Tag: brokenness

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On Being Imperfect – Emor 5781

I am feeling at least as much anxiety right now as I have throughout the pandemic, and that is despite the fact that I am fully vaccinated.

Why? Because it is easy to shut things down, and just say no to all forms of gathering in person. It is easy to say, you must always wear a mask when you are around other people, or stay 6 feet away from others, and so forth.

It is not quite as easy to make cautious decisions about restarting all the things that we stopped more than a year ago. It is not so easy to say, some may come and others may not, due to their vaccination status. It is not so easy to differentiate between what is permissible outdoors vs. indoors, etc. 

And we have all been in this anxious mode for so long, it is not so simple to turn it off. I went to see my optometrist this week, my first real in-person appointment with a health-care provider in more than a year. And despite the fact that I and the optometrist are both vaccinated, it was still very strange for us to be in a small room, so close to each other. We wore masks, of course. 

We are going to be in this limbo phase for a long time, it seems – until children can be vaccinated, until we know for certain that we are sufficiently protected from the more infectious or more deadly variants. I fear that, for many of us, our anxiety level will remain quite palpable for some time.

One of the lingering concerns that I have, after 13.5 months of isolation and anxiety and uncertainty, is what loss to the Jewish world and the Jewish future that the pandemic will have caused. We have not had in-person Youth Tefillah for all of that time. Registration at both our Early Learning Center and JJEP has been lower than a “normal” year. We have canceled two Family Benei Mitzvah Retreats. And so forth.

Students learning at JJEP, the shared religious school between Beth Shalom and Rodef Shalom

Now, as an astute observer of Jewish life commented on Facebook not too long ago, the Qadosh Barukh Hu is grading on a curve this year. Nonetheless, my feeling is that we have so few opportunities in today’s always-on-the-go society to get Judaism into our children, that a loss of so many things in the past year will have a long-lasting impact on what our kids know and how connected they feel.

These are valuable hours that will never be regained.

So that is a burden that I feel I am carrying with me, as I consider my tiny role in the chain of Jewish tradition. I am sure that you all have similar types of burdens, about your work, your family, your relationships, and so forth.

I must say that the pandemic has reminded me over and over how imperfect I am, how flawed all of our lives are. 

Which brings me to Parashat Emor, and what we read today about the Kohanim / priesthood. One of the things we read about this morning was perfection in the context of the ritual sacrifices that took place in the mishkan, and later in the Beit HaMiqdash / Temple in Jerusalem:

דַּבֵּ֥ר אֶֽל־אַהֲרֹ֖ן לֵאמֹ֑ר אִ֣ישׁ מִֽזַּרְעֲךָ֞ לְדֹרֹתָ֗ם אֲשֶׁ֨ר יִהְיֶ֥ה בוֹ֙ מ֔וּם לֹ֣א יִקְרַ֔ב לְהַקְרִ֖יב לֶ֥חֶם אֱ-לֹהָֽיו׃

Speak to Aaron and say: No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God. (Vayiqra / Leviticus 21:17)

Not long after this statement about the perfection of the individual kohanim offering the sacrifices, we find:

כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁר־בּ֥וֹ מ֖וּם לֹ֣א תַקְרִ֑יבוּ כִּי־לֹ֥א לְרָצ֖וֹן יִהְיֶ֥ה לָכֶֽם׃

You shall not offer any [animal] that has a defect, for it will not be accepted in your favor. (Vayiqra / Leviticus 22:20)

The Torah insists that everything involved with the sacrificial offering is flawless: the kohen offering it, and the animal being offered. Of course, that expectation could not be put on the person actually bringing the sacrifice, whom, in many cases, would be bringing it because he or she had transgressed in some way.

And that expectation of perfection in ritual still plays out to some extent today. We expect that the person leading services does so fluently in Hebrew, and does not mis-pronounce words, and that this person is Jewishly observant Jew and a model citizen. We expect that the Torah is read perfectly, such that (at least, when we are doing so in person) we even have two people standing by to correct the reader in the event that she or he makes an error. And that is why we teach our children the language and the words and rituals of Jewish life, so that they can offer their own supplications and praise and requests and Torah in a way that comports with our tradition.

But, after a year of isolation, and grief, and economic and social chaos and upheaval, I occasionally feel that I am a broken vessel. I am flawed in ways that we are all flawed. Even as Congregation Beth Shalom goes from strength to strength despite the pandemic – anointing a solar roof, hiring a Development Director and a new Executive Director – I am feeling inadequate in the face of all the lost hours of Torah, the future of Judaism and the Jewish world slipping through our hands with every passing week of not gathering in person. 

I wake up in the middle of the night wondering, have I done enough to teach our tradition? Have I worked hard enough to help you all appreciate the value and meaning of Torah? Have I reached out to enough people to bring comfort and inspiration? Have I sufficiently grieved, or celebrated, or chanted or pleaded or inveighed for or against? Have I been the rabbi that you all need in this moment? Have I been the husband that I ought to be? Have I been the father that I ought to be? The son? The cousin? The friend?

Ladies and gentlemen, I can only offer myself. And I am far from perfect. And I am certain that many of us have similar doubts about ourselves. 

Fortunately, despite the strict imperative to perfection in Parashat Emor, there are other opinions on the Jewish bookshelf.

זִֽבְחֵ֣י אֱ-לֹהִים֮ ר֪וּחַ נִשְׁבָּ֫רָ֥ה לֵב־נִשְׁבָּ֥ר וְנִדְכֶּ֑ה אֱ֝-לֹהִ֗ים לֹ֣א תִבְזֶֽה׃

True sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit; God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart. (Tehillim / Psalm 51:19)

The Psalmist is teaching us that it is not only acceptable for us to be imperfect, but that is the absolutely the correct way to offer sacrifice to God. We offer ourselves, our imperfection of spirit in prayer, in meditation, in reflection. Furthermore, that line is just two verses after 

אֲ֭דֹנָי שְׂפָתַ֣י תִּפְתָּ֑ח וּ֝פִ֗י יַגִּ֥יד תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ׃

O Lord, open my lips, and let my mouth declare Your praise. (Tehillim / Psalm 51:17)

You may recognize this as the line that is murmured in silence before the Amidah, as we take three steps forward (and three steps back first, if necessary) to enter the court of God in true, reflective prayer, prayer which is offered in earnest sacrifice of the soul on the metaphoric altar of awareness.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, an early 19th-century Ḥasidic rabbi, in a statement that riffs on the line from Psalms, teaches us that, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” It is this line that my teacher Rabbi Ed Feld drew on when he titled the siddur that some of us are holding right now, “Lev Shalem,” which literally means, “a full heart.” We enter tefillah with a broken heart, with the intent to make it complete again.

It is in fact the very intent of our tradition to offer ourselves in prayer, imperfect though we are, as dissatisfied with ourselves and our behavior as we are. 

That is the whole point.

A few years back, when I was on Long Island, a curious thing happened. In an effort to put out practical reading material in the synagogue lobby, I ordered a bunch of pamphlets from a Jewish publisher that were aimed at people who were having difficult times, emotionally and spiritually. The titles were things like, “Caring For Your Aging Parents,” “Bringing Your Sadness to God,” “Coping With the Death of a Spouse,” and so forth. You may have seen these – they are in many synagogue lobbies, and they are written from a Jewish perspective.

A former president of the synagogue, who had invested many, many years in helping to build and support the congregation, saw this and told me, “We cannot have these here. This is not us. This is not who we are.” 

What I think she was saying was, “We are not the kind of people who acknowledge our pain and grief in public. We are stronger than that.” Her knee-jerk reaction was to recoil from the idea that people could see and embrace their own vulnerability.

Being a young rabbi, a year or two out of rabbinical school, and lacking the hutzpah to respond properly, I said nothing. But the display of pamphlets stayed up, and people took them home and read them. Because actually, that is us.

We offer ourselves. And we are not perfect.

And as we look forward to the near future and anticipate that we will soon gather once again, remember that whatever burden you are carrying, whatever anxiety you might be feeling, whatever brokenness you might perceive in your life right now, you are not alone. We are all imperfect, and we are all in this together. That is what synagogue, and tefillah, and Torah are for.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 5/1/2021.)

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All Of This Belongs To You – High Holidays 5780

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Welcoming Brokenness – Vayyera 5777

I had a wonderful moment last week. It was the moment when this sermon came together. It was on Wednesday, my day off, and I was actually on the elliptical machine at the JCC (I sometimes do my best thinking when I’m working out). I was listening to Leonard Cohen (zikhrono livrakhah – may his memory be for a blessing), to his song “Take This Waltz,” from his 1988 album, I’m Your Man. The song is actually a loose English translation of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem, Pequeño vals vienés, (a little Viennese waltz):

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women
There’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows
There’s a tree where the doves go to die
There’s a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Ay, Ay-ay-ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

This song speaks of the pain of love, the fragile beauty of life, the infinite transience of the human experience. It makes me yearn: for desire and loss, for happiness and grief, for perfection and failure, the whole continuum of what it means to be benei Adam, the descendants of Adam and Eve.

Photos | The Official Leonard Cohen Site

Leonard Cohen passed away nearly two weeks ago; he was suffering from cancer, although a statement released by his manager on Wednesday said that he had taken a fall in the night which hastened his death. His oeuvre – songs, poems, prose – speaks of all of the yearnings that make our lives meaningful and rich and sad and joyous.

Now if you have been listening to me speak over the past year and change, you may have noticed that I constantly talk about making Judaism meaningful – that our task as a synagogue and indeed as a community is to create meaning in a Jewish context. And let’s face it: this is not easy.

What is it about synagogue services that is meaningful? Here are some possibilities:

  • Prayer
  • Meditative moments
  • Reading the Torah
  • Learning
  • Community
  • Singing

But what about for people who don’t know how to pray, or do not understand Hebrew, or are unfamiliar with the Torah, or do not know anybody in the room? How will they derive meaning from what we do? What about visitors who have never been in a synagogue before? What about guests or even members of the congregation who are not Jewish? Do we want them to have a meaningful experience as well?

The answer is yes. Yes, we want everybody who enters here to appreciate what we do and how it might elevate us.

Synagogues tend to run on momentum – the momentum of “this is what we do; this is how we do it.” We have done things this way for a long time, such a long time that many of us who do it regularly cannot imagine doing it any other way, and that we have difficulty imagining that some might not appreciate it or know what to do. Dr. Ron Wolfson, professor of education at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, has made a career of helping synagogues improve themselves by trying to make members appreciate what it’s like to those who are not “insiders.” He tells the story of the uncle of a bar mitzvah, who is called to the Torah, and he’s really nervous because he hasn’t done this in a long time. So the gabbai, trying to help him out, says to him in an undertone, “Now kiss your tzitzis.” The man is taken aback and reacts audibly, so that the whole congregation can hear, by exclaiming, “Kiss my WHAT?”

We, the synagogue regulars, often fall into the trap of assuming that everybody knows or understands what we do and why we do it. But that is, of course, far from the truth. On the contrary: even some of us who are regulars do not know what we do or why we do it. (That’s why I am offering a learners’ service once a month, starting in three weeks – the third Shabbat morning of each month.)

But one thing that should draw people to synagogues, whether they know the service or not, is the human desire to seek wholeness, to seek healing of the soul. There is no heart that is as whole, said Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, as a broken heart. That is one reason that our siddur is called Lev Shalem, a whole heart – because we enter tefillah broken-hearted with the intent to make it whole again.

We all know that this is a fractured world, one in which hopes are easily crushed, where idealism is squelched, where we sometimes find pain when we look for solace. And sometimes, when we are truly in adversity, those are the times we need God the most, however we understand God. And we want all who enter this space, regardless of their familiarity with Jewish ritual, to feel that they can satisfy this need here.

Every now and then, those solace-seekers come into a synagogue seeking to mollify the pain. And here’s the message for the day: we have to welcome them in. We have to embrace all who enter so that they may find comfort. We have to go out of our way to make this sanctuary, this respite from the cruel world that awaits outside, a place of warmth and inclusiveness and caring.

Our synagogue happens to be place where any new face will invariably be greeted by numerous people.  Based on what I have seen, it’s a rare instance where newbies are not engaged in conversation during Kiddush.  These are all wonderful things – you are all refreshingly friendly. But there is always room for improvement.

At my last congregation, we made an effort once to improve our lobby to make it more inviting. We bought some comfy chairs, put in a K-cup coffee machine, and encouraged people to hang around. We also put up a display of little pamphlets on Jewish topics, with the intent of helping people find easy info on topics relevant to their lives. Some of the pamphlets had to do with grief and loss, such as “Talking to Children About Death” and “Making Sacred Choices at the End of Life” and “Taking Your Sadness to God.”

A long-time member of the congregation, a former president, came up to me not long after installing this display, and waved her hand dismissively at the display.  “This,” she said, shaking her head, “this is not us.” She meant that the face that the congregation should put forward is an uplifting one, not an image that reminds us of pain and suffering and loss.

But she was wrong. It was us. It is us. We all suffer. Thank God, we have moments of joy. Thank God, we have moments of life and light and ecstasy. But we also have moments of grief and pain. And it is in those times that you need a synagogue, a community, a ritual framework.

Whenever Parashat Vayyera comes up, I have to speak about hakhnasat orhim, the welcoming of guests. Any of you who have been to a parlor meeting with me over the past year know that we study the first part of today’s parashah, what we read this morning, to parse out from it the actions that Abraham performs in welcoming strangers into his home. It is an episode in the Torah that speaks very heavily to how we must conceive of ourselves today. This is our tent – Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’aqov – how good are your tents, O Jacob – and we want people to come in. All people.

I made an observation on Thursday morning at shaharit that, while it is architecturally sensible for the door into a sanctuary to be located at the back, it might be spiritually wrong. How do you think it looks to somebody coming to synagogue for the first time to walk in and see only the backs of others?

Perhaps the entrance should be up front, near the aron haqodesh, the ark. Maybe we should rise for visitors as we do when we take out the Torah. That’s how important it is to welcome others into our tent – to acknowledge the holiness in each person who enters.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the visitor who comes in, particularly the one who needs comfort in the context of grief, is greeted at the door by somebody who can sit with that person and help her/him through the service experience? Wouldn’t it be a good thing if the regulars among us were to offer a place at a Shabbat table to all who are in need?

Folks, Listen!: Embracing Brokenness

To return to Leonard Cohen, the bard of brokenness, I’ll remind you of a line from his 1992 song, “Anthem,” which I mentioned in the study passage last week.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

Embedded in the reference to Lurianic kabbalah is the suggestion that fracture yields light; that being broken enables us to receive the goodness that God gives, the support of community, the wisdom of the generations. Brokenness, in some sense, enables us to thrive.

And that is why we as a community need to reach out to all who enter and embrace them in all of their humanity. That is why we are here, and that is why we need to keep thinking about what we can do to make Beth Shalom the place where people want to come, to bring their joy, their sorrow, and their whole heart.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 11/19/2016.)