The Metrics of Repentance

“Throughout the entire year a person should always view himself as equally balanced between merit and sin and view the world as equally balanced between merit and sin.
”

— Maimonides

The cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden makes a skin cream called Visible Difference. I don't know if it works, but it's a great marketing ploy. It suggests that you will see a noticeable difference after use. It's also a great tagline for this season of repentance. When you say you're going to change, when you beat your chest in contrition, when you forgive someone else, will there be a visible difference? If repentance is done right, you should be able to see the change in yourself and so should others. If you have truly forgiven another person, there should not be residual discomfort in his or her presence but a return to a warm and loving intimacy. When it comes to Yom Kippur, it's all about the returning, the recovery of relationships between ourselves and God, ourselves and others, ourselves and the person we diminished when we were too hard on ourselves.

How can we make a visible difference in ourselves this coming year?

We turn to the medieval philosopher Maimonides. He collected the laws of teshuva, repentance, and wove them into a masterful ten chapter compilation. Many have the custom of studying one chapter per day for the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. This year, I keep thinking about chapter three and the expression "visible difference." Maimonides writes clearly and succinctly that "every person has merits and sins. If his merits exceed his sins, he is righteous. If his sins exceed his merits, he is wicked, and if they are half and half, he is an 'in-between'"[a benoni in Hebrew]. Maimonides believed that just as this is true for an individual, is it true for a country and for the entire world.

This formula for repentance is simple. All we have to do is make sure that our merits exceed our wrongdoings, and we are good. We are actually righteous. But here's the problem that Maimonides introduces. It's a game of numbers, but we have no idea how the point system works. Some transgressions are so terrible that they are equivalent to many good deeds. And some of the good we do is so good that it knocks off many sin points. When put on a scale, not every demerit and merit is equal. Later in the chapter, Maimonides says that God also gives us a slight handicap for goodness, even though we are still unsure of how to measure ourselves. To add to this dilemma, Maimonides says that the only one who knows how this grading system works is God, and God is not talking.

And that is the point. Maimonides wants us to view ourselves as if we are in the in-between category all of the time. We cannot write ourselves off for the wrongs that we do because our goodness may exculpate us. We cannot rest confident in our goodness because our wrongdoings get the better of us sometimes. But if we walk in the world constantly wondering how to accrue more goodness points and ask ourselves if we have counterbalanced an act of cruelty, carelessness, slander or neglect with a double dose of kindness, mercy, sensitivity or selflessness, chances are we will lead a noble life indeed.

Maimonides adds one more critical detail to this perspective on change based on a passage of Talmud: "Since the world is judged by the majority [of its merits and sins] and the individual is similarly judged by the majority, if one does a mitzva, good be upon him. He has pulled himself and the entire world to the side of merit. But if he commits even one sin, he pulls himself and the entire world to the side of demerit" [BT Kiddushin 40b]. In other words, when we measure our deeds we are not acting as independent agents. With each act of goodness we do, we tip the scales for ourselves and the entire world. Maimonides understood something that we often dismiss: the power of one small act of goodness to change the world.

It is time to ask ourselves what are the metrics we will use this year to assess a visible difference in ourselves, our own point system. Instead of your BMI (body mass index), think of a SMI (soul mass index). What are the numbers that I need to change in my spiritual world to tip the scales for myself and others? More minutes in prayer, more blessings, more hours of study, more time devoted to children or friends more time visiting the sick, less time speaking or thinking ill of others? If we don't measure goodness in any way, how will we make a visible difference in 5774?

We are moments away from the Day of Judgment. Take a few minutes of quiet today to write a brief list of a five arenas where you need to make a visible difference. Write down where you are now and where you'd like to be. And remember that when you do even one act of goodness, you pull yourself further on the scale of merit  - and the entire world comes with you.

Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova!

The Shofar's Power

“With trumpets and the sound of the shofar, call out in the presence of the King, Almighty.”

— Psalm 45:6

I saw a bumper sticker this week that said, "I play weird instruments." I wondered if the driver happens to blow shofar. It's hard to say if we would call it an instrument at all since the shofar really doesn't play music in the conventional sense. It plays tears - the primal screams, sobs and whimpers of the human heart when it encounters the soul at its most vulnerable. It is no coincidence that the shofar comes from an animal since its sounds are not sophisticated but more animal-like in their range and treble. We might call it instead the Jewish alarm clock that rings only in this season.

Our associations with the shofar on Rosh Hashana are very old and straight from Numbers 29:1: "It shall be a day of sounding [the ram's horn] for you." Many holidays are associated with tastes, some with smells and many with sights. Rosh Hashana is about sounds. The sounds are of a dual nature, as reflected in the verse from Psalms above. On the one hand, there is the sound of the trumpet, the shrill and majestic announcement that the King of Kings is approaching. It is the sound of joy, royalty and coronation. To demonstrate this, before we blow the shofar we recite psalm 47 seven times. It is a psalm of rejoicing in front of God. The King is in our presence, and we are deeply honored: "All peoples, clap hands and shout to God with the voice of joyous song." 

Every Rosh Hashana we acknowledge God as an authority figure over us and assume once again the posture of the humble servant in God's presence. Unlike human royalty, when it comes to God, we re-affirm God's rule over us annually. This explains why so many verses of prayer on Rosh Hashana mention God as King again and again. A friend recently said to me that she loves Rosh Hashana but doesn't like to refer to God as King again and again. It makes her feel that she is relinquishing her own authority. I told her I felt relief. I know how little I control in this life. Accepting the presence of a Higher Authority over me helps me appreciate the human condition and let go of the ambition of mastery and abide instead in mystery. It certainly makes life more interesting.

But we don't only welcome God with the sounds of formality and royalty represented by the trumpet. We also and primarily blow the shofar.

Maimonides writes that in the Temple on Rosh Hashana, "There was one shofar and two trumpets. The sounding of the shofar was extended, while that of the trumpets was shortened because the mitzvah of the day is the shofar" [Mishne Torah, "Laws of Shofar 1:2]. And while the trumpets likely played out a recognizable tune in the Temple, the shofar made and continues to make an unpredictable sound. Here, too, Maimonides mentions that this is permissible: "Regardless of whether the sound is heavy, thin or raspy, it is kosher, because all the sounds produced by the shofar are kosher" [1:7]. All crying is kosher. There is no correct sound when it comes to tears. They are as different as the people who cry them.  

And with the shofar we recognize the other dimension of God on these Days of Awe. One of our oldest and most central prayers this season is Avinu Malkenu, "Our Father, Our king." We beseech God as both our parent and our authority figure. The trumpets acknowledge one aspect of this relationship: God as King. But the shofar acknowledges the most important role of God as our parent - our Abba with a capital "A" - as one theologian put it. God is the Father who loves us, who weeps over us, who hears the range of our pain and suffering and wants to heal and to help us. The trumpets are formal. The shofar is intimate. Its sound begs us to close our eyes and feel God's loving presence.

A friend of mine recently shared some of her beautiful words. "Love what is broken. Rejoice in what's whole." The trumpets help us rejoice in what is whole this year. The shofar allows us a holy release of what is broken. As we review the year past and hope the year ahead will be filled with meaning and sweetness, we offer up what is whole and what is broken to God. It is the dual sound of our humanity.

Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova!

Say No to Snark

“A fool’s lips bring strife...A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are the snare of his soul.”

— Proverbs 18:6-7

We've all been in the unhappy presence of snark. We know people who make critical, cutting, biting or snide comments when they could have easily said the same thing in a more pleasant way. The problem with snarkiness is that people find it entertaining. There is always an audience for gratuitous meanness wrapped in a thin slice of humor. The Urban Dictionary coined a term for it - snarcastic - that cynical voice that makes us laugh at someone else's expense and then, hopefully, regret it.

I don't remember growing up with the word "snarky" and was trying to find out how long it's been in our lexicon of nasty behavior. The Grammarphobia blog notes this about the word's history: "The earliest published reference for the verb 'snark,' meaning to snore or snort, is from 1866, according to the Oxford English Dictionary." Apparently by 1882 it also meant to find fault with or to nag. In adjective form as a way to refer to someone as irritable, it's been around since about1906. Lewis Carroll used it in his poem "The Hunting of the Snark" as an imaginary figure.

So snark has been around a lot longer than most of us realize. In fact, why date it to 1882 when we can go all the way back to the biblical book of Proverbs to find evidence for it everywhere - even if it is not mentioned by name? Language that hurts, damages and dismisses others is referenced in virtually every chapter of Proverbs as bringing harm to the one who uses it and to its victims. Here are a few choice selections:

•    "Death and life are in the power of the tongue..." (18:21)

•    "An evil man is ensnared by the transgression of his lips. But the righteous will escape from trouble." (12:13)

•    "The tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable, but the mouth of fools spouts folly." (12:15)

•    "Wise men store up knowledge, but with the mouth of the foolish, ruin is at hand." (10:14)

•    "The one who guards his mouth preserves his life. The one who opens wide his lips comes to ruin." (13:3)

•    "In the mouth of the foolish is a rod for his back, but the lips of the wise will protect them." (14:3)

•    "He who guards his mouth and his tongue, guards his soul from troubles." (21:23)

We all know that speech has this immense power, but we don't always harness that power responsibly. We love sarcasm. It's the foundation of the T-shirt and bumper sticker industry (Here's this week's bumper sticker winner: "I'm not speeding. I'm qualifying.") What we don't realize is how diminishing sarcasm can be for the growth and esteem of those on the receiving end.

But, wait, there's good news. A new paper published in Science and reported in The New York Times testing morality in everyday behaviors found that while there was no difference in the survey between behaviors of religious and nonreligious participants, it did find that good deeds are "contagious." In their words: "People on the receiving end of an act of kindness were about 10 percent more likely than the average person to do something nice themselves later in the day." The only down side of this research is that those who did acts of kindness were slightly more likely to commit a small act of rudeness "as if drawing on moral credit from their previous act."

This new study should give us renewed energy to help goodness go viral and be ever more careful about language that is mean, snarky, sarcastic or cynical. As Proverbs warns, we don't want our lips to be "the snare of the soul."

So please add these two questions to your Elul challenge:

•    What can I not say right now because I am concerned about someone else's feelings and because it will reflect poorly on my moral choices? 

•    What can I make a point of saying right now that will make someone else feel safe, open, special, holy and happy?

Shabbat Shalom

Vanquishing the Angel of Death

“In the next world, who is important? Who is honorable? Who is complete?
”

— Rabbi Nahman, BT Moed Katan 28a

Articles reporting on Joan Rivers' funeral this week said that she did not want a rabbi droning a eulogy but asked for Meryl Streep "crying in five different accents" and also wanted a wind machine so that even in the casket her hair would be "blowing like Beyonce's." She said that she had so much plastic surgery that when she died she was donating her body to Tupperware.

This funny first lady of New York will be missed but she might have taken a page out of the Talmud's playbook on death. At the end of a particular tractate, a group of sages each encounter the Angel of Death and try to dissuade him from his duties. Much like the Angel of Death narrator in Markus Zusak's The Book Thief  - the one who hates his job - the Talmud's Angel of Death seems more flexible than we'd suspect. 

One sage, Rava, sat beside the deathbed of Rabbi Nahman. Rabbi Nahman had a favor to ask of his friend and colleague: "Master, tell the Angel of death not to torment me," as if a human being could give this scary figure advice. Rava did not feel the conversation was necessary: "Are you not an important person?" The Angel of Death should respect Rabbi Nahman's scholarship and piety and leave him alone. That's when Rabbi Nahman quipped, "Who is important?" When the Angel of Death knocks, it matters little the pedigree or accomplishments of the human being who stands before him.

But Rabbi Nahman did grant Rava something. Rava wanted to know - as we all do - what the next world would be like. He asked his teacher to return to him in a dream and let him know. "Master, did you have pain in death?" With the gentle guidance of a sage, Rabbi Nahman assured Rava that death was not painful at all: "Like the removal of hair from milk." It was painless. But, Rabbi Nahman added, if God told him to go back down to earth and die again, he would refuse because his fear of the Angel of Death was so great.

Others seemed less afraid. Rabbi Elazar was eating holy food - food that was sanctified for special use - when the Angel of Death knocked for him. Rabbi Elazar told him that he was busy partaking of what was sacred and the Angel of Death should, therefore, pick a different time. The moment passed. "It kills me sometimes how humans die," says the Angel of Death in The Book Thief.

The Angel of Death moved on to Rabbi Sheshet in the marketplace and with our people's signature hutzpa, he told his prosecutor that he did not want to die like an animal in the market. The Angel of Death should instead come to his house and take him with greater dignity. The Angel complied. "Even death has a heart," it is said of the Angel of Death in The Book Thief.

The marketplace must have been a hangout for the Angel of Death because he appeared to Rabbi Ashi in the same place.  Rabbi Ashi encountered him and said, "Give me thirty days to review my studies, for you say fortunate is the one who comes here [to Heaven] with his learning in his hand." Rabbi Ashi wanted to be better prepared for the day of judgment. Thirty days later, the Angel of Death checked his schedule and showed up to take Rabbi Ashi. Rabbi Ashi challenged him again, "What's the rush?" This time the Angel of Death was better prepared and told him that another scholar was ready to succeed him in his leadership, and he was actually being pushed from this world.

Rabbi Hisda, on the other hand, never stopped studying for a moment so the Angel of Death could not take him until he devised a plan. He sat on a column that was holding up the roof of the study hall causing some shift in the weight and balance of the structure, and when Rabbi Hisda was startled by the momentary sound of the cracking and picked his head up from his studies, the Angel of Death had his chance.

"I am haunted by humans" says the Angel of Death in The Book Thief. Sometimes our goodness makes the Angel of Death stop in his tracks. 

Joan Rivers had more than enough hutzpa to speak back to the Angel of Death. Maybe she told him some jokes and he did not like them. But if we could argue our merit to the very same Angel of Death, tell him [or her] that we deserve to stay here longer because we have important business to attend, what would you say?

If you can give a compelling self-defense of your purpose here, then mean it, mine it and celebrate it now because we don't know when that knock will come. These thoughts on our mortality dominate us as we approach our Days of Awe. "Repent the day before you die," we learn in Ethics of the Fathers. We don't know when that last day will be so our job is to make this day worthy.

Shabbat Shalom

Rumor Has It

“Local gossip lasts for a day and a half.
”

— BT Moed Katan 18b

First things first. How's your 30-day Elul challenge going? Let's put another challenge out there: 30 days gossip-free.
 

The English singer Adele has a great song called "Rumor Has It." It's an expression we recognize that takes out the human element. We're not spreading rumors. Rumors do their own work, as Adele's lyrics suggest:

 All of these words whispered in my ear,

Tell a story that I cannot bear to hear,

Just 'cause I said it, don't mean that I meant it,

Just 'cause you heard it...

 Words whispered in her ear remind me of one of my oft-quoted saying from Proverbs. It captures the danger of rumors best: "Words of gossip are like delicious morsels; they go down to the inmost parts." (18:8). Gossip is delicious but a moment on the lips is forever on the hips in a different way. That piece of malicious or maligning information goes "down to the inmost parts." We cannot erase what we know. We will think of that gossip virtually every time we look at or encounter a person when we know his or her secret failing or weakness. 

Another problem with gossip is that the person spreading the rumor does not take accountability for it; he or she may just be passing it along. What's the harm in that? Just because someone said it or you heard it, does not give the statement authenticity. Then what does a rumor accomplish if it may not be true?

A rumor is like a dab of glue that joins people together in secret knowledge that bestows false power over its "victims." Rumors travel quickly and spread so far that they may become impossible to stop or contain. Thus are we warned in Leviticus about not being a talebearer, which literally in the Hebrew is rendered as someone who travels with gossip. Some people love to be in the know; it's a form of control. They love passing on news about people. "Did you hear...?" They don't want to know that you already heard. They want to be the one to tell you. In Jewish law, gossip does not need to be false to be gossip. It can be true and still be mean-spirited and thoughtless.

The Talmud considers what stops rumors and what spreads rumors and concludes that rumors stop if they are disproven. They gain fuel if no one puts an end to them. When I came across the Talmudic statement above - "Local gossip lasts for a day and a half" - I laughed out loud. The sages actually thought about how long rumors circulate.They concluded that a day and a half is "referring to a rumor that stopped." In their observation of group dynamics, some kind of community self-monitoring takes place that quells a rumor and kills it. 

How seriously should you take a rumor, therefore? "A rumor that does not stop must be taken seriously only if a person has no enemies. But if he has enemies, then it was the enemies who disseminated the rumor." In other words, the Talmudic conclusion is that we do pay attention to rumors that do not stop because at heart we assume that good and honest people who live in community with each other will behave with decency and stop unwarranted gossip. If it persists, we need to investigate the truth of the matter. But if the person who is the subject of the rumor has enemies, we dismiss the rumor altogether. Why be part of someone else's negative agenda?

While it would be wonderful to believe that we are high-minded enough to focus on ideas and not on people, we know the powerful draw of rumors, the delicious morsel that is fed into our ears and goes down to our inmost parts and lodges there. That morsel can quickly turn into indigestion. To avoid what we'll call "irritable scowl syndrome" - a general bad feeling about humanity that lives in the gut - we need to make sure that we don't take joy in passing on rumors and certainly think twice before spreading them without investigating their accuracy, as the Bible reminds us: "Do what is just and right."

Shabbat Shalom

Take the 30 day Challenge

“May it be Your will, God, our God and the God of our ancestors, to renew this month for us for goodness and blessing.”

— Blessing for the New Month

Let me introduce you to a new calendar. In the United States, there is National Mentoring Month (January), Black History Month (February), National Nutrition Month March, and Jazz Appreciation Month (April) and - don't feel left out - Jewish American Heritage Month (May). Towards the end of the year in November there is National Bully Prevention Month (November) and in between, every month is "decorated" with ways to create and sustain an interest in history, arts and medicine.         

A month is long enough to deepen a commitment and tweak a habit but not so long that it feels impossible. This might explain the unbelievable popularity of National Novel Writing Month (November), where writers and aspiring authors try to write an entire novel in a month and have chat rooms, get-togethers and coffee house challenges to inspire themselves and get support from each other. The idea is to immerse oneself long enough to create discipline and order through the formation of a supportive community.

 Does this work? It certainly does for many people because of what we are learning about the nature of habit. A number of books have come out in the past few years on habits and how to change them and have described habit as a muscle that must be activated, challenged and not overworked within a framework of time. "Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped." These are the words of Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit.He writes that, "Willpower isn't just a skill. It's a muscle, like the muscles in your arms and legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there's less power left over for other things." If you are careful, you can engineer new habits and rid yourselves of bad habits as long as you recognize that this requires a lot of stamina and determination and you can't change too much at one time or you will weaken the good habit muscle.

In Jewish law, when people make a commitment to do something or take a vow but do not specify a time, the timeframe is assumed to be thirty days. We appreciate that people make commitments to force themselves to be what they want to be but need that extra push. We also acknowledge that when people want to better themselves, they should not be paralyzed or imprisoned by that challenge. We ask them to take it one day at a time and assume that a month may be just long enough to actualize this better self.         

Perhaps that explains why each month, when we say the blessing over the new month the Shabbat before the Hebrew month begins, there is almost always a sense of anticipation and newness in any congregation. You can hear a ripple of enthusiasm and hopefulness. The prayer itself was composed by Rav, the head of the yeshiva of Sura, close to two thousand years ago. It is mentioned in the Talmud [BT Brakhot 16b]. Rav actually said it every day, perhaps believing, - like our modern writers on habit - that daily affirmations of what you really want to accomplish spiritually are the best way to get you there.          

In the prayer we ask God for long life, peace, goodness, blessing, sustenance, bodily strength, a fear of heaven and sin, a life without shame or disgrace, one of prosperity and honor, one graced by a love of Torah and where our most heartfelt wishes are fulfilled. The entire congregation sings loudly of its desires for "life and peace, happiness and rejoicing, deliverance and consolation." And then we say a rousing "Amen" and hope that the month ahead delivers on these great expectations.

This past week, we celebrated the new month of Elul, the time leading up to our Days of Awe and personal transformation. Let's make it easier to improve ourselves by committing to a 30-day habit change in this sacred month: the Elul Challenge. Make it small. Make it do-able. Make it stick. As Duhigg says of his research, "Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything." Showing yourself you can change in one area gave people the motivation and inspiration to change other bad habits into good habits.

 And if it helps you to articulate what it is you want to change, drop me a line and let me know how you'll be challenging yourself and we'll support each other through the month. Take the Elul Challenge. There's no better time on the Jewish calendar than now. May the Force be with you.

Shabbat Shalom

Live Long and Prosper

““In the merit of which virtues were you blessed with longevity?”

— BT Megilla 28a

Throughout the book of Deuteronomy - the biblical book in which we are currently immersed - we find mitzvot framed as ways to lengthen our lives or the quality of our lives. It reminds me of an old TV ad for yogurt featuring seniors with the wrinkled face of walnuts all eating yogurt as the secret to longevity. Health scams often attract people with the promises of youthful aging or stopping the clock - a skin cream that is the elixir of life, a vitamin or an exercise that is the key to getting older and getting better.

 The Talmud sage Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKana [not to be confused with Hakuna Matata] was once asked the question above by his disciples. They rightfully wanted to know from their master teacher what he did to live to such a ripe old age. This begins a larger Talmudic discussion where the sages spill their longevity secrets. Free of cost, I will be sharing many of them with you. Combine them with yogurt eating and you just may live forever!

Rabbi Nehunya: "In all my days, I never attained veneration at the expense of someone's degradation. Nor did my fellow's curse go up with me upon my bed. And I was always openhanded with money." When asked later, by others, he added: "In all my days I never accepted gifts. Nor was I ever inflexible by exacting a measure of retribution against those who wronged me. And I was always openhanded with my money." This rabbi was able to live with an inner security that came from giving: giving people goodwill, granting them forgiveness, and sharing his material wealth (a fact he stresses twice when asked).

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korha: "In all my days I never gazed at the likeness of a wicked man." This rabbi achieved old age by surrounding himself with good people who generated positive influences that kept him young at heart and in mind.

Rabbi Zeira: "In all my days I was never angry inside my house. Nor did I ever walk ahead of someone who was a greater Torah scholar than me. Nor did I ever walk four cubits without words of Torah nor without wearing tefillin. Nor did I ever sleep in a study hall, neither a deep sleep nor a brief nap. Nor did I ever rejoice when my fellow stumbled. Nor did I ever call my fellow by a derogatory nickname." This rabbi lived a long time because he abided in humility and sensitivity to others. He was also able to make the most of a meaningful moment by staying fully awake in his own life.

What fascinates me, in addition to the answers, is the sheer premise made by these ancient rabbis more than two thousand years ago. They believed that with great reflection and wisdom, they could hazard a guess about their longevity. Instead of berating themselves for all that they did wrong in the past and might repeat in the future, they were able to look back with pride at the lives of virtue that they crafted. They could identify behaviors and tendencies that made the quality of life deep and worthwhile.

You don't have to be old to do that. You do have to take some time to ask why God blessed you with the very particular life you lead. You do have to believe that you were created in the divine image at this specific point in time and history to make certain contributions. In what merit are you here right now? What have you done to deserve this life, in the most positive sense? 

This Shabbat - as we begin to cap the summer and welcome the High Holidays - perhaps we can each take some time to reflect as individuals and as families about our larger question of purpose the way that the sages did and to pat ourselves on the back for the good that we do.

 What acts of virtue or acts of restraint have you done to receive the gift of life today?

 Shabbat Shalom

Stealing Minds

“It is forbidden to steal anyone’s mind...””

— BT Hullin 94b

Yesterday's Washington Post had a shocking column about a Virginia school principal whose resume was full of lies about his educational background. He presented himself as having college degrees he never had from institutions he never attended. He obtained his teaching license fraudulently and falsified three university transcripts. Three days after this discovery, he resigned. It seems that he had been employed for 14 years before anyone made this discovery. Ironically, his last name is Toogood. Too bad. 

I scanned the next page of the Metro section to discover that a dermatologist practicing in Mclean, Virginia intentionally "misdiagnosed patients with skin cancer" to perform unnecessary surgeries. He employed unlicensed and unqualified medical assistants to suture and close wounds and conduct other procedures and billed for surgeries that he assigned to his nurses, sometimes billing at three different locations at the same time. Washingtonian magazine recently named him one of the region's top dermatologists. Oy. If this is the one of the best, what does the worst look like?

Reading on the same day how the public was duped is painful, but it raises, in many ways, a different question. How did each of these men get away with this fraudulent behavior for so long? Both of these professions - education and medicine - are regarded in Jewish tradition as sacred. They are mitzvot, commanded occupations, perhaps because they involve and assume a level of trust. Perhaps precisely because of that trust, no one bothered to do a proper background check or an investigation into business practices. We assume that there is a certain unspoken covenant we make with people who lead us and take care of us. Unfortunately that agreement is too often broken.

In Jewish law, there is a category of theft called genevat da'at, literally stealing knowledge, based on a biblical prohibition found in Leviticus 19:11. Some call it stealing the mind. It is a subtle robbery; you likely won't know it's happening until long after it has happened. It's not like getting pickpocketed. You may never know that something was stolen from you. Professor Hershey Friedman describes the term genevat da'at as "fooling someone and thereby causing him or her to have a mistaken assumption, belief, and/or impression. Thus the term is used in Jewish law to indicate deception, cheating, creating a false impression and acquiring undeserved goodwill." This is a prohibition of biblical order so if you weren't going to break any of the big ten, you might want to add this as an unexpected eleven on your Jewish dignity laundry list of commandments.

The example I often use of genevat da'at is buying someone a gift at Walmart and putting it in a Nordstrom box. You never said you bought it there. You let the packaging speak for you. It did not tell the truth. You get undeserved friendship points as a big spender when, in fact, Jewish law calls you a subtle liar. Because we take knowledge so seriously, we take deception seriously as well, the breakdown in knowledge that plays on false trust, ignorance or naiveté. Other examples of this include inviting someone to an event when you know they cannot attend so you get bonus credit with them (unless you are doing so specifically to show respect and honor) or any financial misrepresentation when you are selling or buying something.

You might claim that there is a universe of difference between faking a transcript and faking how much you paid for a gift because you took the clearance tag off and left on the "real" price. But in Jewish law, these are matters of scale and degree. The willingness to misrepresent yourself to look richer, stronger, smarter, more generous than you really are - may one day take you to someplace you really don't want to be: the land of deception, where integrity cannot live.

Alternatively, you can take the view of George Burns, "Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made."

Shabbat Shalom

To Stand or Sit

““But as for you, stand here with Me”

— Deuteronomy 5:27

There is an argument taking place among writers right now. Is it better ergonomically to write while sitting or to write while standing? Hemingway used to write while standing as did Nabakov. We've see an emergence of the writing desk and even the treadmill desk for those who can really multi-task. A. J. Jacobs devotes a section in his book Drop Dead Healthy to this question, saying "The desk is where most of the Crimes of Excessive Sedentary Behavior occur." Since he wrote this book to experiment with ways to achieve optimal health, he piled 3 cardboard boxes on top of each other on his desk and started to answer e-mails.

"It didn't go badly," he writes. "I shifted and rocked a lot. I kind of looked like an Orthodox Jew praying at the Western Wall, but with a MacBook instead of a Torah." His breakthrough came when he followed the advice of Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic and rigged a desk on his treadmill, what some have called deskercise and others have termed iPlodding. He wanted to write the whole book on this desk and even includes a picture of his invention. He claims it helps him focus.

Because our sedentary behavior cause aches and pains, scholars of old also took on this question. Is it better to sit or stand while learning Torah?

In the Talmud [BT Megilla 21a], the beautiful imperative above - to stand with Me - was understood as an ancient way we partnered with God. "The phrase 'with Me' indicates, as it were, even the Holy One, Blessed be He, was standing [at Mount Sinai]." We never think of God as standing with us at Sinai but as giving us something. The idea that God was not only giving us teachings but also standing beside us to support the way that we received them has great value in helping us understand the nature of transmission.

The Talmud then extrapolates, as it so often does. If God stood with us at Sinai to teach us, then teachers must also stand by their students when teaching them: "From where is it derived that the teacher should not sit on a couch and teach his disciple while he is sitting on the ground? "But as for you, stand here with Me." To this, one sage added, "From the days of Moses until the time of Rabban Gamliel [grandson of Hillel], they would study Torah while standing." Standing was a way of honoring Torah and an act akin to receiving the Torah at Sinai again. It was also a way to honor the teacher/disciple relationship. If we want people to really learn, we go to where they are to teach them. Why did this practice change, the Talmud ponders? "When Rabban Gamliel died, weakness descended to the world, and they would study Torah while sitting." 

Sitting while teaching was a sign of weakness. The sages debated the point. In Deuteronomy, one verse says, "And I sat on the mount" while another says, "And I stood on the mount" (Deuteronomy 10:10). This is interpreted by the sage Rav to mean that "Moses would stand and learn Torah from God and sit and review what he learned." Rabbi Hanina said, "Moses was not sitting or standing but bowing." Rabbi Yohanan believed this means that Moses simply stayed in one place when he taught where Rava said, "Moses studied easy material while standing and difficult material while sitting."

We have constructed very set spaces for learning that may not optimize our study. Our imaginations are often locked into the classrooms of our childhoods: desks evenly spaced apart facing the teacher's desk in neat rows. Very little about real learning, the integration of knowledge and wisdom develop this way. The Talmud understood that when we learn we need movement.

The Talmudic passage also made me think of the expression "to stand with Israel." We mean that we are together in unity and support. But I thought of Rava's contribution to this debate. Moses studied easy material while standing and difficult material while sitting. It may be easier to stand with Israel than to sit with Israel, to consider the complex and nuanced ways we can support our homeland in crisis. Slogans, reverse racism, simple political bantering are ways that people tend to protest - to stand with Israel - but real, long-term solutions can never be reduced to a simple formula. They always involve loss, anguish, compromise, patience, diplomacy and resilience.

It's time to stand with Israel and to sit with Israel, too.

Shabbat Shalom

A Bridge to Nowhere

A bridge is a fascinating architectural construct

The writer Vera Nazarian in The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration shared an effective story about the mystery of Bridges: “Once upon a time there were two countries at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean. But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met. To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction form the meeting point. And the two countries are still at war.”

Let Silence Speak

““When I speak, I have reason to regret. But when I am silent, I have nothing to regret. Before I speak, I am master over my words; once the words leave my mouth, they rule over me.”

— Rabbi Judah the Pious

I don't know about you, but I am getting a little tired of all the words spilled over the war in Gaza: the talking heads, the inane Facebook posts, the political rhetoric, the empty words, the angry words, the uncharitable words. So few of these words add clarity. They don't even add confusion. They just add to the mountain of talk that dissipates quickly when you see one profound visual image of anguish on either side.

I thought of this frustration when I encountered the following passage in the daily cycle of Talmud study this week: "What is the meaning of this that is written: 'For You, silence is praise [Psalms 65:2]? The best remedy of all is silence. When Rabbi Dimi came [from Israel to Babylonia], he said: In the West [Israel], they say, 'If a word is worth one sela, silence is worth two'" [BT Megilla18a]. I know what you're thinking: how much is a sela worth? Is it worth it to be quiet? Well in the days of the Talmud we used the Roman monetary system, and a sela was called a Tyrian Tetradrachm. 1,500 selas make up one talent, and 3,000 selas make the equivalent of a Biblical shekel, according to my research. What this means is that your silence is not worth very much, but it is worth twice your words!

One later Talmud commentator interprets this to mean that coming up with an appropriate comment is worth one sela, but refraining from making an inappropriate comment is worth twice as much. Wit is always trumped by restraint. This makes sense. While we may regret not sharing a poignant observation or clever retort, that missed opportunity will always be easier to live with than the insult, hurt or backhanded compliment that we do say. Rabbi Judah the Pious [R. Yehuda Ha-Hasid], a medieval scholar, says above that you cannot regret the words you do not say and that just the act of letting words leave your mouth allows them to master you rather than the other way around. Mastering silence - or zipping the lip - requires a level of personal discipline that speaking does not.

Because we also pay a psychic price for words we regret, we can understand how silence also protects us, not only others. And the proverb from Ethics of the Fathers: "I have found nothing better for my body than silence" [1:17] confirms this. Silence is not only a wise choice in regard to others but a way that we protect, nourish and defend ourselves physically because the price of poor judgment in words can create stress: ulcers and muscle aches, headaches and heartaches.

In Ecclesiastes we read the famous line "a time to speak and a time to be silent" [3:7], but how do we know what time is the right time for speech and the right time for silence? Here are five questions that may help you decide:

• Will this hurt someone?
• Is it necessary?
• Is it helpful?
• Does it make a genuine contribution to the discussion at hand?
• How will I feel if the person I am speaking about hears this?

We are now in the nine day period leading up to Tisha B'av. We read the book of Lamentations. It starts not with a word but with a sigh. It is a time when people are often more cautious about physical danger. It is a good time to be more cautious about spiritual and emotional danger by watching out for gossip and lies, hurtful speech and criticism. Let your silence protect you as the better part of wisdom. Silence creates the sacred space to hear better. If the world remains unlittered by our words, there is more room for the words of others. Let silence speak.

Shabbat Shalom

You Are Not Alone

““Judaism has always looks upon the individual as if he were a little world; with the death of the individual, this little world comes to an end.””

— Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik

A number of Facebook posts this week requested that people in Israel attend Max Steinberg's funeral. As a lone solider  - a soldier who decides to serve in the IDF from another country and is thus without family - Max was one of 13 killed in the fighting this past weekend. Max's friends  - and even strangers - were understandably concerned that Max would not have a lot of people to send him off to his eternal resting place. 

Max's death and the death of anyone who gives his or her life in service to others raises the profound and niggling philosophical question of the rights of the individual in relationship to the community. What is my responsibility to others? What are the limitations of my responsibility? How do I achieve community?  The quote above, by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in his article "The Community," stresses that each person must treat himself and be treated by others as no other. We will weave excerpts of his article into Max's story.

““Each individual possesses something unique, rare, which is unknown to others; each individual has a unique message to communicate, a special color to add to the communal spectrum.”

Max joined the army six months after visiting Israel with Birthright. His parents had never been to Israel. His network of family and friends there was not deep. His mother told NBC news what any mother would have: "I never thought I'd have to bury my child. It's not supposed to be that way." His mother wanted him to be buried near her in Los Angeles, but when she got to Israel, she understood why he needed to be buried there, to be near what was newly important to him.

“[A human being] is a single, lonely being, not belonging to any structured collectivity. He is also a thou-related being, who co-exists in companionship with someone else.”

Max's family learned something about us. Death is a gruesome teacher. But when we mourn the loss of one person, we do so as a group, a collective entity that recognizes and acknowledges that we are not whole without the presence of even one. You cannot be Jewish alone. You always exist in companionship with someone else, even at moments when you are painfully on your own.

“The originality and creativity in man are rooted in his loneliness-experience, not in his social awareness. The singleness of man is responsible for his singularity; the latter, for his creativity. Social man is superficial: he imitates, he emulates. Lonely man is profound: he creates, he is original.”

Max's friends who posted their concern, need not have. Trust in our people. We show up. We are there because Max may have been a lone soldier but he was never a soldier alone. There was nothing to worry about - other than everything else to worry about - because 30,000 people were there to pay their respects to Max and to thank him for his service to his country and his people. 

“Halacha [Jewish law] says to man: Don’t let your neighbor drift along the lanes of loneliness; don’t permit him to become remote and alienated from you...”

Josh Flaster, who leads a group that supports lone soldiers in Israel described Max this way: "Max was a small guy with a big heart...He put himself at risk throughout his service to look after other soldiers who might have been in danger. He wasn't eight feet tall but he acted like he was."

“Lonely man is a courageous man; he is a protester; he fears nobody; whereas social man is a compromiser, a peacemaker...”

We attend funerals of soldiers who are strangers because they protected us even though we are strangers. We are a world full of strangers who often exist solely because of the kindness of strangers. 

“...when lonely man joins the community, he adds a new dimension to community awareness. He contributes something which no one else could have contributed. He enriches the community existentially; he is irreplaceable”

Max, I don't know you. And now I never will. But I know one thing about you. You are irreplaceable.

Shabbat Shalom

Be Our Guardian

“Guardian of this holy nation, guard the remnant of the holy people, and let not the holy nation perish…”

Excerpt from Tachanun

Life-threatening danger to our people surfaces multiple, often conflicting issues - from the practical to the existential. As sirens blast across Israel and the news is dominated by pictures of rubble and rockets piercing Israeli skies, we cannot help but ask ourselves: How long will this last? How can we resolve this conflict on a more permanent basis? Is there hope?

At such times, I find myself thinking often of one of my favorite daily prayers: Tachanun. The word literally refers to a type of prayer: supplication, which demands self-contraction, humility and beseeching God. The Talmud reads a verse in Daniel as the basis for such prayers: “I turned my face to the Lord, God, devoting myself to prayer and supplication [tachanunim] in fasting, sackcloth and ashes” [9:3]. Many different sages had personal supplications, usually a pastiche of different biblical verses designed to petition God for mercy. This prayer - because of its solemn nature - is often the first to be abandoned in synagogue at times of joy, like the afternoon before a holiday or for the entire Hebrew month of Nissan. But when we don’t say it, we miss out on a moment to think about grace and its role in our lives.

The prayer Ashkenazic Jews recite today was probably an amalgamation of such personal prayers and verses constructed in the 14th century. There is a short version of the prayer that is read daily at the morning and afternoon services and a substantially longer one on Mondays and Thursdays, market days when the Torah was traditionally read in public, days that the Talmud marks are an “et ratzon” - a time of God’s openness to hearing our innermost prayers.

One of the foundations of the prayer is a string of words and sentences that appear in the sixth chapter of Psalms, a time when David was ill and suffering and reflected on his pain. “My whole being,” David wrote, “is struck with terror - and You, God, how long?” The odd construct of this sentence clues us into David’s anguish. When terror takes over, we cannot imagine our own resilience. We need the situation to end. We ask God how long this will endure because we can endure it no longer. In this chapter, we confront David’s deepest vulnerabilities: “I am worn out with my sighing, every night I cause my bed to float with my tears. I melt my couch. My eye is dimmed with anger; it has aged because of my tormentors.” 

Tachanun also has a fascinating choreography, and is often called “nefilat apayim” - or the bowing of the face because when a Torah scroll is present in the room, we say a passage of the prayer with our foreheads leaning down on our less dominant arm. “Be gracious to us, God, be gracious to us for we are saturated with humiliation. In anger, remember to have compassion.” When we feel one emotion, we ask for another. Help us forgive.

We move from standing, to a bowing of the head, to sitting erect to standing again. Our body adopts a dance of sadness that moves to a place of strength so that our bodies are telling us not to sign on the couch forever. Take charge. “Strangers say: there is no hope or expectation for us.” We say this line as we are already sitting up straight. Someone else may say this of us but we cannot say this of ourselves. Perhaps one way we respond to a situation that is out of our control is to say this prayer with greater intention and meaning.

Many years ago, I called the reception desk of a busy company, asking for a woman whose first name was Hope. The receptionist replied, “There is no Hope here.” Hearing it startled me, and I responded quietly, “There is always hope.”

Hope is the name of our Israeli national anthem and the abiding song of Jewish history. It’s time to bring hope back.

Shabbat Shalom

Ugly Torah

“Matters of Torah are likened to three liquids: water, wine and milk. Why?”

BT Ta’anit 7a

This week we have been bombarded with images of ugliness and pain. Where it says in the Talmud that matters of Torah are likened to three liquids: water, wine and milk, this week we have to add tears to that list. Those sensitive to the Torah’s teachings about love and peace cannot help but weep at the bloodshed and violence in our beloved homeland. And yet, this particular teaching will strangely elevate ugliness.

The Talmud sage Rabbi Oshya asked why these three liquids have been compared to Torah and explained that since “these three liquids can be retained in only the ugliest of vessels, so too are matters of Torah retained only by one who is humble.”

The Talmud then illustrates this with a story that seems cruel but telling. The daughter of a Roman emperor said to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananya, “Woe to glorious wisdom – like yours – which is contained in an ugly vessel.” She, a princess surrounded by finery, was dumbstruck by the dissonance between the intellectual and spiritual expansiveness of this scholar and his appearance, which defied any Roman aesthetic she knew.

Rabbi Yehoshua did not defend his looks or comment on her rudeness. Instead, with expected wisdom, he asked her a simple question: “Does your father keep his wine in clay vessels?” She replied with an obvious yes since this was the norm. “You who are so important, should put it in vessels of gold and silver.” Just as these are expensive liquids, should their containers be of equal expense to showcase the status they bring.

The emperor’s daughter repeated the conversation to her father who proceeded to have the wine transferred. No expense was to be spared in the fulfilling his daughter’s request. It made sense to a person of influence and wealth to treat his wine with honor and dignity. Alas, the transferred wine all turned sour. The acid in the wine had a corrosive effect on the metal and impacted the taste. Clay is porous and contained none of the poisonous contaminants often found in ancient metal vessels. The experiment failed. The king was angry. “Who told you to do this?”

The emperor summoned Rabbi Yehoshua. We are not sure why a sage would have been discussing these matters with a princess, but now he was to be held accountable for the spoilage. When the emperor questioned him, Rabbi Yehoshua explained that the best material is preserved in the most humble of vessels because it retains its specialness this way. The emperor thought about his and questioned this assumption based on his own experience. “But there handsome people who are learned!” Many wise people are blessed with good lucks. But Rabbi Yehoshua was not buying it. They would be even more wise if they were not as beautiful, he retorted.

“Had they been ugly, they would have been even more learned!”

We often mistake beauty for intelligence, but that is not the prevailing issue here. While it’s true that Ethics of the Fathers says not to look at the holding vessel but what ‘s inside it, this admonition is for the one who looks.  Rabbi Yehoshua suggested that human beauty can be a distraction to its “owner” and minimize wisdom because beauty and humility rarely come in the same package.

Sister Wendy Beckett, an English nun in an order of silence who temporarily renounces her retreats to host art programs on the BBC, was interviewed by Bill Moyers about her incredible gift for art analysis. With buck-toothed charm, she confessed that not being beautiful herself has given her more capacity to appreciate beauty. She spoke matter-of-factly, not asking for pity or false encouragement but with a sadness for the rest of us that we fall too often for the illusion of beauty. “Grace is deceptive. Beauty is illusory” [Proverbs 31:30].

Things are not always as they seem. Perhaps something of beauty will come out of all of today’s ugliness. To be human is to believe that today’s anguish – however existentially exhausting and painfully repetitive – will one day be transformed. Beauty is illusory. But maybe ugliness is illusory too.

Shabbat Shalom

The Difference a Day Makes

“Teach us to count our days well, that we may obtain a wise heart.”

Psalms 90:12

Sometimes when life gets rough or news is suddenly good or a special event takes place, you think to yourself: “What a difference a day makes!” And it does. In one day you can go from being single to being married. In one day you can go from being married to losing a spouse you cherish. In one day you can get a diagnosis, and in one day you can have surgery to remove a growth. One day you become a parent and life changes forever. One day, you stand on stage and get a diploma and suddenly you are a doctor, lawyer or accountant. It is not that you knew less the day before. It is that one day was picked to confer a different status upon you.

Any transition that takes only a few hours but changes a life, reminds us of the preciousness of counting days and making each day extraordinary when we can. The well-known verse from psalms above, however, points not to the extraordinary days of our lives that appear in photo albums but to the span of time that does not stand out for anything unusual. Days and days pass in monotony. Number those days well, and you have made a life. According to Psalms, you will obtain a wise heart.

We find this perspective in the unusual way that days are counted in Genesis 25:7 and 47:9. In the first verse, when Abraham approached his death, and the text records “the days of his years.” In the second, Jacob shared the hardships of the “days of his years” with Pharaoh when the two finally met. Long swaths of time are broken into the days of the years in these ancient passages as a reminder that years are an accumulation of days. They can blend into each other with sameness and tedium or stand out from the years as times of productivity, joy and distinctiveness.

Mason Currey, in his new book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, offers over 100 portraits of the every day rituals of famous novelists, composers and artists in brief spurts of a few paragraphs each. A few sleep all day and work all night. Some can’t begin work with a strong drink and a smoke; others need complete silence and a morning coffee. Maya Angelou writes in a hotel room to separate work from life. Truman Capote called himself a horizontal author because he loved to work in bed. Most woke early to catch the morning light and the first burst of creative energy and generally wrote 3-4 hours.

Some belittle the revelation of an artist’s rituals because it does not make a difference to us what someone else does to inspire the muse. Yet, we do want to know. Perhaps if, like Stephen King, we sit down every day and reach our 2,000 word quota, we will write the next airport bestseller. Maybe if we can discover a good daily ritual we can maximize our productivity.

William James believed that the best way to make meaning is to create daily routines that we stick to religiously: “The more details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” Without a plan, he says that the indecision of how we should spend time, wastes previous time.

We are now in the period of the nine days, a season in the Jewish calendar where we grieve over the ancient destruction of Jerusalem and the Temples. We count these nine days as part of the 21 day period of our past violently lost. But what about day 10 and 11 and 32 and 1,045? When we count days, we are essentially saying that each day matters, and we have an opportunity to redeem time every morning. A day makes all the difference in the world.

Sanctifying time day after day brings us to another writer, William Faulkner, who once said: “I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.”

Shabbat Shalom

Good Neighbors

“Distance yourself from a bad neighbor.”

Ethics of the Fathers 1:7

A police officer approached two men hanging out in a public space in the middle of the night. He approached the first guy: “What are you doing here?

“Nothing.”

He turned his attention the other fellow: “And what are you doing here?”

“I’m helping him.”

We tend to do what the people around us do. It’s human nature. The sages of old recognized this and had a saying: “Woe to the wicked. Woe to his neighbor. How wonderful is the righteous person. How lucky for his neighbor” [BT Yoma 56b]. The decision of where to situate ourselves physically in a community is not random or coincidental. We make social choices everyday. Alice Roosevelt Longworth did. She famously said, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

Alice probably has a lot of company.

In his TED talk, “The Hidden Influence of Social Networks,” Dr. Nicholas Christakis talks about the tendency of like-minded people to cluster with each other and influence each other in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. With James Fowler, he studied the mathematical, social, biological and psychological rules and patterns in networks and offered some stunning examples of the impact of our homogeneous clustering: “…if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher…if your friend’s friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher…if your friend’s friend’s friend  - someone you probably don’t even know – is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. And it’s only when you get to your friend’s friend’s friend’s friend that there’s no longer a relationship between that person’s body size and your own body size.”

Who would have thought that moving might help with weight loss?

In analyzing the reasons for this striking phenomenon Christakis suggests three possibilities: 1) obesity spreads from one person to the other in a causal fashion, 2) homophily – we gravitate to others who are like ourselves, and 3) confounding – we are not causing each other’s weight gain but share a common exposure to a factor that influences us both. We both happen to live walking distance to a bakery.

The Bible devotes many verses to the importance of picking the people you’re with and choosing well because we all operate “under the influence.” We are also told the importance of being good neighbors to attract good neighbors. Proverbs offers a few suggestions:

“Seldom step foot in your neighbor’s house – too much of you, and they will hate you,” [25:17].

“If a person loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse,” [27:14].

“A person who lacks judgment ridicules his neighbor, but a person of understanding holds his tongue” [11:12].

Give space. Be quiet at off-hours and zip the lip.

We live in the proximity of others. Our communities usually determine the norms, values and boundaries of our lives. Our social contract with others may never be articulated, but it’s virtually always present: in the decisions we make, in the social capital we invest, in the way we think, behave, vote and spend our leisure time. No wonder we are told to love our neighbor as ourselves. If we pick the neighborhood carefully, this won’t be very difficult.

Do you live in a neighborhood that helps you be a better person? Do something today that shows you’re a good neighbor.

Shabbat Shalom

Early Risers

“Wake up like a lion…”

Shulkhan Arukh, Code of Jewish Law

Laws of Rising in the Morning 1:1

When I taught young adults, one of my favorite quotes was, “Those who hoot with the owls at night, cannot soar with the eagles in the morning.” My children have heard this countless times when they’ve stayed up late then looked ghastly in the morning, trying to compose themselves for a day of school or work. What I love about the image is not the choice of animals but the choice of verbs. Do you want to muddle through the day or do you want to soar? Stay up late enough and you may have no choice in the matter. Feet drag. The brain feels foggy. And time seems to pass slower than ever until you can meet your bed again. The old Henny Youngman wisdom comes back: “If you’re going to so something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.”

In Rabbi Joseph Karo’s 16th century code of law, it is not the owl or the eagle who begins his book but the lion. The legal fragment above continues: “Wake up like a lion to stand in the morning to serve one’s Creator since he wakes up the dawn.” I’ve always struggled to understand who the “he” is modifying. Is it the lion who wakes up the jungle each day with a mighty roar, instilling fear in the other animals that generates adrenaline, or is it God who wakes up the morning? The contemplation of God inspires us to grab hold of the day and make it ours.

An early 20th century commentary, that of Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, observes here the affect of the owl. A person in the winter lies in bed and thinks about the warm and toasty feeling of being under the blanket or the lethargy of the summer and then feels immobile. Why get up? He suggests that just as one has to rise for work commitments, the mandate is to get up early for one’s ultimate work. This plays on the verb “la-avod” in Hebrew, which means both to work and to worship.

A Talmudic principle underscores this sentiment: “The vigilant are early in the performance of mitzvot.” What are you waiting for when it comes to goodness? Tractate Rosh Hashana 32b uses the term “vatikin” to describe such individuals, a term that implies both piety and early rising possibly from the Greek for straight or trustworthy. People who rise early to pray, study and commit themselves to kindness show great enthusiasm for life and what it can unfold when you seize on the day’s energy.

Naturally, the slow to move become the object of chastisement in the Bible, particularly in the book of Proverbs, because if you’re lazy, you won’t be able to take care of your needs or those of others in the most basic way.

 “Laziness brings on deep sleep, and the slothful person goes hungry” [19:5].

“The sloth will not plow because of the cold and then will beg during the harvest because he has nothing” [20:4].

“The desire of the lazy man kills him for his hands refuse to work” [21:25].

The momentary desire for inertia is overwhelmed by the long-term need to support oneself. But perhaps the best quote from Proverbs on the topic is about lions. “The lazy man says, ‘There is a lion in the road, a fierce lion roaming in the streets.’ As a door turns on its hinges, so does the sloth turn on his bed” [26:13-14]. A lazy man sees a fierce lion approaching but then turns over and goes back to sleep.

We know what the lion had for breakfast.

Shabbat Shalom

The Book of Empathy

"I've been told all about what you have done…”

Boaz to Ruth

empathy: noun 1.the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self. Origin: 1900-05;  < Greek empátheia  affection, equivalent to em- em-2  + path-  (base of páschein  to suffer) + -eia -ia; present meaning translates German Einfühlung [definition.com].

To be empathic in this definition can be either an intellectual identification with someone else or an emotional mirroring. It is the capacity to go beyond the self to hear and relate to the needs or pain of another. And it’s hard, particularly when it involves getting beyond your own hurt, getting over yourself and your bruises to see how you have bruised. Empathy represents a mature level of adult emotional development that few really achieve.

On the intellectual level of empathy, we turn to a passage in the Talmud. There was a legal argument of some consequence between two great sages. One was obligated to follow the other, and the submissive sage was concerned that he was breaking a very important law. Rabbi Akiva saw this scholar's distress and offered him an alternative way to look at the situation, to which the sage replied: “Akiva, you have consoled me; you have consoled me” [BT Rosh Hashana 25a]. Commentaries parse this, saying that he was consoled for two separate problems. But repeating an expression of solace is like emotional highlighting, a way that we acknowledge the depth of how someone has touched us. You have truly and deeply consoled me when I thought that I was inconsolable.

Then there is the emotional aspect of empathy. This takes us to the heart of the book of Ruth, chapter two: “So Boaz said to Ruth, ‘My daughter, listen to me. Don't go and glean in another field and don't go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the girls. I have told the men not to touch you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.’ At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She exclaimed, ‘Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me--a foreigner?’ Boaz replied, ‘I've been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband--how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.’  ‘May I continue to find favor in your eyes, my lord,’ she said. ‘You have given me comfort and have spoken kindly to your servant--though I do not have the standing of one of your servant girls."’”

Ruth is so unused to an empathic ear that she seems almost embarrassed by Boaz' compliment. He is able to articulate her sacrifices when she never does, giving her a profound level of self-worth that was foreign to her.

Christian theologian Henri Nouwen in Out of Solitude writes, “The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

Maybe Shavuot is not only a time for Torah study but for a time for reflecting on friendship and celebrating it. It’s a time when we can reach beyond ourselves to acknowledge the suffering and the kindness of others, and sometimes giving voice to joy and pain beyond what a friend has communicated.

Celebrate friendship this Shavuot.

Our Hearts Weep

“Through the window peered Sisera’s mother. Behind the lattice, she sighed. Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why so late the clatter of his wheels?”

Judges 5:28

Those of us who are parents recognize in this verse in Judges the anxiety of not knowing where a child is: that momentary loss of eye contact in a busy place, that waiting for news, that expectant sound of a familiar car parking in the driveway or a key turning in the door. Until we hear it, we wrestle with a polarity of emotions: we expect the worst and then push aside the demons of worry that are ever-present. There must be a logical explanation for the delay. The biblical text masterfully captures this moment, not by telling but by showing. A mother sighs at the window, wondering when her son will come home.

This is no ordinary mother. It is the mother of a cruel enemy general who oppressed the Israelites for years, a general who died a coward. But the text pushes aside the politics to ponder the anguish of a mother in pain, one who intuits that her son will perhaps not be coming home. We have never met Sisera’s mother. She is introduced to us only to provide this spotlight. Her ladies-in-waiting try to reassure her that Sisera is merely enjoying the spoils of war: the women and the embroidered clothes, as if they were all mere objects. The text here offers a vulgar note of women making other women into chattle.  There is a reason Sisera has not yet made his way home, they contend. And she, too, dismisses any thought of a bad outcome with this reasoning: “she also assures herself,” the verse states. We are not convinced.

As readers who have already learned that Sisera is dead, we sense that when this mother approached the window in pain she somehow already knew.

As a community, we have all been waiting by that window for weeks, checking the news constantly and asking if there are any updates, any developments about our three kidnapped boys. We prayed for them, thought of them, cried for them. We told ourselves that the army would find them. It was just a matter of time.

The murder of three Israeli teenagers was just confirmed when journalists and pundits were talking about political and military responses within hours. The inevitable responses of harsh retribution or measured restraint were out in the public domain, as expected. They were predictable and predictably not effective.

But these were mere distractions. All most of us could really think about was what it must be like to be a parent of one of those boys at that hour and for every other hour after that. Our own sacred texts demand that we do this as a sign of compassion, pushing away the politics and prognoses that will inevitably follow a tragedy like this for one simple moment: the moment a parent who is waiting finds out the terrible news that he or she has lost a child.

We have all been in some psychic, mystical way the parents, brothers, sisters and friends of those boys: Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar. This bond of connection and concern runs deep, in tears, in friendship, in helplessness. We waited by the window with the families of these boys.

Yet, at the end of the day, our verse in Judges reminds us that we are not the parents.  Whatever closeness and pain we experience can never come close to that of the families who lost those children. Sisera’s mother does not stand with her friends at that window. She stands alone.

And this too, is an obvious but critical aspect of community. There is something intensely uncomfortable about strangers or acquaintances who are more distraught than the actual mourners. An I-Thou relationship is constituted through many private understandings. One of them is that we must know when to respect the privacy and singularity of mourning, especially in deaths that receive great public attention. We can never to presume to understand someone else’s most intimate pain. We have our own pain as a community and extended family that has lost three young lights. It translates and extends itself but also has a limit. We go on when those who sit on the floor in mourning cannot imagine they ever will.

Compassion extends us. Respect limits us. Our humanity makes us reach out. Our humility makes us stand back. We mourn with these parents, and we also know that there is an abyss that we will never understand. Even as we all stood with these parents, they stood at a window alone and will be alone still.

Shabbat Shalom

The Name Game

“A good name is better than fine perfume…”

Ecclesiastes 7:1

A good name is easy to compare to perfume because perfume leaves its residue in the form of a smell. Many people wear a signature perfume that identifies them even before they walk into a room. Sometimes it’s a great smell, and sometimes it’s overbearing. Remember the old commercial; everyone in the office smelled the boss coming before he entered the room because of his terrible cologne, so they immediately started working to give the appearance of busy-ness. Your reputation - your name - is a lot like perfume. It announces your presence, introducing you, accompanying you and even leaving a little after-effect for impact. And just like perfume, you hope that the impact is positive and maybe even beautiful.

We are about to read the story of Ruth, a book filled with names that invite interpretation. Some believe Ruth’s name is related to the word for friendship, a grammatical stretch but true to her character. She was totally committed to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s people, God, homeland and future. She had the opportunity to stay and rebuild her life at home but wanted instead the spiritual adventure of a lifetime. Her devotion ends in the true redemption of her life and the life of the people she adopts through the legacy of leadership that follows.

There is Naomi who does not want to be called “sweet” because her life was deeply embittered by loss. When the women of Bethlehem come to the city gate to greet her and ask, “Is this Naomi?” she quickly disabuses them of that notion. I have suffered so much loss that I cannot be called by the same name. I am no longer that person. As she says this, it is a chastisement to these women who dismiss her with their question. God has punished me enough, she reminds them. I do not need you to punish me further. Perhaps if you call me a different name, you will treat me differently. You will find compassion that you do not have now.

Orpah’s name in the midrash means “neck” because in leaving Naomi, she turned her neck from the life she had. There is ploni-almoni, a name associated with anonymity because this redeemer failed to redeem Ruth and was not considered worthy. And then there are Naomi’s sons: machlon and hilyon, loosely translated as “sickness and destruction.” Lovely. Glad I wasn’t at that baby-naming.

Scholars believe that these names were transposed on the text to reflect the feelings that readers should have upon reading this story. Maimonides helps fill in the gap by suggesting that Naomi’s sons were leaders of the generation who, during a time of famine and political unrest, turned away from those in need. They moved to Moab to seek their fortunes and evade the cries of petitioners. We appreciate their predicament. It is hard to have and be surrounded by have-nots. But that is where the work of leadership must take place. Those are the times when instead of moving away, we need leaders to lean in.

Ethics of the Fathers identifies four crowns, three of which appear in the book of Ruth: “Rabbi Shimon would say: ‘There are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of kingship. But the crown of a good name transcends them all’” [4:13]. The book of Ruth contains the crown of kingship in presenting the ancestry of King David. It contains the crown of Torah because, in addition to its special narrative qualities, it demonstrates the Jewish values of charity and the importance of the levirate marriage in protecting women and the family name. And it contains the crown of a good name because Naomi returned to her state of sweetness by the book’s end and Ruth showed us the power of transformation through friendship.

If your name is your perfume, what fragrance do you bring into the lives of others and what beautiful smells are associated with your reputation?

Shabbat Shalom