A Note and a Special Announcement
from Rabbi Creditor
on Israel's 60th Birthday
Tomorrow night, the Berkeley Jewish community will celebrate the first annual "TOGETHER FOR ISRAEL" event at Congregation Beth El from 6-8pm, including delicious Israeli Food, Israeli Music and Dancing, Fun Giveaways, Kid's Arts & Crafts Activities, and (at 7pm) a guest speaker and screening by Elizabeth Rodgers, producer of the New Award-Winning documentary "Exodus 1947." The event is free of charge as a gift from our entire Jewish community. Join me there!
I share with you these following thoughts in honor of Israel's 60th Birthday:
There are those who describe the State of Israel as the stirrings of redemption. For 60 years our global Jewish family has been striving toward a beautiful dream amidst great challenge, both internal and external, to bring a safer, better, prouder day for the Jewish People and the world through the State of Israel.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, a living master, has written: "The creation of the State was an act of redemption of biblical stature. …[However] in this new era, God becomes even more hidden, the circumstances of redemption even more ambiguous. This ambiguity serves a two-fold function: It allows those who prefer to interpret the activity as purely secular to do so, and it permits the religious soul to recognize the divine role out of mature understanding and free will rather than out of a 'coerced' yielding to divine force majeure [greater force]. (The Jewish Way, p. 380-1)"
Read this how you choose. Is God involved in the struggle to balance democracy and a Jewish homeland? Is the political landscape in the Middle East a redemptive path? Whether we see God as an intervening force in the world or as the potential for peace and health as actualized by human beings, there is a yearning in the heart of the Jewish People for our home. Facing eastward as we pray isn't a metaphor. In the aftermath of the Shoah, and in the face of ever-present anti-Semitism around the world, we face East. A majority of the Jewish People either do currently (or will soon, depending on the study) live in the State of Israel. We are members of that family. When we face Jerusalem, we face home.
Jewish Pride and Passion are what I feel on this occasion of Israel's 60th Birthday. Do I agree with everything the State of Israel has decided? No. Is it always easy to be a modern Zionist? No. Does my heart yearn for Jerusalem every day? Yes. Just as I long for for my parents' home, I long for Israel. I yearn for the winding alleys of Tzfat, the whirling life of Tel Aviv, the mystic call of the Negev, the charged air of Jerusalem. I miss home very much today.
And so, with great excitement, I invite you to join me in the Summer of 2009 on a spiritual journey to visit our family - a community trip to Israel August 2-16, 2009!
This trip is not limited to Netivot Shalom members, but will be an experience attuned to our shul community's soul. We will explore sites, engage in social justice projects, and support each other as we learn, live, cry, dream, and breathe more deeply than we did before. This will be a trip open to adults and children, and a family educator has already been hired to provide children's programming during adult-oriented portions of the trip. More information will be available soon, but reading the news today, watching film clips of Israel's celebration, I couldn't hold back. I'll be thrilled to talk to you about this trip, and even more honored to share it with you.
LeShannah HaBa'ah BiYerushalayim – Next year in Jerusalem!
Rabbi Creditor
5.07.2008
A Note and a Special Announcement from Rabbi Creditor on Israel’s 60th Birthday
5.03.2008
Links for Living a Mythic Life: Mythic People II: Eastern Europe
The Baal Shem Tov Story Room
New York Times (September 21, 2003): Waiting for the Messiah of Eastern Parkway
Letter from Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe to a member of the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists (1971)
the miracles continue (Central New Jersey Chabad)
Do the Lubavitch believe former Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the
Order Form for rabbi meir Baal HaNess' blessings:
Etty Hillesum
Faith Healing: Curing with supernatural powers is viewed with skepticism in Judaism.
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Rabbi Menachem Creditor
-- www.netivotshalom.org
-- www.shefanetwork.org
-- menachemcreditor.org
5.01.2008
Yom HaShoah VeHagevurah 5768: "Kisses and Memory"
Yom HaShoah VeHagevurah 5768: "Kisses and Memory"
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
There are days in which the simplest things carry incalculable meaning. Today is one such day.
Yom HaShoah VeHagevurah, our Day of Holocaust and Heroism, amplifies every experience of life to a heightened place. A smile, an embrace, a bright butterfly. Each evokes, for those attuned to the holy moment, devastating heartbreak and deep hope.
Today, just this morning, I sang with a group of young Jewish children. We kissed the Torah and wished it a Boker Tov, a Good Morning. And I was transported immediately back to Poland, back to the nightmares. The camps. A museum with Torah Scrolls made into musical instruments by the Nazis who forced Jews to play while their sisters, brothers, parents, and children were marching, working. Dying. Where kisses weren't. Where Torah wasn't. A world without song.
But today young Jewish children sang with delight and blew the Torah a kiss.
And we remember.
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Rabbi Menachem Creditor
-- www.netivotshalom.org
-- www.shefanetwork.org
-- menachemcreditor.org
4.14.2008
Tazria/Metzora 5768/2008: “Human Boundaries and Inclusion”
© Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Every year the weeks leading up to Pesach include the Torah portions Tazria and Metzora, which enumerate many rules regarding ritual fitness surrounding such bodily experiences as skin ailments and childbirth. The rules for the ‘Metzora’, the person afflicted by a spiritual skin disease (‘tzara’at,’ consistently mistranslated as leprosy) teach that if a person suspects that they have tzara’at, the Kohein/priest must examine them for diagnosis. If they are found to truly have tzara’at, they are sent outside of the camp. Today’s incarnation of the Kohein is the religious leadership who are the gatekeepers, either restricting people from or admitting people to community.
Rabbi Chayim ben Attar (1696-1743) of Italy and Jerusalem pointed to a fascinating aspect of the Torah’s instructions. In his “Or HaChayim” he comments on a strange doubling of language in Lev. 13:45, where we read, “As for the Metzora person who has tum’ah (unfitness).” He writes:
“It appears necessary to interpret the verse in the following way… It is written that the person’s body is tzarua, end nevertheless the Kohein must declare him unfit. And if the Kohein does not declare him Metzora, he has no unfitness… The truly unfit one is the one that is afflicted –and- that the Kohein designates. But if the Kohein designates as unfit someone who is not tzarua, that one is not unfit.”
If a person has signs of tzara’at, and it is obvious to him and to those around him, the Kohein must still label him unfit before he is bound to the category. On the one hand, if a Kohein labels as Metzora one who does not have tzara’at, the labeling doesn’t hold in the eyes of Heaven. On the other hand, if one truly has tzara’at and the Kohein overlooks it, they are not unfit in the eyes of Heaven. The power of the religious leader is enormous, both to religiously stigmatize - and perhaps to reserve Heaven’s judgment.
The antidote for is:
“On the seventh day he shall shave off all his hair--of head, beard, and eyebrows. When he has shaved off all his hair, he shall wash his clothes and bathe his body in water; then he shall be clean. On the eighth day he shall take two male lambs without blemish, one ewe lamb in its first year without blemish, three-tenths of a measure of choice flour with oil mixed in for a meal offering, and one log of oil. (Lev. 14:9-10)”
This recipe is tremendously expensive. If you were an afflicted person without considerable means, you would presumably be locked out from the cure. But we read a little later:
“If, however, he is poor and his means are insufficient, he shall take one male lamb for a guilt offering, to be elevated in expiation for him, one-tenth of a measure of choice flour with oil mixed in for a meal offering, and a log of oil; and two turtledoves or two pigeons, depending on his means, the one to be the sin offering and the other the burnt offering. (Lev. 14:21-22)”
If you believe that God wrote the Torah, then you probably interpret these texts as demonstrating that God wants afflicted people to be able to find a way back. God isn’t concerned with money – God cares about the individual’s striving.
If you believe that human beings wrote the Torah, your interpretation is probably much the same – but you might see the human arbitration of the Kohein as an inherited philosophy of human boundary-setting with flexible regulations for inclusion.
As my colleague Rabbi Neal Loevinger writes, “one of the reasons Judaism insists that spirituality happens within community is precisely so that we learn how to care for others, as God cares for us, and in so doing, become more fully aware of the Divine image within ourselves and others. If the Torah goes out of its way to tell us that the metzorah of insufficient means was to be welcomed into the most sacred spaces and rituals, then surely we can find a way to make sure that Jews all along the financial spectrum feel truly welcome in every organization dedicated to Jewish life.”
We read, in the initial description of someone afflicted with tzara’at:
“As for the person with tzara’at, his clothes shall be rent, his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover over his upper lip; and he shall call out, "Unclean! Unclean!" He shall be unfit as long as the disease is on him. Being unfit, he shall dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp. (Lev. 13:45-46)”
It is important to note, as has Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, in his most recent book, “Leviticus”:
“The practice of certified scale-diseased persons to ward off oncomers by pointing to their impurity (Lev. 13:45) is paralleled by this poignant picture of the Jerusalemites after their city was destroyed: ‘They wandered blindly through the streets, defiled with blood, so that no one was able to touch their garments. ‘Away! Unfit!’ people shouted at them, Away! Away! Touch not!’ (Lam. 4:15)”
Jews know what it is like to be pointed at and derided. But what a contrast: Whereas in the Lamentations text others are shouting at the excluded one, the Leviticus text instructs the afflicted one to point to himself. What might this mean? Perhaps, as in The Who’s “Tommy”, the suffering person is calling out “See me, feel me Touch me, heal me.” The individual is calling attention to her own internal struggles.
We can see the structures of Tazria/Metzora as guidelines for “making the tough choices” when resources are limited. A child requiring special Education, a potential drain on any school’s budget, would therefore not be guaranteed a place. A handicapped person requiring a ramp to get to the bimah might not, depending on the shul’s budget, rise for an aliyah with dignity. In fact, perhaps constructing shuls without bimahs is the way to achieve dignity in a truly egalitarian fashion.
The ethical imperative of religious inclusion has its basis in the powerful role granted to the Kohein in the Torah, and to clergy and lay-leadership in today’s religious communities. Outsiders are created by our categorization processes. Exclusion is a choice, not a mitzvah.
I end with the words of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801-1859; the "Ishbitzer Rebbe") in his classic Chassidic commentary on the Torah, “Mei HaShiloach/The Drawn Waters”:
“[When the Torah says that the person afflicted with tzara’at must be brought to the Kohein] it means that the Kohein, experienced in awe and holy service, has the ability to discern in large and small matters whether or not they are the Will of God. And that quality is actually found in every Jew, but not all the time. The ability to discern God’s Will activates when the Jew is occupied with awe and holy service, when the individual Jew elects upon himself the role of the Kohein, constrains his own self in order to begin healing.”
May it be our wills, speedily and in our days.
4.12.2008
Mythic People 1: Rabbinic Era
Shalom Chevreh,
Here are the links I mentioned in our conversation at Netivot Shalom Sunday Morning, entitled "Living a Mythic life: Mythic People 1: Rabbinic Era". Enjoy!
Kol Tuv,
Rabbi Creditor
Exorcism by Rabbis: Talmud Sages and Their Magic by Meir Bar Ilan
Sukkot 5756: Choni and Jewish Folklore by Rabbi Ismar Schorsch
Hanina Ben Dosa from the Jewish Enclylopedia
4.02.2008
Finding Spiritual Jewish Prayer
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Certain times in my life I've felt an indescribable emotional connection exploding within me through Tefilah/Prayer.
The first time came upon me when a group of fellow Yeshiva High School graduates and I sat in a dark, candle-lit room on Tisha Be'Av at Camp Ramah Nyack. We sang old and new soft Jewish songs and desperately tried to evoke the sadness of ancient Jewish loss with modern Jewish vitality. I only knew a few of the songs, but found myself carried higher – even by those I didn't know.
The second time occurred when I first visited the Carlebach Moshav in Israel, founded by those who followed Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach from the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco to establish a spiritual community in Israel, the Jewish soul's home. Friday night davenning was the first time I ever had a Mamish/real Kabbalat Shabbat. A native son of the Moshav and I began tapping and banging the tables in front of us during Lecha Dodi, more and more rhythmically, until he broke into a drum solo while the room full of men and women sang and danced with eyes closed and hearts open. I only had to learn one niggun that night, because that one niggun lasted a full hour. And it hasn't stopped for me to this day.
The third time I experienced prayerful ecstasy was in the home of my teacher, Dr. Devora Steinmetz, in Jerusalem during my year at Machon Schechter, the Jerusalem Campus of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Liz and I had heard about a monthly minyan at Devora's home, and our first time participating gave us hope that vibrant, soulful, Modern Jewish spiritual communities existed. About one hundred people showed up on the first Shabbat of every month, bringing with them their own siddurim, their own spiritual needs – and their own love of davenning. Devora never led, and rarely did anyone lead twice. Devora simply provided the space and her passionate presence. And the roof would just lift off of the apartment with the harmonies of learning, growing, Jews - young and old.
A more recent joyful moment occurred a few years ago while sitting in Yakar, a spiritual haven in Jerusalem for niggun-singing davenners, holding my father's hand. I already knew most of the tunes, having fallen in love long before with that precious community. I had never davenned with my father in Israel. We'd shared many powerful, emotional, transcendent, and loving experiences in our relationship, but I didn't realize how much his presence would touch my personal prayer life. My heart still aches with the memory of that ephemeral but exquisite visit to Heaven on Earth.
I believe that the following four ingredients, each learned from one of the experiences above, can enhance the intensity and health of our spiritual community:
1) Be willing to join an intense and new experience, with the acceptance of the personal vulnerability that comes with encountering newness.
2) Use your whole self to pray – when your body remembers the experience you’ve crossed the line from prayer to davenning. Hold tight to a general trajectory without concretizing any one moment in its course as the final destination.
3) Find a community with a dependable center that seeks to empower. Safe space for sacred experiencing need not be hierarchical.
4) Love your fellow davenner. Reach to individuals comprising your chevreh, acknowledging them as worthy of contributing without requiring sameness as a criterion.
3.30.2008
What is it about Bedtime?
(c) Rabbi Menachem Creditor
What is it about bedtime? On the one hand it's an in-between moment: Daylight is fading, eyelids are drooping - a gentle goodnight seems natural. On the other hand, there is the "simple task" of getting a child to bed, tucking them in, and finally going to take care of "grown-up stuff." How difficult it is to preserve this escapable sacred experience.
And yet, if we rush we miss the very first "I love you too." We miss seeing in our child's eyes an emerging understanding of the world. We miss the blindingly holy uniqueness of this independent person if we look away too quickly. And it's so easy to be distracted.
What roots us in the moment? Ritual. A hug, the Shema, a shared story. The gift of saying Shema with a child is inestimable. No ringing cell-phone is worth answering when you and your child are truly present with each other. There is nothing to accomplish, no way to fail. All there is is wonder. Grandeur. Love.
And why limit this practice to parenting? Imagine the power of looking into the eyes of a loving partner, a beloved friend, and saying the Shema. So intimate, and such a relief from the tumult of the world. It's just easier to talk about seeing Infinity in a child's eyes, perhaps because they haven't come to feel limited by the burdens of adult life and a challenging world.
Every one of us, old or young, has the same eyes we did as children. They've just seen more. Internalized a world that is so much, too much, with us. We miss the sunset because it feels so far away. Not the child. Childhood is a time when we can draw an elephant being swallowed by a boa-constrictor, give the moon a hat for a gift, delight in an echo, and know for certain that wisdom lives inside ourselves.
In that moment when we say the Shema, we are children once more, effortlessly testifying to the infinite oneness as we bid each other goodnight.