Rabbi Lew on Practice - Rosh Hashanah 5759 - Sept 1998

 

Sherril and I have been working on a book this summer. In fact we've sold it, and it will be coming out next summer. It is a kind of spiritual memoir, and it has gotten me thinking about my spiritual life -- its development and its broad movements. It seems clear that it has at least three major divisions.

I was born into Judaism. Judaism was the place where I lived, the religion and culture which permeated the streets of my native Brooklyn; the family and the larger sense of peoplehood from which I drew my identity, and finally, the synagogue, or the succession of synagogues in Brooklyn and then later in Westchester County which I came to identify as Sacred Space. This was a place I came to identify with God. Although I felt God's presence in the forest, and along lonely roads when I was hitch-hiking late at night and a storm would come up, the synagogue, the Sacred Space, was God's address to me -- the place where God could be reached most dependably. To the degree that I thought about it then, I defined my spirituality in terms of my place in this Sacred Space, and in the larger spiritual family I had been born to.

This situation prevailed until I went off to college. Then I embarked on the second great division of my spiritual life -- a period of seeking.

It is part of the American anthropology, that we seem to leave the religion we are born to behind at a certain point, and to cast out on our own -- to try to find our own spiritual path. This was certainly my experience. I had no unfriendly feelings towards Judaism then; at this point in my life, Judaism seemed to me, to be a minor wing of the Democratic Party, and I was a loyal Democrat, so what was the problem. I simply didn't see Judaism as a serious spiritual path, and so I set about looking elsewhere for spirituality. It was a kind of an undisciplined journey. I'm not even sure I knew I was on it at first. At college, it centered on aesthetics; music and art. In a secular culture, art tends to be the repository of spirituality, and certainly for me, in those years, art was my primary source of same. I had a great vision of stars listening to Beethoven late one night after a class in symphonic music, and reading the last chapter of Ulysses by James Joyce, the Molly Bloom Soliloquy, over and over again, something snapped in my mind, and then something opened up, and I experienced a great transformation. It lasted for weeks.

When I came of age -- when I finished graduate school in the late 1960's, these kinds of experiences had moved to the center of my life, and seeking became a conscious choice. I came to California -- to the Bay Area then, specifically to seek. I was looking for a spiritual path. Northern California was full of them. For some reason, an incredible proportion of the world's most important spiritual teachers had set up shop in the Bay Area. One could walk down an ordinary street in Berkeley, and in one house would be the world's leading exponent of Tibetan Buddhism, and in the next house would be the leading teacher of Hindu trance meditation, and in the next house would be someone who had made up his own spiritual practice a few years before, and he, of course, would have the largest group of all. Why was this the case? Why had so many significant spiritual teachers come to Berkeley and San Francisco and the surrounding area in those days? Someone once suggested to me that it was the zoning laws, but I'm not sure. In any case, Northern California was like a spiritual super market then, and I was sampling all the wares. I studied Hatha Yoga with a disciple of the great Indian teacher, Iyangar. I went to lectures and meditations with Muktenanda and Rudinanda, and I sent away for a correspondence course from Yogananda, who wasn't even alive at the time. I meditated with Tibetan Buddhists, danced with Sufis, and was almost kidnapped by the Reverend Moon and his followers, and the little fat boy, the Mahara-ji caused me to see white lights. I went from intense religious experience, to intense religious experience, but none of them adhered. None of them was transforming. My path had no integrity. I was just shopping. I was seeking.

After several years of this, a friend invited me to accompany him to the San Francisco Zen Center to hear a lecture by a well known Zen master who was visiting from Japan. Since he knew he would be speaking to an American audience, and since he assumed all Americans were Christian, this Zen master spoke on a text from the new testament (80% of his audience was Jewish of course, but how could he be expected to understand this? We don't understand it very well ourselves.) In any case, the text he spoke about was the line from the Gospels "Unless ye be like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven" and I remember that he kept saying "I mean little, little children. One week old, already too late." But it wasn't his speech that impressed me. It wasn't even him. It was the sense of the practice that surrounded him.

So, the next week, I began the third of the three major divisions of my spiritual life-- the period characterized by spiritual practice. I am still in this phase, and I fully expect that I will be in it for the rest of my life. Zen, or at least the Zen I began to do that week, was essentially a practice -- an extremely disciplined practice. It wasn't a theology, and it wasn't a home, and it wasn't spiritual consumerism. It didn't promise great visions or spiritual epiphanies. It was a practice characterized by rigorous discipline -- by what we did, and how thoroughly and regularly we did it. I did this practice for ten years. For ten years, I woke up at 5 a.m. every morning and meditated for several hours. Then once a month, I did a seshin, a period of intense meditation that lasted all day. Then four times a year, I did weeklong seshins -- weeks of intensive meditation where we did nothing but sit, except for the three or four hours each night that we slept. When you are meditating all day long, you don't need much sleep. Finally, I went to the monastery, where we sat all year, interrupting our sitting only to do a few hours of manual labor each morning and each afternoon, so that our bodies wouldn't wither away altogether. During this time, our eating became practice, our work became practice, and our bathing and sleeping became practice.

So perhaps it's not surprising, that when I returned to Judaism, some ten years later, I saw it primarily as practice and I don't think this was much of a stretch. Judaism is, in fact, a spiritual practice of great depth and integrity. Daily prayer, Shabbat, Kashrut, The Yearly spiritual cycle -- these are the lineaments of an ancient and disciplined practice. These were the elements that had informed Jewish spirituality since the beginning of Judaism. But by and large, they had been discarded by American Jews in this century, who, ironically, now found themselves largely dissatisfied with Judaism, and were looking elsewhere for spiritual gratification in increasing numbers.

I think that little by little, we are recovering a sense of Jewish practice. For some, this means a return to orthodoxy, the branch of Judaism that retained this sense most successfully over the past century. For others, it means the renewal of Judaism, the carrying forward of the essential Jewish spiritual impulse in new forms-- in new practice settings, sometimes borrowed from other spiritual cultures, and sometimes carried forward from deep in the Jewish past.

And I think that if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of practice. It will be because it will have come to see itself this way again; not primarily as an ethnicity, not primarily as an occasional church, not primarily as a dwelling place, but a practice -- a set of intentional gestures which have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relation to the sacred.

Last December, I was featured on a report on the Jim Lehrer news hour on PBS about emerging models of religious practice. The PBS film crew took shots of our daily minyan and our morning mediation group, and they interviewed me at some length. Then they had a number of distinguished scholars commenting on what we were saying and doing. Among them was Richard Wuthnow, a sociologist from Princeton, whom I met in person this past summer at Kalamazoo, Michigan, where we had both come to teach at a retreat at the Fetzer Institutue. Wuthnow has a new book coming out this year. It is called After Heaven; Spirituality in America since the 1950's. He showed us an advanced copy this summer in Kalamazoo. It is an absolutely brilliant book. Why do I say this? Because he comes to many of the same conclusions I have come to -- namely, that practice-based spirituality is the at the core of the religious enterprise, and the spiritual model best suited to work in our time.

Wuthnow identifies three principal modes of spirituality: dwelling spirituality, seeker spirituality, and practice spirituality. In the last generation, dwelling spirituality was the prevailing mode. In a dwelling spirituality, God occupies a definite place in the universe and creates a sacred space in which humans can also dwell. To inhabit sacred space is to know its territory and to feel secure. In recent decades, dwelling spirituality has given way to a new spirituality of seeking, one which emphasizes negotiation; individuals search for sacred moments that reinforce their conviction that the divine exists, but these moments are fleeting. Rather than inhabiting a place, rather than knowing a territory, these people are continually exploring new spiritual vistas.

The dwelling model is more secure, the seeking model less constraining. Dwelling spirituality is the world of Aristotle, who claimed that the patriarchal family provides the fundamental model of social order. The seeker model draws from Plato, who believed that society originates in the varied gifts of the individual.

Durkheim, who follows the dwelling model, distinguishes sharply between sacred habitats and the profane world. Max Weber, a seeker, pays no attention to such distinctions. Max Lerner, also a seeker, wrote: "One might agree with Durkheim that the contrast between the sacred and profane is the widest and deepest the human mind can make. Yet for myself, I find all sorts of things to be sacred. Rather than being in a place that is by definition spiritual, for me, the sacred is found momentarily in experiences as different as mowing the lawn or viewing a full moon."

Reflecting the stability of its time, dwelling spirituality taught an orderly, systematic understanding of life that protects its adherents from chaos. The seeker spirituality which has by and large replaced it is far less likely to generate grand conceptions of the universe and more likely to invoke a pragmatic attitude that advises us to try whatever promises to work. It offers fleeting encounters with the sacred, like a sustaining force behind an individual felt momentarily as he or she teeters on a slippery rock in the river.

The movement from dwelling to seeking spirituality has been characterized by the movement from the denial of doubt to the definition of doubt as the essence of reality. God's presence, no longer a given, has to be verified with special appearances, such as near death or a visitation from angels.

In a dwelling spirituality, individuals were expected to conform to rules and internalize them and identity was manifested by the holding of predefined social positions. In the newer pattern, instead of talking about rules and status and roles, people talk about making decisions and searching among options. Status is attained by creating an identity and identity is only discovered through the active process of searching and selecting. Faith is no longer something people inherit but something for which they strive.

Dwelling and seeking are both part of what it means to be human. Many people associate God with churches and synagogues, and in turn, with the powerful feelings that are aroused by memories of home. A human habitat frequently takes on a sacred meaning and as we journey through life, we continually seek attachments to special locations. But equally strong is the human desire to be part of an unfolding process, to negotiate, to be on the road, to experience novelty and to grow.

In Shir HaShirim, we see both these human needs in the person of the Shulamite woman who extols the virtues of a settled home -- our bed is green, the beams of our houses are cedar and the rafters of fir -- but who then wanders restlessly seeking to find the lost warmth of her life. -- I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares. I will seek the one I love.

The circumstances in which people live typically reinforce one or the other of these orientations to a greater extent in different historical periods. Settled times have been conducive to dwelling; unsettled times, to seeking. In one, the sacred is fixed, and spirituality can be found within the gathered body of God's people; in the other, the sacred is fluid and portable and must be pursued with a sense of God's people having been dispersed.

The circumstances of the past thirty years have produced a shift on many fronts from dwelling to seeking. We are not such a settled nation any more; rather we are a mobile nation; a nation of movers, commuters, recent arrivals, migrant workers, exiles, drifters, people who feel alienated or displaced, traveling salesmen, the lonesome surfer on the net, the homeless. More than likely, we grew up in strong neighborhoods and communities. More than likely now, we don't know our next door neighbor.

Economically, we have changed from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers and we can see a similar shift from spiritual production to spiritual consumption. At one time people identified their faith by membership; now they do so increasingly by the search for connections with various organizations, groups, and disciplines, all the while feeling marginal to any particular group or place.

It seems clear that both the dwelling and the seeking models of spirituality will persist into the next century. Many religious institutions will survive by offering a secure place to worship God in familiar ways. Seeker spirituality will also survive. American lives will continue to change at a dizzying rate, and Americans will continue to insist on choosing from among a variety of ways to worship.

But neither of these styles will prove satisfactory. A synagogue primarily offering a safe place to sleep, will itself fall asleep one day and never wake up. Dwelling spirituality encourages dependence on communities that are inherently undependable and fosters an institutional idolatry to the point that energies gravitate too much to these institutions rather than being deployed to the full round of human needs in a complex world.

A spirituality of seeking, on the other hand, is invariably too fluid to provide the stability and dedication required to grow spiritually and to mature in character. Its adherents flit from retreat to concert to conference. One event cancels out the other, and nothing ever seems to take root.

The facile shopping for quick fix solutions to spiritual problems has not served us well nor has the hope that people could solve their problems by simply settling into an established spiritual community.

So according to Richard Wuthnow, and I agree with him wholeheartedly, we are ready for the emergence of a third model, and fortunately for us, it has already begun to emerge. That is the model of spirituality as practice. Religious institutions which will flourish in the coming era, will be those which can move from dwelling and seeking to the ancient wisdom that identifies spiritual practice as the heart of the religious enterprise.

Spiritual practice is a way of retrieving the neglected middle in our understanding of religion. People who practice may be involved in communities or they may be sojourners, but the quality of their faith is determined not by the places they occupy, nor by the journey they are on, but rather, by the seriousness of the time they spend in worshipful communion with the divine and in the consequences of this time for the rest of their lives.

The spirituality of practice, is spirituality in time, not space. It occurs when people engage in intentional activities that deepen their relation to the sacred. Often they do so over long periods of time and devote significant energy to these activities.

These practices include prayer, meditation, contemplation, and acts of service. Their aim is to electrify the spiritual impulse that animates all of life, and to bring the light of God to the world, to this life. They are not necessarily mystical nor do they necessarily involve an inwardness, a turning away from the world. In fact, spending time cultivating our relationship with God seems more often to free us from material concerns and self-interest, so that we can focus on the needs of others. Additionally, we become better able to perceive the spiritual dimension in the people we serve. When our practice opens us to the realization that we are deeply loved by God, we want to return that love.

Spiritual practice is different from seeker-oriented spirituality; it is a more orderly disciplined and focused approach to the sacred. Spiritual practitioners have to choose what to do and where to focus their attention, and this permits them to cultivate a depth of spirituality and protects them from being blown about by moods, circumstance, or the chaos of constantly changing ideas. Practice oriented spirituality may involve exploration, but it is also a way of imposing discipline on personal explorations.

In Wuthnow's book, he follows several people who he identifies as exemplars of this new model of spirituality. Some of them were long time church and synagogue members who went from being occasional attendees of these institutions, to daily practitioners of the ancient traditions offered there -- traditional prayer groups, meditation groups, study groups, societies for visiting the sick and performing acts of loving kindness. Others had invented their own daily spiritual disciplines, putting together elements of prayer, meditation, yoga, body work and psychotherapy. But the point was, they did these things in a disciplined way- in a daily way, and this made all the difference. This added a palpable element of the sacred to their daily lives.

Practice oriented spirituality can be nurtured by religious organizations -- churches, synagogues like ours; but only if these places manage to make the shift from dwelling places to practice places; only if these places come to define their primary mission as strengthening the spiritual discipline of their members; only if these places strive to give their members both roots and wings-- roots to ground them solidly in the tradition of their particular faith, and wings to explore the mysteries of the sacred. But in this context, religious institutions become facilitators rather than ends in themselves and clergy must serve as models of practice rather than as guardians or shopkeepers or salesmen.

All this is quite apparent in the Jewish world. For the better part of the past century, the world of the synagogue has been the realm of dwelling spirituality. This is why the synagogue is in so much trouble. It has been swimming against the stream. When we consider that 80 per cent of the Jewish people no longer set foot in synagogues even on the High Holidays, we usually think in terms of loyalty. What's the matter with these people? How could they desert us this way? What's wrong with these people, is that they live in a world where dwelling spirituality no longer makes sense. They live in an unsettled world -- a world which spits out facile certainties as fast as we can frame them. And they are no longer interested in producing Judaism, they are far more interested in consuming it, or consuming some other more palpable and more accessible form of spirituality. This is why they are no longer here -- they are out seeking. In fact a whole Jewish movement, the renewal movement, has risen up in recent years to match the rise of Jewish seeker spirituality. But in the words of its founder, Zalman Shacter, in a kind of farewell address to his movement a few years ago in Boulder, Colorado, "We have succeeded in creating a holiday inn, when what we really needed was a home." It is interesting to me, that he identified the problem so accurately, but looked to the past, rather than the future, for the solution. I think what the renewal movement needs is not a home, but rather a practice. This Jewish seeker movement betrays all the pitfalls of seeker spirituality in general. It has created excitement -- it has pointed to the spiritual emptiness of mainstream Judaism, to a far greater degree than we are comfortable with, but it hasn't yet succeeded in creating a practice -- a disciplined form of daily spiritual practice. Its adherents go from peak experience to peak experience -- from retreat to workshop to Shlomo concert -- but there's nothing in between; no enduring disciplines, no daily, intentional invoking of the sacred, no methodology for deepening this sense.

It may very well be left to institutions like ours -- institutions which arose out of the old dwelling model but which nevertheless have inherited a serious culture of spiritual discipline -- to adapt themselves to this third wave of spirituality, the practice model; not only because it will enhance our chances of surviving, but because it will enliven us again. It will help us move from an urge for security, which grows more and more desperate as life grows less and less settled each day, to a practice which might bring us closer to the only sure sense of security there is -- a sense of the sacred.

I am always happy to see each one of you, and if you want to keep coming here once a week or once a year or somewhere in between, I will still be glad to see and to honor your choice as well. At the same time, it seems to me that with over 2000 members in this synagogue, over 550 family units, and many hundreds more who come here without being members, we ought to be doing a lot better than the 15 to 20 souls we are currently averaging for daily minyan. And while I would never disparage the level of commitment or participation of any member of this congregation, there is nevertheless no doubt in my mind, that more of you ought to be stepping up to support this activity -- not only out of a sense of what a more active minyan would do for our synagogue, but also out of a sense of what it might do for you. Our daily minyan is the soul of this synagogue. But more significantly, it can bring your soul into daily contact with the sacred which is something you need very badly. And it can do it in a very deep way. Maybe it will take a few weeks, or maybe even months or years for this to start registering on you, but it will happen, believe me.

And you know when I give meditation retreats -- a staple of seeker spirituality -- they sell out within a week of being advertised, and usually the advertising consists of a few casually distributed flyers. People flood these things. But our daily morning meditations are not so flooded. A very small group has been coming regularly for almost four years now -- very, very small. Yet if I took what has happened to these few people, and put it on a scale against what has happened to the hundreds of people who have attended my retreats, I'm quite sure the balance would tip in favor of this tiny group. Their experience of meditation has grown profoundly. They have grown. Their sense of the sacred has grown profoundly. More than they know.

I have been practicing daily prayer for more than 20 years now. When I daven each morning at minyan, many times I daydream through the service; many times nothing happens at all. I have been meditating for over 30 years. When I meditate in the morning, sometimes, I daydream through that as well. Sometimes nothing happens there either.

But at least once, each morning at minyan, a word or a phrase from the prayer service will suddenly sneak up on me and burst into relation. Each day it will be a different word or phrase, and it will stay with me all day, and I will see its meaning permutating as I go about my life, shedding unexpected shades of meanings on that life and lending it a depth and a density. One day last week, it was the phrase karov hashem lishburey lev -- God is close to the broken hearted -- and as I went through the day, I was keenly aware of a sense of the sacred hovering over the broken hearted as they came into my office for counseling, and as I comforted them at a shiva minyan. Last Rosh Chodesh, a phrase from the Hallel leapt up and grabbed my attention. Ci Hitzalti naphshi mi mavet, v'et ragli midechi -- Because you saved my soul from death, and my legs from stumbling. And all day long, I walked around with a palpable sense of what a miracle it was that my life was being sustained and that one foot knew to step in front of the other.

And on those days when I can, in fact, concentrate on the prayers, they act like a mantra, sweeping my mind clean of all incidental language, and leaving it empty for the sacred to enter.

And when I step back three times, and then forward three times to begin the Amidah, the sacred, in fact, enters. I often feel myself in contact with the transcendent then -- a sense of encounter which also remains with me all day long. And later in the day, if I am feeling particularly desperate, or for some other reason, in need of communing with the transcendent, I go back to my makom kavuah -- the spot in the chapel where I pray every day. And because I pray from this spot every day -- because I address God from that spot every day -- because I encounter the transcendent from that spot so often, when I return to that spot later in the day, the associations I feel standing in it -- the way the light hits my eyes, the way the air feels there, the feeling my body has in that very particular setting -- immediately puts me in a frame of mind that is conducive to encountering the transcendent, and the more my practice goes on, the more days and months and years I pray from that spot, the deeper all this gets; the deeper the original feelings, the deeper the associations, and the more it stays with me as I go about my life.

And sitting in meditation for 30 years now, I penetrate the present moment more deeply, the more I sit -- and now even to be awake for one moment in meditation -- even to be alive to one moment of present experience, changes everything for the rest of the day; attunes me to the experience of my life -- makes it much more difficult for me to write anything or anyone off.

This is the life of practice spirituality. This synagogue came into being as a domicile for dwelling spirituality. Many of you have been coming here for several generations. And you continue to come her, because this places continues to communicate a sense of the sacred to you, and continues to communicate a sense of security and a sense of place. And no one is interested in taking any of that away from you. This is a beautiful thing -- a sacred thing -- and it will always be here for you. But at the same time, we must acknowledge that here in California, here in the United States at the end of the 20th century this is not the norm. Spirituality is no longer about finding a secure place in the social cosmos. For most of us, there is no such place anymore, and a spirituality which reflects this model is simply no use to us any more. Nor is the spirituality of the seeker, the spirituality that goes from one peak experience to another without ever making anything of them, very useful to us.

What we need today, what will be useful to us, is a synagogue which supports practice; which supports Shabbat, and daily prayer, and meditation; a synagogue which sees itself not as a social institution, nor as a source of security, but rather, as a path to God.

Such a synagogue will stand, not in space, but in time. It will prevail beyond the dwelling and the journey -- it will transcend its institutional trappings and connect us to our source in the sacred again.

It will help us realize the fundamental mission of the Jewish enterprise -- to bring a sense of the divine -- of the sacred -- into every moment of this life, every nook and cranny of this world.

It will stand not like a house but rather,

c'eitz shatul al palgey maim -- like a tree planted by streams of water

asher piryo yiten b'ito -- which yeilds its fruit in its season

v'aleihu lo yavul -- whose leaves never fades

v'cal asher ya'aseh, yatzliach -- and whatever it does, will flourish

Shanah Tovah Tikatevu

Roasted Cauliflower Soup

I describe myself as a rustic cook, one who tends to eyeball rather than measure. I'll look at recipes to get method and ingredient ideas for a concept I've dreamed up, and then do as I will. Sometimes, like today with this soup, I hit the jackpot.

Roast a large head of cauliflower coated with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garam marsala spice mix.

Sauté chopped onion, garlic, & ginger in a pot, until the onions soften.

Add the cauliflower, stirring to meld the mixture.

Add a quart of vegetable broth* and cook on medium heat for about ten minutes.

Use a immersion blender to make a smooth mixture.

Add some half&half, heavy cream, or coconut milk for a non-dairy version.
How much is up to you, dependent on consistency and taste.
You can also add some more broth or water if you'd rather not make it so creamy

Adjust the spices an necessary, heat to your desired soup temperature, and enjoy!

We had it with toasted slices of sweet batard bread drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with daka – another spice blend.


*I highly recommend making your own broth. I save the odds and ends from cooking in a bag, keep it in the freezer, and when I have enough, throw what’s there into the InstantPot, fill with water, and cook for about 30/45 minutes. Then I strain, pour the broth into containers of various sizes plus make some ice cubes. That way, I can use the broth in a variety of ways. Not only is the broth super tasty, but I love knowing exactly what it’s made with, and know that dishes won’t have any extra salt.

A Shabbat of Gathering - Not Gathering

This Shabbat, the Torah reading begins…..” וַיַּקְהֵ֣ל מֹשֶׁ֗ה אֶֽת־כָּל־עֲדַ֛ת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל  . .    and Moshe gathered the all the assembly of the children of Israel………”

And there, I stop.

This Shabbat, there will be no gathering; there will be no assembly of the children of Israel, at least, not as we have known it for centuries, for millennia. Invoking pekuach nefesh, the tenet of Jewish practice that reveres the preservation of life over all other laws and customs, we must not gather, we must not stand as an assembly, so that we can preserve the lives of those around us, all over the world.

This is where I personally feel the overwhelming changes that come with the upheaval of our lives at this moment. Communal prayer has been the core of my practice for twenty years. It has supported me, lifted me, nourished me. I’ve been involved in the minutia of the ritual, the balance between halachah and minhag - law and custom. And I’ve experienced the joy that comes with letting all that go, simply feeling the uplifting of spirit – dancing with the voices of my kahal, feeding off the gathering of my community, breathing in the holiness we’ve created in whatever space we’ve been in.

But for now, we must gather together in virtual spaces – it is the new normal that will last for some time to come.We are finding, and will continue to find, new ways to invigorate the connections that we have, that we want, that we need. In many ways, even if out of adversity, those connections will be strengthened.

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron, American Tibetan Buddhist nun and spiritual teacher, writes, “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

On this Shabbat of Vayakhel – this Shabbat of gathering without gathering, I wish you all the time and the space to gather as you can, making room for the grief, the relief, the misery, and the joy. Take the time to breathe, and make room for the healing to come.

Sending you all a virtual hug -- looking forward to the day that it's real.

Shabbat Shalom.

Remembrance of Names

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name

A poem by the Israeli poet, Zelda

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name

שנתן לוֹ אלהים ונתנוּ לוֹ אביו ואמוֹ

Given by God, and given by our parents

This poem is translated to English by the poet and artist Marsha Falk,
who uses it as the mourners’ kaddish in her siddur, Book of Blessings.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear

This is one of those poems that has lived close to my heart from the moment I heard it recited by Rabbi Dorothy Richman in the old Beth Sholom sanctuary one Shabbat morning. And this year it touches closer than before, as I rise each day to say the traditional kaddish for my dad, I also keep this one in mind.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by the mountains
and given by our walls.

In this week’s Torah parashah, Pinchas, there are a lot of names---verses and verses and verses of names, as part of a census that is taken of the children of Israel. These names take up a huge part of the parashah. And with all the juiciness of this parashah – the finish of the Pinchas story, the daughters of Tzelophchad, the ritual anointing Joshua receives from Moshe as he is chosen to succeed him as leader -  we rarely talk about this counting, this accounting of the Israelites

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by the stars
and given by our neighbors

There are three times in the Torah we hear about taking a census of the Israelites. The first is  in Exodus (30:11-16), in the midst of the details of building the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. Everyone twenty years and older —well, all the males—must pay half a shekel. Not only is this a method of keeping track of the count, but it’s also a way for everyone to give an offering of atonement, with the proceeds going to help build the mishkan. Whether rich or poor, each one pays the same. Hezekiah bar Manoah, known as the Khizkune, a 13^th century French rabbi says, “a wealthy person must not contribute in excess of this, for if the Torah were to allow the wealthy to contribute more, and the poor to contribute less than a half a  shekel each, how could each of them attain the same level of atonement” When it comes to the spiritual life of our people, we are all equal, no need to list one person or tribe before another – we are coming together for a common goal.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by our sins
and given by our longing

The next census is taken at the start of the book of Bamidbar, Numbers, in the very first verses. It’s the second month of the second year after the children of Israel came out of Egypt. Moses and Aaron counted each male, twenty years old and upward, who is able to go to war. Here, the instructions are that the counting is to be organized by clan, listed by names. We are given the names of the head of each tribe who will help with the counting. And we then get the count, tribe by tribe, with the assurance that all the clans were registered; all the names were listed, even if those names were not voiced. And then, with the tabernacle in the center, surrounded by the Levites who will carry all the furnishings and accoutrements of the mishkan, each tribe is strategically placed around them, standing by their flag, led by their chief, ready to move through the wilderness, protecting their precious center from any harm, as they march to the promised land of their final destination, traveling as one.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by our enemies
and given by our love

Which brings us to this week’s census. A journey that was expected to be two, three years or so has turned into 40. The generation that came out of Egypt was deemed not able to be brought into the land—they could not shake the effects of their life under slavery. They were too fearful and too closed to move into freedom. They were not ready to take on what was needed to form this new nation. So a whole new generation is now poised at the edge of the Jordan, about to go into the Land. Like the former counts, this one is also all males over twenty, able to bear arms. This count will also be by clans, but this time, those clan names are voiced. What makes this count different from the two that preceded it? Unlike the first count, which was centered around building the mishkan; or the second count, which was centered around protecting the mishkan, this count is about the land. “Among these shall the land be apportioned as shares, according to the listed names “ (Num 26:53)

The Israelites are about to enter the land, stake their claim, revitalize the roots that were left behind when Jacob and his family left Canaan for Egypt so many years before. But they never forgot those roots; they never forgot their given names. According to the Midrash, the Israelites did not change their language or their names in Egypt. “They did not call Reuben “Rufus” nor Judah “Leon” nor Joseph “Lestes” nor Benjamin “Alexander” (Vayikra Rabbah 32).  They kept, and remembered,  their names, with all the names of the line going back to the sons of Jacob. I think these names are voiced is as a way to honor the past souls who bore the burdens of slavery, who may not have made it to the land in body, but who had enough faith and fortitude to leave Egypt and start on the road to freedom, even as they may have been too broken to complete the journey.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations
and given by our work

It is said that ritual makes the invisible, visible. I think names bring connection to distance. Giving a name, acknowledging a name, creating a name for the nameless brings things and people close, making it personal. It is an important part of remembrance. Our Hebrew names include the names of those who came before us, and when we say their names, we hear the names of those who came before them. We are reminded that we are entering the stream of our tradition, where we teach in the name of our teachers, allowing the support from the past to carry us into the future.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness

Names became part of my omer ritual this year, as I counted each day with a name of one of the victims of those gunned down in the Christchurch mosques this past March. Rabbi Benjamin Blech, at Professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University, points out that the central letters of the Hebrew word Neshama, soul, are shin and mem, - שם – the Hebrew word for name. Your name, he says, is the key to your soul. Sharing those moments of blessing the day with the names of those innocents lost in the act of prayer, connected my soul to theirs, strengthening my resolve to speak for those souls who can no longer speak, to act in their names and the names of the others who were killed in Pittsburg and Charleston and Orlando and Sandy Hook and too many other places, so that no more souls are lost in such a way.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name
give given by the sea
and given by our death

This poem and this naming take on new meaning now that my dad is gone. Now, he and his name live in me, in my name, in my soul. And his name is honored in my communities. Here, it will be read each week for eleven months, and then each year, along with the loved ones of others. We are the people of the book, a book we keep writing with names, keeping the thread of our tradition alive – both as individual families and as a people. We write these names in our books, on our walls, and in our hearts.

לְכֹל  אִש  יֵש שֵם

Each of us has a name – a name that gives us our present identity, which holds the foundation of our past, and forms a path to the future. Each of our names, shaim shelanu, lives as remembrance \in our neshama, in our individual, and, as a people, our collective souls.

Zichronam l’vracha – may the memories of those names, of those souls, serve as blessings for us

Shabbat Shalom

Mad World

היום שבעה ימים, שהם שבוע אחד בעמר
Today is seven days, which is one week, of the omer
מלכות שבחסד
A day of leadership in a week of loving kindness

Today we finish a week of loving kindness, and look to the start a of week of strength.
We will need lots of strength.......

Today, six months ago, on this day, a gunman walked into a synagogue in Pittsburg, PA, on Shabbat, and opened fire --- killing eleven people, simply because they were Jewish. People murdered in their sacred space, some in prayer, some supporting those who pray, all killed because they were Jewish.

Six weeks ago, a gunman walked into two mosques in Christchurch, NZ, during Jumu'ah, Friday prayers, and opened fire --- killing 50 people, simply because they were Muslim. People murdered in their sacred space, some in prayer, some supporting those who pray, all killed because they were Muslim.

Today, a gunman walked into a synagogue in Poway, CA, on Shabbat, on the eighth day of Pesach, on a day when, as Jews, we honor and remember those who are now gone, and opened fire --- killing one person, simply because she was Jewish. A woman murdered in her sacred space, in prayer, killed because she was Jewish.

After the shooting and murders in Pittsburgh, I decided to wear a kippah all the time when out in the world. After the shooting and murders in Christchurch, I decided to remember the name of a victim each day as I count the omer. After today's shooting and murder......I don't know what to do.

Pittsburgh, Christchurch, the black church fires in Louisiana, Sri Lanka, and now Poway --- the attacks on people in their sacred spaces continues. My heart is broken...I admit to despair.

We live in a world gone mad.........

That Ritual Push

היום יום אחד בעמר
Today is one day of the omer
חסד שבחסד
A day of loving kindness in a week of loving kindness

I've been counting the omer--fairly successfully :) -- eighteen years - another chai-year milestone. It's time to start this year's count. I am not prepared, but that's not the point - the count will still begin - it's season is not predicated on my life's flow. All I have to do is be present for a moment each evening, to say the blessing, and note the count. The formulaic nature of ritual does its job, giving me that supportive push. The spiritual sequence has begun, and once again, I'm in for the ride.

Mourning the Loss of a Minyan

When people would ask my teacher, Rabbi Alan Lew, “how do you become a part of a spiritual community?” He would say, “you just show up, keep showing up -- be present.”

I have no personal connection to those who died last Shabbat in Pittsburgh and yet, I know those people – each and every one of them….I am one of them. Like them, for the past 18 years I have been at services both weekly and daily with my cadre of “regulars” just like those at Etz Chayim/Or L’Simcha/Dor Chadash -- each one of us, from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, showing up, and being present with our roles………

Like David and Cecil Rosenthal, greeting people with contagious joy or Irving Younger, who, when he handed out the prayerbooks, made sure to point out the current page so no one would feel uncomfortable.

Leading the davening, the prayers for their community, like Daniel Stein, Jerry Rabinowitz or Mel Wax, who was always ready to step in if someone didn’t show up - “He knew how to do everything at the synagogue.” a friend said.

Making sure the food and coffee are ready and available—like Rose Mallinger and Bernice Simon, two old timers who were well aware that one cannot live on prayer alone, while Bernice’s husband, Sylvan, would take part in the L’Chayim club each Shabbat with a shot of Jim Beam.

Those people are my people—who showed up and let their consistent presence in their Jewish practice create a spiritual and sacred space so that someone like Richard Gottfried, a dentist who volunteered at a free dental clinic, could have a place to deepen his connection to his faith.

Last Shabbat, we lost a minyan – a minyan like my minyan, like so many minyanim across the world – people who are the lifeblood of their community. Minyan - literally a number, a count, a quorum – is at the core of traditional Jewish synagogue life. It’s that group of 10 or more Jews who gather daily and weekly to pray and to make sure all who come to pray are supported, especially those in mourning, those who come—some every day for 11 months— to say Kaddish, the prayer we say to honor the dead. Jewish ritual law for saying Kaddish demands that we must be in community so we can support and comfort the living.

Joyce Fienberg, a retired University of Pittsburgh researcher, became a regular “minyanaire” after the death of her husband. Perhaps, like some in my minyan, she wanted to support others as she was supported in her time of grief. Or maybe she just found that space and place a good way to start her day. Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi at Etz Chayim, said Ms. Fienberg not only participated, she gave its oldest member, at 99, a ride each day. "She frequently opened the building, prepared food and just volunteered to help," Rabbi Myers said. "No one asked her to do it. She just did it. She was a pure soul."

No, I do not personally know any in that minyan of 11 souls I’ve mentioned, but I am one of them – linked to them not just as Jews, but as people who understand the value and connection to spirit and community that comes with showing up and being present with that spirit and with that community. And now, as we say Kaddish, grieving for those souls who died for no other reason than they were Jewish, in that tradition they held so dear, let’s hold the stories and the light of those souls within us, and let that light reflect out, reminding us to keep showing up and be present for ourselves and for each other in this tradition that has held us for thousands of years.

זכר צדיקים לברכה
Zacher Tzadikim L’vracha

May the memory these righteous ones be a blessing for us all

Memorial Day - in honor of my uncle Eddie

This morning at minyan I commemorated the yarhzeit of my uncle Eddie. Eddie was a bombardier during World War Two--one of those who did not make it home. As I speak of his life and death and recite the El Malei prayer,  deep emotions are stirred within me; tears pour out and my voice catches. I feel so connected to this man who I never knew. I mourn for the love and laughter he would have added to our family. I mourn for my father's loss of his brother and mentor; for my grandparent's loss of their oldest son. On this day I channel their grief.

This particular yarhzeit has taken on a significance that goes beyond the personal. Unsure of the exact date of his death, I decided it was appropriate to observe Eddie's yarhzeit on Memorial Day. And although I now know the exact date and circumstances of his death due to records that are available on the internet, I continue this commemoration at the insistence and support of my minyan community, sharing these words so we all can channel a bit of that grief and remember the reason we mark this day.


"Pa - so you thought I forgot your anniversary. Well, at least Ma stood by me. I'm glad you liked the card. . . I received a letter from Seymour {my dad} on Tuesday and he tells me that he made PFC {Private First Class}. You can't imagine what a kick I got out of hearing this. I went around and passed cigarettes to the boys just like a father passes out cigars when he gets a baby"

"You ask what's new with me. There is still nothing definite to tell you. We may as well not kid each other - when I finish my training here I will be due to go over. . . Please don't start worrying about me - there is still plenty of time for that. . . I'm not worried about anything except that you are worrying about me. This is a great experience for me and I'm sure I will benefit by it. Why, there must be a million fellows who would do anything to trade places with me and get on a B-29 crew"

Those words were written by my uncle, Lieutenant Edward Heiss, US Army Air Force, in letters to his parents, my immigrant grandparents, Sam and Pepi Heiss, in January and February, 1944. He signed off, as he did all his letters, with "I am feeling fine. So long. Lots of love, Eddie." One year later, on January 11, 1945, his B-29 fell to the ground in pieces somewhere over Malaysia. Of the eleven crew members, only three made it out alive---he was not one of those three.




When I was growing up, a colored version of this photo of my uncle was on my grandmother's dresser. I was curious who it was, but somehow, never asked, and no one ever talked about him. I don't remember when or how I found out who he was. Once I did, I wondered how my family's life would have been different if he had come home.

What was he like - this man so often photographed with a smile; the one who, as my father tells it, convinced my dad to go to Yankee Stadium one Rosh Hashanah afternoon.








The commanding officer of his squadron wrote my grandparents, "No matter how fatigued he may have been, or how he felt personally, Edward always had a laugh and a word of encouragement, to cheer the other members of his crew and squadron. . . He undoubtedly was one of the best liked officers in this organization."





For years after my uncle's plane went down my grandfather held out hope that some miracle would find him alive. After all, no body was ever found. A musician--string bass and tuba--who worked many high society events attended by high military brass, my grandfather would go up to those generals and ask, "please, find out what happened to my son."

My Uncle Eddie received a Purple Heart, posthumously.

I would have rather had him in my life.

On Memorial Day we need to remember that war, justified or not, will always take its toll.

Zichrono L'vracha
His remembrance is a blessing to my dad, to me, and to all with whom I share his story.

Continuing softly

היום ארבעה ימים בעמר
Today is four days of the omer
נצח שבחסד
A day of perseverance in a week of loving kindness

The first week of the omer, this week of loving kindness, brings a softness to each attribute, even the ones I think of as hard. There's the open palm of strength, and now we have perseverance in the chesed container. What does that look like?

Balancing Compassion and Judgement

היום שלשה ימים בעמר
Today is three days of the omer
תפארת שבחסד
A day of compassion in a week of loving kindness


Finding compassion is a theme in my life. It's been a focus for me since the realization that it is the antidote to being judgmental. But I must remember to have some chesed, some kindness for myself when the compassion/judgement balance lists too far into judgement. It's a family trait that has been so ingrained in me that it takes a lot of effort to combat. As long as I keep fighting, and keep the awareness even in times when things get out of control, I can keep moving forward.

Open to Strength

היום שני ימים בעמר
Today is two days of the omer
גבורה שבחסד
A day of strength in a week of loving kindness

This omer day of strength in loving-kindness always brings up a lesson learned years ago from one of my first omer counts - that an outstretched arm with an open hand can be stronger that a clenched fist. Last year's words hold true today, with the need to reach out for support even greater.

The Account of the Count

 היום יום אחד בעמר
Today is one day of the omer
חסד שבחסד
A day of loving kindness in a week of loving kindness

It's time to start the yearly accounting of the counting. I don't have any idea where this year's omer journey will take me. I do know that I am not alone for the ride, as the years of sharing this ritual count have influenced many of my friends to come along with me.

I have made one change in my minhag, my custom. The seventh sefirah of the count is Malchut, which I have been translating these past years as leadership. Last year I still used that, using it as a  reminder of the leadership we are lacking, of the longing for the leadership we once had. This year, I'm going to a more traditional translation - majesty. We`ll see where that leads me :)

We start the count with a double dose of loving kindness. With the state of the our country and the state of my family, I need that today.