For Friday night, Shabbat:

The experience of being slaves was so powerful that 36 times in the Tanakh we are told to treat the widow, the orphan and the stranger with justice because we were slaves in the land of Egypt.

Last week’s Torah portion says “Tzedek, Tzedek tirdof, Justice, Justice shall you pursue.” Pursue is an active verb, we should run after justice, actively pursue it. More than any other individual portion, this week’s parsha spells out how to treat the widow, the orphan and the stranger, the marginalized among us. Our country is a nation of immigrants. Yet, there is always a call for immigration reform. There is a tension between “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,” and something else that appears in this week’s Torah portion. This week we are also commanded not to forget Amalek.

How do we balance these two seemingly polar opposites today? How do we treat “the other” today? Who are the marginalized people in our society today? Why does each of us have a responsibility to be mindful of this? What can you personally do? Educate yourself about the issue from a Jewish perspective: http://forward.com/articles/181134/the-jewish-face-of-the-immigration-reform-struggle/?p=all

Consider, as many Jewish organizations are doing, signing a petition supporting immigration reform or calling your representative. Check out http://action.rac.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3561

Our next guest blogger is Linda Blatchford. Linda shows up almost every Saturday and enjoys helping to lead the davenning (prayer service). She is also a very talented jewelry designer.

God is gracious, compassionate, and forgiving – these are three of the thirteen attributes.

Gracious is defined in the dictionary as “marked by kindness and courtesy.” Thinking about a few Torah readings, it occurs to me that maybe G-d is not always kind. Is it kind of G-d to ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Is it kind of G-d to prevent Moses from entering the holy land?  Yet, G-d has reasons for these actions and by studying the texts with our rabbis, we learn about them.

As G-d demonstrates by these actions, perhaps one cannot be gracious and compassionate all the time.  We are human after all and not perfect nor do we need to be (in my opinion). Each of us draws upon the sparks of G-d within us to help others, to do the next right thing, a mitzvah. I am sure that G-d wants us to be compassionate toward other people and help them in any way we can.  Buying a meal, driving someone to a doctor’s appointment, or just listening to a person who needs to talk are all examples of gracious and compassionate things we can do. Sometimes, the little things we can do speak volumes and mean the most.

In the month of Elul, before Rosh HaShanah, we are to approach our friends and family to ask their forgiveness for any wrongs we have done against them in the past year. Why? It is good to start the Jewish New Year with a clean state. It is a form of repentance toward other people, and it’s important to do this before turning to G-d to ask for His forgiveness during the High Holidays.

Forgiving others adds other elements to the process. We may tend to forgive, but not forget. If we emulate G-d by forgiving and forgetting, we are honoring G-d, and rising to a higher level of love, compassion and kindness for others and for ourselves by unburdening ourselves of judgments and past wrongdoings and live in the present, here and now.

So, I hope we all start 5774 with these qualities.

Linda asks an important question. Is God always kind and compassionate? I think the answer would appear to be no. Her examples, Asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Moses not being able to see the promised land are good ones. And what about Job, his faithful servant, who G-d allows to be tested? But there are more recent examples. How could we ever think the Holocaust was kind and compassionate? It has always interested me that the Thirteen Attributes do not say that God is all powerful, all knowing, all good. No, instead, we are told that G-d is kind, compassionate, slow to anger, forgiving of sin. I tend to agree that God can be kind and compassionate. But God gave us humans free choice. When we make bad decisions, God can’t step in and make it right or necessarily be kind and compassionate. Linda is right when she says that we must go to people before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and ask their forgiveness. I think, the deep meaning of what Linda is teaching us is that if we are to emulate G-d by being kind, compassionate, forgiving, then we also have to be forgiving of G-d when it appears that G-d is not being kind and compassionate. Wow! Can we do that? Can I do that?

Elul 10: What Do I Pack? How do I “Be Prepared”?

Hiking up a mountain can be hard work—it takes strength, courage, perseverance, and just a little faith. It takes being prepared—remembering the first aid kit, the water, the flashlight, matches, the Swiss Army knife, the helmet, the cell phone. The rewards can be spectacular. The Israelites were told to “Be prepared for the third day. Wash your clothes. Do not go near a woman.” The women were prepared too. They remembered to bring their tambourines with them into the wilderness. This attention to detail always amazes me. How did they know they were going to have something to celebrate in the wilderness?

When I go camping frequently I pack too much. I also learn how little I really need as I strip down to the bare essentials that will fit in my car, my canoe, or my backpack. How much do any of us really need? As I pack my own house this week, how much is too much stuff? Do I really need 50 wine glasses? Maybe. Six sets of dishes for my kosher home, plus one extra dairy set just for Michigan football Saturdays? Books–do I still need all those books? Most of them. Yes, even the cookbooks despite having so many recipes online now. Maybe not the tour guides to Israel from 1985, a trip I never took that year. What about all those hats, gloves, scarves, t-shirts? Do all these things lead to a spiritual clutter? Maybe. But I find it difficult to part with many of them.

What do you need to do to prepare for this spiritual climbing? What do you need to bring with you? Perhaps a prayerbook, a Bible, your journal, a pen, treasured friends?

Our next guest blogger is Rabbi Katy Z. Allen, Rabbi Katy Z. Allen (AJR ’05) is the founder and leader of Ma’yan Tikvah – A Wellspring of Hope in Wayland, MA (www.mayantikvah.org), a congregation that holds services outdoors all year long. You can find Ma’yan Tikvah’s Earth Etudes for Elul a www.mayantikvah.blogspot.com. Rabbi Allen is also a staff chaplain at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. It is my honor to call her teacher and friend as she teaches much about the connection between Jewish spirituality and nature.

 “Adonai, Adonai, G!d, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in goodness and truth, showing compassion to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin. (Ex. 34:6-7)”

From Rabbi Allen: G!d speaks the Divine name twice! Wouldn’t once be enough? Whose attention is G!d trying to reach?

The medieval commentator Rashi teaches that “Adonai” is G!d’s attribute of compassion, and that the Divine Name is said once before a person sins and once after the person sins and repents. It’s a nice image. I think also about Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s understanding of the four letter tetragramaton as a breath that happens when we try to pronounce the unpronounceable name, and he refers to G!d as the Breath of Life. So, the Divine Name being spoken twice is sort of like G!d breathing deeply twice, once before we sin and once after we sin and repent, or, in the verse above, two deep breaths before naming the aspects of Divine mercy and forgiveness that are available to us.

Jewish tradition teaches that we are to walk in G!d’s ways. Accordingly, this means that we, too, need to have all the qualities of forgiveness listed in this verse. The compassion to a thousand generations might be tough for one individual, but at least we can try to be merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in goodness and truth, and forgiving of other’s transgressions. And taking two deep breaths can help us just as much, or even more, as it can help G!d! If we breathe deeply, letting the air in and out, with conscious awareness that we are bringing into our bodies molecules that were released from some other organism or from the Earth, perhaps we can better manifest in ourselves these amazing Divine qualities.

Philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore writes in The Pine Island Paradox: “if you sit still in the dark, breathing quietly, the world will come to life around you…and then you will understand: you are kin in a family of living things, aware in a world of awareness, alive in a world of lives, breathing as the shrimp breathe, as the kelp breathes, as the water breathes, as the alders breathe, the slow in and out. Except for argon and some nitrogen, every gas that enters your lungs was created by some living creature—oxygen by plankton, carbon dioxide by the hemlocks. Every breath you take weaves you into the fabric of life.”

When we are confronted by a difficult situation with another person, if we breathe deeply and remember the water, the oxygen, the nitrogen; the rain, the oceans, the mountains; the rainforests, the deserts, the water’s edge; the frogs, the salamanders, the bacteria – if we in those two deep breathes can allow such images to pass through our minds, reminding ourselves that we are but one tiny part of the amazing web of life on this amazing planet, and that the Breath of Life sustains us all, perhaps we will find it easier to walk in G!d’s footsteps and to be merciful and forgiving. Perhaps we will be able to look more kindly at our neighbors and ourselves. Perhaps an abundance of goodness and truth will seep into our beings, and bring healing to us and to the Earth.

With all my heart and all my soul, I pray, may it be so. Amen. Selah.

Rabbi Allen has some interesting points. One Rosh Hashanah morning I was sitting on the Atlantic Coast, at Plum Island, just after blowing shofar at sunrise. Soon I would be leaving for Germany to be the Yom Kippur rabbi in a small town. The world looked like an especially scary place that year. A rabbi had been stabbed in Frankfurt and a terrorist plot had been foiled in Heidelberg. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Sitting here the world looks so calm, so peaceful, so easy. It doesn’t have to be complicated. We should just watch the sunrise over the ocean and breathe deeply.” Rabbi Allen’s idea combines what Rabbi Kershenbaum said about G-d and us counting to 10 (or 13) when we get angry and the idea of the breathe of life. When G-d created us, G-d breathed life into us. The soul (neshama, another word for breath), is pure. G-d breathed it into us.  How do you take a breath? Go ahead. Do it right now. Breathe in goodness. Breathe out tension and stress. Breathe in G-d’s loving presence. Breathe out anger, fear and insecurity.

Much of the story of Moses is about leaving his homes. As a baby he was placed in a basket and floated down the River Nile, rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. Thus, he grew up not in his parent’s home but the palace of the Pharaoh. Moses had to flee Egypt after smiting an Egyptian. He left his home and all that he knew and wound up in Midian, in the home of Jethro the Midianite priest. Then he left Midian to return to demand that Pharaoh let the Israelites go. And wandering in the desert for forty years surely was not a permanent home.

Some have said that “home is where the heart is.” While this piece of writing seems particularly apt this week, as I pack to move for the second time in two years, it was written initially several years ago. In studying with my hevruta partner about humility, we were talking about the need for balance. Even the rabbis saw the need generations ago. It reminded me of Bubble Rock perched on the cliff of South Bubble Mountain in Acadia National Park. I have climbed to the top any number of times in all kinds of weather. It is my touchstone. It is a pinnacle experience. I have tried to push the “accidental boulder” off the side of the mountain. Entire football teams have tried. A picture of this rock hangs in my office. It is about balance. It serves as a reminder to pause and remember that special place where the world feels whole and at one, another home for me, a place of mystical insight. How do you bring that experience back into your everyday world? I tried by bringing a piece of Cadillac granite that has been cut and polished into a heart. It sits in my home, by the side of my tub to remind me to breathe deeply and to search for balance.

Where do you feel at home? What role does home play in your life? What is the balance between security and stability and being in the right place at the right time?

Moses got angry. God got angry. The 13 Attributes say that God is slow to anger. Some translations say patient. It is OK to be angry. It is even OK to be angry with God. In fact, Dannel I Shwatrz in his book Finding Joy has an entire chapter on Getting Through the Pain where he talks about how to channel anger. In some cases, if harnessed, anger can make us more effective. Mayyim Hayyim in their fabulous resource for cancer patients, Blessings for the Journey, talks about this difficult topic rather than sweeping it under the rug. The question becomes how do we use our anger. Can we use it for good? Or do we become bitter? What do you do when you become angry?

Moses smashed the first set of commandments. And yet, and yet, life continues. Yet, out of the smashing, the destruction of the tablets of the 10 Commandments, hope arises. A midrash tells us that the Israelites gathered up the broken pieces of the smashed tablets. Eventually they put the pieces in the ark together with the new set. As Estelle Frankel said in her book, Sacred Therapy, “Sometimes we learn to appreciate life’s gifts only after we have lost them.” Ultimately, Frankel concludes, “the whole and the broken live side by side in us all, as our broken dreams and shattered visions exist alongside our actual lives.” What are the dreams that you have that you have not realized yet? How do we hold onto the beauty of our youthful, idealized dreams while maintaining the more mature, realistic ones?

You are my beloved, says G-d. Yet for many of us it is so hard to believe that G-d can love us. That was true for me. As a victim of a violent crime I thought that I wasn’t loveable anymore. That I was somehow “damaged goods.” But then I had an aha moment. The first two attributes are Adonai, Adonai, The Lord, The Lord. But the rabbis teach that there are no extra words in the Torah. Usually this attribute is seen as G-d loving the sinner before the sin and loving the sinner after the sin. What if, it meant that G-d loved me before the attack and after the attack? Was it even possible? It just might be.

Our next blogger is Zahava Raz, the cheerful, welcoming voice of Congregation Kneseth Israel. Her thinking was quite similar. G-d is the G-d of love. Why wouldn’t we want to know this G-d?

After looking at the list of 13 attributes of God, the question came to me, “who wouldn’t want to know this God of Israel, who is so wonderful, so personable, so abundant in goodness and forgiveness, showing compassion to a thousand generations, pardoning sin and full of truth?

It struck me how much this God loves us.  How much He desires us to know Him. Why on earth shouldn’t we run to Him and stay with Him on a daily basis and just get to know Him? This is why the Israelites fell on their faces before Him in worship.  They saw, knew and felt that powerful presence.

Yet we do not come close.  We stray far from Him. We think we cannot enter into a relationship because He is God.  Yet Abraham did, Moses did, David did, and all the prophets did.  We can too.

He must be real to us, we must be like walking Torah’s, full of all those attributes. These attributes should be ingrained in our personalities for peace to come on earth.

Forgiveness needs to be a part of our lives.   If we do not forgive, sickness comes, webecome bitter and harbor grudges.  We should imitate God – we should be slow to anger and showing much compassion towards one another.  And if another injures us, we should pardon them in love.

God is our example.  And He wants to know us as His children . We  should be that close to Him.  And have confidence to come to Him with trust, and not fear.

When the Israelites were wandering in the desert they received a double portion of manna on Friday because they could not collect it on Shabbat. Manna comes from the Hebrew word for gift. Manna was a gift from G-d that fell out of the heavens. When we talk about creating holy spaces we offer gifts. What are the gifts that you bring?

Debbie Friedman, of blessed memory wrote lyrics about our gifts this way:
These are the gifts that we bring
that we may build a holy place.

This is the spirit that we bring
that we may build a holy place.

We will bring all the goodness
that comes from our hearts

And the spirit of God will dwell within…..
These are the colors of our dreams
we bring to make a holy place.

This is the weaving of our lives
we bring to make a holy place.

We will bring all the goodness
that comes from our hearts

And the spirit of love will dwell within…..
These are the prayers that we bring
that we may make a holy place.

These are the visions that we seek
that we may build this holy place.

Let our promise forever be strong,
let our souls rise together in song,

That the spirit of God
and the spirit of love,
Shechinah,
will dwell within.

In her lyrics the gifts we offer are not monetary. Those help to be sure. These gifts are from the heart.

Shabbat is both holy time and holy space. It too is a gift. Like the old Pepsi commercial it is the pause that refreshes. It is the break from the mundane. Time we can spend with God, our families, our communities. May each of you find that holy space, that holy place, that holy time during this weekend. May each of you find a crevice in the rock where you can experience God’s presence. It maybe in the synagogue. It may be standing by the ocean or a pond or a lake. It maybe sleeping in a hamrock, gently rocked by a summer breeze. It maybe in an actual crevice on top of a mountain. But find that space to know that you are loved. That would be a good Shabbat gift. Shabbat shalom.

Elul 4
The 10 Commandments were a gift, a sign that G-d loves us. The knowledge of the 13 Attributes was another gift. Standing at Sinai we created holy space, holy time. Mount Sinia was G-d’s holy place. The mishkan, the Tabernacle, was holy space. The Temple and the Holy of Holies were holy spaces. Our homes are called mikdash m’eat, little sanctuaries, little holy spaces. Our next guest blogger, Rabbi Linda Shriner Cahn writes poetically of healing, repairing and tikkun. She creates holy space.

God’s Holy Place – Tikkun Leah
Blessings showered upon me
Over and over
Who am I that these gifts are mine
The road is neither straight nor easy,
but it is filled with love and laughter.
Each moment a blessing,
unique in its gift.
Each moment a gem,
to be treasured and valued
Each day more revealed…
Purpose and meaning clear a path
Gratitude abounds
So many gifts
A holy place – God’s Holy Place made real

Rabbi Linda Shriner Cahn is the rabbi of Tehila in Riverdale, NY. A graduate of the Academy for Jewish Religion, she has been my teacher, my chevruta partner, my classmate, my friend. Who else would I stay up late nights studying codes with or sharing the joys and worries of raising children.

How do we create holy space today? What makes time sacred? How do we appreciate these gifts that are ours?

Elul 3
Despite Moses’ anger, real violent anger upon seeing the Israelites dancing around the calf, Moses continues to lead the people and advocate on their behalf. He even pleads with God for God’s forgiveness on behalf of the Israelites. He shows real leadership in the face of adversity and rejection when he defends the Israelites. God agrees, forgives the people and tells Moses to return and to continue to lead. There are many styles of leadership. What do you look for in a leader? I believe that everyone has the potential to be a leader. Everyone can answer G-d’s call with the word of Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah. Hinini, Here am I. None of our patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets were perfect and they all doubted their abilities. What style of leader are you—director, coach, collaborative, hierarchical? What leadership traits do you have? How can you continue to lead in the face of adversity, criticism or rejection?