Shine a New Light

The following reflection was offered at HUC-JIR services this week.

NASA astronomer Natalie Batahlia compares the existence of dark matter in our universe to the existence of love. Dark matter, she explains, is this strange force that scientists can’t quite yet explain, that neither our eyes nor our most powerful telescopes can quite see, but that we know we exists. Dark matter causes galaxies to hold together. It causes planets to move along their orbit. Dark matter moves us, brings us together, keeps the universe from completely falling apart.

And so it is with love. We can’t see it. We can’t quite explain it. But we know it’s real.

Love brings us together. It keeps us moving. It’s the force that keeps our universe from completely falling apart.

Our experience tells us that the dark is bad. The unknown can be scary. The mysterious can be overwhelming.

But Judaism recognizes what Natalie Batahlia recognizes—that there’s One God who creates both darkness and light, both mystery and understanding, “yotzeir or uvorei choshech.”

Our dark matters—our brokenness and our pain—these are the forces that move us, the forces that bring us together, the forces that remind us of our own humanity. Darkness is a source of love.

And this is why we pray “Or chadash al tzion ta-ir—shine a new kind of light on our lives: not the kind of light that washes out the dark, but rather a kind that helps us to discern the force of love in our universe, even when it’s buried in dark matters.

Baruch Atah Adonai, Yotzeir HaMei’orot. 

What Does it Mean to be a Jew? Israeli and American Teens Share their Perspectives

The following post originally appeared on the blog of Gateways and Tents, the partnership between Temple Shaaray Tefila of New York and Congregation Ohel Avraham of Haifa.

This past Sunday morning, the American and Israeli teen cohorts met for the first time via Skype. We spent an hour introducing ourselves to each other and learning about each other’s families and interests. The groups found that they had a lot in common—from their shared interest in dance, music, theatre, and sports, to their shared quest to define their own authentic Jewish identities.

One Israeli teen asked the American group: “So, are you secular?” At first, the American teens weren’t sure how to respond. The meaning of the words “secular” and “religious” are very different in Israel and in North America. For most Israelis, the words religious and secular denote a binary choice—between those who lead halachicly observant lives and those who don’t. In North America, it’s possible to see oneself as both religious (in that a Jew might observe some Jewish holidays) and simultaneously see oneself as secular (in that he or she might spend money on Shabbat).

One American teen responded to the question by explaining that he’s not strictly secular, and he’s not strictly religious either. He explained that he goes to synagogue on most holidays and attends Shabbat services a few times a month, and that he’s active in his Jewish youth group—practices that might be called “religious.” At the same time, he eats non-Kosher food, uses electricity on Shabbat, and spends his free time watching TV or hanging our with friends, rather than engaged in Jewish study—practices that might be called “secular.”

The American teens then asked the Israeli teens if they had all celebrated a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. The Israelis all nodded their heads vigorously. When the Americans clarified their question—Did you read from the Torah on your Bar/Bat Mitzvah?—the Israelis changed their answers: most of the boys had read from the Torah, and had done so in an Orthodox synagogue; most of the girls had only had a party.

And despite their having not read from the Torah on their Bar/Bat Mitzvah, the Israeli teens are in many ways more deeply engaged in Jewish life than the American teens. They study Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) in school. They live on streets with names like Ehad HaAm Road and Abba Hillel Silver Road. They speak, read, and write in Hebrew. Although they don’t wear a Kippah or belong to a synagogue, they engage in Jewish life in countless subtle ways. (For a thought-provoking exploration of this topic, see the film The Transparent Kippah.)

So the question arises: What does it mean to be a Jew?

After this first meeting, my sense is that the Americans and the Israelis have very similar definitions of their Jewishness, even though each uses different language to describe it. Whether “secular,” “religious,” or somewhere in between, both groups are living liberal Jewish lives and wrestling to define exactly what that means.

Noah and his Neighbors

This D'var Torah originally appeared in an edition of the Shaaray Tefila e-News

In this week’s Torah portion (Gen. 6:9-11:32), we read the story of Noah’s Ark. Only ten generations after Adam and Eve, God grows tired of humankind’s lawlessness, and decides to start again from scratch.

Now, you might be wondering: “Didn’t we read on Yom Kippur that ‘God does not want the death of sinners, but rather that they should turn from their evil ways and live’? What’s up with the change of heart, God?” Our ancient rabbinic sages were troubled by this too. And so they creatively determine: “God told Noah to build an ark so that Noah’s neighbors might see his labor and be moved to repent.” But unfortunately, as we can infer from the Torah story, Noah’s neighbors were not moved by his actions.

We learn an important lesson from Noah’s neighbors. Sometimes we imagine that we can leave the work of repairing our broken world to other people—that someone else will help that hungry person, that someone else will repair that flooded home.  But we can’t just rely on other people to play the role of Noah for us. Rather, we should be inspired by their example and roll up our sleeves, so that together we can build something more than just an ark.

Taking the First Bite

The following sermon was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan on Shabbat B'reishit.

I’ve lived in New York for over a year now, and I have a pretty good sense of direction, but there are still times that I find myself gettin lost. Maybe it’s when I come up above ground from the subway and I’m not sure which direction I’m facing. Or maybe it’s when I’m down in the West Village and the streets start to run diagonally. Sometimes I feel lost when I start something new—the first day of a new job and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to wear; the first time going to that bodega and I’m not sure where the Cheerios are. 

Whether we recognize it or not, each of us is getting lost all of the time. It happens to us when there’s some information that you don’t have, when there’s something that you need to know in order to make sense of it all.

This week, in the very first parshah of our Torah cycle, we find the story of a character who was tired of getting lost—Eve. Eve spent the first part of her life in the Garden of Eden walking around without a clue about the world around her. There were some nice plants, some friendly animals, this nice guy named Adam, but she didn’t have any real purpose. Every day, the same routine, day in and day out. And yet, despite the routine—or maybe because of it—Eve felt lost. There was nothing to do, nothing to know, nothing to get excited about.

So when Eve saw that piece of fruit hanging from the Tree of Knowledge, she realized “nechmad ha-eitz l’haskil / that the tree was worthy was a source of wisdom.” “Why should I continue to stumble around this Garden,” I can imagine Eve saying, “lost, without purpose, when a perfectly good source of wisdom is hanging right there?”

And so, Eve chose to no longer be lost. She chose to eat the fruit. Suddenly she saw the world as she had never seen it before. Suddenly, she realized that there were such things as good and bad. Can you even imagine how radically amazing it must have been for Eve to go from an amoral, partially-blinded, gray-scale view of the world suddenly to morally aware, 360-degree, Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat vision of reality? Suddenly, Eve had a moral compass. Suddenly, she had self-awareness. And of course, that self-awareness was sometimes inhibiting, but for a previously un-self-aware person, it was incredibly liberating. Eve ushered in a whole new era in the human history, in era in which a person could feel lost and still know where to get the information she needed in order to find her way home again. Eve gave us the power of knowledge.

The choice to eat that fruit and to gain her self-consciousness was, no doubt, a hard decision. I wonder if Eve recognized that in the majority of Western religious literature, she’d be remembered not as a radical free thinker but as a weak-willed sinner.

But even regardless of the reputation it would eventually earn her, Eve’s choice to eat that fruit and gain her self-consciousness would come with a price. Sometimes, self-consciousness can sometimes be a burden. Sometimes, we imagine that it would be easier not to know the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes, we imagine that we might be better off if we could just ignore those pesky parts of our personalities with which we’re uncomfortable. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Maybe your joking nature masks a deep insecurity. Or maybe there’s something in your past that you’re ashamed of, a long-ago trauma that you can neither let go of nor fully face. It hurts us to look at these things. It makes us feel lost. But to bury them back down deep inside of us will only cause us to continue to feel lost. We can’t find our way out of the woods if we’re constantly returning to bury our traumas. We have to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

I wonder how many of us can say that we’re as brave as Eve, that we’re willing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? How many of us are willing to give up saying things like “Ignorance is bliss,” and “What grandma doesn’t know can’t hurt her”? How many of us are willing to give up the safety of living in our personal Gardens of Eden for the sometimes-painful world of self-knowledge and wisdom?

I read this summer in the New York Times a personal essay by James Carlos Blake in which he describes the pain—and ultimately, the reward—of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Blake describes how at the age of three or four, he remembers his grandmother telling him that he had had a twin brother who died at just a couple of days old. His grandmother told him that it had been a very painful experience for his parents, and she swore him to secrecy. But of course, a few nights later, Blake asked his parents about what his grandma had told him. His mother burst into tears and left the room, while his father explained that “Grandma was getting very old and sick, and sometimes she mixed up stories in her mind. That’s the reason why mommy was crying.” His father asked Blake that he never mention it again. And so, he didn’t.

Meanwhile, Blake describes how in his teenage and young-adult years, he lived with what he calls “a chronic loneliness.” Blake was lost. “It wasn’t just clinical depression,” Blake writes. “It wasn’t the blues. It was a confusing sense that I was somehow incomplete.”

Many years later, as an adult—after Blake’s mother had passed away and as his father was nearing the end of his life—Blake remembered for the first time in years the incident with his grandmother. “Was it really a senile fantasy?” he asked his dad. His father grew silent, shocked that his son had remembered this incident from the age of three or four. He then told Blake that yes, he had indeed had a twin brother, that yes, he had died at only a couple of days old, that yes, it was a very painful experience, and that no, no one in the family had ever talked about it.

I don’t pretend that I could even imagine the pain that Blake’s mother and father must have felt to loose their infant child. I don’t pretend to know that I would have done anything differently. And God forbid that anyone should ever have to find out. And yet, I recognize that for years, Blake—and his mother and father—were all lost.

It’s true that eating from the Tree of Self-Knowledge will sometimes cause us pain, or shame, or even cause us to grieve—as was the case with Blake’s mom. But without knowledge, there can be no healing. Without knowledge, there can be no growth. Without knowledge, we’ll always be lost in the woods.

In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, author and doctor Rachel Naomi Remen writes, “When Eve ate the fruit, she became an adult, and gained the freedom of an adult to go out into a world of complexity, adventure, responsibility, and change. To have her own life and to make her own choices.”

As Remen correctly identifies, eating from the Tree of Knowledge means embracing complexity. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge will require facing the parts of ourselves that we’d rather not know. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge will require the bravery to live face-to-face with a broken world, and if we’re lucky, to no longer feel lost, but find ourselves amidst the brokenness.

In our popular culture, we imagine that the forbidden fruit was an apple. But the Torah doesn’t specify what kind of fruit it was. And so, the ancient Rabbis set out to creatively determine what was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

One sage declared that it must have been a fig—for, after Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked, they sewed themselves clothing out of fig leaves. Another sage declared that, although they don’t even grow on trees, it must have been some sort of grape—for a grape may sometimes taste bitter, like the bitterness of leaving the garden.

But I tend to agree with the sage who suggested that it was an olive. An olive’s pit, the sage points out, is very close to its skin; its core is not too far from its edge. The olive is the symbol of a person who is, as much as possible, the same on the outside as she is on the inside. An olive is a person who is powerfully self-conscious. An olive is a person who gets lost in the woods just like the rest of the rest of us; but when she does get lost, she knows how to look within herself and find herself again.

This week, we begin again with the first parshah of the Torah. Year after year, we come back again to this very spot, where the story of our people begins with one tiny, radical moment. A woman eats an olive, and the entirety of Jewish history, of Jewish wisdom, of Jewish thought is catapulted out of this moment—this courageous, terrifying, transformative moment of awareness. Every year, we come back to this beginning. And we discover that the first step in finding ourselves is the knowledge that we’re lost.

And wish for all of us on this Shabbat, and in the coming week, and in the year ahead is: that when we meet again next year, back at this beginning, it will have been a year of self-knowledge, a year of wisdom, and a year filled with the courage to take the first bite.

Shabbat shalom.

You Shall Love Your Neighbor...

The following d'var torah was delivered on Yom Kippur afternoon at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

In a few moments, we’re going to read what is sometimes referred to as the ethical core of the Torah. In one climatic chapter, God lays out God’s expectations for ethical living, including such maxims as “leave the corners of your field for the poor,” “do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” and famously, The Golden Rule: “V’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha—You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In the days leading up the High Holidays, I found myself wondering: What is it that gets in the way of achieving the Torah’s ethical standards? A person asks for money on the train, and we avert our eyes. A person sleeps under the awning by our corner store, and we walk past him every morning as if he wasn’t there. We hold grudges. We lie. What is it that keeps us from loving our neighbors as ourselves?

One answer—and I think a sound, but ultimately unsatisfying answer—comes from our ancient sage Rabbi Hillel. The Talmud records that once a non-Jew approached Rabbi Hillel and asked to be converted to Judaism, so long as Hillel could explain the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Rabbi Hillel accepted the challenge, balanced himself on one leg and said, “Do not do unto others that which is hurtful to you. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

Rabbi Hillel takes The Golden Rule and frames it in the negative: “Do not do unto others that which is hurtful to you.” And yes, this alleviates us of unrealistic responsibilities to perfect strangers. Would loving your neighbor as yourself mean that you have to love your neighbor’s children as much as your own children? This kind of expectation is unrealistic, and Rabbi Hillel provides a more nuanced framework in which to understand our ethical responsibilities. “Do not do unto others that which is hurtful to you.”

But Rabbi Hillel’s formulation can’t possibly relieve us of our responsibilities towards that person who sleeps under the awning at the corner store. Maybe something that isn’t hurtful to me will, unwittingly, be hurtful to someone else in ways I couldn’t even imagine. It doesn’t hurt me to stand under the shower for 30 minutes every morning, but it likely does hurt someone who doesn’t have access to clean water at all. It doesn’t hurt me to spend all my money exactly as I’d like, but it does contradict the command to “leave the corners of your field for the poor.” So while Rabbi Hillel’s maxim does help explain why it’s sometimes hard to live up to the Torah’s ethical standard, it does so only to a partially. And nevertheless, the Torah still says, “V’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha—Love your neighbor as yourself.” And I find, time and again, that that’s really hard to do.

The 18^th century German-Jewish philosopher Rabbi Naftali Herz Weisel offers the following solution. Rabbi Weisel examines a grammatical peculiarity in the phrasing of “v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha.” Perhaps you’ve heard that last word before, kamocha. It’s in one of our prayers—“Mi chamocha ba-eilim Adonai—Who, o God, is like you?” Who is “kamocha?” Who is “like you?” Using this insight, Rabbi Weisel retranslates “v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha”—not “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but rather, “Love your neighbor, kamocha.” “Love your neighbor, like you.” “Love your neighbor, he is like you.” “Love your neighbor, because, like you, he is also a human being.”

The word kamocha, the word “like you,” doesn’t refer to how much we’re supposed to love our neighbor, but rather to the reason that we’re supposed to love our neighbor. “You should love your neighbor, because your neighbor is like you.” Because that person who asks for money on the subway is like you. Because that person who sleeps beneath the awning at the corner store is like you. You should let go of your grudges, because that person against whom you hold a grudge is like you. All 7 billion of us are just like you. That is to say, all 7 billion of us are human, like you. All 7 billion of us were created in the image of God, like you. All 7 billion of us have a spark of divinity inside of us, a light in our eyes, breath in our lungs, a mother, a father, a story of where we come from and a hope for where we going—just like you.

So I think I found an answer to my question. I think I know at least one thing that gets in the way of living up to the Torah’s ethical standards, and more importantly, of living up to my own. And it’s not what might you think. It’s not that I forgot that each one of us has a divine spark inside. It’s that I sometimes forget that I do.

My wish for all of us this Yom Kippur is that 5774 will be a year in which we keep our eye on the divine spark inside of us. Because if you can remember that you’re divine, that’s the first step in remembering that we’re all divine. That varied though we may be, each one of us is like you.