Pressing Business

בס''ד

Parshat VaYeshev

20 Kislev, 5772

December 16^th, 2011

Among our most important teachers in rabbinical school were Ignacio Ojeda and his staff, who ran the kitchen and the cafeteria. My guess is that they were conscious of their role as unofficial professors, and their part in turning aspiring rabbis, educators, undergrads, et al. in actual human beings, even if they never outright said it.

Their coursework was simplicity itself: how to be kind to people, even when working hard. They taught by example.

Coming into our cafeteria meant being greeted with a smile and by name, questions about your family, and, in my case, constant teasing because you weren’t married yet.*

I cannot overestimate how important those brief moments of kindness were. They took a relationship which had the single, paltry virtue of being functional, and raised it into a gift. It was a privilege to walk into their dining hall.

The Talmud teaches in the name of Rabbi Helbo, who in turn heard it from Rav Huna, that if you know a person will regularly greet you, you should greet that person first. Not to do so is to be called a thief. Brakhot 6b

To paraphrase the Mesillat Yesharim, you don’t need me to tell you that these words are true; everyone knows to be polite. But the truth of kind greeting is so obvious that it is easily set aside. Therefore let us reminds ourselves of what we already know.

Sometimes we assume that familiarity absolves us of the need for niceties. Sometimes we believe that the business we have before us takes precedence over personal connection. These conceits are very seductive, very convincing – we have known each other for years, we have important matters to which we must attend. These conceits are wrong.

Remember that everyone, literally everybody, needs to be seen for more than their function. Remember that with kindness, everything is forgivable, without it, little is acceptable. Remember that, in a spiritual community, there is no more pressing business than kind connection.

*Please do not follow their example!

What Defines Us

בס''ד

Parshat VaYishlah

13 Kislev, 5772

December 9^th, 2011

It happened for the first time in 2009. Customers, lined up since 9pm the night before, literally burst through the Wal-mart’s doors at 5am, and trampled an employee, Jdimtyai Damour, to death.

This year, a women pepper-sprayed 20 others in the face. Her reason? To clear a path to the Xbox display.  A 63 year man collapsed in a Target when his heart failed. Shoppers stepped over his fallen body so they could continue shopping. He later died in the hospital.

Largely in order to deal with these incidents, retail chains started opening for 24 hours on the Friday after Thanksgiving, meaning that their employees leave their Thanksgiving tables to go straight to work, or lose their jobs.

Societies are defined not only by the values they promote, but also by those they tolerate. The toleration of the culture that Black Friday has spawned is one of the worst insults we can level at ourselves. What we allow is the statement, yearly, on our national day of gratitude, that the consumption of non-essential goods at rock bottom prices far outranks our valuation of human decency. Don’t believe me? Here’s how we feel about towels. 

I have a paperweight that reads, “kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh” – all of Israel is responsible for one another. It’s from the Talmud - a lovely sentiment, just looking at it.

But the dirty little secret of the phrase is that, in context, it means that all of Israel is legally responsible for one another: that is, we bear culpability for each others actions simply through because part of the same nation. What our neighbors do reflects upon us.

This is deep wisdom about what it means to be a nation, about the impossibility of eschewing mutual responsibility, and it is true here as well. What is allowed to happen on Black Friday speaks volumes about us all, and is destroying the only truly ecumenical holiday in this country. It’s time for the end of Black Friday.

Thank you, Jason

בס''ד

Parshat VaYetze

6 Kislev, 5772

December 2^nd, 2011

Story number one.

Once upon a time there was a young man who had a real facility with puppets. In college, in the fifties, this man dreamed of a new kind of puppet – much more lifelike, for more than just kids, and was even asked to start a 5 minute television show. This show, called Sam and Friends, featured a lizard or amphibian-like puppet by the name of Kermit.

Despite his initial success, it took this man, Jim Henson, ten years of slogging through commercials before he was invited onto a PBS show called Sesame Street.  Mostly because of Henson’s puppets, Sesame Street became the greatest children’s show of all time. Another five years and Henson was able to spin off a new show, based on his vision that puppets were for everyone, called The Muppets. The Muppets themselves jumped straight into the childhood and life of millions of American kids, including me. When Henson died tragically in 1990, he was a legend to my generation.

It’s crazy just how much those puppets made a difference to us. Our world was one of pressure to achieve – pressure which has only increased to this day. The Muppets were somehow the opposite of that – heroes whose heroism was their tragic inability to do anything right: Fozzie’s jokes, Gonzo’s stunts, Kermit’s plans for the show, Piggie’s plans for Kermit. What kept them alive was a vision of kindness and loyalty to each other, which somehow got them through everything, and a huge dose of humor, which made the tough times a treasure. The Muppets taught us to how laugh at life. In middle school, that lesson means a lot.

Story number two.

I went to high school with guy by the name of Jason Segel. We weren’t friends, but he was a real decent human being. Being that we were in high school, this was something of a feat.

When it was time to graduate, I was surprised to find out that he had decided not to go to college, but rather pursue acting. I was socialized to regard college as about as negotiable as death and taxes, and I remember thinking him kind of insane.

But sure enough, Jason started to work and get real billing. Eventually becoming part of the Judd Apatow steamroller, Jason is now one of the most successful comedic actors in the country.

Jason, according to interviews, actually has a room in his house dedicated to the Muppets. So, post his success, he approached Disney with the first Muppet script in over a decade. The movie came out November 23^rd, and my brother at I were there for the midnight showing. It is a fact that I cried when Kermit sang, “The Rainbow Connection.”

The life of an adult is one of which children cannot conceive. Our prospects become fuller as we get older, and paths that were beyond our young understanding reveal themselves. Life has more, rather than less, in store for us as we grow up. But it is equally true that our vision of what happiness is born young, and stays with us for life. The expectations of how we should feel, what we should value, what lets us know that we are safe, are loved, are alive – these are creations of our childhood. Eikhah says, “hadesh yameinu kekedem” – make our days new like they were in the beginning: bring us to the happiness we dreamed of as children, and that we slog through work to find as adults. What the Muppets had was what I think of as true happiness.

So thank you, Jason. The movie was great. You brought the best of our childhood back to us.

To Everything There Is A Purpose

בס''ד

7 Heshvan, 5772

November 4, 2011

The great and holy Rav Kook made a small point with big implications. When the world was being created, on the sixth day, “And God saw all that God had made, and found it tov meod – very good.” (Bereishit 1:31)

What Rav Kook noticed was the inclusion of that pesky word kol – all. For, taken literally, God stated that everything God created in this world was good.

How can this be? War, death, and sickness exist in the world – are they good? Poverty, struggle, pain – are they good?

Rav Kook believed that even in what we consider to be universal evils, there is always at least a spark of good, and even in that which we would die fighting against, there is always a spark of holy purpose.

To everything there is a purpose. Without the existence of pain, human beings would never understand compassion. Without the reality of death, human beings would not push to make life sweet. Without fundamentalism, we would never have learned that even belief in God can lead a person astray. Though the existence of this purpose does not mitigate the evil contained therein, everything has a reason for being.

It is right to pray that evil disappears, and more right to work towards redemption’s arrival. But sometimes we are so busy stamping out what we don’t like about the world that we forget to understand why that evil came to be, and what it has to teach us.

The Opinion of Others

בס''ד

28^th Tishrei, 5772

October 26^th, 2011

Don Marquis, an American humorist jack-of-all-trades, once said, “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

He’s right, and his being right is huge problem for us all.

You and I learn how to be good through others’ approval. When we’re children, people’s response to us teaches us whether we’ve done right or wrong. So, the inclination to care what other people think starts early and runs deep.

But with a constancy that bespeaks the immutability of human nature, making people think does not win their kindness. Rather, when you speak up for justice, when you poke holes in facades covering societal ills, when you question the way things are, be assured that you will make a lot of people very, very angry.

Anger is understandable. Human beings are bad at change, and readily prefer the evil they know over the good they don’t. Even when change is in our self-interest, it is our nature to resist it. The people of Israel to Moshe and Aharon, “…May the Lord look upon you and punish you for making us loathsome to Pharoah and his courtiers…” (Exodus 5:21)

What this anger means, though, is that sometimes we have to lean against our instinctual tendency to want approval. The opinions of others are not the sign of our merit.

About Noah, the Torah says, “…He was a righteous and blameless man in his generation…” (Genesis 6:9) I have no doubt that his contemporaries thought well of him, and praised his holiness. But a more holy man would have fought for the fate of the earth, pushed people to be better, and accepted the wrath he incurred thereby. There is a reason we call ourselves “the seed of Avraham,” and that Noah’s name is left behind.

True Religion

בס''ד

Hoshanna Raba

21 Tishrei, 5772

October 18^th, 2011

The University of Minnesota just put out a groundbreaking study, massive in both size and scope – 39,000 women over nearly 20 years. What it revealed was that taking vitamin supplements did not help these women live any longer. In fact, those who took supplements died three to 10% earlier.*

But what I know for certain about this study is that it will not change anything. Belief in the power of multivitamins will prevail. The vitamin industry will stay strong. All this is because, in this country, health is religion, not science.

If well-off Americans have one true religion, it is our health and the health of our children. We treat received knowledge about health and illness as articles of faith: once we’ve accepted a health factoid as true (anti-oxidants prevent cancer*, vaccines cause autism*) no amount of evidence to the contrary can shake our belief in it.

Sartre writes, “How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it…But there are other people who are attracted by the durability of the stone…What frightens them is not the content of the truth…but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation.”

Part of the honest life, even in the face of disease, is acknowledging that there are few givens and little surety when it comes to our health. The truth of our bodies, as Sartre says, is indefinite – stated in probabilities, not absolutes. Honesty means giving up certainty and living well and boldly nonetheless. It is strange for a rabbi to say, but we could do with being a little less religious.

* Just to be clear, there is no claim that supplements negatively impact one’s health. Three to 10% is in the realm of statistical variance. The study simply indicates that multivitamins have no positive effect on longevity.

* http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/antioxidants. From the National Cancer Institute: “However, information from recent clinical trials is less clear. In recent years, large-scale, randomized clinical trials reached inconsistent conclusions.” 

* http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/health/research/03lancet.html. The study suggesting that autism and the MMR vaccine were linked was retracted by The Lancet, the British medical journal which originally printed it. Significantly, the NYT article reported these comments: “’It builds on the overwhelming body of research by the world’s leading scientists that concludes there is no link between M.M.R. vaccine and autism,’ Mr. Skinner wrote in an e-mail message. A British medical panel concluded last week that Dr. Wakefield (the author of the study) had been dishonest, violated basic research ethics rules and showed a “callous disregard” for the suffering of children involved in his research.”

Journey, Foreigner, My Sukkah

בס''ד

Erev Sukkot,

14 Tishrei, 5772

October 12^th, 2011

A friend of mine graciously invited me along to the Bowl last night, for what sounded like the Greatest. Concert. Ever. That’s right, 80’s throwbacks, I saw Journey and Foreigner live.  I was a juke box hero. I was ready to rock.

The stress of the High Holy Days always turns freneticism into normality. There’s simply so much to do, so much to worry about, that my mind continually darts from mental place to place without any sense of stillness. Though I love the Days of Awe, they rarely bring me peace.

I stepped into that concert with that stress still on my shoulders. But at some point in the middle, I realized that I was a different person. The old me had returned.

So what was it about an awesome, cheesy, big-haired 80’s concert that transformed me? Simply that, in the midst of 18,000 people, you can’t really go anywhere but the bathroom. And that, with 80’s rock decibels, you can’t really do anything but listen to the music (and rock out, of course).

There are many blessings to not being able to leave. There are even more to having to pay attention to where you are. The problem with contemporary life is that there’s too much of it: we rarely have the opportunity to let our minds rest on any one thing. At ridiculous power-rock concerts, one doesn’t have much of a choice.

The introduction to Sukkot is clear and inevitable: “A person should live in the sukkah seven days, just in the manner that a person resides in his house during the rest of the year.” We just pick up our lives and move them to the sukkah. For seven days, space and attention are changed. If we do it right, it’s hard to exit into real life. And that’s the point: only when we can’t really leave does the magic take over.

May nothing take you away from your sukkah,

Hag Sameah,

Rabbi Scott Perlo