspire meaningful prayer
o sustain a culture of lifelong Jewish learning
o nurture religious and spiritual growth
o promote excellence in kehillah leadership

(By the way, that’s 235 characters, and that’s less than half of the new mission statement.) They did not mention spiritual purity, per se, but I think it falls under at least two of those bullet points.

If the movement is indeed to continue, it must find new ways to do all of the above - to bring the themes of Judaism into people’s lives, to help them seek spiritual cleansing on Pesah and Yom Kippur, given the current cultural and technological milieu. We must take what works and emphasize those programs and institutions, and develop new ones that work for today. And if that means that the traditional synagogue model is replaced by something else, something that can be served in 140-character chunks, so be it.

USY works. The Ramah camps work. The Twitter model? Not yet. Regardless, the fundamental search for purity, or holiness, or meaning, is what we need to focus on as a congregation, as a kehillah, and indeed as a movement, as we boldly sail into the future.

Shabbat shalom, and hag kasher ve-sameah.

Thursday Kavvanah, 4/14/2011 - Kashering the Soul

As Pesah approaches and we grow more frantic with completing all the necessary preparations in time, I am reminded that Pesah, like Yom Kippur (exactly half a year away), is as much about the spiritual cleanse as the physical. On this holiday, we "fast" for eight days by denying ourselves dietary staples, as we invoke themes of redemption and purity.

Spring cleaning is not just for the house and the kitchen; along with our external environments, we kasher our souls for Hag Ha-Aviv, the Festival of Spring. Go ahead, get down on your knees to scrub that oven - it's good for you.

Thursday Kavvanah, 3/31/2011 - Cleansing our Souls

The weekly parashah (portion of the Torah) is Tazria, which features less-than-appealing descriptions of a bizarre skin disease and other types of tum'ah, ritual impurity, and the purification rituals associated with them. This ranks as one of the most difficult parts of the Torah to relate to, especially since it is not clear what affliction tzara'at (the skin disease) actually refers to (although it is usually translated as "leprosy").

How might we read this as modern people? Is this passage about disease, or something else? Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, a key figure in the 19th-century musar (ethics) movement, observed that the tzara'at passage follows the list of kosher and non-kosher animals, indicating that what comes out of one's mouth should be as pure as what goes in.

I would extend this to include all the sources of internal tum'ah, what you might call "spiritual impurity": not only speaking ill of others, but also corrupt thinking, placing more importance on possessions rather than relationships with people, failing to care for those in our society who need help, and so forth. Perhaps we need a modern ritual to help us cleanse our internal tum'ah, the impurity of the soul.

Any ideas?