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Rosh Hashanah

Introduction to the Haftarah, Day 1: By Treasure Cohen (Rosh Hashanah 2013)

September 10, 2013 By blogmaster Leave a Comment

Introduction to the Haftarah—Rosh Hashanna

Treasure Cohen—Sept. 5, 2013/ 5774

Shana Tova!  Today is a powerful  day in our Jewish holiday cycle– the birth of a new year for our people and an opportunity for re-birth  in our personal lives.  So it is not surprising that both the Torah and the Haftarah tell stories about birth– The birth of Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s son in the Torah reading, and the birth of the prophet Samuel in the Haftarah.   And we are reminded that neither birth comes easy:  both stories contain elements of pain and longing, loss and sacrifice, and yet open up new beginnings in the life of our people.

Divrei Tora-KOL RINALike the Torah reading, our  haftarah–which takes place almost 600 years later– begins with a family story:  This  man  Elkanah  has  two wives, Peninah who has many children, and Hannah–his favorite– who is childless. Hannah is deeply despondent.    Her sister-wife taunts her that God has closed up her womb, and her husband cannot comprehend her pain:  “Why are you so sad?  Am I not more devoted to you then ten sons?”

When the family makes their yearly sacrificial pilgrimage to Shiloh, a depressed and distraught Hannah visits the Temple alone and  unburdens herself to God, weeping as she prays– ” Adonai Tzevaot, if You will look upon the suffering of your maidservant and remember me, and if you grant your maidservant a male child, I will dedicate him To Adonai all of the days of his life . . .”

The priest Eli watches her but cannot understand why her lips are moving and no sound is coming out of her mouth.  He assumes she is a drunk, and reprimands her.  Her response:  “On no, my lord.  I am a very unhappy woman.  I have drunk no wine but I have been pouring out my heart to Adonai. Do not take me for a worthless woman; I have only been speaking all this time out of my great anguish and distress.”  Eli recognizes her sincere devotion, blesses her, and she leaves–now able to eat, no longer depressed, and within the year, her prayers are answered and she gives birth to a son Samuel, meaning, “I asked Adonai for him.”

And based on this poignant scene, the Rabbis have credited Hannah with introducing a model of personal or private prayer.

As you are well familiar-as you balance this heavy High Holiday prayer book in your hands, we have inherited a substantial legacy of prayers that resonate through their beautiful melodies and powerful poetry.  Sometimes these words touch our hearts deeply and enable us to pray with a single-minded devotion. And when we join our voices with others, we gain strength from the power of praying with our community.

But sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes the prescribed liturgy even creates barriers to prayer–if we cannot understand the language or are unable to find a personal connection to the words.  And sometimes we are so overwrought with our own feelings and cares, that we have a compelling need to share with God the raw emotions and passionate voices that cry out from within us—like Hannah.

Our Jewish tradition embraces both public and private prayer.  We pray together and we pray alone.  We are guided by the set words in our prayer books, and we compose our own spontaneous prayers that can change for every occasion, mood, and need.  Even this Haftarah contains examples of both:  Hannah’ s powerful but silent outpouring to God at the beginning, and the ten formulaic verses of praise and thanks to God at the end, prefaced by the words, “And Hannah prayed.”

We will be spending a lot of time praying during this High Holiday season. We will have many opportunities to turn the pages of this book and say the words that have echoed throughout the generations as together we inaugurate the Jewish new year.  But this is also a time of intense soul-searching in which each of us strives for internal change with prayers that are private and personal.  Inspired by Hannah, may the power of our prayers, whether the ones in the book or the ones in our heart, draw us closer to God’s holiness and to our own, as we seek change and growth, renewal and rebirth in the coming year.

Filed Under: Divrei Torah, Holidays Tagged With: Rosh Hashanah

Introduction to Shofarot in the Musaf: By Jeff Bruckner (Rosh Hashana, 2013)

September 10, 2013 By blogmaster Leave a Comment

  • Around 1850, Schopenhauer pronounced noise to be the supreme archenemy of any serious thinker. His argument against noise was simple: A great mind can have great thoughts only if all its powers of concentration are brought to bear on one subject, in the same way that a concave mirror focuses light on one point. Just as a mighty army becomes useless if its soldiers are scattered helter-skelter, a great mind becomes ordinary the moment its energies are dispersed.
  • Even though we may not be a great mind thinking great thoughts like Schopenhauer, we are similarly affected by noise.  He further said that “even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound”.
  • Another example of the search for silence:  Shimon bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar (the foundational work of Kabbalah), hid in a cave for thirteen years studying the Torah, according to Jewish legend. I think we can safely assume that there were no Shofarot in his cave.
  • Certainly the Shofar is noise –  and I think we can all agree that it  interrupts our thoughts. Following the logic, therefore, the Shofar is the archenemy of thought.  What wisdom within Jewish tradition embraces such a paradox?
  • Doesn’t wisdom require thought?
  • Doesn’t spirituality require thought?
  • During these high holy days, we are encouraged to think about our transgressions in order to prepare for our year to be written into the book of life. Why does the Shofar interrupt our serious work?  Isn’t the thinking of such thoughts, after all, one of the central pillars of the Rosh Hashanah (and Yom Kippur) services?
  • Perhaps we should conclude that the purpose of the Shofar is to keep us from thinking.  Why? Let me offer some possibilities; perhaps you will find one of them useful as you participate in the Shofar Service:
  1. Shofar-Kol Rina - An Independent MinyanThe Shofar is to remind us of a specific thought – the presence of G-d.  The corollary – the thoughts of the Torah are to be preferred over our own.  Think of the Shofar as a guide for our thoughts, not something that prevents or destroys them.
  2. The Shofar is meant to bring us out of the realm of thought and into the realm of community.  In other words, don’t get so caught up in in the Kavanah (intention) that you forget about the Keva (routine).  Or perhaps better said, this is not just a personal journey, but a community affair, and the Shofar is reminding us to look around us and connect with each other.
  3. The Shofar is a call to action. The Shofar connects us to our ancestors though ritual, and rituals contain power.  Simply by doing what has been done for thousands of years give us, the community, power – power than can be used to do something that matters.  What might that be?  As Dave Gray (contemporary thinker and author) has said: “… there are only two conversations that matter. Everything else is just noise [no pun intended]. The first conversation is the one that frames or re-frames people’s view of the world. The second is the one that moves them to action.” What will we decide to do this year?
  4. Finally, perhaps the whole point of the Shofar is not to interrupt us, but to get us to practice returning to where we left off.  In other words, the Shofar is helping us practice remembering. Consider this Hasidic teaching: “Existence will remain meaningless for you if you yourself do not penetrate into it with active love and if you do not in this way discover its meaning for yourself.  Everything is waiting to be hallowed by you; it is waiting to be disclosed and to be realized by you. For the sake of this your beginning, God created the world.” Rather than an attempt to steer us, the Shofar knows that we already know the way. It knows that life is a series of interruptions that distract us from our true purpose, and it is trying to teach us.  The Shofar is saying, “If you can remember who you are after my interruptions in the service, then you can remember who you are after you leave this sanctuary and reenter your life”.

 

Filed Under: Divrei Torah, Holidays Tagged With: Rosh Hashanah, Shofar

Remarks Before Shofar Blowing: By Dan Anbar (Rosh Hashana 2013)

September 10, 2013 By blogmaster Leave a Comment

Today we are commanded to hear the sound of the shofar.  This commandment first appears in Leviticus 23:24-25.  It says: “In the seventh month, on the first of the month, it shall be a Sabbath for you, a remembrance of the shofar blast; a holy occasion.”  In the next verse the scripture continues: “But on the tenth of this seventh month, it is a day of atonement, it shall be a holy occasion for you; you shall afflict yourselves.”

The immediate proximity of these verses suggests that the two Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are linked through a single idea.  The blow of the shofar, representing this idea, is the thread connecting the beginning and the end of this period and makes it one whole.  This ten-day period starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur is referred to as Yamim Nora’im – Days of awe. The period starts with the blow of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah and ends with the blow of the shofar at the end of Ne’eelah as we usher Yom Kippur out.

What is this single idea, and what is the significance of the shofar?

Shofar-Kol Rina - An Independent MinyanThe central theme of Yamim Nora’im is the idea of repentance. We live our lives interacting with people, making choices, saying words and making decisions.  We sometimes make poor choices offending people and God.  Yamim Nora’im is when we take “time out” to reflect on how we conduct our lives and have the opportunity regret, and repent, and correct the wrongs we committed against God and our fellow human beings.  The shofar blast is what our ancestors heard as Moses delivered the commandments at Sinai.  The scripture tells us that the event was accompanied with “a very powerful blast of a shofar” and that “the sound of the shofar grew increasingly stronger.” Moses spoke and God answered him with a voice; a sound, rather, as Rashi interprets the text (“Be’kol” = a sound that has the quality of a voice).  So as Moses was reading the commandments God was confirming them “with a voice” – the sound of the shofar.  The shofar is the most powerful means of communicating with God.  The Leviticus text is using the phrase “a remembrance of the shofar blast.”  The word is “Remembrance” not “Reminding.”  It is not to remind God about God’s revelation to Moses.  Rather, it is for us to remember the defining event in our history and the commitment we made as a nation at that time: “So Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances, and all the people answered in unison and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.”” (Exodus 25:3)

Our sages added a symbolic meaning to the mitzvah of blowing the shofar.  The shofar is a ram’s horn,   Thus, the shofar blasts remind God of the ram that Abraham sacrificed in Isaac’s stead.  This, we hope, will remind God of Abraham’s faith and his complete obedience as reflected in the Akedah story.  Perhaps this memory will give us credit in God’s eyes that we as Abraham’s descendents too are capable for complete and full repentance.  Perhaps it will remind God of His own regrets of even having the idea of asking for sacrifice of Isaac?

It is the tradition in some synagogues to blow the shofar every morning during the month of Elul up until the day before Rosh Hashanah. This is intended to remind the congregation of the coming of the Day of Judgment and urge them to prepare themselves.  The Hassidim have an additional explanation for this custom: It is to confuse Satan who comes before God during the “Ten days of Awe” to play the Accuser’s role.  Blowing the shofar during the month of Elul will, they hope, confuse Satan and he would lose track of the counting of the days. Stopping the blowing the day before Rosh Hashanah will make him to think that Yamim Nora’im are over and so we will have God’s full attention on Yom Kippur without Satan’s interference.

Today and tomorrow we will hear 100 blasts of the shofar.  It is a mitzvah to hear at least 30 of these blasts.  So if you miss hearing some of them today you have another chance tomorrow to fulfill the mitzvah.

Ketivah veHatima Tova!

Filed Under: Divrei Torah, Holidays Tagged With: Jewish, Rosh Hashanah, Shofar

Mating and Covenant: A Patriarchal-Matriarchal Perspective (A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Day 1, 2013) by Rabbi Len Levin

September 8, 2013 By Kol Rina Leave a Comment

Kol Rina - An Independent Minyan | Jewish Synagogue NJ | WorshipSome friends have come to me in recent years saying (in one version or another), “I tried my best. I raised my child with the best Jewish education I could afford. But my child went out into the world, fell in love with whoever he-or-she fell in love with, and being Jewish didn’t seem to play much of a part in it. What could I have done differently?”

I have at least one kind of consolation to give today, as we read about the families of Abraham and Sarah, of Hagar and Ishmael, and Keturah, and are reminded of the other stories in the same book of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau, and all the others. It turns out that our problems are not new problems.

Would it surprise you to know that the Torah records the names of eight sons of Abraham, and of these, only one—Isaac—followed in his father’s religious path? Yet Abraham is a paragon of faith and prime exemplar for us all. He did the best he could, and then left the rest to nature—or to God. Maybe that is the best any of us can do.

Til Faith Do Us part by Naomi Schaefer RileyI have just been reading a book, “Til Faith Do Us Part,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley, with the subtitle: “How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America.” Yes, there has been a transformation, working its way over the past 60 or so years. Back then, it seems that America was comprised of hermetically sealed ethnic and religious communities. But with the maturation of the American multi-ethnic melting pot, young people today see nearly everyone they come into contact as potential mates. It isn’t just Jews; the mainline Protestants, the evangelicals, the Catholics, the Moslems—all of them are experiencing this transformation and are looking for ways to adapt to it, all of which she reports.

There are so many flavors of people from Jewish and other religious backgrounds described in the book, and so many flavors of intermarriage. There is the Catholic-Jewish couple where the children are raised all Catholic or all Jewish—that’s the simplest case. Or the couple that decides to raise the children in both religions, or in no religion. Or the Sikh and the Hindu, both from India, but with a religious divide between them. Or the Moslem Egyptian tourguide who met the pretty Israeli travel agent in Sinai and they came to America to find a more accepting environment than back home. Or the interfaith couple that both convert together to a third religion—it could be Unitarianism, but could also be evangelical Christianity. Then there’s the couple that started out together in the same religion, but one of them “finds religion” somewhere else mid-course, so that what started as a same-faith marriage ended up an intermarriage.

As I was going back and forth between these descriptions and the narratives of the patriarchs and the matriarchs, I started seeing the Biblical narratives in a new light. Nearly all the patterns that Naomi Schaefer Riley describes can be found in some Biblical family or other. There is very little new under the sun. But sometimes you have to peel away the pious veneer of our traditional reading of these stories to see a more complex reality beneath the surface.

Let’s start with the story in today’s [First Day of Rosh Hashanah] Torah reading. We read: “Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham, playing.” (Gen 21:9). The Hebrew word is metzachek. We find this word in a number of other contexts in the Torah. In the story of Isaac and Rebekah, we read that when they were in the land of the Philistines, Isaac spread word that Rebekah was his sister. But when they saw Isaac metzachek with Rebekah, they said, Come on now, she’s not your sister, she’s obviously your wife! (Gen 26:8-9) Later on, when the Israelites made the Golden Calf, they got up l’tzachek in front of it (Ex 32:6), whereupon God told Moses to look down and see that the people were totally out of control. So whatever Ishmael was doing with Isaac by way of metzachek was not mere innocent playing, but something of a nature that Sarah—apparently with no need for further explanation by the Biblical narrator—saw as sufficient justification to expel both Ishmael and Hagar from the family. Under today’s family law, it probably would come under the heading of “abuse.” Whatever it was, it was incompatible with remaining under Abraham’s tent.

We have the testimony of the Torah that Ishmael was by nature a kind of person not compatible with Abraham’s covenant with God: “He shall be a wild ass of a man—His hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him.” (Gen 16:12) The Torah tells us a number of other things about Ishmael: his mother Hagar was an Egyptian, and she got him an Egyptian wife after they were expelled from Abraham’s household. (Gen 16:1, 21:21) Ishmael had twelve sons, like Jacob. (Gen 25:12-15) On the positive side, Ishmael showed filial affection for Abraham, for when Abraham died, Ishmael and Isaac buried their father together. (Gen 25:9) We are not told if Ishmael had a spiritual relation with God, but his mother Hagar did. An angel appeared to her the first time she was thrown out of the house by Sarah, and showed her a well, which she called Be’er La-hai Ro’I, the Well of the Living One who Sees Me. (Gen 16:13) Maybe not by chance, Isaac settled at Be’er La-hai Ro’I after Abraham’s death. (Gen 24:62, 25:11)

So I think it makes very good sense to say that Hagar and Ishmael were not without spirituality, but they had a different kind of spirituality than Abraham. It would be only slightly anachronistic to say that theirs was a religiously mixed marriage that failed for a number of complex reasons, of which religious incompatibility was one.

We read further on, in Chapter 25 of Genesis, that Abraham took another wife, named Keturah, and had six sons by her, one of whose names—Midian—becomes significant in later Biblical history. He gave them all gifts and sent them to the East while he was still alive, so that only Isaac would be the true heir, both of his property and of the covenant with God. Now, the Rabbis of the Midrash were not content to let Keturah remain an otherwise-unknown personality, so they said that Keturah was really Hagar, come back for another spell as Abraham’s concubine after Sarah’s death. Whether you accept this explanation or not, it remains the case that his roaming eye persisted to a ripe old age. Moreover, by the Bible’s account, Abraham was a spectacular failure in passing on his spiritual heritage to his children—it took in only one out of eight.

Let’s move on to the next generation. We read that Abraham was extremely concerned that Isaac not marry one of the Canaanite women in the vicinity, so he sent back his servant (who traditionally was Eliezer though in the Biblical text he is nameless) back to his home country to pick out a cousin, Rebekah, as Isaac’s mate. (Gen Chapter 24) It sounds very much like our contemporary concern to marry within the fold. The Canaanite women were certainly not Jewish. But was Rebekah “Jewish” (quote-unquote)? Maybe half. Remember, Terah worshiped idols, and he was the father of both Abraham and Nahor. (Gen 11:27) Of these, only Abraham heeded the call of God Almighty, together with his nephew Lot, who was the son of a third brother Haran. (Gen 11:27, 12:4) There is evidence down the road that the family descended from Nahor—including Bethuel, Laban, and Rebekah—still maintained some form of idol-worship. So Rebekah came from the “less-Jewish” branch of the family (anachronistically speaking) and bringing her into the family was an informal way of converting her to Judaism.

Rebekah conceived and gave birth to twins, Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hairy man, a hunter; Jacob was smooth-skinned, and dwelt in tents. (Gen 25:25-28) To say it in Yiddish, Esau was the goy in the family, and Jacob was the Yid. But we also read that Isaac loved Esau more, and Rebekah loved Jacob more. A reversal of what you would expect. What is going on here? Again, we have to peel back the layers of traditional pious interpretation and look underneath. The tradition depicts Isaac as so devoted to God that he never resisted when the knife was put to his throat in tomorrow’s Torah reading, when he was bound on the altar. But a lot of his subsequent behavior can be explained in terms of post-traumatic stress syndrome with maybe a little passive-aggressive behavior thrown in. Isaac, who was brought up all-too-Jewish, to the point it almost killed him, is showing a desire to live out non-covenantal fantasies vicariously through his wild, earthy son Esau, while Rebekah, who was brought in as a half-outsider, has become super-loyal to her adopted religion, fiercely defending the interests of Jacob, who represents the Jewish future in the family. It is a role reversal that we see time and again among today’s intermarried couples, and makes for complicated family politics.

I will mention briefly a few other examples to fill out the picture. There is Rachel, who though she was Jacob’s favorite wife, turns out to have stolen her father’s idols on the way out from Aram, so she was not 100% pure in her monotheistic fidelity. (Gen 31:19, 29-35) There is Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law who becomes mother to two tribal families, from one of which the Davidic dynasty is descended. (Gen Chapter 38) She wasn’t even half-Jewish, but a full-blooded Canaanite woman (apparently by that time, there weren’t enough girl-cousins back in Mesopotamia to keep sending back for them), who in the story ends up more “righteous” than Judah, the born Jew. (Gen 38:26) Of course, there is Ruth, the Moabite woman who befriends Naomi and is also an ancestress of the Davidic line. There is Zipporah, the Midianite woman whom Moses marries, and who saves his life by circumcising their son. (Ex 4:24-26) On the other side of the ledger, there is the case of Samson, who married more than one Philistine woman, with ultimately disastrous results. (Ju 14:1-20, 16:4-21)

Back to Naomi Schaefer Riley’s book, “Til Faith Do Us Part.” Overall, I recommend the book, especially for the sober view it gives of the difficulties that come up in trying to create a religious family life within an intermarried setting. To her credit, in her own life she at least tried to anticipate these problems at the outset. When Naomi went out on her first date with the black Jehovah’s Witness man who later became her husband, she said that one thing he should know about her was that if she had children, they would be raised Jewish. He kept his word on that. But it still didn’t totally alleviate the problem that he was absent from the picture when she tried to give them a Jewish religious upbringing all by herself.

One of the things that Ms. Schaefer-Riley deplores in a lot of the intermarried couples whom she surveyed for the book is that at least half of them made no plans for what religious education they would give their children until after they were married. She quotes an evangelical pastor, David Slagle, who says, “Young people today are intentional about their education their career, thinking through the possibilities for an occupation and where they want to live and buying a home.” But when it comes to falling in love and choosing a life-partner, “our romantic view of marriage precludes intentionality.”
This comment, I think, cuts to the essence of the problem. We are all of us occupied with creating the narratives of our lives, whether we think about it that way or not. But unless we do so with intentionality, it may just happen, with haphazard results. When we select our mates to settle down with, if we don’t have the larger picture in mind, we tend to get caught up in the passion of the present and not think ahead to the full end of the story whose foundations we are laying.

One of the biggest gifts that the Jewish tradition gives us is a sense of participation in an ongoing narrative that unfolds on many levels. On the most basic level, there is the narrative of our own individual lives. But we are more than individuals; we belong to families, and as individuals we carry on the narratives of our families, while our families provide us with models for our own life-narratives.

On yet a higher level is the notion of covenant. A marriage is a covenant, and a religion is a covenant, and this is no accident. By entering into a covenant, we become a part of a reality larger than ourselves, while we enlarge our selves in the process.

Covenant is one of the key concepts in the patriarchal narratives we read on this holiday. The continuity of Judaism depended then, and depends now, on finding those individuals who will pledge themselves to uphold the covenant. The whole drama centers on who acts to further the covenant, and who wanders off in a different direction?
So as we prepare to write the next chapters in our lives, let us take the long view. Let us think hard about what choices we need to make, to lay the foundations for the rest of our lives. Let us write the stories of our lives that we can be proud of looking back on, to give our children and grandchildren the richness of legacy that forms a bridge between the present hour and eternity.

 

Filed Under: Divrei Torah, Holidays Tagged With: Jewish, Rosh Hashanah

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