October 2007 Archives

Like most rabbis, I get frustrated at what I wish we could accomplish in our religious school. I wish I could get parents to let the students use the skills they are learning in school--like kiddush and Havdallah--more regularly in their homes. I wish I could get a larger percentage of parents to bring their kids to Shabbat services. I wish I could get the funding we have been searching for to develop our Hebrew language retention program that would give teachers and parents who are not fluent, the tools to reinforce the vocabulary and grammar our kids learn with our two Hebrew specialists (but then forget by the next week because they don’t have enough opportunity to use it).

However, I am also encouraged by the advances I have seen over the last 10 years at my synagogue school:

* Almost every one of our Bnai Mitzvah can lead the entire Shaharit service thanks to our innovative tefillah curriculum. Most important, graduates tell me they feel comfortable as part of the Jewish community wherever they travel and that they have little patience for services that skimp on the traditional Hebrew liturgy!

When blogging "for the sake of heaven," it's easy to get the last word in when you post right before Shabbos! However, even though a new week has begun, I'm hoping my generous hosts at Beliefnet--and my colleagues who've graciously invited me to join their conversation--will extend my opportunity to offer some thoughts.

I wrote a book called, "The Answer" because I believe that answers are precisely what we want and need in order to make the best possible use of our finite time in this world. I also believe we are living in an answer-addicted, inquiry-allergic culture, where people genuinely want to "tidy up" but are afraid of the mess they have to wade through in order to do the tidying, and, in the face of that fear, tend to take short-cuts that often leave them feeling even less capable of imposing order on the chaos than when they began. I have framed each chapter of the book with a question to remind us all that we have the power to use the questions that come into our lives no matter where or how we live, no matter how hermetically sealed we've attempted to make our existence, or how tightly controlled the environment, to shape and arrive at real, lasting, substantive answers all the days of our lives.

I haven’t had a chance to read Rabbi Jen Krause’s book yet, but I agree with her that the rabbis were the first self-help coaches. I would add that was so because they had the first self-help manual: the Torah.

If you think about it, the Torah is really all about two things: relationships and finding balance. The Torah covers relationships with parents, siblings, spouses, kids, our neighbors, the poor and vulnerable, people we do know and people we don’t, and even those who want to hurt us or others. It deals with finding a balance between being productive and regenerative, between taking care of yourself and others, between being successful and living generously, between using resources and protecting them, between having and sharing, between doing and being. This is the stuff of most self-help manuals! Torah means teaching. Every letter and verse contains a teaching for how we can lead a better, more fulfilled, satisfying, and good life.

Rabbi Jen, I wish you were right about your description of Jewry but the facts on the ground seem to say otherwise:

As many have noted there are two sides of Jewry. Rabbi Jen nicely described one side. But in virtually every city around the world, Orthodox Judaism is growing, not steadily, but by leaps and bounds. Virtually 20 percent of the Jewish population under the age of 18 defines itself as Orthodox. Whereas in 1975 there were 450 Chabads worldwide there are now a staggering 2,700!

The fact is that the ghettoized nature of these communities doesn’t (at least in their minds) hurt their pockets, minds or marriages one iota. How can one not envy the care, love, and support embodied in the Syrain community? (Again, yes they are digusting in there treatment of converts..that's obvious blah blah blah.)

When I learned how to study the work of the prolific medieval commentator Rashi from the wonderfully prolific Nechama Leibowitz, of blessed memory, in her tiny Jerusalem living room, she would always ask, "What's Rashi's question?" (or, more colorfully, as she was quite colorful: "What's bugging Rashi?"). She was asking us to play an ancient Jewish version of Jeopardy. Rashi had provided his answers, but unless we understood the questions that inspired them it was "game over."

While I, like Rabbi Stern, disagree with the Syrian community's fundamentalist approaches to Jewish life detailed in the Zev Chafets article, I do not have the type of "SY"-envy he describes. As Stevie Wonder sings in "As," "So make sure when you say you're in it, but not of it, you're not helpin' to make this Earth a place sometimes called hell." Being "in" the world to make millions, but only being "of" the tiny little slice of it you want to preserve is a luxurious fiction we neither can afford in these precarious times, nor is it a vision of what I believe Judaism exists to do in the universe.