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October


Our Two Communities


Guests are invited to our sukkah, some of whom are alive and some of whom are historical. The Ushpizin, biblical characters who traditionally visit the sukkah, remind us that we all live in two communities.

There is a horizontal community. They are our contemporaries, who surround us: family and friends, teachers, work associates, and even those whom we watch or listen to and help shape our opinions about the world. Our horizontal community has the advantage of being immediate and alive; it has the disadvantage of limitation — you can only choose it from people who happen to be upright when you are.

The vertical community is composed of historical figures from every age. Here you can choose from centuries. Your guide might be a biblical character, a Rabbi from the Talmud, a Hasidic teacher of the 19th century — anyone whose legacy of learning speaks to you. The Ushpizin remind us that we do not only live in space, we live in time. If you don’t know the past you are parochial, stuck in the years you happen to be alive. Study those who went before, travel in time, and your community becomes boundless.

Low Hanging Fruit


Sukkot is a magnificent holiday. It involves building, dwelling outdoors, recalls the harvest, a journey through the ages and a memory of the desert sky. Right after Yom Kippur, with its ethereal echoes, it returns us to the earth.

Sukkot is the Jewish enactment of low hanging fruit. It is a reason to invite your friends and neighbors over, without the bother of having to clean your house (before or after!) And you have a place to put up all those cards and kids drawings. Genius.

The sukkah is a mitzvah you can do with your entire body. Even better, the mitzvah involves eating. Weather permitting, it is as though the tradition enabled us to visit a resort and called it a commandment.

When my brothers and I were little, we went “sukkah hopping” which means that we walked from sukkah to sukkah in our neighborhood and ate brownies and cookies (and maybe a grape). Years later I saw the movie “The Swimmer” based on the Cheever story about a man who swims neighborhood pools from house to house. I recognized the theme, but we had it better; no exertion. It was sukkot – we only had to smile, bless, and eat. Hag Sameach.

Love and Knowledge


Early in his career Lawrence Olivier was playing Sergius in George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man.” When English director Tyrone Guthrie came to see the play he asked Olivier: “Don’t you love Sergius?” Olivier answered that he didn’t, and Gurthrie said to him, “Well, of course, if you can’t love him, you’ll never be any good in him, will you?”

Olivier later called this the “richest pearl of advice in my life.”

As an actor, Olivier understood that love was the entree to the character’s soul. What is true in acting is surely true in general. The best way to know a subject is to love it; the best way to know a person, is to love her or love him.
The parent who can distinguish the child’s cry, or a spouse who sees in a glance that a partner is joyous or distressed, is proving Guthrie’s point.

Judaism teaches that God’s love and God’s knowledge are both all encompassing. The more we love, the more we know.

September


Turn Your Head – For Rosh Hashana


The Psalmist insists that God has removed our sins “as far as east is from west.” (Ps. 103:12). How far is east from west? The Kotzker Rebbe explains – as far as a turn of your head.

We think of changing as a remote, difficult task. But sometimes it requires only a small turn. Veer slightly on the road, and over time one’s destination is quite different. Adding to one habit, or diminishing another, is a small turn that over time becomes a major change.

We read in Deuteronomy that Israel will be “Only high and not low” (28:13). Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer explains – if you drop a stone it falls to earth because that is its origin. If you light a fire it leaps up because it is nourished by air above. Everything seeks its source. The soul longs to return to God, to soar, to rise. Teshuva means return – to reconnect with our Source. All you need to do is turn your head and redirect your heart. May this be a year of repentance, health and joy.

Your Inner Isaac


My father once explained the character of the biblical Isaac by citing Abraham Mendelssohn. He was a successful banker whose father was the great philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and whose son was the great composer Felix Mendelssohn. Late in life he lamented, “The first half of my life I was the son of my father; the second half of my life I was the father of my son.”

Isaac was the son of Abraham, founder of the Jewish faith, and father of Jacob, source of the twelve tribes. But Isaac had his own special virtues. He re-dug the wells of his father, solidifying Abraham’s legacy. And he is the only one of the patriarchs who never left the land of Israel.

As the high holidays approach, we often think of the heroic virtues and the dramatic gesture. But a good life can be an Isaac-life. Isaac made sure the preciousness of the past was not lost and the values of the present were preserved. In his most dramatic moment, he went willingly to the altar with Abraham, full of the trust of someone who knows that faith and life often require calm, trust and steadiness. May this year help us recover our inner Isaac.

Inside and Outside


I judge myself from the inside. I know how I feel, how complex are my own motivations and ideas. My view of others is different. Especially when they do something I dislike, I often attribute a single motive, idea or personality trait to them.

Perhaps for this month of Elul we should reverse the process. Try seeing yourself from the outside — how do my actions affect others? How do they appear to them? At the same time, try to judge others from the inside: what could have moved them to do this, or why might they have done something I think is wrong — can I find good reasons for their action?

You can only see the world through your own eyes. But detachment — the attempt to move away from the center of ego toward the perspective of another — is a crucial moral exercise. Believing in the depth and complexity of other souls takes work. But then, we want them to see us that way, don’t we?

Who Made That?


Two hundred years from now, on a fine spring afternoon, scientists look up at the heavens and tell God that it is all over — humans can stand on their own.

The scientist says, “Look, God. You were good in your day but we can do everything ourselves now.”

“Really?” says God. “You can make a human being from dust?”

“Absolutely” say the scientists.

“Let me see” answers God.

The scientist reaches down to scoop up some soil, but is interrupted.

“Oh no” says God. “You get your own dust.”

Human beings have learned a remarkable amount about manipulating the world. But the risk of hubris remains. Too often we treat the world not as a gift but as a birthright. It is easy to imagine we know how to stretch the world to our whims and wishes without consequence.

The Rabbis explain that God told the first inhabitants of the garden — “If you destroy My world, there will be no one to repair it after you.” Our weaponry and our technology are powerful beyond what our ancestors dreamed. We would be wise to remember we are still playing with God’s dust.

August


Baruch HaShem


When you ask a religious Jew how he or she is doing, the answer is likely to be “Baruch HaShem” – blessed be God. Good news often has “Baruch Hashem” added to it as well, as in, “my children are all well, Baruch HaShem.”

Baruch Hashem appears three times in the bible. What may surprise you is that all three times it is spoken by non-Jews: by Noah in Genesis 9:26; by Abraham’s servant Eliezer in Gen. 24:27; and by Moses’ father-in-law Jethro in Exodus 18:10. This cannot be coincidence and it points to a beautiful lesson.

Not only is God sovereign over all, Jew and non-Jew alike, but God’s blessings are to all. When a Jew hears the music of Bach or the Beatles, sees the artistry of Titian or Picasso, reads the works of Tolstoy or David Foster Wallace, or perhaps sees the acrobatics of Roger Federer or LeBron James, it is also appropriate to thank God. As the Psalmist tells us (145:9), God’s blessings are over all God’s work. We live in a world filled with wonders from all of God’s people, Baruch HaShem.

Needs Wheels


From George Prochnik’s award winning biography of Stefan Zweig, “The Impossible Exile”:

“One day in the 1920’s when Zweig happened to be traveling to Germany with Otto Zarek, the two men stopped off to visit an exhibition of antique furniture at a museum in Munich. After some desultory meandering around the galleries, Zweig stopped short before a display of enormous medieval wooden chests.

“Can you tell me,” he abruptly asked, “which of these chests belonged to Jews?” Zarek stared uncertainly — they all looked of equally high quality and bore no apparent marks of ownership.

“Zweig smiled. “Do you see these two here? They are mounted onwheels. They belonged to Jews. In those days — as indeed always! — the Jewish people were never sure when the whistle would blow, when the rattled of the pogrom would creak. They had to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice….Yes, these chests on wheels are striking symbols of the Jewish fate.”

We are blessed to live in a generation when we do not fear fleeing at any moment. May we never again live in a world where all of our possessions need wheels.

Two Rights Can Make A Wrong


Most ethical dilemmas, like most tragedies, are not a conflict of right and wrong but a conflict of rights. People want different, competing and sometimes worthy things that cannot coexist.

The authors of the Federalist papers knew this well. When Madison writes that, “the causes of faction cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects” he is telling us that there will always be division — there will always be good reasons for division — and we have to be vigilant in not allowing those divisions to destroy us.

Work and family, competing loyalties, rival loves, universalism and particularism, understanding and opposition — many things make a claim and sometimes their clash will result in tragedy. As we grow we try to bring things together that once seemed far apart. But since outside of God there is no ultimate unity, life calls for thoughtfulness, empathy and the restraint that does not deny conviction, but tempers it with understanding.