NEXT Monday, November 23rd, 7:30-9:00 p.m. Join B’nai Jeshurun Congregation as they once again host:THE ARTS OF THANKSGIVINGfeaturing visual and performing artists from a variety of faithsand cultural backgrounds, expressing the beautiful diversity of our city through music,art and dance. This will be our 10th annual Arts of Thanksgiving. This year will be no different as we welcome performing artists from a variety of faiths and cultural backgrounds. The evening will feature pre-recorded performances and will include messages from clergy and organizational leaders across Cleveland. Registration is required.REGISTER ON EVENTBRITE
Also…
This year’s fourth annual West Park Community Interfaith Thanksgiving Service will take place at 7:00 p.m. NEXT Tuesday, November 24th.Since this event is always quite large, our hope is to keep us all safe by offering this event virtually. Each of our communities will be highlighted* as we worship our God together. Everyone is also invited to offer a donation to the food pantry of your choice, that others might be filled during this season. The event will take place online at https://westparkucc.org/livestream *Rabbi Lader and Charlotte Feldman will be representing our congregation.
This week’s Torah portion is Toledot – Gen. 25:19-28:9, and opens with the story of the birth of Isaac and Rebecca’s sons, twins: Jacob and Esau. It is written that “Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for meat [and Esau was a hunter], and Rebecca loved Jacob.” (25:28) Yes, this is the story of Esau, the elder of the twins, spurning his birthright for a bowl of Jacob’s lentil stew… and then Rebecca helping Jacob disguise himself to receive Isaac’s blessing, as if he were the first born son. Is Isaac truly old and infirm and blind? Or is he blind to the situation around him? Or is he helping Rebecca bring about what was told to her when she was pregnant and the two “struggled in her womb”? This is a story of parental love… and favorites… and birthrights and blessings. And we find resonance in this story for the approval we seek (and need) from our parents to become self-sufficient adults. In their book on the families of Genesis, Wrestling With Angels by Naomi H. Rosenblatt and Joshua Horwitz, we read: “Jacob and Esau show us how desperately children need their parents’ love and how explicitly that love needs to be conveyed… Parents need to find time to share with children, to listen to them, to teach them. Nothing can replace a parent’s loving attention, and no child can get too much of it.” (p. 255) What birthrights and blessings can we offer our children? Our nieces and nephews? Our grandchildren? The chldren in our lives? We pray for the wisdom to favor no child, and to appreciate the gift that each child brings.From the beginning, help us give each child our fullest love and our fullest blessing;and help us give each child their share in the heritage of our people.* *based on a poem by Ruth F. Brin, “The Generations of Isaac”
Last Shabbat, the Jewish world lost a renowned scholar, writer, and rabbinic leader: Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. I have quoted Rabbi Sacks a number of times over the past years, and used a number of his books as the basis for sermon ideas. For me, his Orthodox rabbinate was a rabbinate that sought to balance tradition with modernity, and made “a place at the table” for the many Jewish [and non-Jewish] voices that helped him help us move from “me” to “we.”In memory of Rabbi Sacks, I wanted to share a d’var Torah he wrote last year on this week’s Torah portion – Chayei Sarah – Genesis 23:1 – 25:18. The coincidence of this portion relating the deaths of Sarah and Abraham is not lost on me, and Rabbi’s Sacks’ focus on how one lives one’s life with purpose is a testament to the way he lived his own. JONATHAN SACKS – TO HAVE A WHY CHAYEI SARAH 5780 The name of our parsha seems to embody a paradox. It is called Chayei Sarah, “the life of Sarah,” but it begins with the death of Sarah. What is more, towards the end, it records the death of Abraham. Why is a parsha about death called “life”? The answer, it seems to me, is that – not always, but often – death and how we face it is a commentary on life and how we live it. Which brings us to a deeper paradox. The first sentence of this week’s parsha of Chayei Sarah, is: “Sarah’s lifetime was 127 years: the years of Sarah’s life.” A well-known comment by Rashi on the apparently superfluous phrase, “the years of Sarah’s life,” states: “The word ‘years’ is repeated and without a number to indicate that they were all equally good.” How could anyone say that the years of Sarah’s life were equally good? Twice, first in Egypt, then in Gerar, she was persuaded by Abraham to say that she was his sister rather than his wife, and then taken into a royal harem, a situation fraught with moral hazard. There were the years when, despite God’s repeated promise of many children, she was infertile, unable to have even a single child. There was the time when she persuaded Abraham to take her handmaid, Hagar, and have a child by her, which caused her great strife of the spirit. These things constituted a life of uncertainty and decades of unmet hopes. How is it remotely plausible to say that all of Sarah’s years were equally good? That is Sarah. About Abraham, the text is similarly puzzling. Immediately after the account of his purchase of a burial plot for Sarah, we read: “Abraham was old, well advanced in years, and God had blessed Abraham with everything” (Gen. 24:1). This too is strange. Seven times, God had promised Abraham the land of Canaan. Yet when Sarah died, he did not own a single plot of land in which to bury her, and had to undergo an elaborate and even humiliating negotiation with the Hittites, forced to admit at the outset that, “I am a stranger and temporary resident among you” (Genesis 23:4). How can the text say that God had blessed Abraham with everything? Equally haunting is its account of Abraham’s death, perhaps the most serene in the Torah: “Abraham breathed his last and died at a good age, old and satisfied, and he was gathered to his people.” He had been promised that he would become a great nation, the father of many nations, and that he would inherit the land. Not one of these promises had been fulfilled in his lifetime. How then was he “satisfied”? The answer again is that to understand a death, we have to understand a life. I have mixed feelings about Friedrich Nietzsche. He was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the modern age, and also one of the most dangerous. He himself was ambivalent about Jews and negative about Judaism.[1] Yet one of his most famous remarks is both profound and true: He who has a why in life can bear almost any how.[2] … Abraham and Sarah were among the supreme examples in all history of what it is to have a Why in life. The entire course of their lives came as a response to a call, a Divine voice, that told them to leave their home and family, set out for an unknown destination, go to live in a land where they would be strangers, abandon every conventional form of security, and have the faith to believe that by living by the standards of righteousness and justice they would be taking the first step to establishing a nation, a land, a faith and a way of life that would be a blessing to all humankind. Biblical narrative is, as Erich Auerbach said, “fraught with background,” meaning that much of the story is left unstated. We have to guess at it… With some conspicuous exceptions, we hardly know what any of the Torah’s characters felt. Which is why the two explicit statements about Abraham – that God blessed him with everything, and that he ended life old and satisfied – are so important. And when Rashi says that all of Sarah’s years were equally good, he is attributing to her what the biblical text attributes to Abraham, namely a serenity in the face of death that came from a profound tranquility in the face of life. Abraham knew that everything that happened to him, even the bad things, were part of the journey on which God had sent him and Sarah, and he had the faith to walk through the valley of the shadow of death fearing no evil, knowing that God was with him. That is what Nietzsche called “the strong heart.” … On their way to Auschwitz, Edith Eger’s mother said to her, “We don’t know where we are going, we don’t know what is going to happen, but nobody can take away from you what you put in your own mind.” That sentence became her survival mechanism. Initially, after the war, to help support the family, she worked in a factory, but eventually she went to university to study psychology and became a psychotherapist. She has used her own experiences of survival to help others survive life crises. Early on in [her] book, The Choice, she makes an immensely important distinction between victimization (what happens to you) and victimhood (how you respond to what happens to you). This is what she says about the first:
We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from the outside.
And this, about the second:
In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind – a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries.[3]
We have learned this extraordinary mindset from Holocaust survivors like Edith Eger and Viktor Frankl. But in truth, it was there from the very beginning, from Abraham and Sarah, who survived whatever fate threw at them, however much it seemed to derail their mission, and despite everything, they found serenity at the end of their lives. They knew that what makes a life satisfying is not external but internal, a sense of purpose, mission, being called, summoned, of starting something that would be continued by those who came after them, of bringing something new into the world by the way they lived their lives. What mattered was the inside, not the outside; their faith, not their often-troubled circumstances. I believe that faith helps us to find the ‘Why’ that allows us to bear almost any ‘How’. The serenity of Sarah’s and Abraham’s death was eternal testimony to how they lived. May Rabbi Sack’s family find comfort and strength at this time, and Zichrono Liv’rachah – May his memory be for a blessing. ____________________________________________[1] The best recent study is Robert Holub, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, Princeton University Press, 2015. [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, 12. [3] Edith Eger, The Choice, Rider, 2017, 9.
Last Shabbat, the Jewish world lost a renowned scholar, writer, and rabbinic leader: Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. I have quoted Rabbi Sacks a number of times over the past years, and used a number of his books as the basis for sermon ideas. For me, his Orthodox rabbinate was a rabbinate that sought to balance tradition with modernity, and made “a place at the table” for the many Jewish [and non-Jewish] voices that helped him help us move from “me” to “we.”In memory of Rabbi Sacks, I wanted to share a d’var Torah he wrote last year on this week’s Torah portion – Chayei Sarah – Genesis 23:1 – 25:18. The coincidence of this portion relating the deaths of Sarah and Abraham is not lost on me, and Rabbi’s Sacks’ focus on how one lives one’s life with purpose is a testament to the way he lived his own. JONATHAN SACKS – TO HAVE A WHY CHAYEI SARAH 5780 The name of our parsha seems to embody a paradox. It is called Chayei Sarah, “the life of Sarah,” but it begins with the death of Sarah. What is more, towards the end, it records the death of Abraham. Why is a parsha about death called “life”? The answer, it seems to me, is that – not always, but often – death and how we face it is a commentary on life and how we live it. Which brings us to a deeper paradox. The first sentence of this week’s parsha of Chayei Sarah, is: “Sarah’s lifetime was 127 years: the years of Sarah’s life.” A well-known comment by Rashi on the apparently superfluous phrase, “the years of Sarah’s life,” states: “The word ‘years’ is repeated and without a number to indicate that they were all equally good.” How could anyone say that the years of Sarah’s life were equally good? Twice, first in Egypt, then in Gerar, she was persuaded by Abraham to say that she was his sister rather than his wife, and then taken into a royal harem, a situation fraught with moral hazard. There were the years when, despite God’s repeated promise of many children, she was infertile, unable to have even a single child. There was the time when she persuaded Abraham to take her handmaid, Hagar, and have a child by her, which caused her great strife of the spirit. These things constituted a life of uncertainty and decades of unmet hopes. How is it remotely plausible to say that all of Sarah’s years were equally good? That is Sarah. About Abraham, the text is similarly puzzling. Immediately after the account of his purchase of a burial plot for Sarah, we read: “Abraham was old, well advanced in years, and God had blessed Abraham with everything” (Gen. 24:1). This too is strange. Seven times, God had promised Abraham the land of Canaan. Yet when Sarah died, he did not own a single plot of land in which to bury her, and had to undergo an elaborate and even humiliating negotiation with the Hittites, forced to admit at the outset that, “I am a stranger and temporary resident among you” (Genesis 23:4). How can the text say that God had blessed Abraham with everything? Equally haunting is its account of Abraham’s death, perhaps the most serene in the Torah: “Abraham breathed his last and died at a good age, old and satisfied, and he was gathered to his people.” He had been promised that he would become a great nation, the father of many nations, and that he would inherit the land. Not one of these promises had been fulfilled in his lifetime. How then was he “satisfied”? The answer again is that to understand a death, we have to understand a life. I have mixed feelings about Friedrich Nietzsche. He was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the modern age, and also one of the most dangerous. He himself was ambivalent about Jews and negative about Judaism.[1] Yet one of his most famous remarks is both profound and true: He who has a why in life can bear almost any how.[2] … Abraham and Sarah were among the supreme examples in all history of what it is to have a Why in life. The entire course of their lives came as a response to a call, a Divine voice, that told them to leave their home and family, set out for an unknown destination, go to live in a land where they would be strangers, abandon every conventional form of security, and have the faith to believe that by living by the standards of righteousness and justice they would be taking the first step to establishing a nation, a land, a faith and a way of life that would be a blessing to all humankind. Biblical narrative is, as Erich Auerbach said, “fraught with background,” meaning that much of the story is left unstated. We have to guess at it… With some conspicuous exceptions, we hardly know what any of the Torah’s characters felt. Which is why the two explicit statements about Abraham – that God blessed him with everything, and that he ended life old and satisfied – are so important. And when Rashi says that all of Sarah’s years were equally good, he is attributing to her what the biblical text attributes to Abraham, namely a serenity in the face of death that came from a profound tranquility in the face of life. Abraham knew that everything that happened to him, even the bad things, were part of the journey on which God had sent him and Sarah, and he had the faith to walk through the valley of the shadow of death fearing no evil, knowing that God was with him. That is what Nietzsche called “the strong heart.” … On their way to Auschwitz, Edith Eger’s mother said to her, “We don’t know where we are going, we don’t know what is going to happen, but nobody can take away from you what you put in your own mind.” That sentence became her survival mechanism. Initially, after the war, to help support the family, she worked in a factory, but eventually she went to university to study psychology and became a psychotherapist. She has used her own experiences of survival to help others survive life crises. Early on in [her] book, The Choice, she makes an immensely important distinction between victimization (what happens to you) and victimhood (how you respond to what happens to you). This is what she says about the first:
We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from the outside.
And this, about the second:
In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind – a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries.[3]
We have learned this extraordinary mindset from Holocaust survivors like Edith Eger and Viktor Frankl. But in truth, it was there from the very beginning, from Abraham and Sarah, who survived whatever fate threw at them, however much it seemed to derail their mission, and despite everything, they found serenity at the end of their lives. They knew that what makes a life satisfying is not external but internal, a sense of purpose, mission, being called, summoned, of starting something that would be continued by those who came after them, of bringing something new into the world by the way they lived their lives. What mattered was the inside, not the outside; their faith, not their often-troubled circumstances. I believe that faith helps us to find the ‘Why’ that allows us to bear almost any ‘How’. The serenity of Sarah’s and Abraham’s death was eternal testimony to how they lived. May Rabbi Sacks’ family find comfort and strength at this time, and Zichrono Liv’rachah – May his memory be for a blessing. ____________________________________________[1] The best recent study is Robert Holub, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, Princeton University Press, 2015. [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, 12. [3] Edith Eger, The Choice, Rider, 2017, 9.
We’ll slowly go through the Shabbat services and invite everyone to make comments and ask questions as we go along. We might find that discussions get stuck in a certain area because people really want to think about and discuss the details we can’t contemplate in the short time frame of a service. It’s fine, for example, to dwell on the multiple translations of the same Hebrew text and consider their different implications. Or, to take the time needed to really look at those footnotes and understand why they are there.
It will be helpful if you have picked up a copy of Mishkan T’filah.
Hundreds of Reform Jews gathered November 11 to lift up our civic engagement efforts and accomplishments, hear from our partners about the impact of the election on the most urgent issues of the moment, and commit to pursuing justice in 2021. If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch a recording on the RAC’s Facebook page. But our civic engagement work isn’t over yet: Now, our efforts are focused on ensuring that every vote is counted in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. Here’s how you can get involved in this important work:
In a year with unprecedented turnout and millions of votes cast by mail, it will take time to count all ballots to ensure that every voice is heard. Although there are many uncertainties, there is one thing we know about the election: Vulnerable and oppressed communities remain vulnerable and oppressed. Our role is to work together, to keep building relationships to strengthen each other, and reach out to those who could be susceptible to messages of hate.
Tell your elected officials to support a new relief package to protect the most vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Town Hall with Shosh Ault and Arnon Chait
Rescheduled
We apologize for Wednesday night’s technical/sound problems during our Town Hall program with Peter Sackett, Shosh Ault, and Arnon Chait… It has been rescheduled for Thursday, December 3rd at 7:00 p.m. Here is the link for this livestream presentation: https://youtu.be/MUOf8T1ehO8
We are so pleased to advise that Shosh Ault and Arnon Chait have agreed to be our guests at our next Town Hall — Our subjects will include the following: their respective journeys/paths to the USA and Cleveland,where they were living before the USA,when they left, why they left, what they left behind,who joined them on their journey,and later, how they found their way to Beth Israel – The West Temple.And, how they have led their blessed lives – their respective family and business adventures. We all have the greatest respect for these special guests. They have been pillars of our temple community for many, many years. These interviews will bring their stories to the forefront. Peter SackettPresident, Board of Trustees
Jewish Wisdom for Stressed-Out Parents in a Pandemic
For Parents, Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles…
THIS Sunday, November 8, 7:00 p.m.
our Scholar-in-Residence series continues
“Jewish Wisdom for Stressed Out Parents In a Pandemic” featuring Greg Marcus, the founder of American Mussar As parents, we are constantly challenged by our kids. Sheltering at home during the pandemic only throws gas on this fire. On top of regular parenting challenges, we now have to navigate hybrid or online education, one’s own career, single parenting or spousal relationships, all under one roof. These are fraught and overwhelming times. Come to this highly interactive session to learn how the Jewish Mindfulness practice of Mussar can help you become more present, stress less, and love more.. You’ll walk away knowing that you are not alone, and with a tool or two to help you cope with the current challenges.
Greg Marcus brings an everyday perspective to his teaching, with a broad background including a Ph.D in biology from MIT, a ten year career as a marketer in the genomics industry, and ten years as a stay at home parent. His latest book is The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions:Finding Balance Through the Soul Traits of Mussar, and he is currently a Rabbi in training at the Academy of Jewish Religion, CA.
Greg created Mussar parenting to help him cope with two teen daughters.
Please use the following Zoom Link:https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82820040865?pwd=S096TUpZN1hYM3ROUkIzbHoycUo1dz09Meeting ID: 828 2004 0865Passcode: 319702 Dial in: 646-876-9923This Scholar-in-Residence program is funded by BI-TWT’s Zaransky Speaker Fund and the Congregational Enrichment Fund of Cleveland’s Jewish Education Center
