Divrei Derech

Shlep or Journey? vol. 2

The last 48 hours or so certainly drove home the ‘shlep’ side of a journey. It’s a long way from California to Israel and, apparently, there are no direct flights from Fresno… go figure.

We definitely experienced a significant amount of shlep.

Did you know that if you want to bring oxygen onto an airplane, not only do you need a prescription, but you also have to have batteries for the unit matching what it will take to run at the prescribed level? Yes, that little detail kept one of our crew from getting on the plane but, fortunately, we were able to get her on a later flight arrangement and eventually reunite with the group in time to catch up with us for our late dinner.

The late dinner was, of course, because our flight out of New York was delayed for a couple hours while the mechanics fixed “not a serious issue.” That was all ‘shlep.’ But in the midst of the shlep we definitely experienced some ‘journey.’ So, we’re shmoozing with the Baltimore day school kids around us as well as a few of the Orthodox and Chasidic Jews. It’s not many flights where you might see a young mother hand her infant daughter to a teen girl she didn’t know an hour ago while the mom goes to the restroom.

The Jewish community is instant community.

Rabbi Laura discovered a taste of our old stomping grounds with a nice little bottle of Wente wine from Livermore… a nice touch of our California home on the plane from JFK to Tel Aviv.

I know there will be many more moments of ‘shlepping’ throughout our ‘journey’ through Israel but there’s something about shlepping to and through Israel that makes it okay.

And, by the way, did I mention that I can hear the waves crashing on the shore from our hotel room?

(Great to have my cousins along!... Saretta and Ilene)

"Is it safe to visit Israel?"

I was already preparing some thoughts in answer to the questions I keep hearing… “Is it safe to go to Israel?

Then I heard the news from Boston.

Two bombs ripped apart the Boston Marathon finish line, shaking the city of Boston and the nerves of all America.

My response to the questions of safe travel in Israel have not changed from yesterday.  I live in Fresno.  The lead story on our evening newscasts, just about every night, reports another shooting or stabbing in our region and locals are not generally afraid to live here.

It’s safer in Israel.

Vigilance is part of everyday life in Israel.  No, it’s not fun to have to hold out your backpack or purse for security to check every time you walk into the market, post office, school, bank…

You get used to it… like many of us have gotten used to the TSA in the world after 9/11.  For many of us, that adjustment to post 9/11 life returned us to life as usual in Israel.  It’s been more than twenty years since I lived there but, even then, security procedures were much more vigilant than we even find in America today.

We learned to be wary of unidentified packages.

Just a few weeks ago, we received a package at the temple that caused us some concern.  I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything to worry about, but I’ve been well trained… err on the side of caution.  We called our friends at the FBI who decided to clear our building and call in the local police bomb squad.  Yes, it was nothing dangerous, but I greatly appreciated our law enforcement representatives taking it seriously and confirming that we had done the right thing by calling them in.

The bombing in Boston was another horrible reminder that we still live in a world that requires such precautions whether we’re in Fresno or in Israel.

I’m not worried about visiting Israel.  I’m not too thrilled to travel through airports shortly after an apparent terrorist attack, but I’m excited to return to a place of deep comfort, a home different than my home in California but still quite homey.

And if I get a tinge of concern about Middle-eastern unrest, I simply turn on our local news and am reminded that the feeling of safety is relative.

I’ll try to blog from Israel and send thoughts and pictures from our ancestral homeland.

(...a few years ago at the foot of Mt. Masada)

Shlep or Journey?

 

It’s a great question… What’s the difference between a shlep and a journey?

It’s the question that began our Shabbaton weekend up in Wonder Valley with master storyteller Joel ben Izzy.

I’ve always enjoyed Joel’s ability to enthrall us with stories.  He’s a great entertainer and I would be content spending a weekend listening to his tales.  But Joel is also a great teacher and he taps into one of the most important and most ancient gems of Jewish tradition… our ability to tell stories.

Joel described likened the process of gathering stories to that old experiment from our youth when we would dissolve a bunch of sugar in a jar then drop a string in.  The string would eventually attract sugar crystals that would grow into rock candy… multi-faceted stories.

Then he gave us several threads that helped us crystallize our own stories.  We considered when we had shlepped and when we had journeyed.  We looked back through the generations with a question as simple as how we received our name.

What I especially enjoyed observing was how animated everyone became sharing their own stories.

Torah is a story, but the word means ‘teaching’ (and ‘learning’).  Torah has many meanings.   Sometimes we think of it as the scroll but, just as often, it refers to the entire body of Jewish teaching which, in my opinion, includes the fabric of each of our lives.

We have many midrashim (rabbinic stories) about the primordial nature of Torah, how various details predate the writing of the scroll.  The letters of Torah themselves are considered primordial and through the generations they’ve descended from the heavens to form and chronicle our journey.

Yeah, there are definitely moments when we feel like we’re shlepping along but, as we look back and tell the stories of our shlep, we begin to see our place in the beautiful journey of the people Israel.

 

Read more about Joel ben Izzy on his website Storypage.com

(Our guide through this piece of our journey... Joel ben Izzy)

(Joel teaching our youth to tell their stories)

(It just seems like the perfect place for a storyteller is sitting on the hearth)

(Stan & Fran sharing some warm memories)

(Arlana & Smadar sharing with animation)

(Our Shabbaton guide, Mark sharing stories with his mother)

Yom Hashoah & Hatikvah

A few years ago, Ruth and I agreed that we didn’t resonate well with many of the Yom Hashoah commemorations we’ve seen.  They’ve seemed to wallow and many of us just can’t force ourselves to continue going back to that place without including a missing ingredient.

I had generally kept my feelings to myself.  I was born post Holocaust and my family had all come to America long before the onset of the Holocaust, so I didn’t quite feel it was my place to complain, but Ruth lived it.  Born in Germany, she experienced the events of Kristallnacht and escaped with her family in the midst of the horrors, so when she shared that she was not interested in participating in the typical Yom Hashoah observance, we began to recast the service with an appropriate balance of hopefulness and we employed it again for this year’s gathering.

The best compass I’ve found for our observance is Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, the Hope.  This is how it’s translated in our prayerbook, Mishkan T’filah…

So long as within the inmost heart a Jewish spirit sings, so long as the eye looks eastward, gazing toward Zion, our hope is not lost — the hope of two thousand years: to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

This year we came together lifting our voices from the depths of the Jewish spirit.

I was thrilled to take a ‘chance’ encounter and have it lift us up for our observance.  Last week I knocked on the door of our friend and teacher, Prof. Thomas Loewenheim, our Kol Nidre cellist whose brother, Gabriel was visiting.  Gabriel’s rich baritone graces the stage of Israel’s Opera and regularly on the bimah of one of the great synagogues in Germany today.  The family comes from Germany, and Gabriel’s voice has returned to participate in the resurgence of Jewish life there today.

Huge thanks to Gabriel for participating in our Yom Hashoah observance and to Debbie Teitelbaum for piano accompaniment and to the many people who came out to participate.

We ended our service with the singing of Hatikvah.  We began with the equally hopeful and prayerful words of Hannah Sennesh…

Eili, Eili,

O Lord, my God, I pray that these things never end

The sand and the sea, the rush of the waters,

The crash of the heavens, the prayer of the heart.

Everything Old is New Again

I took this year’s Confirmation students to San Francisco in January to meet up with a couple other Confirmation classes and explore some of Jewish life in the Bay Area. One of our stops was the Contemporary Jewish Museum which regularly rotates its exhibits with often eclectic offerings.

I’ve been to the museum many times and, I admit, sometimes as I’m chaperoning our students, I don’t always pay too close attention to the exhibits. I’m focused on keeping the kids engaged and making sure we don’t lose anyone and quite a bit of what we see, I’ve seen on a previous visit.

So, I hadn’t paid close attention to an exhibit that I probably should have. It really does meet my interest in many ways.

There’s an exhibit they’ve had running for some time called Black Sabbath, The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations.

I’m pretty well versed in old jazz and even some of the Jewish content we find in it but, apparently, there were some great offerings I had missed… and our teens caught them.

I was walking by the hall in which this particular exhibit was housed and a couple of our teens called me over… ‘you gotta hear this.’

‘Yeah, yeah, okay… what is it?’

‘Just listen…’

I put on the headphones and they pressed play.

Now, I’ve played jazz from the ’30’s since I was nine years old but I had never heard of Bulee “Slim” Gaillard and Leroy Elliot “Slam” Stewart, known as ‘Slim and Slam.’ I did know their major hit, ‘Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy), but the tune playing in my ears was completely new to me though it had been recorded about seventy years ago.

I thought it was great. The teens thought it was great. I played it for a couple of our younger teens as they were finishing making matzoh balls for our big congregational seder and they boogied to it.

Everything old is new again.

I’m thankful to our open-minded and open-eared teens for turning me on to some great tunes.

And I’ve especially enjoyed the addition to my Passover Playlist as we recall the history of Black Jewish relations in our shared struggles for freedom for all of God’s children.

 

If you’re interested in the subject, here’s a description from one of the ‘playlists’ on the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s website... Black Sabbath Playlists...

"If you listen to Cab Calloway’s 1933 recording of his signature song, “Minnie the Moocher,” you can hear a few “oy yoy yos” in the midst of all the “hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hos.” It was no anomaly. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, one of the most reliable (and entertaining) ways to track the impact of Jewish culture on African-American artists was to listen for bits of Yiddish making its way into black blues, jazz, and pop. Black argots like help and jive were becoming central to black style and soon Yiddish-- a fellow linguistic outsider-- started mixing in as well. Calloway, who appeared alongside Al Jolson in the 1936 film The Singing Kid, was probably the best-known Afro-Yiddishist, his close relationship with his Jewish manager Irving Mills leading him to mix his own hepcat jive tongue-twisting with a constant flow of swinging Yiddishisms. Right behind him was Slim Gaillard, a word magician from Detroit who ran bootleg booze for the local Jewish mob and sang in a language he called “Vout” (or Vout-O-Reenie,” or sometimes “Floogie”) that often contained Yiddish. Take a listen to the lost world of Afro-Yiddish hip."

Thoughts on NAMM and the Worship Industry

It’s not all fun and games.

 

Yes, I technically take the weekend off once a year to go explore the NAMM show, the international music trade show, but in recent years I’ve become fascinated with an entire realm of the industry dedicated to ‘worship music.’

I found half a dozen magazines created for the worship leaders, worship musicians and the entire technical field underlying the multi-media experience found in modern churches today and the pages are full of products designed to assist in spreading ‘the word.’

I remember visiting Saddleback Church a few years back.  We went to visit this mega church in Orange County to observe their model for welcoming people.  I was certainly impressed by the level of their customer service, but I remember being fascinated by their audio visual equipment and speculating on the massive budget that must have gone into their state of the art production.

I’ve visited small churches here locally and marveled at the clear priority they have for this realm of worship.

And, yes, as I walked the aisles of the trade show, I salivated at the gear designed to present and transmit the message from the pulpit and beyond.

Music has been an integral part of Jewish worship since the days the Temple stood in Jerusalem.  We believe that temple musicians performed music such as the Psalms as part of our ritual and Psalm 150 which culminates the book, chronicles a long list of instrumentation that would have performed the orchestration.

We continue to train sacred musicians, primarily the cantors who serve our congregations and we enjoy a growing handful of contemporary Jewish musicians but it’s clear that some of our Christian neighbors have taken this field to far greater heights.

It’s a mixed bag.  I hear critique of this form of worship as shallow, interested more in form than meaning, but it’s clearly a point of connection for millions of listeners.  I’ve personally experienced what it feels like when the entire congregation joins together in song and continually look for ways to recreate and perpetuate that powerful feeling.

While I can’t imagine ever reaching a parallel with our peers in the worship music industry, I’m continuing the exploration and looking for the steps we can take to enhance our experience.

...even a weekend of fun seems to lead to learning more about what we can do to improve our worship.

Synchronicity… Coincidence… or…

I remember one of my rabbinic school teachers telling us that ‘a coincidence was God’s way of working subtly in the world.’

The quotation must have had an effect on me because it keeps coming back around and around and it came ‘round again on our Confirmation adventure this past weekend.

We had decided, quite spontaneously, to take a short detour off the freeway as we returned from San Francisco to where we were lodging at my parents’ home in Concord for an iconic ice cream experience at Fenton’s Creamery.

(This isn't the real building... this is how it appeared in the animated film 'Up.')

Fenton’s can be quite crowded, especially on a Saturday evening. We had to park several blocks away, the line was out the door, we waited an hour to get in and, yes, it was worth it.

Then, as we walked four blocks back to the car and turned the corner heading to our parking spot, we were about to pass a young man heading the opposite direction on the sidewalk when we noticed… it was David, one of our religious school teachers from last year who moved to Oakland this year. Amazing!

I figured the odds were better to get hit by a meteorite.

And there we were, half a dozen of us from Fresno, running into a friend from the Jewish community of Fresno, just walking down the street in Oakland. Wow!

We could not have asked for a better culmination to our day of exploration throughout the Bay Area.

Did God decide to cap off our day with an artistic synchronistic flair? I don’t know, but I’ll certainly take it.

5 Confirmands and a Rabbi in a Minivan

 

You just can’t beat a spontaneous stop at Fenton’s Creamery on a Saturday Night.

It capped off a wonderful weekend of adventures around the Bay Area with this year’s Confirmation Class and the first Three ‘F’ Confirmation Kallah.

I’ve been running around California with Confirmation students for ten years or so and this was our first opportunity to gather the three congregations who make up the next iteration of this program.  I used to co-teach with my colleague and friend, Rabbi Avi Schulman in Fremont.  We brought our students to Fullerton to meet with the students from my classmate Rabbi Ken Milhander’s congregation, and now that I’m in Fresno, we certainly have a gathering with a ring to it… Fremont, Fresno and Fullerton.  We also included students from my former congregation in Pleasanton and while, the town doesn’t fit the theme, it was great to reconnect with the students there as well.

Our congregations have much more in common than the opening letter of our city.  Each of our communities are situated in relatively small Jewish populations with relatively small religious schools.  Therefore, it’s especially valuable to give our students the opportunity to connect with the greater Jewish population around them and see aspects of Jewish culture in other regions.

 

We explore Jewish museums together and experience services in other congregations, as well as give the teens plenty of time to socialize with their peers around the state.

I’m thrilled to reconnect with my colleagues, increase our students Jewish world and educate them in a variety of important subjects… like the fine ice cream of Fenton’s.  ...by the way, we even made that experience into an important lesson on Confirmation and Shavuot… 

Maybe you know why a trip to a classic ice creamery is perfectly relevant to the Confirmation program.

3 Rabbis in a Minivan

Rabbis Paul Kipnes (Congregation Or Ami, Calabasas), Rick Winer (Temple Beth Israel, Fresno) and Laura Novak Winer (Jewish Educational consultant) drove in minivan for the ride back from the Pacific Area Reform Rabbis (PARR) conference. Rick's driving, Laura's navigating and Paul's typing.

We all reflected on what we gained from 4 days with 160 rabbis plus spouses/partners.

We enjoyed: Studying with scholar Melila Hellner-Eshed of Israel's Hartman Institute. We explored applications of Kabbalah's Zohar text to Jewish healing for individuals, rabbis and congregations. It sounds really esoteric but rabbis get into that stuff.

Meeting with Israel's Consul General David Siegel who updated us on the latest behind the scenes news from Israel, including issues of religious pluralism, women's equality, and the security situation with surrounding countries.

Dialoguing with new president of the Union of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, whose presence underlined the importance to the URJ of connecting with West Coast Reform leadership. Rabbi Jacobs spoke eloquently about the far-reaching moves to transform our national organization into a nimble, flexible, responsive and effective movement.

Organizing Reform Rabbis (and congregations) into Reform CA, a unified Jewish religious voice on issues of concern in California. We energized each other as we recognized that our values should have a voice in the public sphere.

Kvelling about the continued growth and efficacy of our Movement's Camp Newman which engages over 1,400 Jewish kids each summer. We reviewed the master plan for the transformation of the physical space to deepen our educational and religious program.

Sharing collegiality where we could pray, support and laugh with others whose experiences can offer wisdom and guidance as we continually deepen our rabbinates.

Benefitting from private one-on-one consultations with rabbinic coaches, CCAR Chief Executive Steve Fox, an our URJ District Rabbi, Point of Contact, and Specialists.

Studying with Hebrew Union College Dean and Professors as well as student, which provided insights ini best practices and new ideas.

Finally, hiking through Indian Canyon Indian Reservation provided gorgeous vistas, healthy exercize and meaning conversations with close friends.

When rabbis go off to conferences, we welcome the opportunity for reflection and rejuvenation. and we thank our communities for supporting an encouraging our participation.

See you next year, PARR colleagues.

Oseh Shalom Bimromav

We recite and sing the words in each of our services… more than once.

It’s the last line of the Kaddish prayer that separates the sections of our service and ends the liturgy as we remember those who have died.

Oseh Shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu…

May the One who makes peace in the heavens above bring peace upon us, upon Israel, and many of us add to the passage, “and upon all the world.”

The rabbis who wrote this prayer looked heavenward and saw the many celestial bodies hurling through space, seeming to co-exist harmoniously and prayed that inspiration could serve as a model for the people on earth.

(Yes, I know that those stars and planets do occasionally collide, but the relative intergalactic calm is still awfully impressive.)

Here in Fresno, we have a multitude of cultures and ethnicities.  Our harmony may not equal that of the stars in heaven, but we have many beautiful moments of people coming together, cooperating and working for the betterment of our surroundings.

This past Sunday, our Interfaith Thanksgiving Service brought together participants from a wide variety of backgrounds.  We were hosted by the Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple Dharma Center and enjoyed offerings from the Buddhist Center, the Native American Community, the United Christian Church, the Sikh Community, the LDS Church, the Muslim Community, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Baha’i Community, the Mennonite Brethren and our own Temple Beth Israel choir.  

In addition, Friday, I gathered together with our mayor and several of the non-Christian religious leadership as we do quarterly to keep in contact and explore our common goals.  It’s very easy for us to focus on the common work we share and our interest in improving our community and surroundings.  We shared our hope for a peaceful resolution to the crisis in the Middle East and looked forward to continued work in making our world a better place.  We continue to learn from each other and build bridges of understanding and cooperation.

 

(Left to right: Imam Seyed Ali Ghazvini, Negin Tahvildary, myself, Mayor Ashley Swearengin, Dr. Sudarshan Kapoor and Kamal Abu-Shamsieh.)

Our little group may not be as numerous as the stars in the sky, but I find it a wonderful model and a little step in fulfilling the prayer, Oseh Shalom Bimromav… May the One who makes peace in the heavens above bring peace to all the world

...and we say ‘Amen.’