A marathon tour of the north and south of California comes to a close. I sit in the center of a table, at a restaurant I haven’t been to since my graduation from the fifth grade. One serving of garlic bread comes to the table, then another. The night passes in conversation and preparation to go to the airport, and then, home.
The topic turns to the latest small-town gossip: the family friend who was, at age sixty, fired from his job of twenty-five years. I hear anger, and desperation and frustration. Most of all, I hear betrayal. Not too surprising.
Does Judaism have anything to say about this, they ask. Like, something similar to the shopkeeper’s law, another adds. I know not this shopkeeper’s law of which they speak. So I ask for elucidation.
You can’t go into a store and look around, they tell me, if you have no intention of buying in the first place.
Ah. I know that one, just not by that name. I learned it once, a long time ago, from a peer, a partner in shopping, on Nachalat Binyamin, as I searched for a mezuzah. I was fifteen, and it was what seems like another life.
I’m interested by this party’s desire to know what we can or cannot do, according to Judaism, when it comes to business. Are they looking for an entry point into rabbinic wisdom or merely an excuse to justify what they’re feeling? The conversation continues.
The waiter comes back, for the fourth or fifth or sixth time, and this time offers dessert. There’s the cannoli, and the chocolate cake, and the carrot cake, and something we shouldn’t have or want. You see, he already knows of our tribal membership. He’s telling us not to order the “Yule Log.” I can’t imagine anyone ordering a dessert with the name “log,” but I see quickly that this man is merely trying to connect - he wants to let us know, in the most subtle of ways, that he too is Jewish.
And we get it, and so does he, and then he defends his recent “lapse of faith,” going on to explain that the Yule Log, unlike the other desserts, “isn’t kosher.” Seeing as there’s no rabbi here, I recommend you choose another thing to eat.
Actually…
Actually. Great. I’m outed. We smile. He suggests I bless the cake. Doing all I can to ensure that the fork in my hand does not find it’s way to the waiter’s left eye, I smile and nod and ask for a decaf coffee.
The conversation continues, and now people have things to share about the Biennial that just swept through this town. It was pretty amazing, especially Shabbat. Oh yeah? Do tell more.
They talk about praying with so many other people - like San Diego’s Beth Israel on the Holidays, they say, but only one, not two seatings. And the rabbi in charge, they say, gave a great sermon. What was it about? Health care, they explain.
I chuckle inside that an hour-long talk focussing on resurrecting Shabbat from the coffers of bad reformations boils down to support for contemporary politics, but wonder what else will be added. Oh well. But they go on, and remember Shabbat, and the initiative, and now the conversation gets interesting.
You see, it’s a nice idea, this Shabbat thing, but unrealistic - what with work and society how it is.
But then the man in the corner chimes in, the man who just spent a semester of his own studying in Israel. He keeps Shabbat now, he says. It’s about friends and community and stopping and resting. Everyone agrees. If only, they say, we could refocus Jewish life on connections and people and real meaning, Shabbat would easily follow.
I stay quiet through the discussion, taking mental notes in preparation for a long blog entry. But, at the same time, I wonder.
I wonder why it seems to people that Shabbat is so impossible to make real. It doesn’t work here in America. Sure, in Israel you can do it, but, here? No way. But I’ve seen it work - every week! Ha! They’re so wrong! Jews make Shabbat come alive all the time in far corners of this western prairy. And so does that man in the corner, and so do so many others.
I wonder if this isn’t just the same as that Shopkeeper’s Law. It’s a question of what we want to do with Torah. Is it a nice book of parables, or is it something tangible, something real, that I can feel and touch and hold? Lo bashamayim hi! It is not in the heavens! No, it is here, and now, and waiting to be held, Moses so carefully reminds us.
And he was so right. But it’s only here on earth if we make it so. And it takes a lot of hard work and patience to do that. And it takes listening - listening through long dinners and appreciating people where they are.
We’re all at the starting line, each one of us, just waiting for someone to blow the whistle telling us it’s OK to go.
-David Singer
December 30th, 2007
Last call to all you out there who like Jews, like learning, and like Jewish learning. It also helps if you live somewhere in the northeast.
Registration fee goes up soon. If you’re a student or from the New York area, the weekend can be cheap as hell - you have NO excuse.
Check it out. I’ll be there. Will you?
December 21st, 2007
Friday night, the chairs are full, the couch is crowded, standing room only. Atop the white tablecloth are foods of all kinds and flavors. My living room is filled with new faces and old friends, my peers and others older than me - students who study in my “Jews: What We Say, What We Do” class.
I stand near the door and start humming a niggun - something not too difficult, easy to pick up. Some others join in, a few tap the tables to a beat. One by one individuals parade past me, towards the sink, as I sing my tune - a theme song to hand-washing, it seems.
Did I get the blessing right? Which hand to I wash first? Hold this information page for me, will yah.
They ask so many questions because, for many of them, this is a first. First Shabbat dinner. First Shabbat. First time around so many Jews. First time making it real. For others, it’s by now old habit - ritual, done over and over again.
This group is here to learn. A year ago, I knew none of them. One by one they trickled into my cadre, slowly they got to know each other. Since, they have built community. They have learned together and celebrated together.
Two pairs are since married, both expecting children. One converted. Another will convert soon. Another is writing an essay on what being Jewish will mean to her.
Some are learning about everything they were robbed of in their childhood - the rituals, the ideas, the meaning behind the acts. Others are here to be challenged. Some here to support the challenged.
But, all in all, they all came to my apartment Friday night. Together, we brought in Shabbat. Together we learned and ate and prayed and sang.
So many thousands of miles away, this same Shabbat, in San Diego, an important rabbi (Yoffie) for a large group of Jews (the Union for Reform Judaism) proposed that they, a group known for their inobservance (historically, at least), take back Shabbat once and for all.
This wasn’t a new idea. Many rabbis, just as influential, have pushed the concept before.
I remember, one Yom Kippur, sitting in the vast emptiness of the San Diego Civic Center watching the day’s services. The rabbi came forward to speak. Shabbat was his message.
At the climax of his speech, he stripped off his robe to show his shirt: “Shabbat, Just Do It.” So we did it. But did his words have much effect on the community at-large?
Words are nice, and so are programs. This initiative gives me hope, and is, certainly, exciting. But organizations rarely change people, people do. And that individual one-on-one connection is hard, and slow, and takes dedication.
It takes leaders saying, I believe in this, and want to make it real - real for myself, real for others, real for the world. It takes sacrifice, and hard work - the work to say “I believe this so much that I’m willing to give up convenience and ease to make it happen.” It takes standing up to the world and saying, “This may fly in the face of how things normally are, but I’m going to do it anyways. I’m going to stop working, and start learning, start resting, start stopping. Stop.”
I get a call Saturday night from a handful of my students. They wish I were there, wish they could see me, learn with me. The fighter gets on the phone, “I don’t get it,” he says. “It’s Shabbat, we were surrounded by 5,000 other Jews, but they took us to the Zoo!”
So there’s still work to be done.
When the night wound down, and all the guests left my apartment, there were leftovers to still be eaten and a mighty mess to clean up. But already, it was time to think of the next time, the next Shabbat.
Time to get moving. Time to get talking. Time to get thinking.
- David Singer
December 17th, 2007
Translated literally, Chanukah means “Dedication,” recalling the re-dedication of the Temple. In a sense, this is a time of affirming our identities as Jews; a season of “Jewish pride.” In American Judaism in particular, this holiday has acquired the practice of gift-giving, for better or for worse.
This has become the time of the year which, more than any other, we support large corporations, which produce so many of the gifts that we give to our loved ones. When we purchase these gifts, we send a message to these companies–a kind of “positive reinforcement” for the work they do. This Chanukah we have an opportunity to send a far more important message to these companies (including Coca-Cola, Adidas, Johnson and Johnson, and GE): Take one minute to add your voice to the Olympic Dream for Darfur. To write a letter to the corporate sponsors of the August 2008 Olympics in China, click here.
In a holiday about Dedication, there is no cause more in need of our Dedication. Let’s all begin this Chanukah, by bringing pulling our weight to bringing light to the darkest corner of the world.
Matt
December 4th, 2007
So the underground movement which everyone knows about but everyone wants to ignore and no one is willing to make a cumulative assessment about has finally gained the publicity it needs to hit the ground running: the New York Times wrote about it - on the front page of the National section at that! Now it must be true.
Young Jews in their twenties and early thirties, empowered by Day School educations in the eighties and nineties are increasingly venting their frustration with institutionalized synagogues that seem closed to change, innovation and common sense by taking matters into their own hands. They’re creating minyanim that are committed to an intact liturgy, centered around aesthetically beautiful (often musical) prayer, framed by halakhicunderstanding.
In college they (we) learned what leadership was the hard way. “You want to pray on Shabbat?” our Hillel directors asked us. “Great, then lead the minyan.”
We were the experts. The power was in our hands. Money was not an issue. When we needed guidance, we knew who to seek. And everyone else stood back and applauded our efforts: our successes and our failures.
So now, like the hilltop youth of Israel a generation ago, Jews are again taking the Jewish future into their own hands, using the models that they know so well to help them - the internet, a living room, and good food - creating facts on the ground that recreate reality from the ground up.
Look at the picture head-on: young Jews want to pray; young Jews want community; young Jews are tired of superficial-seeming Bar Mitzvah-centered Judaism. They’re sick of passivity, pediatric approaches, and ignorance. They can react in two extreme ways: either they leave the Jewish world, or they uber-involve themselves in this new experiment. I, for one, am much happier with the latter.
But this movement does pose a problem. Namely, it challenges rabbinic authority. The minyanim look at rabbis and, for the most part say, “Who needs you!? We don’t.”
That is something that me and my colleagues must address head-on, especially those of us young enough to be both active in the movement and studying for the rabbinate at the same time. This challenge forces us to take a deep look at what we do and how we do it; it forces us to be honest with ourselves and make the rabbi a relevant and meaningful role again in the lives of our community.
Now’s the time to read the article. You can find it here.
Now’s the time to think for some answers. Now’s the time to challenge assumptions. Now’s the time to think outside of the box.
Thoughts?
-David
November 28th, 2007
Here I am, prancing around Los Angeles for a few short days of sun and driving. A nice reprieve from my true love: Brooklyn.
I spent Erev Shabbat with IKAR, a relatively new, progressive community here in the city of Angels. In many ways, IKAR is doing just what we’re doing on the other coast, and, in other ways, they’re doing things entirely different. Either way, they present an opportunity for self-reflection on what we’re doing in our own ‘hood.
I show up Friday night at 6, and walk into the Los Angeles JCC, an old-60’s inspired building long-overdue for a renovation. The night starts out with a picnic-style Shabbat dinner. It’s not my custom to eat before Kabbalat Shabbat, but I figure, hey, what the hell. This is for research’s sake!
New faces and old for the community sit down to chomp on food. New friendships are built, old ones are strengthened. The room is filled with bag after bag from Trader Joe’s. Maybe this is the key to success? (In that case, only a few short months more of waiting… but I digress…)
And then the prayer. So moving! About a hundred people fill a social hall in a very Brooklyn-Jews-esque style of worship. Traditional Kabbalat Shabbat, mixed with a few short drashes, good singing and smiley faces. Can’t hate that.
The point is, that IKAR is a welcoming community committed to spirited, traditional, and inspiring prayer, learning, and world-fixing. Sound familiar?
So much of what we’ve been about in Brooklyn is offering a low-key entry into Jewish life - for the newly affiliated and newly disaffiliated alike. We work from within a synagogue. They work from without.
Who has the right answer? Who knows. Maybe both are equally good.
Regardless, it feels good to see other Jews on a far away coast worrying themselves with the exact same things we do on ours. How do we re-engage young Jews in Jewish life? How do we build community, in new ways, from the ground up?
I’m reminded of beautiful late-summer day a little over a month ago, when nearly 400 of us gathered in a sun-filled Picnic House in Prospect Park to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. Amazing. What will it take to make that a regular occurrence, a fixture of the community?
We’re all experimenting with new ideas, trying, succeeding, and, at times, failing. But it’s all l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven.
And that, I think, is just dandy.
-David
November 4th, 2007
Today AJWS President Ruth Messinger spoke at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. I’ve heard her speak on many occasions, and each time I walk away with a different sense of “news.” She emphasized from the start that the genocide in Darfur, which the world has tolerated for 4 years now, is astoundingly marginalized from mainstream media. “If you were with us in DC, if you’ve been wriing, and joining us in our efforts,” she explained, “whatever you’ve done, it hasn’t been enough.”
What must happen now in order to revitalize the Jewish slogan “never again”—a slogan that has been ignored again and again? That’s an open question – I welcome responses.
For a creative passionate approach to ending the conflict, check out Olympic Dream for Darfur, founded by a community member of ours who has been making this conflict her full-time job. Dream for Darfur focuses its effort on shaming China for supporting this genocide–this seems to be the most practical and hopeful strategy for ending the genocide. Stay updated—stay angry!—by bookmarking the American Jewish World Service website. Listen to Ruth Messinger’s interview on NPR.
Messinger closed her address by pointing out: “Several generations from now, your children and grandchildren will ask you what you have done to end the genocide in Darfur…I hope you have a good answer.” Indeed, we have done much, made so many calls, so many rallies and marches and letters. But we cannot fool ourselves into being proud: whatever we’ve done, it hasn’t been enough. Let’s do more.
Matt
October 23rd, 2007
Last Thursday at NYU I listened to a debate involving Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Michael Steinhardt. The subject: Jewish values. One point of disagreement among the panelists has remained in my mind. Both Rabbi Boteach and Michael Steinhardt offered a list of values–values upon which the Jewish community stands; values which must endure to ensure that 10 generations from now Jewish life is still thriving. It’s a common age-old practice, identifying the 3, 4, or 5 values that are at the core of Judaism. Both argued so emphatically for these values, and the values they chose were different. In fact, these identified values have always differed. In Pirkei Avot, we read two very different lists of “Al Shlosha D’varim HaOlam Omed–On these 3 things does the world stand.
Prof Noah Feldman argued against the Values-at-the-Center approach–against the claim that by identifying certain values we can ascertain a recipe for continuity. When pushed to question what should be the community’s focus, he answered in no uncertain terms: Torah. Period. As R. ben Bag Bag said, “Turn it, turn it, for everything is within it.” Everything: evolving values; points, better points, and counterpoints; everything is within it.
The next day began Shabbat. Singing al shlosha d’varim (on three things does the world stand), I heard the echoes of Feldman’s challenge. Does our world stand upon certain values?
On what teachings, values, or principles does our world stand?
(For the provocative article that prompted the debate, see Noah Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox” from the NYTimes.)
Matt
October 23rd, 2007
Rosh Hashanah 5768 Sermon, Prospect Park Picnic House, Matt Soffer
We can learn a lot from our best-selling gadgets. As an owner of a Palm Treo, I have a complaint: it doesn’t shut off—it disables the phone-connection, but the rest of the computer, including my calendar, contacts, and tasks remains on, wide awake and welcoming me into the world of my To-Do-List. (I realized this while on a flight, and the flight attendant was less than pleased.) The iPod, which recently reached a global population of 100 million, also lacks an actual “off-button.” Yes, it turns “off,” but it’s not a devoted button—in order to turn it off, you have to do work, and eventually discover that it’s really just an extended “pause” button. That’s not an off-button—at best, it’s “taking a nap.” Meanwhile we live in a world that is losing its off-buttons, and we are losing our naps. It all breaks down to the number 7. But first, a story.
This summer, I was a chaplain in a hospice/end of life care unit. In the morning of my first day of clinical work, I received a note: Room 7, Mr. Green. Mr Green had just lost his father who was 98. When I entered the room, Mr. Green’s eyes were sore with grief; he was still holding his father’s hand. Right away he asked a question: “What do I do now, chaplain?” New to this role, I asked myself the same question: “what do I do?” Before I could respond, Mr. Green’s daughter arrived. The two embraced; she glanced toward her grandfather, shed a tear, and asked her father, “what do we do now, dad?” She took out her Palm Treo, and stepped out of the room to make calls—she answered her own question by turning to her list of “things-to-do.” And so she did what she “had to do.”
This early encounter of mine was one of many in which I observed this human habit of constantly doing, as it creeps into our lives in the most significant moments. It is the habit of doing that can turn a sacred wedding into a business party, or a comfortable home into a 24-hour office. Living in today’s world, we have all experienced first-hand, how our constant “doing” interferes with the all-too-neglected practice of being. Being with bride and groom, being with family, being with ourselves—just being in the myriad moments of our busy, limited lives.
Our tradition has much to say about these two categories—being verses doing. To a culture that lacks off-buttons, Judaism responds with the number 7.
In the beginning, there was the number 7. 7 words in the first verse of the Torah: B’reishit Bara Elohim Eyt HaShamayim v’Eyt Ha-Aretz. These first 7 words of Torah tell of the creation of heaven and earth—with the number 7, our universe begins. For 6 days, God engages in the business of doing, and on the 7th, God stops, making that day holy.
Historically, the 7-day week is a Jewish invention, and the idea of a 7th day of rest emerged as a radical response to oppressive labor conditions. As Rabbi Michael Lerner explains, Shabbat is the result and celebration of the first national liberation struggle.” Shabbat is not only a Jewish law about what we can and can’t do on a certain day, it is also a Jewish concept, an idea—an ethical legacy. At the core of our age-old Jewish story is the memory that Avadim Hayinu, we were slaves, deprived of a day of rest, and then liberated.
Tragically, we live in a world that, by and large, is not. According to The American Anti-Slavery group, 27 million people are enslaved around the world—up to 17,000 in our own United States—in this “Land of the Free” alone, slavery is estimated to yield profits of 9 billion dollars a year. As Charles Jacobs, President of iAbolish.org explains:
Modern-day slavery does not fit our familiar images of shackles, whips, and auctions…. Though the vast majority are no longer sold at public auctions, today’s slaves are often no better off than their more familiar predecessors.
Avadim Hayinu, we were their predecessors. We, as inheritors of the Shabbat concept, are strongly connected to the millions of people who are living in our nightmare memory. “Six days shall you work, and the 7th day is a Sabbath to your God. On it, you shall do no work, neither you, nor your family members, nor your animals, nor anyone who works for you, nor the stranger who is within your gates.” Those who are enslaved in our society are strangers within our gates—working for us. The fruits of their labor are the clothing on our backs, the coffee in our pots, the diamonds on our fingers. Now is the time to remember that in the beginning there was the number 7.
And there have been 7 throughout: Lev. 25 instructs that every 7th year is a Sabbatical year for the land, a year of complete rest. This 7th year is known as the Shemitah year (shemitah meaning rest, release, liberation). In a Shemita year, the land must be free of cultivation or organized harvesting. Rabbi Gunther Plaut explains that this is an ancient expression of the Shabbat idea. And it is this Shabbat idea, an ancient Hebrew invention, that we recall this year because this year in the Hebrew calendar is a Shemitah year—a year of rest, a time for our land to stop doing, a time for us to stop exploiting.
In this shemitah year, we are also compelled to consider our world environmentally and ecologically. Are we observing the idea of shemitah, of Shabbat for our land? Are we actively pursuing alternative energy resources? Weaning off of oil, lessoning our world-leading carbon emissions? Protecting wildlife? Managing our waste? This year the environment is in need of this sacred #7, and we must guard it—for God, for our world, and, most relevantly for us in this season, for ourselves, as we stand in relationship to each other and God.
It’s not only soil that needs Sabbatical—Shemita relates to our productive work lives as well. According to the Harvard Business Review, workaholism is on the rise, particularly among high-earning individuals, the vast majority of whom now work more than 50 hours a week. According to the American Institute of Stress, Job stress is more strongly associated with health complaints than financial or family problems. Though for most of us a sabbatical may be out of the question, perhaps a more reasonable possibility might be a year in which we don’t work ourselves sick, a year for us to breathe, to focus on the off-buttons: taking our lunch breaks, exploring this beautiful Prospect park, taking care of our bodies, and of course, spending time with our loved ones.
When Mr. Green’s daughter returned to the room, Mr. Green reached out for her hand, and drew her near. He placed her hand on the hand of his fathers, putting his own hand on top. Mr. Green was teaching his daughter how to turn off her Palm Treo and instead hold her grandfather’s hand—being present this way hadn’t appeared on her to-do-list. Mr. Green and his daughter had become human beings rather than human doings, as they said goodbye. I quietly left the room. There was nothing left to be done.
Before us there are 7—7 days in between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. These days are designed to represent life—this entire period of the Days of Awe, is a microcosm of our lifetime, with Rosh HaShanah as the beginning, Yom Kippur as the end. On Rosh HaShanah we eat apples and honey, we celebrate Creation. On Yom Kippur we don’t eat or drink, we don’t wash or brush, traditionally we dress in funeral garb. In the Kol Nidre service, it’s a custom to remove the Torah from the aron kodesh, the holy ark, during the chanting of kol nidre. When the Torah is removed from the aron kodesh, it becomes a simple “aron”—the Hebrew word for coffin. With our human sins on our minds and our vulnerability in our hearts, we stand before the naked aron and face our pure and mortal selves. It is meant to be a liturgical near-death experience. However, unlike the day of our death, at the end of Yom Kippur, the Shofar is sounded—we awaken, and are pulled out of the depths, pushed forward into the next year of our lives. We eat, we nourish our bodies, and we move forward to another week, another month, another year. RH is the beginning, YK is the end, and in the middle there are 7—7 days, in which we consider ourselves, not as human doings but as human beings.
In the end…there are 7 – 7 words in the final line of the ancient priestly benediction: Yisa Adonai panav eilecha v’yasem l’cha shalom: May God lift up his face upon you and give you peace—Shalom, wholeness, oneness, the completion of creation. May we—not as human doings but as human beings—find the paths toward sacred rest and renewal, the hidden “off-buttons” aching to be pushed, and in this Sabbatical 7th year, this Shabbat for the earth, may we be open to God’s blessing of peace—the Shabbat that is the only way to Shalom.
September 16th, 2007
August slowly begins to make way for September, with the Holidays and another year of learning, praying, community building and general merry-making coming on its heels.
As we prepare, in the next few weeks, to jump into 5768, what new opportunities are you looking for in your Jewish journey? What learning needs have been left unmet? Where would you like to go with prayer? What ideas do you have for saving the world that you’d like to share?
There is already so much being offered - just jump around the Brooklyn Jews website, or take a look at some of the great programming happening within CBE.
But let’s do even more! Let’s think outside of the box. Let’s try old things in new ways. Let’s bring new community members into the fold of this crazy idea that is Brooklyn Jews.
In the next month, Matt and I will be putting in a lot of work on the year’s calendar. Any ideas you have for how we can make this coming year even more amazing and meaningful would be greatly appreciated.
Post a comment here, or drop us an email. We look forward to being in touch.
-David
August 16th, 2007
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