thinking jewish

תשובה

Two rows up, back section, aisle seat, left side of the room facing forward.

That's my seat. My seat. Not yours. Mine. When I go inside. When I attend. I never do.

When I go, I do so to watch. I enter because I feel guilty. I attend because I'm supposed to support a friend. The room feels cavernous and empty. It is quite, it is cold. The light is blinding - too bright.

So I sit. And I stare. And I wait. Wait for the end.

Sounds like amcha...

Every High Holiday season we discuss, anew, the idea of tshuva - repentance, return, renewal. We speak of it in English as if it is the act of gaining forgiveness for our sins, of being cleared of our wrongdoing as if we were Catholic and had just done penance.

Sorry, no such concept here...

Tshuva, literally "return," is about turning one's ways around and going back to a Godly way of living. When we seek tshuva, we go back. We return to a better way of life. We try again.

Today I tried again. I made tshuva.

מה טובו אוהליך יעקוב...

I walked into the HUC chapel anew, this time, for the first time in a year, ready to pray. I had ignored the space for a year for many reasons: I was lazy, I was busy, I was preoccupied. Mostly, I hated tefilah at HUC. Period.

I chose to display my dissatisfaction by ignoring the problem. That is one way...

Another means of protest is active engagement. So today I chose that.

Protesting performance and prayer-less prayer by not going was wrong. It runs contrary to everything I believe in. I spend my time encouraging Jews to develop a relationship with prayer and, when they don't like how that prayer is being actualized, to work to change it, either overtly or just for themselves.

So you don't like the experience? Then find your corner and make it work for you there. Do what you want. Go at your own pace. But join the community and pray.

So I'll stop being a hypocrite. I've found my own new corner in the HUC chapel. No longer will I enter and head for the second row in the back section, left side, aisle. I'll be closer to the front, right side, far wall. My own section. I'll have a personal mechitza, from behind which I pray as I want.

This Elul, let us all figure out a way to do tshuva and open ourselves to constructively re-entering all the communities that we have intentionally separated ourselves from. Actively engage. Show a different way.

Don't be a hypocrite.

Out of Sync...

On a different note from the last barrage of posts about prayer, let's talk about another instance of being out of sync...

The Jerusalem Post reports on the letter by some college leaders of Kesher and NFTY's letter to the URJ, urging an end to support for Israel's war against Hezbollah back in July.

Whuh!? Let's just recap some history...

Israel was attacked by Hezbollah. Eight soldiers were killed. Two were taken hostage. So Israel responded and then there was war.

The URJ nearly immediately published support for Israel's fight, and these kids responded by publicly sending a letter to the Union and the press calling for an unconditional immediate cease-fire and for the URJ to "condemn the Israeli Defense Forces' killing of unarmed Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, as well as its premeditated targeting of civilian infrastructure, which has put additional lives at risk and hampered relief efforts."

Good job, kids. Way to assert common sense and respect for the people and organizations with which you work...

Out of Sync

At 1 AM on a cold Saturday night, a seventeen year-old seeker asks to go for a walk. He wants to learn. He has questions to ask. He's ready to grow.

"Tell me about davening," he says. That's not his real question. He knows that "daven" means to pray in Yiddish. He wants to know why some of his peers, some of his teachers, others, move in prayer. Why do they bounce forward and back? Why do they sway side-to-side? Why do they shuckle?

We all daven. Some of us move while we do so. Why?

What is movement in prayer? What good does it do? Am I shuckling just to look traditional? I sure as hell hope not.

In a pre-Shachrit exercise, 150 HUC students and faculty sit in chairs ready to be taught. We are instructed to sit up, sit down, and repeat - to do so to a beat - our own beat.

The music starts, a beautiful niggun, and we all begin moving but, crucially, out of sync. Our movement was our metaphor for successful prayer.

Good prayer is not always organized and structured and in unison. Someone can be standing, another sitting, someone swaying, another rocking. We don't all have to be saying the same part of the same prayer at the same time. That's OK.

If we can allow movement to supplement our understanding with the text then our ability to pray sincerely is strengthened.

And so I am blown away by the presenter of this exercise. Liz Lerhman offers to teach us for the next semester about movement in synagogue. She is a hippie, she's new age, post-modern. Who she is scares me and threatens to challenge some of my most basic understandings of truth. What I expect to learn from her scares me. But I know that within her statements are deep truths about the nature of successful, non-shallow prayer.

Put your body into your words. Put your words into your body.

Move. Sway. Daven.

Quote of the Day

"Isn't Reform Judaism the promotion of plurality and educated choices? Fascinating. Reform Judaism does not mean not observant. Reform Judaism does not mean assimilated. Reform Judaism does not mean uneducated. We must stop the acceptance of these fallacies; they are completely incorrect. Reform Judaism is plurality at its richest form. We must promote education and then accept the result and ideas of the educated, not the uneducated."

-Zach Newburgh

What is תפילה?

Suddenly, I'm back in the real world - still in the confines of the URJ Kutz Camp, but surrounded by rabbinical, cantorial and education students of HUC, not teenagers.

It's somewhat of a shock. I'm the youngster here. I'm the naive one, the one who has so much more to learn, so much more to experience. No longer the leader, the teacher. מה לעשות

The Kallah's theme is "worship." Opening program begins by asking the question, "When did you have a bad worship experience?"

I cringe.

The question has within it many presumptions, most notably that prayer (worship) is all about the experience. It isn't. Prayer is not about me, it's about God. Prayer isn't about the experience, the experience just helps with the prayer.

Lenny Kravitz (the rabbi, not the rock star) points out that the problem with prayer today is that most of us go to pray looking for the experience, or drawn by the spectacle, not because we feel any obligation to do so - yet we must.

There is nothing wrong with saying that we (yes, we, liberal Jews) are obligated (cringe) to pray. We can do it in many ways, at many times, but it is something we are called to do. Is it not? Is that not simply a part of being Jewish? It is.

But I diverge...

I have bad prayer experiences when prayer is forced, overly-coordinated, performed or fake. I have bad prayer experiences when prayer is intellectually dishonest, or superficial, or shallow.

A good prayer experience was last night when, spontaneously, a group of Jewish seekers came together on a lake and davened on a Shabbat afternoon. When a seeker, without preparation, led his peers in parts of the service and, when times came that he didn't know what to do, he just asked. It wasn't awkward, it was real.

Spontaneity is where it's at. Word.

Just go and pray. Just do it. Learn the liturgy, pursue the knowledge, study, and pray. Don't "go to services," just stand there and daven.

So now I enter a three-day Kallah full of programs and learning, less prayer than last week's GER-Kallah (and not to mention a shorter Birkat HaMazon).

Where do we go from here? How do I re-enter this real world of adults and no youth movement and no camp and no daily schedule?

Let us go out there and do Jewish, and not worry about what the experience will be. Rather, let us worry about where we will be taken, and where we will bring others.

Four Shots of Espresso Over Ice

Michelle loves her job. She truly takes pride in her work. Every day she drives through Warwick, New York on the way to her place of employment excited to serve her customers with pride and joy. When her fellow employees incorrectly fill the order of a regular visitor of her shop, she corrects the mistake quickly and happily.

Michelle loves working for Dunkin Donuts.

The only way to truly be fulfilled in one's occupation is to enjoy the work you do. You've got to love what you do.

Michelle loves what she does.

I love what I do.

What makes us succeed at our work? How do we not just complete the tasks put before us, but actually accomplish something, actually go somewhere.

Michelle brings people happiness with their daily coffee. I've spent the last 3 months trying to push teenagers to do more with their Judaism.

Do we succeed? Do we even know what success is?

Success is having an hour-long discussion with a kid at 1 in the morning about what it means to pray with your whole body, about God, about being Jewish, about hating synagogue and being there for people in their times of need.

Success is pushing teens to take their understanding of Jewishness a step further, and then being pushed back when I haven't let them go far enough.

Success is teaching a leader how to lead better - how to use his passion to make change, while still engaging those who are scared of his forward-thinking.

Success is opening doors and windows - success is knocking down walls and opening up new frontiers for us all. It is an open mind, a passion for growth and an endless amount of energy to keep trying.

I learned about all of this this weekend. My students taught me these lessons anew. Not everything that I wanted to stick this summer was retained. But so many things that I never expected to last a minute are now month-long traditions. So many of those in whom I had lost hope showed me why I never can - cause they turned out to surprise me the most with their success.

When Michelle gets an order right each morning in the Warwick Shop Rite's Dunkin Donuts, her success is immediate and clear. Mine is not. Michelle has it easy. I envy her.

But I wouldn't give up what I get to do all my life for anything. Nothing at all...

Quote of the Day

"Good day tittles!"

-Max Chaiken

The Old Style of War

Sitting in on a program discussing the ethics of the Israel Defense Forces, I'm struck by the comment of one NFTYite.

"It seems like the ethical guidelines of the IDF are based on the old style of war." He continued, "... a time when innocent civilians weren't killed during conflict."

Any student of history knows the fallacy in his argument - innocents have always (will always?) be hurt in war, that's why war is awful.

But if we look a level deeper, we can come to a better understanding of youth today, and the world in which they have grown up.

This NFTYite, 17 years old, has come of age in a time when war meant terrorism, bombings, "collateral damage," and guerilla warfare. He doesn't remember a time when armies fought each other. War, as he knows it, is the United States versus al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents, and Israel versus Hamas and Hezbollah.

War, as he knows it, is terrifyingly close to home at all times, while simultaneously on the other side of the planet. War, as he knows it, is no longer ordered, between soldiers, nor does it go hand-in-hand with diplomacy.

Sad... so sad.

Happy Birthday to Me

Season 3 of Lost will premier on October 4 at 9 PM.

What better a birthday present could a man ask for than that? Thank you world.

Trickle Down Affect

The suspense mounts, we wait anxiously to see... What was accomplished this summer? What stuck? What will be kept? What is to be forgotten?

Today I am just an observer, here to watch what happens. I can no longer lead, it is not my place this time. So I sit back and hope. Not for a specific change or idea, but rather for confidence that the ideas that we threw in their heads that summer so long ago actually made a difference - that the lake god was not left at Kutz, but taken home and taken to the regions.

I wait to see. Minutes counting down... the clock ticks, the suspense grows...

Now the students are the leaders. It is time for the students to teach. Time for them to move people - to push - not too hard, not too soft, but just enough.

Will it trickle down? I'll let you know soon.