Our sages imagined a whole cycle of sacred time to prepare our souls for the High Holy Days. It starts on the 17th of Tammuz, the Tzom (Fast) of Tammuz, which is July 19 this year. It encompasses the low point of Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Jewish month of Av, the day that commemorates tragedy upon genocide upon misfortune, letting us practice the pain of loss.

This summer series will explore Jewish sacred time in the summer and how to use it and other traditional Jewish spiritual practices, such as Mussar (the 1,000 year old spiritual practice of spiritual accounting), to be the person you want to be. Using texts and discussion, we will explore what the rabbis had in mind and what it can mean for us today.

The next class is August 4 at 7 pm, and others will occur every other Thursday (7/21, 8/4, 8/18, 9/1 and 9/15), from 7 – 8:30 pm.

The  class will be at 1429 Butterfield Road, San Anselmo. Please call for directions (or use mapquest or your GPS).

Cost: $18 per class. Come to all, or drop in to one or two.

Week One (July 21): The Jewish Sacred Calendar in the Summer: What were the rabbis thinking?

Week Two: (August 4): What does Tisha B’Av have to say to me? J Introduction to Mussar Practice. Text study from the Talmud and Tanakh.

Week Three (August 18): Getting ready for Elul: How can I use this month to prepare my soul? Let’s practice some Mussar.

Week Four (September 1): In the midst of Elul: What do I still have to do to be ready?

Week Five (September 15): Final touches for this year: How do we keep up the work? Getting ready for Selichot.

Call or email if you have questions. 415.721.7096. rebmeredith@att.net.

 

 

I recently read an ad online for a training workshop titled, “How to deliver bad news.” What a great idea! I know of too many times when someone needed to share such news, but could not quite find the right time. So the person anxiously waits, and waits, and when what appears to be the slightest opening, they seize it, give the news and walk away, relieved, only to find out later, what worked for them did not work at all for the person receiving the news. As one who has been on the receiving end myself, I know how challenging this can be, both to absorb the information and to accept how the news was delivered.

 

And so I believe it is with God and Moses in this week’s Torah portion, Hukkat, deep into Bemidbar (In the Wilderness, or Numbers, the fourth of the Five Books of Moses). Moses’ and Aaron’s sister, Miriam, dies, and the people bury her, and then they cry for thirst. They do not just cry, they surround the grieving brothers and demand relief. It is an ugly time in the wilderness, with no one at their best: the grumbling mob, Moses, or even the Holy One. Moses has to be in a state of mourning for Miriam, and then the people come to him with one more complaint, one that reflects their own grief at the loss of her leadership and presence. Yes, they are thirsty, but surely the thirst cannot be only physical. She–who the midrash tells us was responsible for the well of pure water that followed them throughout their wanderings–must have provided them spiritual sustenance as well.

 

So, the people, and especially the brothers are grieving, but do not know how to treat each other well. How very painful these scenes are to read: we know so many people whose families wander lost in the wilderness of grief, and turn on rather than to each other. Traditional Jewish rituals around death and dying offer us specific guidelines to offer help, rather than harm at these vulnerable moments.

 

But it is God’s role that is the most perplexing, I find. Moses, in his own state of grief, confronted by an angry mob, acts out and does not follow precise instructions–and for this, God tells him he will not be allowed to enter the Promised Land? Much commentary has been written on the topic, because it is such a mystery. And this is why I wonder: was this God’s “slight opening” to tell Moses, the faithful servant, that it was never to be that he would enter the land? Is it possible that his life’s task was to deliver us to the border, and turn the reins over to Joshua? Would Joshua have been able to take up the mantle of leadership with Moses next to him as the emeritus leader? It is not the crowd-pleasing ending to the story, but it is a realistic one.

 

Maybe the text is telling us that while Moses was likely considering his own mortality after his sister’s death, God thought this was the opportune moment to deliver the news. Maybe we are witnessing an example of the difficulty of sharing the truly painful parts of life. Even the Holy One could not find a graceful way to break the news. May we, as we study Hukkat, consider the loving care required when sharing the pain of life. And may we, on the receiving end, gain compassion for the one who is trying. Let the training begin!

 

Shabbat Shalom!

 

This will be the final class in the series. We will be studying the prayers we pray after the Torah is put away, or after tachanun. (Although we may spend a couple of minutes on tachanun itself…) Please join us.

Title: Lunch, Learn, Pray: Concluding Prayers
Location: Congregation Shomrei Torah, 2600 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa
Start Time: 12:00
Date: 2011-06-18
End Time: 13:00

Shabbat shalom.

When I was a girl growing up in Queens, in NY, my mother often took my two sisters and me to Broadway musicals: we saw Fiddler, Man of La Mancha, 1776, revivals of Annie Get Your Gun, with Ethel Merman, and South Pacific, and many more. All the women dancers were small, petite, capable of being lifted easily by the male dancers. When I was a teen, my sister took me for the first time to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, where I was astonished and amazed by Judith Jamison, the larger than life – or at least larger than any woman dancer – I had ever seen. She was noted for power, grace, regal bearing and emotional interpretation. But how did someone of her exceptional size – she reached at 5’10” – make it to the dance stage in the first place? Her parents sent her to ballet lessons when she was 6, to help imbue her already noticeable height with grace… She was already a giant among grasshoppers, who believed in herself enough to develop her technique and let the music flow through her, so that she could reach the heights of an art form usually reserved for the petite body.

 

Grasshoppers and giants: those images come from this week’s torah portion: Shelakh Lecha – the fourth portion of the fourth book of the torah, Bemidbar, or Numbers. God tells Moses Shelakh Lecha – send for yourself… men to scout the land I have promised to give you. It is a story of such profound heart ache, such terror, such bad behavior and such heroes. It is such a modern story, and such an ancient one…

 

The leaders of each tribe, brave men and true, are given six specific tasks by Moses:

1. “Go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country, and see what kind of country it is.
2. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many?
3. Is the country in which they dwell good or bad?
4. Are the towns they live in open or fortified?
5. Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not?
6. And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land.” (Num. 13:17-20)

 

It was a military, strategic task, to do the planning they needed to claim their inheritance…

So off they went to explore the land, returning 40 days later. Here’s what they reported to Moses, Aaron, and the whole community, as they showed them the fruit of the land. (Num. 13:26)

Note that they spoke to the entire people, rather than just to Moses and Aaron…

“We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.

So far, so good…

However, the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the Anakites there. Amalekites dwell in the Negev region; Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country; and Canaanites dwell by the Sea and along the Jordan.” (Num. 13:27-29)

 

It all sounds like the instructions Moses gave them. Is the country good or bad? Are the cities fortified? What kinds of people? What’s the problem?

 

In Hebrew, after they show the giant grapes, the next word is efes… However… Did you notice it? That one little word. It means so much. Efes is often used to say, “it will all come to naught.” The land may flow with milk and honey, efes – it will all come to naught—because of the Anakites and Amalekites and the giants… we seemed like grasshoppers ourselves and so we must have seemed to them… (Num. 13:33)

 

You can almost hear it as a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you see yourself as small and weak, it is entirely possible that others will as well—and treat you accordingly. Ibn Ezra, the 12^th century Spanish commentator, noted that this whole scene was another episode of us not being ready to rid ourselves of the slave mentality, the ability to embrace the opportunity for change and growth.

 

The rabbis associate this story with the disastrous day of Tisha B’Av, the 9^th of Av, the day that witnessed the destruction of both the first and second temples as well as a number of other collective Jewish disasters. We read the Book of Lamentations – or Eicha, in Hebrew. We fast. We mourn… We experience the pain of loss. And this torah portion is associated with all that?

 

10 of the 12 scouts, excepting Caleb and Joshua, came back with a report that sent us, the children of Israel, into yet another dither of hysteria: better we should return to familiar slavery, or die in the wilderness than face a beautiful land where we would be seen as the small, scared, insecure people we were…

 

Our leadership failed us that day, and we became a frightened horde who threatened to pelt Caleb and Joshua with stones rather than listen to their message of hope. And this became the archetype for every disaster that struck us until the Holocaust.

 

How did this happen? What was so terrible?

 

One of my teachers explains that the tragedy of this story is in the nature of the sin we committed that day. Our leaders – with a tiny word – efes – however —allowed their own anxiety in the face of insecurity to overwhelm all that had been given to them already. And we – the people of Israel, we ran amok again, just as we had at the Golden Calf. One way of looking at sin – a  word laden with heavy connotations, one that could be explored at length, another time – is that it is the actions that stem, unmediated, from our fears and anxieties. Of course we will be scared when faced with giants, or the sea before us and our enemies behind us, or when we are asked to do something far outside our comfort zone, that asks us to stretch, maybe too far… But how do we deal with that anxiety? Have you ever lost it at someone you love because of your own fears? Of course, many of us have… and it’s that sort of behavior that the torah so often shows us is both the norm and something we can struggle with, to learn to be better people…

 

It is what we do with our fears and anxiety that is a key to Jewish spirituality. The tradition offers us better ways of looking at our behavior, different models for handling the stress, and for looking at ourselves honestly and realistically – to assess with open eyes whether we really are grasshoppers, or whether we are projecting our fears onto others.

 

Joshua and Caleb were able to be visionaries, while their compatriots, fellow communal leaders, could not harness their imaginations to see a world in which the miracles they had already lived through could continue: as a friend of mine wrote, they revisioned the possible into the impossible because of their fears. Joshua and Caleb were able to rise above their slave mentality to picture themselves – and the rest of the children of Israel – living in the land of milk and honey. While they might have seen themselves as grasshoppers, they did not assume that others did, nor did they imagine grasshoppers as helpless creatures without a friend in the world. They took stock of their situation, and with faith in the Holy One, each other and themselves, knew that the children of Israel could achieve what had been promised them. Just as Judith Jamison was not cowed by the normal expectations of the dance world and honed her craft despite her unusual frame, so did Caleb and Joshua trust their circumstances.

 

Redemption is found when we can see ourselves realistically and recognize we are made b’tzelem elohim – in the divine image, born with the divine spark; sometimes we might be grasshoppers, but we can defeat giants. I pray that we all explore the ways we see ourselves as grasshoppers, and begin to transform that view to one of strength, and value, ready to meet the challenges of our own lives.

 

 

At ordination, one of my sister ordinees noted that the primary question she is asked is why did she become a rabbi… it is a frequent question for me too. My stock answer is sisterhood and my daughter’s beautiful soul. But how is also an important question: 140 flights to and from LA on Southwest, the flexibility of the people i work for, and especially from my family. And Rabbi Stacy Friedman also deserves credit – when I met with her about 7 years ago about becoming a rabbi, she did not laugh at the idea and she pointed me in the direction of the Academy for Jewish Religion CA, the transdenominational seminary that nourished my heart, soul and mind for the past five years. She understood that, despite my commitment to Reform Judaism, Hebrew Union College would not be able to meet my family’s individual needs, while it turned out that AJR (AJR) used great flexibility to do exactly that. My family also exhibited remarkable flexibility to allow me to leave for 2-3 days a week, 35 weeks a year for 4 years. R. Stacy also told me at the end of my first year in seminary that she was already planning tonight’s service, exhibiting complete faith in me. For this, I am grateful.

The journey took a circuitous path… I was president of Sisterhood back in 1994, when I attended my first Women of Reform Judaism/URJ biennial (URJ was still UAHC back then!): where I had my first experience of praying with 4,000 committed Jews, saw Debbie Friedman for the first time and feasted from a smorgasbord of learning opportunities. I was completely hooked. Whatever I had to do to have access to that kind of spiritual experience – I would do. Be sisterhood president? No problem. Create programs, with all the messy details? Of course. Serve on the temple board? Well, if I have to. Because the learning wasn’t just book knowledge – the texts illuminated the challenges of my life. And each time I studied was an incredible high.

An example: for a sisterhood retreat, no one wanted to chant torah, so I decided it was time to learn. (My bat mitzvah, at age 12, comprised 1 verse of haftarah…) Cantor David Margules burned a CD, and with the text and his voice on my computer, I learned the first five verses of Genesis. As I sat in my office, tears streamed down my face as I dove into the river of all the Jews through the millennia who had learned these same verses. I remember Sam pleading with me to “turn that racket off!” until he saw the tears…

And working with as part of the High Holy Day Sanctuary Service leadership all those years allowed me to partner with this deeply spiritual and creative group of people and gave me the confidence to imagine I could DO this, lead people to a spiritual place. And you don’t have to be a rabbi to do these things.

But I personally wanted more. Yearned for more. Craved more. And the path opened up to me. And I have learned so much, been excited so often by our tradition.

For example, I learned that virtually every time I read a torah portion, I rediscover that I love that portion – there is so much in it! And so it is with this torah portion, Be’ha’alotecha – the 3^rd parasha in Bemidbar or Numbers, the fourth book of Torah…

First let me detour to give you one definition of Jewish spirituality: it is the effort to strengthen our neshamas – our souls – against the yetzer hara… the inclination toward evil. And so, one way to look at Judaism is as a set of spiritual disciplines.

And this week’s torah portion offers several clear hints about why this must be so: “And the people took to complaining bitterly before God.”[1] We complained about everything – we didn’t like the manna (even though it tasted like rich cream – or in the midrash, whatever we wanted) – we wanted meat (even though we had all our livestock with us)… even Moses (whom God tells us is a very humble man, the most humble of men…[2]) became overwhelmed: he tells God that he can’t handle the unruly mass of us and if God doesn’t do something – well, kill me now![3] And then just a little later, we stumble upon Miriam and Aaron speaking against their baby brother, and for this, Miriam (alone) is stricken with the white disease and must spend a week outside the camp, for which Moses utters the immortal words – El Na Refa Na La – Please God heal her.[4]

When left to our natural devices, it seems our souls could benefit from a little discipline, no?

So the Jewish spiritual disciplines:

Moadim – our sacred calendar

Mussar – the discipline of self-reflection

Tefilah – prayer

And Torah… I’m going to talk about the first two tonight.

Moadim: each holiday has its own spiritual task – spiritual tasks that truly we are supposed to work on every day, but sometimes we don’t actually get around to it, and so we have a holy day to reflect on that spiritual work… For instance, Shavuot, which just passed on Wednesday, is the holy day the rabbis calculated was the day we received the Torah… And our spiritual task? To figure out if and how each of us can be present to the divine presence and translate that into something usable to reach our best selves.

Mussar: The 1,000 year old spiritual path of transformative practices based on insights and teachings found in Jewish texts. And yet, Mussar is not an intellectual exercise; indeed Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, the Ramchal, who lived in 18^th Century Italy, wrote that his text, The Path of the Just, didn’t teach anything innovative: any thinking person already knew what he had to say: they just didn’t employ it. The goal is to transform personality or human nature itself in the service of reaching an essential human value: service and responsibility for other human beings. ‘Mussar’ means instruction, correction, accepting reproof of a moral/ethical nature. It is entirely about doing the spiritual work to be able to be healthy in ourselves and in our relationships, to connect to the best parts of ourselves… And it requires work. And offers real benefits…

Moses, we learn this week, was the most humble, anav, of people: from this we learn that humility is not about being meek, mild, self-effacing, but about having an accurate measure of ourselves – taking up the right amount of space. For example, most women take up too little space in our own lives and we all know people who take up a lot of space.

There is a story of the Chofetz Chayim, a 19th and 20th century Polish rebbe who had a tremendous impact on the Jewish world. When asked how he had achieved this success, the Chofetz Chaim answered, “I set out to try to change the world, but I failed. So I decided to scale back my efforts and only try to influence the Jewish community of Poland, but I failed there, too. So I targeted the community in my hometown of Radin, but achieved no greater success. Then I gave all my effort to changing my own family, and failed at that as well. Finally, I decided to change myself, and that’s how I had such an impact on the Jewish world.”

Jewish spiritual disciplines offer us a way to deal with the behaviors that we have shown since at least biblical times: who among us hasn’t been jealous of our siblings or has not complained about something? These disciplines require our whole being – heart, mind, body, soul. You don’t have to become a rabbi to experience the joy of all these connections and the depth of learning that can change your life. You just need to show up with all of your being. It’ll be worth it…

Shabbat shalom.

 

Title: Leading Kabbalat Shabbat services
Location: Congregation Beth Sholom, Napa
Link out: Click here
Start Time: 07:00
Date: 2011-06-17
End Time: 08:30