Kol Romm

2003-12-18T16:57:00.000-05:00

VAYISHLACH

In Yaakovâ€™s confrontation with Esav, Yaakov was prepared in three ways. As a well-known â€œRashiâ€� points out: â€œLâ€™doron, litfillah, oolâ€™milchamahâ€”with gifts, with prayer, and with preparedness for war.â€� As it turns out, even though Esav came up against Yaakov with an army of four hundred soldiers, Esav seemed to be placated by the gifts (appeasement), and behaved somewhat amicably as Yaakov had hoped for in his prayer. Yet, Yaakov wished to separate himself and his people from Esav and his people as expeditiously as possible, knowing Esavâ€™s true character and designs and that this truce, this reconciliation was only temporary. Esav still down deep, emotionally and culturally, wanted to conquer Jacob and annihilate bâ€™nai Yisrael.

One knows instinctively as a Jew where the worldâ€™s sympathies lie in the War on Terrorism. At the capture of Saddam Hussein, a Cardinal at the Vatican could only express sadness that this butcher of tens of thousands was â€œhumiliatedâ€� by being shown to the world dirty, disheveled, and having his head inspected for lice and his mouth checked for hidden cyanide pills. The International Red Cross, who cooperates with terrorists by letting them use their ambulances to smuggle arms and explosives and combatants through checkpoints, is worried about the quality of Saddam Husseinâ€™s treatment. The European Union, and the U.N., those paragons of virtue, who would have left him in power because of debts and contracts they all had with Iraq, are only worried that he not be executed. Like the liberals, those â€œuseful idiotsâ€� that all totalitarian rulers love to negotiate with, there is a jaded world out there that cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore. And, of course, the Palestinians, the inventors of modern terrorism against innocent civilians, are â€œfreedom fighters.â€� Letâ€™s give the Arabs the Jews and the Jewish State. That is the way to solve the emergent Islamic militancy and bid to conquer the West. But, remember, as throughout all of history, the Jews are like the canaries in the coal mine. Islamic ambition and fantasy are the biggest threat of the twenty-first century. The U.S. administration seems to be among the few who understand that this is a new kind of war that needs new rules of engagement to combat it. In the small theater of the Arabsâ€™ war against Israel, we all have had a foretaste of how the Islamic world is fighting and how it will continue to wage its jihad against the West and the developed nations.

Doronâ€”appeasementâ€”does not work for long. Tefillahâ€”prayerâ€”helps us to strengthen our resolve not to sacrifice our own values and culture in order to give in to the mindless â€œmulticulturalismâ€� that seeks to understand the mind of primitive fanatics and romanticize them and denigrate its own very values of tolerance, justice, democracy, and peace. There are times when there is no choice left but milchamahâ€”battleâ€”against forces that religiously and ideologically wish to do us in. To wait until they have the technological means to do so is to lose the war and be taken over by those who negate the whole notion of â€œmulticulturalismâ€� and â€œlive and let live.â€�

Parshat Vayishlach marks the end of a year of these â€œKol Rommâ€�s. In them I have disclosed quite a bit about myself, and those people close to me. I have looked back upon the two years since I retired early from the Conservative rabbinate, and established homes and lives in Riverdale and Haifa. Over the course of this past year two new grandchildren have come into our lives, bringing the total of grandchildren to four, three to Rav Zvi and Shira, and one to Gadi and Jana. Our parents have gone through episodes and changes.

I worry about the years ahead and their impact upon my generations of the twenty-first century. I know that they will continue to be active, proud Jews, no matter how the tides turn. Yisrael is a â€œstrugglerâ€� and ultimately will prevail. Yisrael is also a â€œprince,â€� no matter how denigrated. Torah is a heritage and a privilege, no matter how ignored. I will continue to do good to the best of my ability and try to be an influence for good in my small way.

And since December 18 is our thirty-second wedding anniversary, I thank Diane who has enabled much of our lifeâ€™s journey together, and wish us years of walking hand in hand throughout the many challenges of at least as many years ahead.

2003-12-12T16:02:00.000-05:00

VAYEITZEI

The Shabbat of Vayeitzei was spent at Zvi’s on the Lower East Side. It coincided with the first snowstorm of the season that piled snow in great accumulation with driving blizzard winds all Shabbat from Friday night throughout the day on Saturday. Yet, the Bialystoker Shul was packed with at least a hundred people at every service. You have to understand that “every service” in the Bialystoker over Shabbat means Kabbalat Shabbat, two complete Shacharit-Musaf services, Minchah and two complete Motzaei-Shabbat Maariv services, upstairs and downstairs. In addition, Zvi’s pre-Minchah shiur on Hilchot Shabbat (which he and they pronounce Hilchos Shabbes) not only took place while a Nor’easter snowstorm was raging outside, but was excellent in content and in Zvi’s presentation, and had a large audience besides. I was, frankly, amazed.

Already by the Torah reading at the second Shacharit service, the one I attended, I was feeling elevated spiritually at the experience of davenning with Zvi as the rabbi and among a congregation of religious Jews, a kind of warmth of community, of (how else can I put it?) “Yiddishkeit” that negated the cold, roaring world outside the shul. Like Yaakov I awoke as from a sleep and marveled “Ma nora hamakom hazeh! Ein zeh ki im bait Elokim v’zeh shaar hashamayim—How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God and this is the gate of Heaven.”

In my thirty years of the Conservative rabbinate, I never felt like this. Aside from the fact that I never had attendance in these kinds of numbers without a Bar or Bat Mitzvah even without a blizzard, I find that there is a big difference spending Shabbat in shul with a congregation of the genuinely Sabbath observant. This was never my lot in the Conservative Movement.

It made me remember one of the many vignettes of shul life from the last congregation I thought I had served in my erstwhile rabbinical career. It is one of thousands of those “you can’t make this stuff up” type stories that emanated from that place.

The story centers upon a religious-philosophical question. Should officers and board members, the “lay leadership” of the synagogue, come to shul on Shabbes, ever, or at least sometimes in the course of the year outside of being invited as guests to a “Bar Mitzvah?” (Of course, the broader question is: Should a shul member, and especially a lay leader, ever take a stab at practicing the Jewish religion? But, for the moment let’s stick to the narrower question: Should officers and board members show up on Shabbat in shul at least a half a dozen out of fifty-two Shabbatot a year?) Obviously, these officers and board members did not!

The ritual committee brought a motion to the board. Based upon the required attendance of the Hebrew School students at Shabbat morning Junior Congregation (minimally six times throughout the entire school year) the ritual committee suggested that every board member and officer take it upon himself or herself to attend shul on Shabbat at least six times a year. It would seem minimal and certainly not an onerous obligation for those purporting to be synagogue leaders.

But what a firestorm of angry reaction this proposal created! How dare you make us come to services! We serve the synagogue and the Jewish people by sorting schmates for the rummage sale, or by throwing imbecilic gasoline on the acrimonious fires of pointless sisterhood and board meetings. When we say we want women to count in the minyans and get aliyahs to the Torah we didn’t mean that any of us should actually be at minyans or be at Torah readings except at Bar and Bat Mitzvah services, and then under duress that the service is too long and the kid’s part is just a small one somewhere in the middle. How dare you propose that we come to shul just to come to shul. And the rabbi is not charismatic enough to draw us week after week, year after year, anyway.

Suffice it to say the proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. I think of that board meeting as the night my synagogue’s board voted down the practice of the Jewish religion. God definitely was not in that place.

On the other hand, on Shabbat Vayeitzei, in the midst of a blizzard, I definitely felt the presence of God in the Bialystoker Shul.

2003-12-04T09:28:00.000-05:00

TOLDOT

We have an announcement! On Thanksgiving day, our new granddaughter was born to Rav Zvi and to Shira. Chavi not only got her wish for a baby sister: the baby looks just like her, nearly everyone agrees. Aharon is thrilled with "his" baby, too, and is still assessing exactly what the new arrival may mean in terms of time alone with Imma.

As a grandfather, back from Israel in time for the new arrival, I immediately fell in love with this newest descendent. It was so appropriate for Zvi to name her in shul on Shabbat Toldot. Her name is Miriam Leba, after Diane's mother, who has been "waiting" for a name for fifteen years. A past generation (and a very nice woman of whom I have fond memories) has found a "presence" in the present and established a link to the future.

In fact, this double arrow, to the past and to the future, is probably what the Hebrew word "toldot" has been implying for millenia. Toldot is usually translated as "generations" or "progeny" in many English versions of the Bible. It, indeed, is a word that is built upon the Hebrew root yod-lamed-dalet which has to do with being born. But in medieval Hebrew, "toldot" is often used in the sense of "history." "Toldot," too, can be used for "results," or "outcomes." It all makes sense if we think of the past as being the parent of the future, giving birth to "outcomes" generation after generation.

May this new little "outcome" do honor to the name of my mother-in-law. As I sat in shul on the Shabbat of her naming, at a Torah reading beginning "V'eleh toldot Yitzchak...," I was very happily contemplating my own.

2003-11-24T15:40:00.000-05:00

CHAYEI SARAH

When Rivkah saw Yitzchak for the first time, the Torah tells us: “Vatikach hatza-if vatitkas—She took (her) veil and covered herself.” To this day, Jewish brides are veiled at their wedding ceremonies. Before the wedding ceremony itself, there is a ceremony whereby the groom gets to see his bride before the wedding and the opportunity to personally cover her face with the veil. Many people assume that this custom of the “badeken” is derived from the experience of Yaakov, who thought that he was marrying Rachel and instead married the heavily veiled Leah. While, admittedly, it is not a bad idea to ascertain who it is that you are marrying before proceeding to the wedding canopy, the badeken is based upon our pasuk about Rivkah veiling herself before first meeting Yitzchak. In fact, part of the berachah pronounced over the newly veiled bride: “Achotainu at hayee l’alfay rivivah—Our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of myriads” is based upon the berachah given to Rivkah by her family upon her setting off after Avraham’s servant to be a wife for Yitzchak.

So why did Rivkah cover her face upon seeing Yitzchak?

Sforno comments that Rivkah was afraid to look upon Yitzchak. Similarly, we find regarding Moshe at the Burning Bush: “Vayaster Moshe panav—Moshe hid his face.” Yitzchak’s piety and sanctity of being (as the “olah temimah” of the Akedah) was such that his appearance inspired awe and reverence in others. Rivkah’s reaction to him was not unlike Moshe’s to God’s appearance to him in the Burning Bush.

My question to Rivkah would be: “Did your pre-marital awe last throughout the marriage?”

Many years ago, my wife told me what they had discussed at a Long Island “Wives of Rabbis” meeting. She said that the women almost unanimously agreed that a common problem with their rabbinical husbands was that they were given to believing that they were so revered and deferred to with awe in their public lives, that it was hard to convince them that around the house part of their jobs was to take out the garbage. I guess that on the domestic front none of these wives believed in post-marital awe.

Some thirty-three years ago when Diane and I first started dating and before we were formally engaged, I thought that she was a little in awe of me and afraid of “losing me.” After almost thirty-two years of marriage, after becoming the parents of grown and married children and grandparents to three with a fourth very soon on the way, I know that Diane loves me and supports me emotionally and materially in all my life’s decisions. But is she in awe of me? If that feeling ever existed, it was certainly gone by our first full day of marital bliss.

On the other hand, I probably was never “all that” in the piety and awe-inspiring departments.

2003-11-20T12:19:00.000-05:00

VAYEIRA

One cannot escape noticing all the domestic tugs and pulls in Parashat Vayeira: Sarah and Hagar, Yishmael and Yitzchak, Avraham Avinu trying to referee all sides, his ordeal at the Akedah, and then finally the bits of news about “the relatives” back in Syria. Family matters really matter.

Diane and I are blessed with two wonderful daughters-in-law in Shira and in Jana. Our adult sons get along with each other and visit with each other and their growing families. For Diane and me, the months we spend in Israel, as wonderful as they are, are marred by the longing to play with our grandchildren and to be a tangible part of their lives.

We are back now in the Riverdale apartment because Shira’s due date is the first week in December. This baby will be our fourth grandchild, God willing, and the third child for Zvi and Shira. But I was really also champing at the bit to see my grandchildren again. I miss them profoundly when I am in Israel, and the constant phone calls to the States are no substitute for the real thing.

And what changes the three months have made! Beni (Gadi and Jana’s son) has passed the half-year mark and is alert, responsive, happy, and a handsome little kid (and I say this admitting that he mostly looks like Jana’s side of the family, Gadi’s protestations to the contrary). He is a fun baby to play with because he really “plays” back and smiles and laughs to my clowning around with him.

We spent Shabbat Vayeira at Rav Zvi and Shira’s magnificent apartment on the gentrified Lower East Side and, of course, were honored guests at Zvi’s shul, where he is quite a sensational rabbi. But not taking away from the nachas shept over both our sons, each phenomenal in his own chosen way, I longed to see Chavi and Aharon that weekend. Chavi, at five, is as gorgeous as ever, and is reading and writing in English and in Hebrew. Aharon, who hardly spoke three months ago, is now speaking in sentences with a vocabulary that astounds me in its variety and complexity, all articulated in a cute little voice. So what was I worried about? Aharon will tell you that he “likes trains.” So do I. He doesn’t yet know what I have been saving for him for over a year until he was ready—a 70 piece wooden train set. And wait until he gets to see the apartment in Haifa. The back bedroom, the room yet to be “finished,” will house my electric train collection (finally) from the Lionels and American Flyers of my own childhood to the many sophisticated HOs (not toys) I have acquired over the years.

In addition to being a Jewish role model as a grandfather, I hope also to introduce to my grandchildren a world of eclectic interests, including a love of nature and natural history, a love of art and design, and a willingness to explore, to try out ideas, and to sustain over the years all kinds of intellectual pursuits and curiosities. If they become the kind of people who can synthesize diverse fields with original insights I feel that my life as a grandfather will not have been in vain, especially if it helps them as my personal descendents to become creative, vibrant links in the Jewish masoret.

May this microcosm of Avraham’s descendents—my direct descendents—grow up following good ways and making good lifetime contributions for the benefit of all humanity. “V’hitbar’chu b’zaracha kawl goyay ha-aretz—And all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your offspring.”

From God’s mouth to our ears in today’s cockamamie world.

2003-11-14T12:34:00.000-05:00

LECH LECHA

I am writing this posting after Shabbat Lech Lecha as a retrospective.

Upon arriving in America from Israel, our first agenda item was to see our parents who had been going through health issues and lifestyle changes while we were in Israel. Although we both were on the phone every day with Philadelphia and Owings Mills, our first priority was to see Diane’s father in his new independent living apartment and my parents at home after my father’s month-long hospital ordeal.

Gadi picked us up in his car at JFK airport. We spent one night in the Riverdale apartment. Felix, the concierge, had taken good care of my plants and aquarium, as requested, but I spent the night “fixing up” the final touches such as pruning, cleaning up dead leaves, and doing a partial water change in the aquarium. Nobody takes care of my living things the way I do, and even with the best of Felix’s intentions, the three months of my absence had taken their toll. My plants and fish really need me. Felix had also been turning over regularly the ’87 red Nissan Pulsar NX, my New York car. It started up the next morning perfectly. Loaded up, it was ready for its journey of several hundred miles, crossing over 135,000 very nostalgic miles on the odometer.

Our plan was to see Diane’s father first. We stayed with him overnight. I left Diane with him, to help him go through boxes upon boxes of his accumulated documents and important papers, while I traveled north to Philadelphia to see my folks and spend Shabbat with them and in my father’s shul. I would go back to the Baltimore suburbs the beginning of the next week and bring Diane back to Philadelphia to my parents. Gadi had a business show in Philadelphia then and he and his business partner Roger would also stay over two nights at my parents’ home.

My father-in-law was acclimating well and loving his new apartment and circle of friends, even though he had had a medical procedure just prior to our arrival. My father seemed well and back to himself. He had been out and back to all his community work already. He was driving his car even!

They both seemed to speak of their respective communities in terms of “family.” The residents of the mostly Jewish independent living apartment facility were like a “family” into which my outgoing father-in-law seemed to be accepted right away. My father, on Shabbat morning, from his President’s podium, thanked the congregational “family” for all their concerns, visits, and actual help and assistance to my mother and himself during the past month. This feeling of family was a result of fifty-three years of living in a close-knit neighborhood, and, of course, of my parents’ community concerns and doing for others themselves over the years. The synagogue, in many ways, is like a family, with its love and nurturing, its feuds, its rivalries, and its senseless hatreds. There are shared histories and traditions that individuals plug into with greater or lesser intensity over the years and according to need at different stages of their lives. I feel it, too, on those occasions when I “come home” to Overbrook Park.

I was thinking about “family” while sitting in shul among these remaining, elderly survivors from among the neighborhood parents of my friends, the young post World War II adults of my childhood in what was then a newly built neighborhood. While I think of them as active authority figures and myself still a child in my memory, the reality before my eyes was of “elderly people,” some with canes, most of them shrunken, some bent, but still a living community. The current rabbi, a man in his forties, never knew the human beings behind many of the names on the pew plaques in the chapel and in the sanctuary, on the stained glass windows, on the embroidered parochot, amud covers, and Torah mantles, on the silver, or the names for the library, the classrooms, the sanctuary. I did. I knew them all. Shared history.

As the Torah reading of Lech Lecha began, this insight about our “family” of Jews was driven home to me as an almost oracular reinforcement of what I already knew in my heart. God commands Avram to leave his paternal home and homeland and go to what would become Eretz Yisrael: “V’e’esecha l’goy gadol va-avarechecha va-agadlah shemecha veh’yeh berachah—And I will make of you a great nation; and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.” We began as a single family.

We Jews are truly like one big family, with a shared history and traditions, and memories in common over the millennia in many different places, shared memories that are learned anew in each generation, even by relatively recent “inclusions” into the family. We relate to one another as relatives no matter where we may travel and both support and reinforce one another even as we bicker and fight among ourselves within the family. The worst crime is to betray the family and give ammunition to our detractors who are many and have been so throughout our history.

“Jewish family” is learned first through our own families, then expands to our local communities of Jews, and grows ever wider, in growing concentric circles of Jewish experience, throughout the broadening journey of our lives, lech lecha. I know from personal and historical experience that “avarecha mevarechecha umekallel’cha a-or v’nivrichu b’cha kowl mishp’chot ha-adamah—God will bless those who bless us and curse those who try to do us harm so that the entire world may be blessed through us.”

As a small minority of mankind, we have contributed far out of proportion to our numbers to the civilization and progress of the world throughout history. Those nations who have hated us and tried to harm us and were successful in eliminating us from their midst, by doing so marked the beginning of their own decline and disappearance from the center of the world scene.

“Veh’yeh berachah”—and what kind of reciprocal berachah can this family of Abraham’s be for God? The blessing of God is that He should receive some nachas from His creations.

Upon this return from Haifa to America we went first to parents and reconnected with our past, which at this time and stage in our lives has a real claim upon us. The next step is to reconnect with our future, our children and our grandchildren, all of whom we miss terribly while we spend our time in Israel. But this Jewish family reunion and the ensuing berachah of shept nachas will take place and be posted after the Sabbath of Vayeira.

2003-10-31T09:37:00.000-05:00

NOACH

The parashah of Noach begins with “Eleh toldot Noach...” and ends with Avram’s (Avraham’s) immediate parental and generational geneology. If we compare the language used to describe Noach’s character and righteousness with the wording of God’s command to Avram, immediately following in the beginning of Lech Lecha, we see why it was natural for the classical midrash to contrast the relative merits of Noach with the much greater virtues of Avraham Avinu. What struck me most, however, was an observation by a relatively modern Martin Buber: “Noah stays put in nature; a man of the soil is rescued from the deluge. Abraham is the first to make his way into history as a proclaimer of God’s dominion.” That is, Noach is like those religious people who are content to save themselves and their families, and do not care about the rest of the world. Avraham was not singled out for survival (like Noach), but for a mission. Avraham acted upon and inspired the world around him.

I am thinking about my father, zu lange yahr, whose Jewish name is Avraham in Hebrew, but was pronounced by his parents as Avrum in Yiddish. I have not mentioned it before in these writings, but he had been in the hospital from just before Rosh Hashanah until the end of Simchat Torah. He had picked up an infection starting in his foot, probably from walking barefoot around the pool, the whirlpool, and the showers at the local YM-YWHA, that turned into quite a severe case of cellulitis requiring hospitalization and intravenous delivery of super antibiotics.

It is hard being in Israel, so far away, at these times. Needless to say, I called on the telephone every day except for Shabbat and Yom Tov and sometimes more than once a day. I was in touch with the admitting doctor at the hospital. I was on the phone daily with my mother. The sense of guilt that they were being looked after by a community of neighbors, friends, and people from their shul (for rides for my mother to the hospital, for taking my mother grocery shopping, for the many bikur cholim visits by friends and neighbors) and not by me, the first born son, was palpable in me over this past month or so, grateful though I am that they are both so respected and cared about in their community.

I worried that the hospital would take a cavalier attitude towards an eighty-seven year old man with a serious infection that kept him in bed and immobile for the first week and a half of his hospital stay. With me there, in Philadelphia, I could be more of a “nudge” to the nurses and an advocate for his getting well and coming home.

What they didn’t see in this old man, lying in bed and—I imagine—looking fully geriatric and helpless, was the oldest currently sitting synagogue president in all of United Synagogue. His is still an active mind, heartbroken at the thought of these first High Holidays in his life that he could not be in shul. He wrote all of his president’s speeches and instructions from his hospital bed and gave them to the rabbi who made “working” hospital visits to his room before the holidays.

During his hospital stay he was awarded a plaque from the Overbrook Park Civic Association in honor of years of work as a volunteer ambulance dispatcher and active member of the Neighborhood Watch in a surprise ceremony at a dinner planned well before his hospitalization. In addition to the personal plaques awarded to my father and to my mother (who attended the ceremony on his behalf) the service award will become an annual event in their names. Their names are the title of the award as engraved on a large wall plaque hanging at the Civic Association’s headquarters. Each year, from now on, new recipients of the “Albert and Laura Romm” award will have their names added to the large plaque.

I am happy that he and my mother are so revered by their community. He is Avraham Dov married to Chayah Sarah. The community is returning to them in their old age—this Avraham and Sarah, my parents—the concern and outreach that they gave the community over fifty-three years.

Diane and I have tickets to return to America for November 4, purchased before my father entered the hospital. I look forward to coming first to Philadelphia and staying with them and helping out as my father is on the mend at home.

One is always too close to one’s father to see him as the world sees him. But this latest illness has proven to me once again from afar that my Dad is no Noach stuck in nature merely surviving, but truly is “Avrum,” a center of influence and effect upon the world around him, and not just upon us, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

2003-10-24T09:38:00.000-04:00

BEREISHITH

For the night of Shabbat Bereishith, I was asked to speak at the “Shalom Zachar” celebration of the birth of a new grandson to one of the couples we met here on the Carmel and who introduced us to the shul. I consider it a great honor.

It is, of course, helpful in choosing a theme that the Torah portion begins with “Creation.” It gives us the special opportunity to think for a moment about the creation of this new life, a life just starting out in the world.

I am thinking of an oft quoted passage from Kohelet Rabba about the “partners” in the creation of a baby:

There are three partners in the creation of the fetus: The Holy One Blessed be He, and its father, and its mother. The father contributes all the “white stuff,” the brain, the fingernails, the whites of the eyes, the bones and the sinews. The mother contributes all the “red stuff,” the blood, the skin, the flesh, the hair, and the dark spot of the eyes. God contributes the spirit and the soul, the facial features, the ability to see, to hear, to speak, to use one's hands, to walk upright, wisdom and understanding, perspicacity and knowledge, and strength. When it is time for the baby to be born, God takes back His contribution and presents that which represents the contributions of the mother and the father before the parents.

Without having to spell out for you why fathers contribute “white stuff” and mothers contribute “red” in this quaint explanation of the creation of a person, we nonetheless see that what it is that makes us subjectively human are those very qualities that are in “the image of God,” b'tzelem Elokim. Each baby will in some ways resemble the mother and in other ways resemble the father. But if you should ask: who does the baby ultimately “look like?” The answer is: God! We all should resemble God in the high development of all those qualities that make us human, those that collectively are called “menschlichkeit.”

The parents have a challenge—to help to develop those qualities in their child that God pre-programed before birth and then assigned to the parents to nurture in the child in order to make his way through life.

At this Shalom Zachar we wish this new life blessing and success in all his endeavors for good throughout a long lifetime, and that he be a source of nachas to his parents, his grandparents, his entire family, and all who come to know him throughout life. Katan zeh, gadol y'hiyeh. May he grow to the study of Torah, to the marriage canopy, and to a life of good deeds.

May children's children see peace over Israel.

2003-10-02T05:06:00.000-04:00

HAAZINU—SHABBAT SHUVAH

Every Friday that I am in Israel I speak on the telephone with my former roommate from my first year at the Seminary. He had left the pulpit rabbinate many years ago, made aliyah, and lives in Tel Aviv. On the Erev Shabbat a week before Rosh Hashanah, he joked with me on the phone. “How is your writing of the High Holidays' sermons going?”

We both laughed. Neither of us was writing High Holidays' sermons. Yet, we deeply felt the joke. This season of the year, at least for American pulpit rabbis, is the “big time.” Most working pulpit rabbis at this season are cloistered in a room, frantically trying to compose four or five outstanding sermons for performances for the record books for the thousands of largely ignorant, indifferent quasi-Jewish individuals who provide a captive audience for the rabbinical shnook only at this time of the year. Since the audience is there mainly to challenge the rabbi to dare to offend their highly developed intellectual, moral, and sociological sensibilities so as to justify their staying far away from the synagogue and religious practice the rest of the year, it is a time of great stress and tension for the rabbi. How do you package the same message in different wrapping four or five times over, not only for this Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but for year after year after year?

I told my friend that the Shabbat sermons in the synagogue I attended in Haifa were composed and delivered on a small rotation basis among several of the congregants. There was no official “rabbi” of the shul. I had been asked and had delivered a drashah on Vayera this past October, the first time in my life I had ever spoken at length in Hebrew before a congregation of Hebrew speakers. Since my return to Haifa in August and weekly attendance at Shabbat services I had not been asked to prepare any sermons for any of the Sabbaths. Maybe last October's sermon didn't go over as well as it seemed at the time, I thought. At any rate, I had not been asked for any drashot for the holidays. My friend said that a week before Rosh Hashanah I would know by now.

Before Shabbat services were over the next morning, the gabbai in charge of assigning drashot came over to me and asked if I would do the drashah on Shabbat in two weeks, Shabbat Shuvah. Of course, I would. Thank you for asking! So I wasn't asked for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, but Shabbat Shuvah is in traditional communities the time when the rabbi would exhort the community to repentance. It was a big honor and subliminally it meant that I was being considered “a rabbi,” more or less.

To my surprise, there were no sermons at all on the two days of Rosh Hashanah in this shul. I guessed that there would be none as well on Yom Kippur. That meant that my Shabbat Shuvah sermon would be THE High Holidays' sermon!

By the way, during Rosh Hashanah services some of the guys sitting around me mentioned that they remembered when I had spoken from the bimah last year. One of them said to me that “my words were still sweet in his mouth, though he didn't remember what I had said. Oh yeah, something about Vikings.” In truth, when speaking about the Akedah as told in Parshat Vayera (the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, by the way) I had mentioned that the Binding of Isaac is such a popular literary theme that there is even an Old Scandinavian saga from the Middle Ages on the theme of the Akedah. I had asked the congregation in Hebrew to picture with me a blond, little Yitzchak about to be sacrificed by a Viking Avraham Avinu, with a big, red beard and a yarmulka with two huge ox horns protruding from either side! Don't ask. They laughed in all the right places. At least some of them remember the jokes almost a year later.

Last October, for my debut, I spoke without written notes, although I had rehearsed and refined my drashah in my mind the whole week before. For this outing, I decided to write the sermon for Shabbat Shuvah on paper in complete essay style, practicing it out loud over and over so as not to be bound to the papers and to affect a sense of spontaneity in my voice.

Here is what I wrote. I am translating into my own “ethnic” English style something originally composed in my own particular “ethnic” Hebrew style. It probably loses some of its charm in translation. I find that a Hebrew speaking audience “gets it” when it comes to my own kind of creativity more than my American Jewish congregants ever did in English.

Rabotai ugevirotai,

This Sabbath, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is called “Shabbat Shuvah.” The name is derived from a pasuk at the beginning of today's haftorah from the prophet Hoshea: “Shuvah Yisrael ad Hashem Elokecha ki chashalta ba'avonecha—Return O Israel to the Lord your God for you have stumbled in your iniquity.” And since this Sabbath falls during the period of the Aseret Y'may Teshuvah—the Ten Days of Repentance, it is appropriate for us this Sabbath to focus on the concept of “teshuvah.”

I have found that the concept of “teshuvah” is like the weather—we talk a lot about it, but nobody seems to do much about it. Who among us truly, during these holidays, looks inward and does a genuine cheshbon hanefesh, a soul searching self evaluation?

The word “teshuvah” expresses the idea “to return.” We learn from the Torah that “Yetzer ha-adam ra min'urav—A person's inclination is wicked from his youth.” That is to say, that we were born free of sin and that our “normal” condition as human beings is to be “good.” When we sin, it is as though we turn astray from the straight path, from our normal state of being. To do “teshuvah” is to “return” to the “good,” our true nature. Notwithstanding all of this, I have a question—If we are, all of us, considered intrinsically “good,” how come it is so difficult to do teshuvah?

Nu, I have never in my life met a Jew (including myself) who doesn't believe that he isn't standing in the center of the universe. He thinks that he is perfect, without defect. He constantly compares himself to his fellow Jews. He calls the Jew who observes fewer mitzvot than himself a “goy.” And the Jew who practices more than he does? Oy, a fanatic! It is very hard to do teshuvah if a person thinks that he is perfect, and without blemish. But, indeed, we all sin, secret sins.

I was surprised, as a new oleh to the “Holy Land,” to see in the newspapers, during the entire month of Elul, all the advertisements for trips abroad in “special deals” for the holidays! I read about a special package deal for three days in Cyprus over the Rosh Hashanah weekend at a certain price. It was at the time that I was mulling over joining the synagogue to get seats for the holidays at the level of membership in the “amuta.” Joining the synagogue as a full member was far more expensive than the trip to Cyprus!

The “mazik” in me placed the two possibilities on each side of the balance scale—three days in the sun, on the beach, on an island in the Mediterranean, as opposed to three days inside, many hours of page after page of the Machzor, trapped in shul. Sun vs shul. Beach vs shul. A Mediterranean island vs shul. This is a very tough choice!

The angel in me helped me in the end to choose “shul.” Every sensitive person knows that he needs a fixed time for soul searching in the midst of his community. Maybe this year I'll really do the teshuvah that I should.

I was delighted to receive in the mail a newsletter from my cellphone company. In it was an article entitled: “Very Israeli on Rosh Hashanah.” Among those items listed were:

1. apples in honey
2. to vacation in Turkey in a great deal that you alone found, and then to complain that everybody there was Israeli

I chose the synagogue for the holidays and was happy to be among Israelis.

But, to my way of thinking, even the most secular among us needs a set time for self scrutiny. I would guess that this kind of self scrutiny is more likely possible in the synagogue during the Days of Awe than at the beach, belly in the sand, in Cyprus.

Each one of us has his own personal list, that in his best moments, when he truly resolves to change his lifestyle, he lists goals in order to make spiritual improvements, that is to say, to do teshuvah. My list is not identical to anyone else's. I don't wish to trade sins with you, and you certainly do not want my sins. The majority of all of our sins, it seems to me, are in the category of “between man and his fellow,” or even “between a man and himself.”

From the Rambam, in Hilchot Teshuvah, we learn the procedure, the process by which we make teshuvah possible:

1. that the sinner stop sinning and remove the sin from his thoughts and resolve never to commit this sin again

2. that he forgive himself that he had sinned

3. that he gets someone who went through the process of teshuvah himself to be a witness and counselor to him so that the sinner doesn't slip and ever return to that sin

4. that he confesses out loud that which is sealed in his heart

The above section of Rambam sounds to me exactly like the self help groups for dieters like “Weight Watchers” or to stop drinking alcohol like “Alcoholics Anonymous,” or any such path to making life better by eliminating bad habits. We have many habits in our lives that are no good for us and it is worthwhile to eliminate them and never go back to them. We all have “baggage.”

There is no “patch” that you can stick on your shoulder that works without the will to change, or without acceptance of the fact that teshuvah takes hard work.

Shabbat Shuvah is a good time to start. As a comrade with you in this important and holy mission, I wish all of us and everyone dear to us, to take this lesson to heart, and that this year be quiet, a year of health, a year of prosperity and honor, a year in which we return to the Lord our God, and a year in which God fulfills all the wishes of our hearts for good and enables our quest for spiritual improvement.

May this be the will of God. Gemar chatimah tovah. Shabbat Shalom.

2003-09-19T07:42:00.000-04:00

NITZAVIM-VAYELECH

We are coming into the last Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah 5764. I am glad to be spending the holidays this year in Israel.

I am studying and growing intellectually here at a constant rate and it feels good. My Hebrew vocabulary is multiplying daily and evolving in its sophistication and subtlety. This phenomenon is due to watching television in Hebrew, perusing the Ikea catalogue in Hebrew, reading about gardening and “teva” in my Israeli books and periodicals, and even from the mishnaic Hebrew terms rediscovered in my Talmud study group that in the rotation just met at my home this past week.

I have really come to understand “Lo bashamayim hi—the Torah is not in Heaven,” out of our reach and impossible to attempt to attain. For me, speaking Hebrew is a way to achieve a certain level of Jewish “ruchaniut” together with a certain Jewish “hashkafah.” After all these years, I finally feel that I have the skills to really pursue Torah study and the desire to do so even were the Torah in Heaven and even more difficult to encounter.

I hope for peace and life to come to this land this new year. How a land so redemptive of the individual's spirit can be the inspiration for so much turmoil, internal and external, is an irony that is deeply perplexing.

As for me, I promise upon coming into another new year, to personally keep trying to do the “tov” and thereby to “choose life,” for me and for all who are dear to me.

2003-09-12T01:33:00.000-04:00

KI TAVO

Much of the Parshah of Ki Tavo is concerned with the blessings and the curses to be articulated in the ceremony on Har Gerizim and on Har Eval “when you come into the land” of Israel. So far, so good, tu, tu, tu, has been the transition to Israel for Diane and me. We are establishing a social life among people newly met here. The little details of the apartment are being completed one by one. We even have niceties in which we do not indulge ourselves in the Riverdale apartment. In Israel we have cable TV and a cable modem for the computer. In New York, we have “rabbit ears” and dial up, and not even on a dedicated line. My fourth meeting of the Talmud study group will take place at my apartment in the rotation already. And this week, I formally joined the shul in Ramot Almogi, on the membership level of the “amuta,” meaning that I am paying out, in addition to dues, a $2,000 (in shekalim) building fund in monthly installments that will take me up to July of 2005!

Of course, I do not have the pressure of having to find work to support myself and much of what I do is voluntary and not under any kinds of constraints. I do miss my kids and grandkids. I have to make do with weekly telephone calls and photographs. When the inevitable “piguim” take place, I call my parents to let them know that we are all right and that my brother and his family are all safe and accounted for.

I had to smile when I came to a particular passage in the “curses” section of Ki Tavo: “Yitain HaShem et m'tar artzecha avak v'afar; min hashamayim yayraid alecha....” From all of the construction schmutz and the pounding of the chalky sand scraped up around the building site, it seemed that I would never creep out of dusting the apartment, floors and furniture, at least twice a day, a never ending chore for a “house husband.” We brought to Israel in our container shipment a powerful 220 volt “shoaiv avak,” the Hebrew term for a vacuum cleaner, literally “a drawer (as in 'water drawer') of dust.” We have all the attachments for floors, carpets, and furniture. For a year and a half my constant joke has been: We brought to Israel a shoaiv avak, but what we found was “afar.” I cannot translate this literally without losing something. By way of description, however, the “dust” here when wiped with a damp cloth turns into a muddy smear. It consists of fine particles of earth that penetrate the screens of the open windows and come in on the shoes of visitors' feet. Is it a “curse,” or just a bane of existence?

I am happy to report that as of this writing the dusty curse has subsided considerably. Much of the heavy, dirty drilling and other construction work on our building has been completed. The vaad habayit has hired someone to “spongeh” the lobby, the stairwell, and all of the corridors every day. The scar in the forest at the north end of the construction site has been replanted with shrubs sitting in garden topsoil damped down by drip irrigation hoses. The last remaining garden apartments on minus 3 are being landscaped with patio blocks and sod and flowerbed plantings. This past week, palm trees, cycas, and petunias(!) were planted in an architectural raised bed by the swimming pool. We are not getting all of the kicked up and flying particles of “afar” to the degree that we were in the past. The dust has stopped “raining down from the heavens.” This must be the “blessing” phase.

In fact, I am sure that it is. I sit back contemplating both homes, here and in Riverdale. We will be going to the Riverdale home soon to celebrate, God willing, the arrival of yet another grandchild. We will stay about a month and then return to Israel and remain here through Pesach.

The appropriate blessing for our travels back and forth during the year to our two homes is also found in Ki Tavo. I had uttered this passage as a closing benediction to services for thirty years in the pulpit rabbinate. I now hope that this blessing applies to Diane and me:

“Baruch ata b'voecha uvaruch ata b'tzaytecha...Blessed are you in your arrival and blessed may you be in your departure.”

I am sure that, after all this time, the apartment in Riverdale needs dusting.

2003-09-09T01:58:00.000-04:00

KI TAYTZAY

This past week, I opened my email (newly accessible on the PC in the Haifa apartment). There was a message from the son of a former congregant from Bellmore that had been posted at 2:30 in the morning, New York time. I opened this email at about 10:30 AM, Israel time. The message was only an hour old.

I was implored in the message to get in touch asap. His father had passed away and the family was trying to reach me to ask that I participate in the funeral. My answering machine in Riverdale was not accepting messages apparently, and obviously I was not answering the phone. But it was 2:30 in the morning, so the email was sent as a backup that I might read when I got up and opened the computer.

I wrote back immediately that I was in Haifa and that I would wait a few hours to call the house directly and get to speak personally when it would be about breakfast time in New York. I waited until the afternoon my time and called and spoke to the wife of the deceased.

It must be now nigh on seventeen years that I know this family. They were part of the usual gang at the congregation's Couples' Club, one of the few group activities at the shul that Diane and I both actually enjoyed showing up to because we truly liked the people, who in their heyday really put together creative and fun activities. They were, in the main, our slightly older contemporaries. We enjoyed their company as a group, both intellectually and socially.

This family also sat near Diane in the pew seats on the High Holidays. I had seen them and interrelated with them at many family functions, their own and at those of others in their circle of friends in the congregation. The deceased had studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Gadi's alma mater, and his son, who had sent me the email, was an electrical engineer, like Gadi. I had many conversations with the deceased over mutual topics like Philadelphia, U of P, Gadi's getting in touch with his son, and many more too numerous to recount.

It was a given that I couldn't come in from Israel and be at the funeral. If I had still been in New York, I most certainly would have been there for the family. When it was clear that I could not be at the funeral, his wife said that they would ask her brother-in-law's rabbi. That my successor in the congregation did not even figure into the equation gave me cause to wonder. I really do not want to go there.

The deceased passed away during an operation to repair a hole in his heart two days after the couple's fortieth wedding anniversary and a day before his sixty-fifth birthday. He had been planning to retire at sixty-five.

I took this personally as another sign that I did the right thing by retiring at fifty-five two years ago. I constantly need reinforcement to bolster my conviction that I did the right thing, no matter what circumstances factored into the decision to do so.

The haftarah to Ki Taytzay is the fifth of the Haftarot of Consolation recited on the seven Sabbaths between Tisha b'Av and Rosh Hashanah. While the passages from the Book of Isaiah speak of Israel's return from exile and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, I guess I take them personally as I come into another Jewish new year as a private citizen, this time also a dues paying member of the shul in Almogi.

“B'rega katon azavtich oov'rachamim g'dolim akabtzaich—For a small moment I have forsaken thee; but with great compassion I will gather thee.”

The end of the story has not as yet been written.

2003-09-08T01:20:00.000-04:00

SHOFTIM

It is an irony of sorts that my current existence in Israel is taken up with calls and appointments for hooking up the gas, the telephone, and the cable TV. Diane and I are still buying household items and I have focused upon the style of the various Mediterranean pots and containers and the plants to put in them to make a container garden on the mirpesset. I say that there is an irony in these petty household endeavors because the news is full of “pigua,” like the latest tragedy involving frum families and children on a bus in Jerusalem, followed by “chisul,” the attempts to take out the leadership structure of Hamas, Israel's “deck of cards,” like the Americans' deck of the deposed Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. The violence seems distant, something to read about in the newspapers or to see clips about on the television news. Yet, at the same time that the bus was blown up in Jerusalem, a similar homicide bomber was intercepted before his attempt to carry out a parallel atrocity in Haifa.

Parshat Shoftim opens with a famous passage: “Zedek, zedek tirdof—Justice, justice thou shalt pursue.” I watch Israelis on television cry out for justice, that “chisul” is not revenge but justice meted out to the organizers of murder as polical strategy. I watch Arabs take to the streets in Gaza, shouting for justice. Their justice is death to the Jews—all of them, death to Israel, death to America, death, death, death! And this “justice is death” chorus is egged on and further inflamed by their religious leaders.

The traditional intepretation of “Justice, justice thou shalt pursue” is to find a court of law to settle disputes. A civilized society has judges and officers of the courts to make sure that justice is administered equitably and is enforceable once the decisions and the solutions to controversies are handed down. In this sense, for the Israelis as well as for the Arabs the pursuit of justice is not even close to feasible at this time.

“Oslo” was a failure because while the Israelis were offering concessions towards a two state solution with the goal of the absolute recognition of the legitimacy of the State of Israel by all of the Muslim world, the Arabs were continuing a two-pronged policy of terror tactics and negotiations with the ultimate goal of undermining Israel and destroying the Jewish State.

The “Road Map” is a similar non-starter for the same reason. “Justice for the Palestinians” means diametrically opposed different things to the Jews and to the Arabs. There is no court on this earth capable of handing down an enforceable solution.

And, as everyone of my generation who grew up in America knows, “No justice, no peace!”

2003-09-05T11:30:00.000-04:00

RE'EH

While sitting in shul in Ramot Almogi among the English speakers' contingent (Jewish Brits, South Africans, and Americans) on Shabbat Re'eh, I overheard a conversation in English emanating from the row of pews behind me during the reading of the Torah: “Re'eh. I think part of this is a holiday reading.” I wanted to turn around and say, “Only if you have a 'second day' of Yom Tov.” But I didn't. I am still not in my head attuned to minhag Eretz Yisrael vs the Diaspora, and I try to keep my mouth shut about most things I carry around in my brain as someone who spent thirty years of his adult life as an American pulpit rabbi, a non-Orthodox rabbi at that. I feel uncomfortable here presenting myself as a rabbi, although my neighbors in the apartment building and the circle I have become close to in the shul know by now that I have retired from the American rabbinate and made aliyah, at least for half a year at a time.

Against my will, when I was given an aliyah to the Torah on my first Shabbat back in Haifa, I was called up as HaRav Yehuda Leib ben Avraham Dov. The gabbai, when he asked me my Jewish name for the aliyah and I answered Yehuda Leib ben Avraham Dov, said to me in Hebrew, “It's HaRav, isn't it?” I muttered back in Hebrew, “More or less.” When I was called as “HaRav” some heads turned among those with whom I have not as yet made personal contact, especially among the businessmen from the Edot HaMizrach. Nu, do I need more pressure to behave in a public role, and not have the solace of a private individual?

Parshat Re'eh begins with “Re'eh anochi notain lifneichem hayom berachah ooklalah—Behold, I set before thee this day a blessing and a curse.” It is the beginning of a passage describing a ceremony to take place upon entry into the Land of Israel on Har Gerizim and Har Eval and the valley in between. To me, however, the notion of a blessing and a curse set before one is very different from the intent and the content of this Torah passage. I think, in life, every seeming curse may actually contain a blessing.

If my father-in-law had not fallen on his way to my parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary party, he would not be in the process of moving now into the Atrium, an independent living facility, more like an upscale apartment hotel, and much more posh than the low rent apartment he was living in “on his own” at the time of his fall. There was a blessing inherent in the “curse” of his fall backwards off the escalator in a railway station.

If I had not left Bellmore when I did, I would not now have the apartment in Riverdale and the apartment in Haifa, and all the new people and experiences in my life that I have now. Yaish lifamim berachah shehb'toch klalah.

It is my Jewish background and the studies that led me to the rabbinate and my ongoing lifelong learning, that have made my assimilation into this Hebraic environment so smooth and easy for me. Ironic, isn't it?

Yes, Parshat Re'eh, whether as Aser Taaser or as Kawl HaBechor, plays a large role as a text for the Torah readings for the holidays as they are observed in the Diaspora. In this phase of my life I am trying to spread out and dilute my blessings and my curses between the stony crags of Riverdale and the lofty peak of Mount Carmel.

2003-09-01T11:45:00.000-04:00

EKEV

By Shabbat Ekev we were in Israel already for a few days.

When we arrived at the apartment, I told Diane to wait outside for a few moments with the suitcases. I wanted to go in first, check that everything was exactly as I had left it in May, and raise all of the lowered trisim so that the magnificent view of the sweep of Haifa Bay would be revealed across the livingroom window and the sliding glass patio door. Diane had up until this moment seen the furnished and decorated apartment only through the photographs I took and brought with me back to Riverdale. This was my big moment to unveil my creation.

And Diane was bowled over with amazement and delight! Pictures, actually "still lifes" of various corners and arrangements, did not do justice to the scope of it all in real life. Diane said that she couldn't believe that this apartment was ours and that we actually lived here. I was proud. I did it my way.

I introduced Diane around to all of our neighbors to whom I teased, "See, I wasn't lying. I really am married." In shul on Shabbat Ekev, she was a focus of the attention of the congregants with whom I had interacted throughout September, October, and the two trips in May.

Actually, the opening "blessing" part of Parshat Ekev was a good welcome to this longer stay by both of us together in our Haifa apartment. "Ki Hashem Elokecha meviacha el eretz tovah, eretz nachaley mayim ayanot tehomot yotz'im b'vik'a oovahar--For the Eternal thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains, and murmuring depths, that come out in deep valleys and mountains." Did I mention that this description sounds like our view from our livingroom and our mirpesset, if you include forested slopes as well? From our perch atop Har HaCarmel, we look over the sea, the city, the greenery, and the Galilee.

We still had some details to finish. We had yet to hook up the gas line for the stove, the telephone line from Bezek so we could have a land phone and an internet connection, some minor glitches fixed in some of the electrical switches, pick up the car, have a sofabed delivered for my arabesque security room, etc. But little by little, each detail will be addressed and checked off the "to do" list.

And this little by little approach is endorsed by Parshat Ekev. "V'nashal Hashem Elokecha et hagoyim hael mipanecha m'at m'at, lo toochal kalotam maher pen tarbeh alecha chayat hasadeh -- And the Eternal thy God will put out those nations before thee little by little; thou mayest not be able to consume them speedily, lest the animals of the field increase upon thee."

The forest down the slope before us has many families of jackals that live among the trees as far as the eye can see. They sometimes howl in jackal chorus and long distance communication throughout the night. Some people might find this disturbing. Jackals in a forest in a city! I, however, am in Gan Eden. I have the culture and convenience of living in a major city, have a forest and sea as my front yard to satisfy my love of nature, and I have Eretz Yisrael at my mirpesset doorstep, Har HaCarmel, the ancient footsteps of Eliyahu HaNavi.

So I am enjoying my life here and taking things slowly, little by little. That way, I will keep the jackals at bay.

2003-08-31T02:25:00.001-04:00

VA-ETCHANAN

Shabbat Va-etchanan found Diane and me sitting in our rented dormitory suite at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Permit me to reminisce after the fact about my thoughts that Shabbat afternoon. We were not close to any shul here of which we were aware and so spent Shabbat mostly not violating Shabbat prohibitions rather than being among a celebrating Jewish community. The dormitories, rented out to guests during summer vacation, surrounded a landscaped quadrangle. Visiting pipers, probably staying here as lodging for the short trip to Edinburgh (which we took twice) for their participation in the "tatoo" at Edinburgh Castle, were out in the quadrangle practicing on their bagpipes. It's not every Shabbat that one sits reading in one's room while pipers in shorts and tee shirts pipe bagpipes outside the window.

We almost did not make this weeklong stayover vacation in Scotland between the two legs of our trip to Israel. We almost did not get to see the bonny banks and the bonny braes of Loch Lomond or the Edinburgh festivals or ride the steam paddle boat up the River Clyde to drink Arran ale in a pub in Arran. We almost had to alter our plans because of me, well, at least in part.

We meticulously packed in Riverdale for the return to the apartment in Haifa. We made sure that we had all of our documents and passports, American and Israeli, in our belted zipper pockets. I had asked Diane if I had packed everything I needed to show anyone or that we needed as personal documentation while living in Israel and she, after a cursory look at my two passports, teudat oleh, and teudat zehut, said "ok." She was busy packing clothes and sundry other small items into our suitcases.

The plan was that Gadi would take us in his car to JFK airport. We left early enough to account for heavy airport traffic. Jana and Beni were along for the ride. We did hit traffic, but it gave us more time in the back seat to play with Beni. Our reservations were confirmed with Virgin Atlantic, and were correct as to the present date and flight, a change made last January. The procedure was to go to the ticketing desk first before checking baggage to have them put the correct date and flight on a sticker on our printed tickets. Diane asked me to give her my tickets. I said I thought she had them. She always held the tickets for both of us. She looked at me. Didn't you leave them in your zipper pocket that you wear on flights from when you came back to New York in October? No, I didn't leave them in the zipper pocket. I flew back and forth to Israel two times in May to buy the car, remember? I had the pertinent tickets in my zipper pocket. I took the others out. I thought that she had put our tickets for this flight together and I left the house today assuming that she had everything we needed.

The ticketing desk had my reservations in the computer but I needed to produce the printed tickets. I could buy new tickets for some outrageous price that was twice as much as our original round-trip package. Diane was already talking by this time about going back home after extending our reservations to Heathrow to coincide with our connecting flight on El Al to Israel a week later and to forget about Scotland.

Gadi and Jana had already left after dropping us off and were somewhere on a highway on their way home. They had a cell phone in their car. After changing bills for as many quarters as we could, we tried to reach them from a pay phone in the airport. We had hoped that they could get back to the apartment in Riverdale, get my tickets from my wardrobe closet shelf (the only place I thought they could possibly be) and bring them back to the airport. There was a copy of our key left with the concierge at the front desk in the lobby. Their car cell phone was only taking messages! Zvi, Shira, and Chavi and Aharon we supposed to have come to the airport to see us off. They weren't there yet. We tried their cell phone. They were still in Woodmere at the home of our mechutanim and we asked that they leave immediately to get my tickets in Riverdale and rush them back to me at the airport. We would check in to their cell phone periodically to see where they were on the road and if indeed my tickets were in the envelope on the shelf in my wardrobe. Time was of the essence, though we could transfer to the next later flight to Heathrow that evening. To do so, I still needed my printed tickets. Zvi took on the task. Gadi called back and was a backup in case there was a problem getting the key from the lobby front desk. He would get his copy of our key from his apartment and come over to help Zvi get in, if needed.

After a great deal of agita on our parts and periodic contact with Shira holding their cell phone and giving us progress reports, Zvi and family pulled in at the last minute to the curb at Virgin Atlantic departures. Shira handed me the envelope with my tickets through the window of the car. They sped off to a symphony of blown kisses all around.

We had already changed our flight to the next one and I had to get it marked on my tickets. So done, we checked our baggage and had a long wait at the gate for our later flight. But I had my tickets. I would need them for El Al a week later as well. Why couldn't they just do electronic tickets in this day and age? Our Scotland flights from Heathrow and back were e-tickets. With the printed tickets we were in the computer anyway. Why couldn't they just honor it? Why require printed tickets at all?

I sat thinking about what wonderful children we had.

On Shabbat Va-etchanan, listening to the bagpipes wailing in the quadrangle, I had a hint of why our children were so wonderful. The Torah portion reiterates Aseret Ha-dibrot, the Ten Commandments, and presents the Shema and V'ahavta. Because we as parents tried to fulfill as best we could "v'shinantam l'vanecha," we got back from the kids "kabed et avicha v'et imecha," even when their father did something stupid and caused them a great deal of pressured inconvenience.

Children really are a blessing. I'm glad we did have them before having grandchildren.

2003-08-31T02:25:00.000-04:00

DEVARIM

Parshat Devarim is always read on the Sabbath morning that precedes the fast of Tisha b'Av. For me, Parshat Devarim was the last Sabbath for awhile in Riverdale before returning, this time together with Diane, for a stay of several months in the apartment in Haifa. We planned to spend a week in Scotland as a stopover upon this particular return to Zion.

At the end of Shabbat morning services in our shul in Riverdale, the new president mentioned among his list of announcements that Diane and I were going back to Israel and wished us a safe trip. The gabaim were a bit mortified at this announcement. They came running over to me at the kiddush. "Why didn't you tell us you were leaving for Israel after this Shabbat? We would have given you an aliyah!" I said, "I don't mind. I don't need an aliyah." They said, "But we care. Are you coming back for minchah? We'll make it up to you then."

In truth, I didn't mind. In what was supposed to be the re-creation of my life and identity after retirement from the rabbinate, I wanted to be able to go to shul as a private citizen, sit in the back row, and be anonymous. It didn't work out that way, either in Riverdale or in Haifa. The world is small and there are just too many people who know who you are wherever you go. Even as a member of the shul, any member, I was, by virtue of going away to Israel for a few months entitled to an aliyah in the eyes of the gabaim as an obligation on their part. At minchah, the three Torah aliyahs were reserved already by the sponsor of the shaleshudes. So, I was assigned to daven minchah from the amud, which I did.

I had wanted to change my life. I wanted to prove that there is life after the Conservative rabbinate. I thought that a rabbi who looks and thinks like me would be insignificant in Israel and that would be fine with me. I would develop in Israel some of my other interests and talents and be a new person with a fresh start in another country. But the shul in Haifa has actually been wooing me to join, is seemingly excited about the fact that I was an American pulpit rabbi, and even had me deliver the drasha in Hebrew (a lifetime first for me) on a Shabbat morning last October.

There is a passage in Parshat Devarim that gives significant reason for the Torah cycle to ensure that Devarim be read on the Sabbath before Tisha b'Av. The passage begins with the word "aichah" just as does the Book of Lamentations read on Tisha b'Av. In fact, this Torah passage is chanted in "Aichah trope." "Aichah esa l'vadi tarchachem umasachem v'ribchem--How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your burden, and your strife?" So says Moses.

In a slight corruption of the meaning of this passage, and certainly not to compare myself to Moses (l'havdil!), I did reach a point in the rabbinate wherein I was just tired of the congregation's "politics," which was more important to them than the practice of Judaism (which they didn't practice in any kind of observant, active way). I felt I wanted "out" of the prison of caring about them and their families 24/7, far more than I felt that any one of them cared about me. I was tired of people who could barely read an aleph from a bet telling me what the religion should be, a religion that they hardly practiced and certainly were not learned about, as though "rabbi" meant a paid performer, there to play a stage role at bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, under contract by the families the same as the caterer for the party. And I just wanted my freedom, from the ever present pressure of professional survival, from having to constantly suffer fools gladly, and worse, to pretend to take their stupidity seriously and even follow their directives as though they were my bosses. I was tired of being target practice for the projected failures of the losers in their own lives who, sitting on seats that go begging on synagogue boards, felt a little power over someone, power certainly lacking elsewhere in their own lives lived small and mean.

And yet, in my post rabbinate years, not drawing a salary or being employed by a shul (or at all!), I am still being related to as a rabbi and asked by people to help them if I can with personal issues that one would go to a rabbi to help resolve, even in Israel! Both the shul in Riverdale and the shul in Haifa have and are looking forward to using me as a volunteer in areas related to my Jewish education, and experience gained through thirty years in the pulpit. Go know!

Yet, truly and sincerely, I am not looking for aliyahs. I sincerely intended to be anonymous as a remedy for living in a fishbowl for so many years. I guess, that if you don't chase after kavod, kavod has a way of finding you anyway.

2003-08-31T02:24:00.000-04:00

MATTOT-MAS'EI

Diane and I were with my father-in-law in his hospital room waiting to check him out to go home when the phone in the room rang. It was Zvi. It seemed normal enough. My sons were calling their grandfather from New York all during his hospital stay. But this time, Zvi asked to talk to Abba first.

A former congregant from Bellmore was trying to track me down and found Zvi who had the phone numbers of the suburban Baltimore apartment as well as the hospital room. The message was to call back to the home of another former congregant. His wife had died and, being ill with a heart condition for years, she had often expressed the wish that I be the rabbi at her funeral. I received the message on a Friday, early afternoon. The funeral was to be on Sunday, but the family was waiting to hear from me in order to set a time.

I called back to say that I would be there on Sunday. I would have to drive back to New York motzai Shabbat, about 9:30 PM, arrive back in Riverdale around 2 AM, so they should make the funeral for 1 PM, Sunday, to give me time to get ready and be at their house in Bellmore by 10 AM Sunday so that I could sit and talk with them a bit before the funeral. As much as I try to move on with my life, the past keeps sucking me back in. Even though I have mixed feelings, mostly negative, about returning to do things for the Bellmore Jewish Center crowd in a very public, very "crowded" context, I felt that I had to make the long drive, stay awake overnight in New York, and be with this particular family early the next morning, a good hour's drive away from my Riverdale apartment.

The deceased was my age, 57. She had specifically asked for me and I understood. We had had maybe hundreds of thousands of conversations during my time in Bellmore, and life cycle rituals, happy and sad, some really very sad, that I was "there" for her throughout. She had been active in the life of the synagogue in her own right, paralleling the synagogue involvement of her husband. I had been a major rabbinic presence in the lives of her children and son-in-law as well. I could not possibly say "no."

At the funeral, the Bellmore crowd consisted in the main of the "older people," those in their fifties and sixties with whom I started my career in Bellmore and with whom I had "grown up" over the years, fighting all the early battles until I became established as "their" rabbi. Basically, none of the "younger people," those who chose "not to know Joseph," was there. The people wished me well, asked after Diane, my kids, and grandkids, and hinted that they missed me and were not exactly ecstatic over the current turn of events at the shul. The devil in me felt a little bit good about this, but my lifestyle now consists of two homes, on two continents, and a life of pursuing whatever I wish to pursue without tension, aggravation, and a job of virtual "indentured servitude."

At the funeral, the day after Shabbat Mattot-Mas'ei, I mentioned that the deceased, through her active involvement in the life of her family, her community, her shul had planted her flag in the ground of her life. She made her mark. Now, she was moving on to a "better place."

I felt the same way about myself. It was clear that my banner was still firmly standing on the turf of the Bellmore Jewish Center, but, for the sake of my sanity, it was also clear that my destiny was to keep moving on. One cannot drive forward looking only through the rearview mirror.

But it doesn't hurt to give a few short glances from time to time.

2003-07-21T10:56:00.000-04:00

PINCHAS

Pinchas may have received as a “reward” for his act of zealous religious assassination God's “covenant of peace,” but there is a textual hint that his act was not one hundred percent acceptable to God or to the traditional Jewish sensitivities opposed to violent fanaticism no matter how “sincerely” motivated. In the Hebrew phrase “briti shalom,” as traditionally written in the Torah scrolls, the letter “vav” of shalom is broken. There is a skip in the ink in the middle of the letter that looks normally like a single stroke with a cap. Pinchas' “shalom” or “peace” was not complete!

I was thinking about this kind of incomplete shalom over the past week. I had anticipated my parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary party for several years, especially after my father went into the hospital for a hernia operation and overnight stay that gave him a hospital generated staph infection that nearly killed him.

When the week of the party finally arrived and both parents were alive and well, what happened? My hundred year old uncle died and my father was an “avel” by the time of the party. We did not cancel the party, but had no music, and certainly Uncle Jack's death cast a pall over the proceedings.

Diane's father, who was taking the train from Baltimore to Philadelphia in order to be at the party, never made our rendezvous at Philly's 30th Street Station. He never made it past the light rail connection to the Amtrack line. He fell over backwards on the suburban station's escalator and was rushed to the hospital. We left Philadelphia that Sunday evening after the party to be with him in the Baltimore suburbs and have been here since.

He had gotten some bruises, no broken bones, and at this writing is in a “rehabilitation” wing to work on his failing sense of balance thrown off by his stooped posture and diabetes induced lack of full feeling in his feet.

But more than that. Our sense of “shalom” vis a vis his independence and capabilities for living alone and on his own now has a “broken vav.”

We are due with tickets and reservations to leave for Israel on August 3. We have things that must be taken care of that have been postponed for months in terms of taxes, water, electricity, gas, and deliveries for the Haifa apartment. I have to take possession of my new car in storage at the dealer's.

The original pictogram of the letter “vav” was a “hook.” We have finally reached the dreaded day, I am afraid, that the hook that held together a kind of mutually self-sufficient status quo between our aging generation and our elderly parents has torn loose with his backwards fall and that we will be responsible for a different kind of living arrangement.

I am starting to feel in my kishkes Pinchas' sense of “broken peace.”

2003-07-18T19:13:00.000-04:00

CHUKKAT-BALAK

My Uncle Jack passed away this week on July 7, five days after his one hundredth birthday. He had the chance to celebrate “one hundred” several times over the past two weeks with family and friends.

At one hundred, he had his dignity and his mental capacities intact. He never took a pill. For many years he made sure to eat a piece of lox every day, something he had observed years ago in my mother's mother--”Mommom”--who also lived to nearly one hundred.

Uncle Jack was nearly thirteen years older than my father. Jacob Hoffman, as well as my Aunt Bessie, who passed away two years ago at almost age 95, shared the same mother, Mollie or Bubba, with my father, but they had different fathers. A widower, Cantor Harry (Zvi Hirsch) Romm or Zeida, who had left behind a son Motek in Russia, married the widow with two children—Mollie—in Philadelphia. My father—Albert Romm—was the result of this union. This short history explains why my father's older brother and sister in the family home on Ritner Street were “Hoffmans” and my father and, by extension, we are “Romms.” But they never felt like “halves” but “full” brothers and sister. Zeida was for all intents and purposes Uncle Jack's father, de facto, and treated well by Jack and Bessie.

Uncle Jack, also known as “Jake” Hoffman to his business associates was the Jacob Hoffman, Realtor of the signs on buildings for sale or rent in Philadelphia that proliferated throughout the city during the decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s of my youth. He was one of the founders of the South Philadelphia Realty Board in 1929. He had visions for the city. The Spruce, Pine, and especially Lombard Streets in center city in my childhood were sorry slums. Today, these streets boast gentrified town houses. Jacob Hoffman, Realtor had a hand in this transformation. To his last days he was a mentor to many in the Philadelphia real estate establishment who came to him because they trusted his wise appraisals of true value honed through more than seventy years of experience.

It was Jacob Hoffman, Realtor who first consistently called me “Leonard” and not “Lenny,” because he had had a friend named “Leonard,” now a long gone shadow memory. I got my first summer teenager's job in a real estate office through Uncle Jack.

In the summer of 1960 he took his nephews, me and my brother Eddie, on a car trip to Washington D.C. in his Anglia, his English Ford. We got a private meeting with our congressman who seemed to know Uncle Jack personally. We never forgot it. Apparently, he never did either and would still talk about it forty-three years later.

He was generous to his extended family and charitable to the community at large. He was devoted to his mother, and to his own household—his wife Ruth z”l, and twin daughters Naomi (who married Hal) and Debbie. He was “Zeidi” to his grandchildren, lived to see all three grandchildren married, and got to hold his two infant great-grandchildren.

He was on all the usual boards of charitable institutions, Jewish and general cultural, that you would expect of a man of his means. He was up until his death, the oldest living member of the board of Har Zion Temple.

He travelled. He took adult courses. He participated in elder hostel programs. He was feted and awarded by Bnai Brith. He was active in the Germantown Lions' Club up until his death.

In the double parshah of Chukkat-Balak there is a well known passage: “Mah tovu oholecha Yaakov.” Jacob Hoffman, Realtor, whether from Ritner Street, Larchwood Avenue, Overbrook Parkway, the Presidential Apartments, or Brith Shalom House...

“Mah tovu oholecha Yaakov...How goodly are your tents O Jacob.”

You spent a long life making your houses and houses for the community into homes. May your soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life.

May you be now embarking upon an eternity of helping God redevelop Gan Eden.

2003-07-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

KORACH

O.K., so Korach was a rebel, and got what he deserved. That is not to say that he was wrong about everything he used in his arguments against Moses and Aaron. For instance, although inappropriately expressed, Korach states a truth when he exclaims: “Ki kawl haedah koolam kedoshim oov'tocham hashem... The entire congregation, all of them, are holy and God is in their midst...” The fact that Korach made this argument to challenge Moses' leadership and Aaron's priesthood does not take away from the fact that each and every one of us Jews is “kadosh,” or at least has this touch of personal sanctity as a goal to live up to throughout the conduct of our lives.

This Shabbat of Korach I am at Brandeis University leading a Shabbat morning service so that a particular chatan can celebrate his auf ruf. The wedding at which I am the officiating rabbi is the next day, Sunday, in the Jewish chapel at Brandeis. The groom is one of “my kids” from the congregation in Bellmore whom I watched grow and mature over the years from about age ten to twenty-four. I have known about this wedding for an entire year and have scheduled Diane's and my return to the apartment in Haifa in August based upon being in the United States for this wedding in July.

This last statement is only half true. My parents are celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary the following weekend. We have planned a gala event for family and friends of theirs that I have been anticipating and for which I was hoping that things would be all right for several years now. It was for both of these weekends that our plans vis a vis our return to Israel were made.

In a sense, there is a certain elegance of juxtaposition in these two July events in which I am intimately involved. I am helping to “launch” a marriage this weekend. By next weekend I will be celebrating in my role as one of the “results” of a marriage of sixty years' duration. If I have any wisdom on the state of matrimony on this weekend of the launch as gleaned from first-hand observation of the sixty year conjugal partnership of my parents, it would be based upon the unwitting truth of Korach's declaration.

“For all of the congregation is holy...” It should not go unnoticed that the term for a valid marriage in Judaism is “kiddushin,” sanctity. To be married is to regard the wife as sacred to her husband, and for the husband to be a person who perceives the relationship as one of holiness. Both husband and wife are part of the congregation of holiness. Both husband and wife work to preserve and nurture the marriage because they are committed to the marriage itself as much as to each other. I have a family tree in the works based upon my sketch and finished as an art piece by Shira that starts with my parents recorded by their Hebrew names at the “roots” with the trunk signifying sixty years' growth with branches for my lineage and my brother's lineage, wives, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—a snapshot in time of the tangible “achievements” of this particular kiddushin. As with my own marriage, what cannot be foreseen before actually becoming part of the tree as time unfolds tends to seem so right and predestined in hindsight. I guess that this is as good a definition as any of success in marriage. Kiddushin is about the human souls brought about by this marriage as branches and twigs on the tree, “koolam kedoshim.” This tree will be presented to my parents next weekend at their party.

The Hebrew inscription at the top of my parents' tree, nestled in its luxuriant leaves, is a blessing based upon a midrash in the Talmud Tractate of Taanit: “Ilan, Ilan, bameh avarechekah? Shekawl hanetiot shenot'im mimcha yehiyu kamotcha...Tree O tree, with what can I bless thee? (Since you already have everything!) That all of the seedlings that derive from you, be just like you.

After sixty years of kiddushin this is how we best can bless our parents. It is also not a bad wish for a new marriage just starting out.

2003-06-27T16:30:00.000-04:00

SHELACH

So we conclude the parshah of Shelach Lecha with the mitzvah of tzitzit. Need I reiterate that in the Tractate Sotah that I am currently studying in kollel we learned an interesting midrash on why in the original mitzvah there was a command to fashion in the tzitzit a p’til techailet, a string dyed “sky blue?” Of course I don’t. By now you know that my reading of the Torah is infused with the Talmud I have begun studying again. Talmud has invaded my consciousness.

D’tanya, it was taught in a baraita: Rabbi Meir would say, why is techailet unique in that it was selected from all the other dyes for coloring the tzitzit? Because the color of techailet is similar to the color of the sea. And that of the sea is similar to the color of the sky. And that of the sky is similar to that of the Throne of Glory.

Whoever fulfills the mitzvah of tzitzit is considered to have received the Divine Presence. (Rashi) Moreover, as God sits on His sapphire colored Throne of Glory, He is apt to recall the techailet in the tzitzit that Israel wear and is moved to have mercy upon them. (also Rashi) In fact, in Sifrei our same Rabbi Meir is recorded as teaching that the Torah does not state of the tzitzit “or’item otam,” you shall see them, but “or’item oto,” you shall see Him, because the color techailet reminds us of God Himself, as Rabbi Meir expressed it in the midrash quoted above from Sotah.

Of course, most of us today do not have a p’til techailet in our tzitzit. We hold by the custom that we do not know exactly which chilayon produces the techailet commanded by the Torah. When in doubt, do without.

Diane and I are going together to our home in Israel for many consecutive months starting this August. We are keeping the apartment that we own in Riverdale, and will be returning to it for next Spring and Summer. But it is also very exciting to be finally living together in our apartment in Haifa. It is exciting, but also a little scary.

To live in Israel and to own property in the Holy Land is the fulfillment for us of long imagined dreams we both had throughout our marriage. Israel is wonderful and magical, a miracle beyond Herzl’s wildest dreams. But Israel is also a tough place to live. It can be as the meraglim reported at the beginning of Shelach Lecha: “eretz ochelet yoshveha hi,” a land that eats up its inhabitants. We are not unaware of the physical dangers imposed from those who wish to do us harm, and the economic pitfalls imposed upon its hapless citizens by the bizarre nature of the Israeli government, its defense needs, as well as the strange capitalistic-socialistic-welfare-inefficient (?) system of economics the country is heir to. Yet, we still wish to live there, at least part of the year, for the rest of our lives. We live in a special historical time. Jews should try to come home.

I will be bringing my tzitzit with me. Even without techailet, I pass the tzitzit before my eyes when I daven Kri’at Shema after shiur with the young men the ages of my sons at the kollel minyan. “Oritem oto,” and you shall see Him. I am following my tzitzit to the techailet of the Mediterranean outside my Haifa window.

And I am keeping my eyes on the Goal.

2003-06-20T15:27:00.000-04:00

BEHAALOTCHA

I have the key and the alarm codes for the Young Israel. It is part of my evolution as opener and closer of the shul at the beginning and the end of kollel each morning. I also set up before and clean up after the kollel breakfast. In terms of the kollel, I am both a “learner” and a sort of shamash. To me, they are both sacred work.

In a way, it enables me to be “both sides” of the menorah of the mishkan as remembered at the beginning of Parshat Behaalotcha.

How so? The seven branched, beaten gold menorah was designed to look something like the moriah plant, a central stem topped by a lamp with three branches like stacked semi-circles tipped with lamps in a horizontal row, three lamps on the left and three lamps on the right. Our parshah opens with a commandment to Aaron: “When you kindle the lamps, toward the face of the menorah shall the seven lamps cast light.” This means that the wicks on the left and the wicks on the right were turned towards the central shaft and its lamp. All seven lamps illuminated and shed the Divine light upon Israel. The three lamps that turned to the right symbolized those who occupy themselves with activities of eternal life. The three that turned to the left represented those who occupy themselves with activities of temporal life, yet assist the ones who turn right. All fulfill the will of God when combined together. “If not for the leaves, the grapes could not exist” (Chullin 92a).

When I was a pulpit rabbi, I would sometimes on a weekday notice that the Eternal Light in the sanctuary had burned out. After all, this contemporary reminder of the Mishkan menorah is powered by electricity fed to several red, incandescent light bulbs. When it comes to light bulbs, nothing is eternal. I would take the tall ladder to the bimah and personally climb up the rungs to change the bulbs. It was my personal “behaalotcha et hanerot.” Whether my “behaalotcha” meant “going up to the lights” or making “the lights go up,” I, too, symbolically was enabling “Divine light” to shine upon Am Yisrael. It was not “low” work. Each rung climbed on the ladder was going “up” yet another spiritual madregah.

My participation in kollel as a “learner,” combined with serving the kollel as key keeper and breakfast server is not “low” work either. I am able to combine in myself all seven lights of the menorah. May I be permitted to raise the flames higher and higher.

2003-06-13T12:00:00.000-04:00

NASO

This entry is actually two weeks’ entries in one. Why? The answer lies in the Theory of Relativity of time. With one day of Shavuot observed in Eretz Yisrael Friday a week ago and with two days of Shavuot observed in the Diaspora, the Torah portion of Naso was read last Shabbat in Israel and will be read this Shabbat here back in Riverdale. This Israel-Diaspora disparity will continue over the next few Sabbaths until we Jews outside of Israel double up the parshahs of Hukkat-Balak. Thereafter the Sabbaths will share the same Torah portions in Israel and abroad.

Moreover, my flight back from Israel to New York started from Israel early in the morning a week ago Thursday –erev Shavuot—and even with the stopover in Milan, even though I was actually in transit for about fourteen hours, I arrived in New York at 1:30 in the afternoon, still Thursday, still erev Shavuot! By the time I got to the Riverdale apartment, it was well into Yom Tov at my point of departure, Eretz Yisrael, but with many hours yet to go until candle lighting time at my place of arrival. This phenomenon is Jewish relativity of time.

Naso is my “bar mitzvah” portion. That the portion is being read this year on two separate Sabbaths, Israel and abroad, is symbolic to me of the dual identity that my life is taking on during this last third of my life. There is the Hebrew speaking Yehuda Romm, who just beat the system and purchased his car in Israel in time for his “zechuyot,” and there is the English speaking Leonard Romm, who came back to America in time to celebrate two days of Shavuot. Leonard Romm, a.k.a. Bu, got to see and play with his three grandchildren this past week between the two Sabbaths of Naso.

Time is fleeting, but as we see, time is also relative. Yehuda Romm is seven hours more advanced than Leonard Romm.

But at this very moment, Yehuda Leonard Romm is still suffering incredibly from jet lag.

2003-06-12T12:11:00.000-04:00

BEMIDBAR

It is erev Shabbat. I’m back in the Haifa apartment writing this entry longhand on a notepad. I flew back to Israel the day after Beni’s Pidyon Haben in order to finish the paperwork business with the car that couldn’t be completed two weeks ago with the government workers on strike at meches and misrad harishui. I think, as much as one can guess third hand from afar, that everything by now is cleared through meches, but since my return flight is early this Thursday morning, I still won’t have enough time here to take possession of the car. At least I’ll get my U.S. passport, teudat oleh, and both driving licenses back in time for my flight. I will have to make further arrangements, maybe from America, for delivery or probably storage until Diane and I come back together in August.

I arrived in Israel this past Tuesday. I got a mazal tov for my birthday from the woman at passport control. It is hard being alone, galmud. The few days I have been here seem like a year. I sit in my Haifa apartment talking to Diane on the phone—6:15 AM her time, 1:15 PM my time—talking already about wanting to come “home.” I guess, “home” is where the Hoon is!

So what do I read about in Parshat Bemidbar? Pidyon Haben! What is the Torah? An oracle following my life?

I brought with me a picture album containing photos of the birth and the bris ceremony. It has photos of everyone in my entire family in its two branches and features the three grandchildren. I turn the pages over and over again. It is still not the same as being together.

“Bemidbar” is how I feel, alone in the wilderness. It is a strange Hebrew root, “dalet, bet, raish.” It connotes “speaking,” but also “dominating,” and even “suppressing.” The “dalet, bet, raish” indicates also a place for pasture of the flocks. You mean, the shepherd, the “leader” of his flocks, had only the sheep to “talk” to out in the “pasture?”

So I talked to the neighbors and to those I had to in the course of getting some work accomplished. But without my wife and family here I feel “suppressed,” deprived of intimate talk—even though I am sitting here on the mirpesset, overlooking the forest, and the broad expanse of the sea, supposedly out of the wilderness, and already settled into the Promised Land.

2003-05-23T15:43:00.000-04:00

BECHUKOTAI

This erev Shabbat of Parshat Bechukotai I am back in Riverdale. I am back in time for the pidyon haben this Sunday. Of course, Amir Peretz called off the strike last Sunday, the day before I had return tickets to the U.S for an 8:00 A.M. flight Monday. I could not extend my return ticket for later in the week. Everything was booked. And I would not have missed Beni’s pidyon haben for anything. The paperwork remaining for the car at meches and at misrad harishui, now not on strike, would take more than one day’s round trip through the dealership and I could not take possession of the car with insurance and my documents back before my return flight. I could not even, according to the law, mail back my documents to Israel and have my brother-in-law pick up the car on my behalf, park it in my garage space, and mail my passport, licenses, and other documents back to me.

The opening passage of our Torah reading seems to be mocking me. “Im bechukotai taylaychu.” It is as though Medinat Yisrael is saying to me: “If you play by my rules, you travel.” I have booked a more expensive round trip flight this time leaving this coming Monday. I have already faxed my schedule to Marwan at the Volvo-Honda dealership who is sitting on my full payment for the car. I am hoping to deal with all of this to completion before my return to New York erev Shavuot. My deadline to buy a car in Israel with zechuyot is still July 1. Without my zechuyot this Honda Civic is taxed something like 140 per cent of the purchase price. I have no intention of paying $40,000 for a Honda Civic ES! This round trip back to Israel just to finish the paperwork with the government agencies is to be chalked up to “the cost of doing business.” I’ll get some other work done with Haifa city hall in connection with the apartment while I’m there. The city workers were on strike last week, too.

By the way, after kollel this morning one of the guys related a good dvar Torah on “Im bechukotai taylaychu.” God is saying: “If you walk in the ways of my decrees…” “Bechukotai” can be seen as Torah study, the learning of God’s mitzvoth. “Taylaychu” can be understood as process (tahalich). For all of us, the essence of Torah study is the process, that we do it, and reap whatever side benefits accrue to our spiritual and religious lives. We all have different backgrounds and abilities and will never be equal in our academic accomplishments. But what we can all share in is the process of learning, and that is an important mitzvah in itself.

So, too, with the Israeli government and its absurd jumble of inconvenient, inflexible rules. For me to gain from a favor soon to be taken away from me, a very big economic favor, I have to play along with the proper process, even if it means flying back to Israel for essentially bureaucratic paperwork that couldn’t be finished last week because the government bureaucrats who were needed just to sign off on some papers were out on strike. Azoi gayt dos, as my grandmother would say.

At the end of this intercontinental marathon, I will have, hopefully, a shiny, new silver Honda Civic. I will also have celebrated my more important joy of being with everyone at the pidyon haben.
And I will have been processed, ahem, in the process.

2003-05-23T11:09:00.000-04:00

BEHAR

So here I am, erev Shabbat again sitting in the Haifa apartment. I was able to purchase a “modest” new car, a 2003 Honda Civic sedan, silver with gray upholstery. It took one visit to the Honda place down the mountain at Lev HaMifratz to close the deal. It took a second day, Sunday, to have the purchase price transferred electronically from my bank account to the dealership’s bank.

Rav Joseph, the maggid shiur of the Riverdale Kollel Dirshu, questioned me before this trip to spend two weeks in Haifa: “It takes two weeks to buy a car?” Well, as it turns out, “Yes, and then some.”

I came here to buy the car under my rights as a new oleh, a savings of otherwise many thousands of dollars for the identical vehicle if purchased without zichuyot. I came here at the beginning of May because the rights of North Americans have been foreshortened to July 1—far short of the three years time to buy a car with “rights” as promised when Diane and I made aliyah last year.

I bought a car at a nice price so I should be happy, right? Actually, I am going into this Shabbat very nervous. Why? There is a remez in the opening of the Torah parshah of Behar:

“v’shavtah haaretz!”

For the entire two weeks there has been a “shvitah,” a strike, by all those who come under the aegis of the Histadrut, including the meches workers and the misrad harishui. Every day I have been here, I have hoped the strike would be over the next day. I am now coming into my second Shabbat with uncertainty. They say, as they have been saying every day since I arrived, that they are meeting (this time motzai-Shabbat) until the wee hours of the morning. All of the past two weeks, the morrow has brought an ever expanded strike, including even more categories of workers.

I can’t get delivery of the car without the meches stamp on my document and without vehicle registration. Already this morning I had the dealer return my American passport, teudat oleh, and New York and Israeli driving licenses. I need them for my flight back to New York on Monday at 8:00 A.M., if the airport is not shut down. I resolve: I will not miss Beni’s pidyon haben!

What’s the worst-case scenario: I’ll come back to Israel in two weeks. The strike must be over by then?!

Yesterday, Bibi, who is now Treasury Minister, angrily promised to make these prolonged country wide, general strikes illegal and impossible.

Believe me, I hope so!

2003-05-23T10:05:00.000-04:00

EMOR

Here I am, erev Shabbat Parshat Emor, sitting in our Haifa apartment facing north from the uppermost ridge of Mt. Carmel, thinking and looking down the forested slope at the expansive scoop of the Mediterranean Sea called Haifa Bay, “my mifratz.” It is hard to believe that just last erev Shabbat I was in the Bronx celebrating the brit milah of our new grandson “Beni.” I do not have a phone line yet in our Haifa apartment, ergo no internet, therefore I’ll have to post this entry when I return to Riverdale.

So why am I here, alone, you ask? I flew to Israel basically to buy a car before our suddenly foreshortened “new oleh” rights run out. I got here in time to celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut number 55. The celebratory fireworks display was a fantastic sight from my vantage point at the living room window and out on the mirpesset.

Everyone welcomed me at our building. They remembered me. I got warm hugs even from the Arab and Druze workmen. Yes, the building is still a slow work in progress, but it is much farther along on the way.

Oh, and this morning I bought a car. Except that the meches people are on strike and I am hoping that the paperwork will clear by next week so I can take possession of my car and documents before I have to return to New York. I want to be back in time for Beni’s pidyon haben, the first in our family for at least three generations.

I brought xeroxes of my gemara pages to Sotah with me to Israel so that I can keep up with the kollel, although this is an absence without pay. The Talmud “learning” has become addictive with me. I can’t even read the Torah parshah anymore without thinking of the Talmud.

“Lah yitamah”—the kohen, is he meakev or is it a reshut to become tamei at the death and burial of his deceased, unmarried sister, or does “lah” come to teach us “only for her” and not for one of her amputated limbs while she is still alive? And why am I thinking of this while enjoying a warm, sunny erev Shabbat on my mirpesset, chumash in hand, embraced by the glorious nof of Har HaCarmel? Has Talmud ruined my mind, or merely invaded it?

As I remarked this week to my Israeli banker, Orit at Bank HaPoalim, I live in two worlds, my Hebrew speaking one and my English speaking one.

Sitting here on my mirpesset, high atop the uppermost ridge of Mt. Carmel, sitting reading Torah, the Mediterranean Sea at my feet, I think I may also be experiencing a foretaste of the World to Come.

2003-05-02T17:28:00.000-04:00

KEDOSHIM

I have just returned from the brit milah ceremony for our newest grandson, born to Gadi and Jana eight days ago. Now I know a name for this latest descendent—Benjamin Shimon Romm. The name now gives him a certain more human quality at last. He is adorable and handsome. He also has duly been brought into the covenant of Abraham.

It is obvious at this point in his life that Benjamin’s facial features favor Jana more at first impression than they do Gadi’s. I think that this is a point that Gadi is still debating. In truth, the baby is perforce a genetic blend of the two. At various stages and ages in his life he will at times resemble Jana more and at other times his countenance will be a strong reflection of Gadi as well.

One fact, however, is absolutely certain. In our families, we are absolutely certain who the fathers are. At the mitzvah of brit milah this morning I thought of the sacredness of our families during the davening and the whole gathering of family and community at the celebration attached to a new birth and a ceremony of acceptance into the generations of his people. We come into this world and make our way through it through a broad understanding of tohorat hamishpachah, purity of family, the generation of progeny in holiness. To us each child has been wanted and is considered a blessing. Each new life in the family is a person who is loved. We Jewish men do not merely acknowledge our offspring, we rejoice in them.

We are worlds apart from the people on the daytime television shows that feature DNA testing results to determine who fathered the children of women who do not know for certain among God knows how many possibilities. And I think we can find the secret of Jewish behavior and morality in this week’s Torah parshah of Kedoshim.

“V’hitkadishtem v’hyitem kedoshim ki ani adonai eloheychem—you shall sanctify yourselves and you will be holy, for I am Hashem your God.” As Sforno parses the passage: “Sanctify yourselves,” by separating yourselves from sexual immorality. “And you shall be holy,” that your offspring be predisposed for the Shechinah to dwell in their midst, as our Sages say: “The Shechinah only dwells upon families of distinguished ancestry in Israel” (Kiddushin 70b). “For I am Hashem your God,” who said to Abraham, “To be a God to you and to your seed after you,” only to seed descended from your ancestral line.

Those conceived in purity will be more likely to continue to follow the precepts of the Torah. Those conceived in purity and certainty are indeed a link in a generational chain of sacred trust. As a grandfather, I could not be happier and more welcoming to this new member of the family. He will over the years resemble my son Gadi, his father, in many ways--in decency, in generosity, in love, in intelligence, in intellectual curiosity and inventiveness, in compassion for others, and in personal attractiveness because of the depth and charm of his spirit. I am sure that these wonderful traits of his father will be physically visible in his facial features as he grows throughout life as well. May he grow great to both his father and his mother. And to all of us who love him.

It is so appropriate that the brit milah took place on Friday, Rosh Chodesh, erev Shabbat Parshat Kedoshim. And I might add, that for a sacred link in the chain of the masoret, Benjamin Shimon Romm sure is cute!

2003-04-25T13:29:00.000-04:00

ACHAREI MOT

In the days before Pesach, a guest rebbe was teaching our kollel the laws of Pesach, ostensibly from the gemara of Pesachim. In an aside to the laws of bittul and biur chametz from the beginning of the tractate, he expressed amazement that at least one of the rishonim saw bittul as absolute nullification of chametz, making it literally “dust of the earth.” Even a big piece of chametz subsequently discovered on Pesach, you could halachically eat! This was good news he said for the man wearing his kittel at the seder, worn for the first time since Hoshannah Rabbah, who sticks his hand in the pocket and discovers a kichel!

My first reaction to this comment was: “My kittel doesn’t have pockets. His did?” I asked Rav Zvi later that day, “Does your kittel have pockets?” He answered: “Of course not. No kittel has pockets.” I asked Rabbi Cohen. He said: “Since the kittel is basically a burial garment it doesn’t have pockets. When we leave this world we take nothing materialistic with us. We don’t need pockets.”

I then started thinking about my kittel. I originally purchased and wore my kittel for my wedding ceremony, probably the best and happiest major event in my life. Subsequently, I wore my kittel over the next thirty plus years on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. While somber and serious days of reflection, filled with introspection and teshuvah, they were also times for me personally that were spent in thankfulness for the many blessings bestowed upon my life and the lives of my dear ones as I watched my family grow and develop from year to year. The parshah of Acharei Mot, read this Shabbat, is filled with memories of me in my kittel, as verses from here are also read throughout the day on Yom Kippur. They are happy memories. Not the least of these is that my grandson Aharon was a Yom Kippur baby, born on a Kol Nidre night.

The first days of Pesach this year were spent with Rav Zvi at his new home. Zvi, resplendent at the seders in his kittel dialogued with my granddaughter Chavi. Chavi was a delight in the reflective light of her father’s kittel. She was cute, intelligent, beautiful, and well prepared to be the featured “player” of the seder to an appreciative audience of her parents, both sets of grandparents, an aunt and uncle, and even a pair of great-grandparents! I sat thinking, that kittel is worn at a time of most exquisite joy. I thought, it doesn’t get any better than this!

Then, upon coming home from shul in Riverdale at the end of Yom Tov I found Diane on the phone with our son Gadi. Jana was in labor in the hospital. We rushed over to the hospital and arrived moments after the birth of their son. We have been blessed with yet another beautiful, healthy grandchild!

It just may be that the kichel in the kittel at the seder is just another one of those apocryphal stories, that overlooks a detail, like a pocket, to make a point. It may be true that the kittel is primarily a burial garment without pockets to remind us of our mortality. But my kittel, too, has witnessed much of the celebration of life. It is a happy cloak. And you know what? I have realized that the things that have made my life fulfilled, that give me joy and nachas, that make me happy and have enabled me to grow as a human being and a Jew, for these riches and treasures of life, you don’t need pockets either!

2003-04-11T15:55:00.000-04:00

METZORA

Watching the tearing down of the statue of Saddam Hussein in the square in front of the Palestine Hotel seemed to me to be even more symbolic than the ABC commentators articulated in their “voice over” chatter. May the Palestinian Arabs finally realize that President Bush is serious about the “War on Terrorism” and that if they ever want to have any kind of state between Israel and Jordan they had better clean up their act. They can’t depend upon their fellow Arab “warriors.” They cannot depend upon the innate anti-Semitism and the thinly disguised self-interest of the Europeans. They cannot depend upon a Vatican in decline with a current “morality” problem of its own to speak for them (while fighting to save church property and personnel that unhappily are found in Arab lands.) They cannot depend on the Western left wing movements to demonstrate and remonstrate on their behalves, because the innate anti-Americanism and pro-whatever-the-U.S.-has-supposedly-exploited-and-oppressed motifs of the crowds marching with anti-war, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian signs was blatantly obvious and unappreciated by the majority of Americans. They cannot depend upon the U.N., that impartial forum of civilized nations getting together to discuss the solutions to their grievances in which the source of every problem in the World of the Ugga-buggas is the existence of a Jewish State. They cannot even depend upon their calibrated “terrorism” on civilians to gain a sympathetic ear as the desperate acts of a poor oppressed people confronting a superior army. I think finally by following the tactics and minutia of how Arabs behaved in the War in Iraq the unprejudiced observer can see that for the Palestinians terror is both a tactic, a strategy, and an ingrained cultural way of waging war that goes back to the ancient tribes. Do they think that anyone in his right mind would allow these people a militarized state? And do we not see that the Israelis are actually restrained in the use of military force against them or else they would have been totally eliminated long ago? Genocide of Palestinians is clearly not Israel’s aim. Could the Palestinian Arabs (or any Arabs) make the reverse claim if they had the means and the opportunity? And they cannot depend upon foreign “human shields” who have proven both in Iraq and in “the Territories” to be even less than “useful idiots.” The only thing left is to isolate or remove Arafat, create a truly responsible government, and negotiate for the possible, not for the hopelessly stillborn illusion. The Arab street is a mob that changes its murmurings every five minutes as the wind blows. The Arab intelligentsia is frozen in a broken record of litanies that lead nowhere. And who gives a damn about “Arab pride?” Really. You defeat them in battle and they won’t negotiate a settlement because they are “humiliated.” You negotiate with them and voluntarily withdraw and cede territory and they think that you are weak and instead of making peace start an “intifada.” I believe that President Bush understands all of this and is much smarter, much more truthful about his intentions, and much more effective in his world wide “War on Terror” than anyone gave him credit for.

As the War in Iraq seems to have been won--at least militarily--in time for Pesach, I hope that we are truly witnessing a liberation and a redemption, not just for Iraq but as a new 21st Century turn for the better in the entire mindset of the Middle East. The “metzora” of our parshah was a pariah during the period of his “tzoraat.” The defeat of Saddam’s regime in Iraq has been seen by some as a chance for Iraq to cease being a “pariah state” and rejoin the nations of the world. I hope so. I pray, too, that President Bush will go from strength to strength in his War on Terror, and control the interventions of the French, the Germans, the Russians, and, yes, even the British in their bigoted stance against what they erroneously and hypocritically deem the “other pariah state,” Medinat Yisrael.

This Sabbath before Pesach is called “Shabbat Hagadol”—perhaps from a passage in the reading from Prophets for this day. Let us all hope that the conclusion of the War in Iraq and its potential for good in the spirit of redemption of Pesach truly this year enable us to witness that “great and awesome day of the Lord, the coming of Eliyahu Hanavi.”

2003-04-04T13:42:00.000-05:00

TAZRIAH

One of the sons of the former Talmud teacher of my son Zvi at Yeshiva University is celebrating his Bar Mitzvah service this Shabbat. Since his father and family alternate between the family shteibel in Boston and the Young Israel I also attend in Riverdale, I had occasion to wish the boy a mazal tov and comment: “Tazriah, what a parshah for a bar mitzvah!” I, of course, was thinking of the largely unappetizing subject matter of the parshah that consists of the tumah of various female bloody excretions and the detailed descriptions of the lesions and skin sores collectively termed “tzoraat,” usually imprecisely translated as “leprosy.” But, afterwards, I thought to myself that perhaps I was not being truly perceptive as to the underlying profundities of the subject matter and their very appropriate implications for one about to assume responsibility for the conduct of his life.

I have always understood from the Torah text that the involvement of the kohen in the diagnosing, checking up on the healing, and making judgments about the tumah-tohorah status of skin eruptions was not meant to be a medical journal article in dermatology. The kohen is not acting as a physician and the quarantines described are not cures. The kohen is acting as a priest. The disease and its “remedies” suggest something else. That part of the procedure after “healing” involves not only immersion in a mikveh mayim but also various sacrifices including a “guilt” offering that is described as being much like a “sin” offering, tells me that we are not just talking disease and infection here, but disease as a consequence of wrongdoing and sin.

A summary of the Sforno comment to the passage “…seayt o sapachat o baheret…a rising or a scale or a red spot” yields this observation: One must not confuse tumah with physical illness. They are separate and unrelated. Tumah is caused only by those afflictions that the Torah has ordained. These four types of leprosy are visited upon man, as are the afflictions of garments and houses (also mentioned in the parshah), for the purpose of alerting him to his shortcomings in the hope that he will repent and improve his behavior. That is why the Sages refer to them as “an altar of atonement,” for through the suffering experienced by the victim, he will repent and God will forgive him. These particular personal signs of impurity as warnings to repent, and the procedures that follow repentance and healing, do however indicate to us a certain moral connection between sin and other non-tumah sickness and even premature death.

I have studied enough Torah and Talmud to discover that there is a link between certain kinds of intentional transgressions and the consequential punishment of “death at the hands of Heaven.” Illness can morally be seen as a punishment for sin. In fact, even rationally, many of life’s illnesses that befall us can be linked to bad behavioral habits and practices, exposures to environmental degradations, and the ravages of certain lifestyles. Much of the opposite, a lot of which parallels observance of the commandments of Torah, creates a lifestyle unexposed to certain kinds of illnesses. Dietary and self-control issues may also prevent or forestall even certain genetic tendencies to disease.

While no one of us has the wisdom or even the right to be like the “friends” of Job and chastise the sufferer of an illness with a smug proclamation of “You must have done something to deserve this,” I am nonetheless reminded of a comment by my teacher Esra Shereshevsky in college long ago when I studied with him the Book of Job. At the beginning of the course he remarked, part tongue in cheek, part in earnest musar, “The central theme of the Book of Job—zadik v’ra lo—is not really a Jewish problem. The truly saintly person always knows what he did to deserve God’s punishment!” Think about it. It is always the unsaintly who when faced with adversity ask: “Why me?”

So, the parshah of Tazriah really is appropriate for a new, burgeoning bar mitzvah. In addition to writing him a check, I wish this young man a long life of health and contentment as earthly reward for fulfilling the behavioral patterns and world- view of a bar mitzvah and a ben Torah.

2003-03-28T14:10:00.000-05:00

SHEMINI

This past Wednesday, Chavi said to me: “You know, Bu, I really like you. You don’t give me ‘time outs’ like Abba and Imma do.” I answered: “I like you, too, but I want you to understand something. Abba and Imma sometimes have to punish you when you do something wrong. They do it BECAUSE they love you. If they didn’t teach you right from wrong when you do something wrong it would show that they didn’t care about you and your neshamah. That’s also why they give you rules and you should listen to them when they remind you when you don’t do the rules. They do all this because they love you and you love them.”

Of course, this model of parents developing the neshamah of a child through rules, discipline, and the teaching of self control is a good way to explain in simple terms how I as Jew understand at least a part of God’s caring about me personally. The practice of Judaism is largely about rules (mitzvoth) and self control, thereby developing a certain kind of personality, an outlook on life, a participation in the affairs of the group, and an empathy for others, Jews and non-Jews, in fact, for all that have the breath of life.

The Torah portion of Shemini reminded me of this observation in the very week I had my conversation about parental love and “time outs” with my granddaughter. In the parshah we learn about the animals we may eat and those we may not. Keeping kosher may be among the most apparent of the daily disciplines that mark the life of a Jew—although the observant Jew will acknowledge that there are many more that are all interconnected and interrelated. In reviewing the parshah, I was struck by the philosophical observation of Sforno to the passage about permitted and forbidden animals.

To the pasuk “Zot hachayah asher tochlu—These are the living things which you may eat,” Sforno comments: (After the sin of the Golden Calf, Israel degraded their spiritual level attained at the Giving of the Torah. Only in response to Moses’ praying on their behalf did God consent “to dwell in their midst” by way of the Sanctuary, its furnishings, attendants, and sacrifices. Israel then merited and attained the level of “the glory of God appeared unto all the people” and to the fire descending from heaven.) “Therefore, God considered the need to remedy their temperament that it be predisposed to be illuminated with the light of everlasting life. This was to be done through the regulation of food and laws regarding the reproductive system. The Torah prohibits foods that defile man’s moral characteristics and mental powers. ‘You shall therefore be holy’ just as God is holy. God prohibited a niddah, a zavah, and a yoledet so as to sanctify the seed of Israel and purify it from all tumah.”

The rules, the disciplines, the laws governing all aspects of our lives, public and private, are there to remedy our temperament that it be predisposed to be illuminated with the light of everlasting life. God gave us the Torah and mitzvoth because He loves and cares about us. We reiterate this concept twice daily in the second berachah of the recitation of Shma: “With great love You have loved us. Torah and mitzvoth, statutes and laws You have taught us. …We will rejoice in the words of Your Torah, because they are our life and the length of our days. Never remove Your love from us. Blessed are You, who loves His people Israel.”

So you may ask why I don’t ever punish Chavi with “time outs” inasmuch as I am an adult in her life who loves her and cares about the proper development of her neshamah. And I’ll answer you. Because I am her grandfather, not her father. I am not living with her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The hours she and I spend together give me a little girl who behaves mostly wonderfully and who is beautiful inside and out. Why is this so? Because her Abba and Imma are wonderful, loving, caring parents who know when it is appropriate to discipline this little nachas with “time outs.”

2003-03-20T14:29:00.000-05:00

TZAV

I am writing on a Thursday at the beginning of the war with Iraq. It is, of course, a time of tension, uncertainty, of death for many. No one thinks that decisions to go to war are light decisions. While Kohelet may talk about a time for war and a time for peace, I hope that the goal of this war, as horrible as it is, is to create a viable, just peace in its aftermath. I hope that this war, which is complicated, will truly serve a larger picture to prove that terrorism can be shown to not work Up until September 11, 2001, common wisdom had it that terrorists were “freedom fighters,” absolved from the kinds of conventions that their targets were constrained by, that they would ultimately win, because eventually they would overthrow all those they blamed for the political and economic conditions of their miserable causes. The United States (as well as Israel) is taking the terrorists’ wars back into their own laps. May this lead to true peace. May the terrorists find that there are those among their brethren who decide that terrorism does not work, that terrorists are neither heroes nor martyrs, and that certain Third World countries cannot recapture a romanticized, glorious past by dragging the world back into the Middle Ages. They must develop by themselves the means to participate in the world economy. You can’t just blame the Jews for all your failings forever.

War calls upon many to make the ultimate sacrifice. At this morning’s Torah reading I thought about the Olah sacrifice mentioned at the beginning of Parshat Tzav. The Olah is a sacrifice that must be entirely burnt upon the altar. Yet, even while most of the flesh of the sacrifice goes up to God, fat does drip down and there are residual ashes. The fire of the altar is to be kept burning continuously. It seemed to me to be a symbol for the war on terrorism. The ever vigilant fire must constantly be kept burning in preparation for the sacrifice. In the aftermath of the Olah conflagration, some of the ashes are taken away from the old. But on the altar the fire is kept burning and the process of creating a new flame of kedushah can “rise from the ashes,” those that remain on the altar. Let us hope that a better world order in the Middle East will rise from the ashes, even though the fire may create the setting for more Olah sacrifices until the job is done. I think that we are looking to a future with a series of short wars with countries that harbor and assist terrorists one after another. Let us hope that some will have gotten the message and will change their policies so as to avoid a conventional war. I hope that the war on terrorism is won through resoluteness, proving to the adversaries that terrorism does not work.

This war has begun in a time frame in which we Jews remember that the evil of Amalek can be defeated (Purim) and that liberation and redemption are possible (Pesach). I join with many others praying for those on the front lines of the war on terrorism. May they defeat evil and help our adversaries find liberation and redemption and may they come home sound of limb and spirit. As we recite Psalms during these times, may we “lift up (our) eyes unto the hills.”

Our help comes from the Lord.

2003-03-14T15:25:00.000-05:00

VAYIKRA

Wednesdays, for me, means spending time with the grandchildren at Zvi and Shira’s home. Picked up by Zvi after his teaching of his shiur at Yeshiva University, I arrive in time for Chavi’s return from kindergarten at Beis Yaakov and Aharon’s cheerful and energetic awakening from his nap. I stay long enough to give the kids dinner, eat with them, put Aharon to bed, and get Chavi into pajamas and read with her. It is an arrangement that works out well for everyone all across the board. My playing with the kids all afternoon gives Shira an opportunity for running errands unencumbered outside the home, while Zvi is out fulfilling his duties at his shul. I have the best times of my life that, no matter how many hours I spend with my grandchildren, seem like nanoseconds over way too soon.

Wednesdays were chosen this time around, during the months of our stint in our Riverdale home this year, because Shira, “my daughter-in-law the artist,” is taking a class in ceramics from 6PM to 7:30, a time slot that doesn’t quite dovetail with Zvi’s availability to be home from shul. Shira is producing some imaginative, artistic pottery (of which I am angling to get at least one piece as a gift). Zvi can be at minyan, meet with people, come home whenever he can without pressure and leave on time without pressure to give his evening shiur back at the shul. As for me, I am experiencing sheer bliss.

There are those among the sages who looked down upon the notion of an adult male spending even some of his time “playing” with little children. They thought it undignified and made him look like a fool. I, obviously, do not hold this view. While it may seem that my play is just fun (and fun it certainly is!), I am not truly “getting down to their level” (even though what we do together is certainly age appropriate for each child). In reality, I am teaching them. I am there together with them, sharing in their achievements of basic skills and abilities that are the basis for all of their academic and intellectual pursuits for their entire long lives, please God. These are all skills and plateaus that have a certain limited developmental “window of opportunity” during the pre-school years. I am proud, in part, as a grandfather, to at least have a share in helping ensure that developmental stages are not missed, which, if missed, can lead to a great deal of lifelong tzuris later on. I am thrilled that my son and daughter-in-law allow me to be a part of my grandchildren’s world.

I think of all this as we turn to the Book of Vayikra, the parshah of Vayikra. In classical antiquity, Jewish children began their learning of Torah, not at the very beginning with the Book of Bereishith, but with the Book of Vayikra. While “Torat Kohanim,” the Priestly Handbook, might seem a strange introduction to Torah for little kids, with subject matter concerning the sacrifices, procedures, and Kohanic duties of the Sanctuary of old, it nonetheless was first on the curriculum to memorize. The rabbis opined that just as the sacrifices were to be offered in purity, so, too, the study of Torah should begin with the sacrifices learned by little children who are pure.

In classical antiquity, Jewish children first learned to read the Hebrew alphabet at age three. Part of the time I spend with Chavi,now age four, involves reading together from her many books in English that she enjoys. In addition to an opportunity to snuggle together on the sofa with a book open in front of us we are now at a stage where Chavi can read the story to me dramatically, part memorization, part whole word recognition, part phonics as we “sound out” the words in sections “forgotten.” And it is fun mixed with love. Chavi and I play cards and kiddie board games together. She can stay focused and on task for long-range goals, and has a grasp of the value of numbers and addition and subtraction. I don’t let her win on purpose. When she wins, she really wins. When she loses, she accepts loss graciously (most of the time). Her play with dolls and stuffed animals can leave her transfixed for an hour, setting up imaginary scenarios and plays and stories of her own. Aharon, now at seventeen months, is truly a sentient being, and a happy little child who is a delight to be with. He likes to sit on my lap and look at books. He has a great attention span and loves to point to the appropriate objects on a page when asked: “Do you see a star, a horse, whatever.” He has begun to notice that there are letters on the pages, too. He is perfecting his walking, running, and climbing. He throws and catches. But most of all, he likes to fiddle with electronics and anything mechanical, pressing buttons, pulling, pushing, twisting to see the cause and effect of his actions, whether with his kiddie toys or with adult audio or computer equipment. He speaks with a few English words at this stage, passively understands what you say to him, and mostly communicates surprisingly well with grunts and gestures. I was there when he took his first steps. My “grandfather name,” Bu, was one of his first words, used appropriately to get my attention. I reinforce when I put the grandkids to bed their family masoret of “Hamalach hagoel (I have to pronounce it ‘their’ way) osi,” the Shma and V’ahavta.

I live daily with anticipation for yet another grandchild due this May from Gadi and Jana. Already, I have been invited to spend time with my descendent from this line. May God allow us all this nachas.

Being an important part of my grandchildren’s early years will not only give them memories of me from their childhood when some day they, God willing, will be grandparents themselves. I will be part of who they are as people in ways they won't remember getting from me that are much more than just the mere traces of my inherited DNA.

Grandchildren are the links to the future of our masoret. You think spending time with little children is frivolous? Our little children are the “guarantors” of Torah!

2003-03-07T15:36:00.000-05:00

PEKUDAY

It was during our first months of aliyah, after we had purchased our Haifa apartment but could not move in because it was still under construction, that Diane and I took the train down to Tel Aviv to the art museum. We had decided to do “touristy” kinds of things with our time while awaiting progress on things that were beyond our powers to control. At the time, the art museum was featuring a Raban retrospective.

A series of ten prints of cities in the Holy Land first published by Raban in 1928 from the Bezalel School caught my eye. The print of “Haifa” I thought especially appropriate for our new apartment. It depicted an ancient Haifa descending the northern slope of Mt. Carmel down to the curve of the bay. The “border” of the line drawing incorporated, of course, Elijah the Prophet motifs, all done in a kind of “arabesque” art deco style. Since the view from our apartment is a northern one, from the peak of Mt. Carmel down the slope to a panoramic view of Haifa Bay, and since there is a narrow strip of northern wall in the living room between the picture window and the glass sliding doors to the balcony, I thought that the Raban print of Haifa would be perfect on that strip of wall between all the glass as a kind of “YOU ARE HERE” sign.

To purchase the Raban print of Haifa, I had to purchase the whole set of ten prints of Holy Land cities and holy sites. But, not to worry, I purchased all ten. They would fit into my decorating scheme. I had the Haifa print framed singly to place on the northern wall. The other nine prints I had framed in three sets of three. The other art designated for the apartment was either “Biblical” in theme or “arabesque” or “middle eastern” like the illuminated page from a Turkish book with Turkish printing still in the Arabic alphabet, and the Raban style was very compatible with everything else. Besides, my other furnishings incorporated “modern” leather furniture (including Marcel Breuer “Wassily” chairs also originally from 1928) with Persian rugs in “native” designs, a Syrian lamp table, and a chased metal Arab serving tray on a wooden stand to use as a coffee table in front of the sofa. The “look” of the living room was conceived as “modern” with a middle eastern tone to the accessories. Raban’s art deco-arabesque-Biblical style tied everything together perfectly.

Raban’s Bezalel School of Art was established by the pre-State of Israel Jewish yishuv in Eretz Yisrael. I suppose its cultivating of all manner of “Jewish” arts and Jewish artists was part of the Zionistic “new Jew” response to the European notion that Jews qua Jews never developed arts and great artists because of religious prohibitions against “graven images.” Part of the Bezalel School’s mission was to begin developing Jewish art and artists for the soon to be created Jewish State. Well and good. But why buy into the erroneous, condescending, and, frankly, anti-Semitic assertion that Jews had never developed art and artists? Maybe, as with most other things Jewish, art and artists always existed, but their talents were channeled to those things needed by the community for the service of God. What is considered “art” and what is considered “craft” are often very subjective and culturally prejudiced on the part of the “art critic” or museum curator.

The Bezalel School took its name from Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. In the parshah of Pekuday we are taught that God “filled him with Godly spirit, with wisdom, insight, and knowledge, and with every craft—to weave designs, to work with gold, silver, and copper; stone-cutting for setting, and wood-carving—to perform every craft of design. He gave him the ability to teach, him and Oholiab, son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. He filled them with a wise heart to do every craft of the carver, weaver of designs, and embroiderer—with the turquoise, purple, and scarlet wool, and the linen—and the weaver: the artisans of every craft and the makers of designs.” It is not hard to discern why the Bezalel School chose its name.

Is the artistic fabrication of the utensils and furnishings of an ancient Israelite sanctuary less “art” because they were not bowls and tables and altars and lamps for an ancient Egyptian sanctuary or discovered in a royal Egyptian tomb? In fact, some ancient Israelite and Jewish “crafts” are just as much “museum quality” as any artifacts of any ancient culture that are elevated to the status of “art” because of archeology and notions of cultural diversity. How do I know that the cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant were not fashioned with artistic skill and vision comparable to the various Aphrodites (l’havdil!) that remain in museums today from ancient Greek temples?

And who is to say that furnishings and day- to- day objects, let alone ceremonial objects, cannot by design and execution be “elevated” to the status of “art?” My aforementioned “Wassily” chairs, whose “architectural” design from the Bauhaus School of designers marks them even in reproduction as more than “just” chairs but “art,” because there is an artistic vision from the zeitgeist of the period that inspired Marcel Breuer to “abstract” an overstuffed leather club chair down to the basic “ideal” of a club chair with a chrome plated metal frame and leather straps for the seat, back, and armrests. If this can be considered art because of certain criteria of original design, how much more so the vision and skill and imaginative design of much ritual object Judaica of the past couple of centuries! Throughout the twentieth century to the present “Judaica” has been highly collectible for art collections.

I am a Jewish person who loves art of all media and likes to surround my living spaces with artistic things in artistic settings to set a mood for my values and the conduct of my life. I am not a mere aesthete who believes in “ars gratia ars.” I am not an ancient Greek believing in “the holiness of beauty,” but a contemporary, traditional Jew who believes in “the beauty of holiness.” The set of Holy Land cities and sites by Raban of the Bezalel School is not only highly collectible, but appropriate to the mix of art and artistic furnishings of my Haifa apartment, my mikdash me’at, perched atop Mt. Carmel, whose tone and life within I hope will be worthy to be lived among the footsteps of Eliyahu HaNavi.

2003-02-28T14:16:00.000-05:00

VAYAKHEL

It was during the Thursday morning Torah reading of Vayakhel that I had a small heuristic experience. The Torah reader was rapidly chanting (as is the way of morning minyan) the passages so familiar to me from years of hearing them over and over again and my having read them out loud many times as a Torah reader myself. When I heard the words: “…et brichav, et amudav, v’et addanav, …its bars, its pillars, and its sockets” I had a flash of insight. The “addanim,” usually translated as “sockets” when in reference to the mishkan, must be related linguistically to the “addaniot,” the “window box” planters I have purchased in Israel for container gardening on the apartment’s balcony. The “addanim” of the mishkan were actually “bases” made of silver into which the “yadot,” “hands,” here in the sense of tenons protruding from the planks, were fitted. I made a mental note to myself to look into this “addanim”—“addaniot” relationship further.

Indeed, the word “edden” is used in modern, spoken Hebrew in the sense of “base” or “stand,” as in “the base of a statue.” It is also used for the “base” of a window. If the base of a window is “edden,” the planter that is made especially to sit outside the window on the protruding part of the “edden” can be called an “addanit,” even if I happen to put that planter somewhere other than on the window ledge. I can do it in English with my “window box” planters as well. But, to get closer to my point, this week I filed away another factoid discovered from a newly hatched, serendipitous insight that flashed in my mind during morning minyan.

I know what you’re thinking: “Big deal! So what?” So, I’ll tell you why these insights are significant to me personally. First of all, I am fifty-six years old, nearly fifty-seven. I find it amazing that I still even have insights! Secondly, this discovery is part of my ongoing ever more sophisticated command of the Hebrew language. I have learned ninety-nine percent of my Hebrew outside the land of Israel as a kind of continuing personal adult education. And my Hebrew vocabulary comes not only from the usual “holy books,” though I do not disavow dabbling in them from time to time. I also read about my many hobbies and interests in Hebrew as well as in English and have the vocabulary in Hebrew to talk about tropical fish, gardening, nature, plus all the everyday vocabulary and syntax skills that get absorbed unconsciously when one reads books in a language. I can read and finish articles in the Israeli Hebrew newspapers and magazines to the amazement of American born relatives living in Israel for a long time who still can’t read the newspapers.

This is all fact and no brag. That I fluently spoke to workmen in Israel during construction on the Haifa apartment and picked up a lot of specific construction contractor vocabulary is also testimony to a basic vocabulary and shorashim gleaned from my Hebrew learning in America. That Diane and I negotiated apartment price and mortgage terms in Hebrew which made the conversations with the parties across the table much easier for them, and we still even negotiated well and creatively with supposedly tough Israelis and came out ahead against the system, occasioned surprise from the Israelis that we were new immigrants who had not lived in Israel for many years at some time in the past. We would get comments in Hebrew like: “It’s tough being olim chozrim, isn’t it?” And we would answer: “We’re not. We’re olim chadashim, new immigrants.” “So, how come you speak Hebrew?” “We read a lot.”

While Diane’s accent is better than mine, my vocabulary is much larger than hers. And I do owe much of it to my Torah education, and my continued exposure to Torah in my personal Jewish life and practice. Even the Arab in Amman who sold me a Jordanian carpet in a bargaining conversation conducted in Hebrew several years ago when relations were a little better asked me, an American Jew, how it was that my Hebrew was so good. I purposely made the point to him that Hebrew was learned as intrinsic to my Judaism and my identity as a Jew. By unspoken implication, Israel was part of my Judaism as well.

I learned the names of kitchen utensils in Hebrew from the sacred vessels of sanctuary. I select cuts of meat and poultry at the meat counter at the Israeli supermarket in words used in the descriptions of the sacrifices. And this week, I made the connection between the “addanim” of the “mishkan” and the “addaniot” on my “mirpesset.”

I suppose, in my life, this is my way of going from “kodesh” to “kodesh.” May God give me the ability to keep learning and having personal insights all along as I grow older and hopefully wiser. It does take a bit of fortitude to go from strength to strength.

2003-02-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

KI TISSA

Every minyan has its “pushka guy.” To the best of my knowledge, no one ever asks the pushka guy to assume his role. From my lifetime experience in many minyanim, I suspect some commonality of personality that unites those who like to walk around the shul, charity box in hand, during the weekday morning repetition of the Amidah. The pushka guy slowly passes by each of the worshippers enabling (some say, not so subtly coercing) each one to fulfill the mitzvah of daily giving to zedakah.

I’d like to think that the pushka guy gives to zedakah himself though I can never absolutely be sure. I do know that these guys all love to handle the pushka, neatly arranging the bills and coins, making change from the pushka for those who have bills on them too large for this kind of contribution this early in the morning. Pushka guys always seem to enjoy their voluntary role with its voluntary opportunity for a bit of control.

Since I have joined the early morning kollel at the shul I attend in Riverdale, I stay after the learning to daven with the kollel minyan. Even the kollel minyan has produced its own pushka guy. Most of the guys in the kollel are the ages of my sons. I find it somewhat comforting that yet another generation of Jews can produce its own contingent of pushka guys.

When the pushka guy comes around, of course, the contribution is voluntary and there is no set amount that one should give. Nonetheless, one feels an obligation to give as it is embarrassing to wave him on in a gesture of “no.” I get up at 5:30 in the morning to get to kollel by 6:15 and sometimes do not have money in my pockets. I quickly dress in the dark, so as not to wake Diane. Most of the week I do not have the need to put cash in my wallet, nor have I purchased anything so as to receive coins in change. On those mornings when I reach into my pocket and find that I do not have any money on me, I feel truly mortified. Sometimes, the night before, if I think about it, I make sure that I have money for the pushka. But such as things are, I don’t always think of it the night before.

It is not that the pushka money is the only zedakah I give in the course of a year. In fact, by comparison, the pushka money is small change. But the very public contribution of zedakah at morning minyan, is a kind of standing up to be counted among those who aspire to the ranks of shomrei mitzvoth.

In some ways, at least emotionally, it is like the half-shekel kapparah mentioned at the beginning of our Torah portion of Ki Tissa. There, in our parshah, the half-shekel contributed by each male of military age in lieu of taking their count in a straight census, was contributed as a kapparah, an atonement for sins that might bring them death on the battlefield once they were called upon to fight in a war. The very act of taking a census was thought to bring death to those counted directly. So a half-shekel per person, no matter whether rich or poor, was collected so that half-shekels could be counted. This later became an annual contribution towards the maintenance of the Temple. It was an enforced zedakah and still retained a sense of its being a kapparah as well on the part of the donor.

Sforno has an interesting psychological insight as to why we should “give a ransom for our souls.” To the pasuk “…v’natnu ish kofer nafsho—every man shall give a ransom for his soul” Sforno comments: Since the need to count men is due to the changes which occur in his personality, both positive and negative…Therefore, every counting causes iniquities to be recalled…It is fitting to give a ransom for his soul in honor of God…who in His mercy forgives iniquity.

In a sense, my participation in the kollel program is part of the personal changes in my circumstances and personality. It is for me part of standing up to be counted in actually doing what I felt I should have been doing for years. Every counting does indeed bring to mind past sins and iniquities, or even just things that I should have done differently all along. For me, the Talmud study itself is a symbol of change in my life. When the pushka guy comes around at kollel minyan, I feel that my small contribution is accruing towards the ransom for my soul.

2003-02-14T13:22:00.000-05:00

TETZAVEH

The other day, I noticed for the first time that Rabbi Zvi was wearing a white shirt with French cuffs and cufflinks. When I asked him about this, inasmuch as French cuffs were something new to his usual costume, he said: “Well, yeah, Shira bought me three shirts like this.” To his mother he confessed: “Now that I’m a Manhattan rabbi…”

There probably is some truth to this. For years Zvi has been very conscious of the details of his wardrobe. There is a style to which he faithfully adheres that, given some small leeway for minutia of individuality, is really tantamount to a uniform telegraphing exactly the ecological niche to which he belongs in Jewish life and his rank of respectability within it. I can tell by his appearance that he is “yeshivish,” though not Chassidic, that he is a “talmid chacham” and a “rav.” He radiates by his manner of dress “seriousness” with a base of “gravitas” anchoring his broad-brimmed, black Borsalino fedora. He wears dark dress suits, often but not necessarily double-breasted, with white shirts, never colored or patterned and certainly not darkly colored, and serious neckties. Even his yarmulka makes a philosophical statement: black velvet, never crocheted, never in other colors. His tzitzis peek outside his shirt but do not hang loose. They are discreetly wrapped and tucked under his belt. The French cuffs on his shirts do telegraph another level of his new status as rav of an historic Lower Manhattan shul.

Zvi hasn’t worn a pair of jeans since, maybe, he was nine years old. Even as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University he was not part of the crowd who wore chinos or khakis. To Zvi, casual clothing usually means taking off his tie and jacket and wearing suit pants with his white shirt, collar unbuttoned. Sneakers are for Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur, and worn with a suit.

He doesn’t get this from me.

I wear sweater tops without shirts and dress slacks, chinos, khakis, jeans, cargo pants, whatever, during the week when I don’t have anywhere special to show up to that requires dressing up. Dressing up under “routine” circumstances can include sports jackets and slacks, or even suits, light and dark, worn with colored, often darkly colored, shirts and ties. I like black shirts. I consider medium gray to be a pastel shirt. I know which occasions and in what capacity I serve that require a white shirt and tie with a suit and I own many white shirts that require cufflinks. I also have black, red, and French blue cufflink shirts. I own a full outfit for “black tie” occasions. I know how to tie my own bowtie. I prefer boots, even for dress, in black and all shades of brown. I do wear, when appropriate, dress slip-ons, loafers, lace shoes, boating shoes, and sandals as well. I must have fifty or sixty pairs of shoes divided up between both apartments, Riverdale and Haifa. I rarely wear a hat. My kipot are black, crocheted, and held onto my head with two hairclips. In short, even though I am an older middle-aged person, or even a young old person, there are times that I dress like a (conservative) college undergraduate and times, for occasions and roles going up a sartorial “chain of being,” that I dress more and more formally according to my own sensitivities as to what I think our general society would deem appropriate. Even when I am wearing my dark suits, white shirts, and the occasional fedora when it is cold but not too windy, I do not think that the casual onlooker would mark me as a member of the “yeshivish” community. I look more like a ‘30s mobster in a fedora than I do like a “yeshiva bochur.”

My son Gadi, the engineer, wears jeans and sweaters and colored sport shirts to work on normal workdays, will dress a little more formally with a jacket and tie for meetings with clients, and has the wardrobe to keep dressing ever upwards for time and occasion. He wears either clipped on crocheted kipot or those little leather ones you get at weddings and bar mitzvahs. He is religious, but he, too, does not look “yeshivish.” I have always said that my younger son looks like the kind of modern orthodox, professional-occupation, congregational baal habayit who might sit on the committee to hire someone like my older son to be the congregation’s rabbi.

Clothes may make the man, that is, clothes may signal social status, occupation, wealth, ethnic affinities, and many subtle nuances and distinctions as well as subsets within all of these categories. Moreover, the styles of clothing evolve over time as well as do their appropriateness to status or occasion within cultures and between cultures. In the contemporary United States of America, the trend towards leisure clothing for all sexes and ages and occasions is such a democratic equalizer that people look for subtleties of labeling and minor details to telegraph that my pair of denim jeans is really a much more expensive, upscale pair of jeans than yours. We may superficially dress alike, but really I am a person of status, power, and means. Look more closely at my “democratic” clothing! Reverse snobbery can also make some people philosophically dress beneath their status and means. It is obvious that clothing always is in every culture much more than a simple means to cover one’s nakedness.

In our parshah of Tetzaveh, it is a certainty that clothes do make the kohen! “…V’asu et bigday Aharon l’kadisho l’chahano li—they shall fashion Aaron’s garments in order to make him sacred and to make him into a kohen for Me.” The kohanic vestments served “for splendor and for beauty” to lend dignity, status, and importance to the “office” of the kohen. Moreover, a kohen could not even officiate without wearing his kohanic clothing. The clothes make the kohen, literally.

Jewish scholars are to be mindful of their garments and their appearances. They are physical embodiments of God’s word and commandments. They, too, are to dress so as to lend dignity, status, and importance to the “office” of the chacham, to honor God and to inspire reverence in their pupils.

All of us Jews are to be a “nation of priests and prophets.” We should all dress with the appropriate level of dignity for each occasion and our role in it, in attire that is clean, in good condition, and in combinations that do not encourage mockery but rather respect. It is for the glory of God and the Torah that each of us in our lives is like a “teaching priest.”

Whatever particular styles and nuances of fashion we happen to choose for ourselves, whatever subsets of lifestyle, philosophy, and belief we choose to telegraph to the world by our clothing on any given occasion, it behooves us to strive in our lives to be “clothed in righteousness.” Some can do it in jeans. Some can do it wearing cufflinks.

2003-02-07T14:29:00.000-05:00

TERUMAH

In the course of my rabbinic career, I have given two congregations their Hebrew names. In both congregations it was a struggle to get the Hebrew names that I had chosen passed in committee and by the board of directors. Up until the “namings,” each congregation had just the most prosaic, unimaginative English names: the Baldwin Jewish Center, the Bellmore Jewish Centre. Both were “B.J.C.”s to their congregants. At least you knew their geographical locations.

The name that I liked for Bellmore, with more than a decade to think about it after I had named Baldwin, was “Or Zarua.” I had always felt that a shul should be a place of learning and enlightenment. If the name had been passed right away, we would have been the first congregation in the New York area to my knowledge to incorporate this particular Hebrew name. Meanwhile, in the two years it took to get it passed, a newly formed congregation in Manhattan took this name. What was holding back my congregation? To some, on the Hebrew name committee, “Or Zarua” was too hard to pronounce. To some, it was too difficult to remember. To some, it was not a recognizable synagogue name, like “Temple Shalom,” or “Temple Israel.” When I finally got across to them the wonderful symbolic significance of the meaning of the name, the board still had to make emendations or they wouldn’t pass this name. We had to spell “Or” O-H-R. Why? Even after I pointed out that there was no “Hey” in the Hebrew spelling of “or,” there were those who felt that the full name of the shul -- Bellmore Jewish Centre- Or Zarua -- would read on the letterhead as though it was “either” the Bellmore Jewish Centre “or” Zarua! So much for “sowing light for the righteous.”

Baldwin was a slightly different kind of struggle. I was rabbi there at the time of the congregation’s fiftieth anniversary. As part of the jubilee celebration, the congregation would finally add a Hebrew name. At the time, I suggested: “Kehillat Kodesh,” Community of Holiness. Some thought it sounded like a name better suited for a chevra kadisha. At least it showed a generational difference from Bellmore in relating to the selection of a Hebrew name. The Baldwinites had to be aware of the term “chevra kadisha,” the group that prepares the dead for burial, and the fact that “chevra kadisha” in Aramaic is similar in meaning to the Hebrew “Kehillat Kodesh.” But, of course, I explained that our congregations are always referred to in Hebrew as “Kahal Kadosh,” Holy Congregation. “Kehillat Kodesh,” therefore, could be a nice Hebrew name for a synagogue. Jewish “kedoshim,” holy ones, were not only the dead and buried, but all of us living Jews. In fact, we were enjoined by the Torah to be this “am kadosh v’goy kadosh,” this holy people. There were those who argued: “But isn’t Kehillat Kodesh, then, a bit presumptuous? After all, we of this congregation are far from leading holy lives.” I answered: “Kehillat Kodesh is not descriptive of the present, but a goal for each of us to strive to attain, to become a community of holiness.” “Kehillat Kodesh” was added to the congregation’s name.

The Torah parshah of Terumah brought back these memories. Whether in the proper chronological order or not, Parshat Terumah introduces the mitzvah to build a sanctuary, a portable temple. “V’asu li mikdash, v’shachanti b’tocham,” They shall make a sanctuary for Me, so that I may dwell among them. The sanctuary is not a dwelling place for God. God cannot be confined. The sanctuary is rather a focal point of ritual contemplation so that God may dwell among us, in our midst. It is a “mikdash,” a sacred entity by virtue of its having been differentiated and set aside from the ordinary, as is implied in all the Hebrew words stemming from the root “kof-dalet-shin.” It is we who learn how to make the distinctions between “kodesh” and “chol,” right and wrong, good and evil, “do” and “don’t do,” “permitted” and “prohibited,” and we who build the mikdash so that we may strive to actually become the am kadosh, the people set aside and dedicated to being a light unto the nations. “Kadosh” truly is neither a conceit on our part nor a chauvinistic arrogance. We are “set aside,” we have become “dedicated” to the achievement of religious goals that are always a lifelong stretch to reach. It is the process of kedushah, not necessarily some end result, that makes each and every one of us kedoshim.

For us, in our time and place, the synagogue is a kind of mikdash. But many of us think that our practice of Judaism is confined to gatherings on the synagogue premises. This attitude ignores the “saifa” of our passage in Terumah: “They shall make a sanctuary for Me, so that I may dwell among them.”

I have always thought that the description of our dining tables at home as a “mikdash me’at,” a small sanctuary, meant more than just the Pharisaic practice of eating our “chullin” in a state of purity as were “kodoshim,” sacrificial foods, while the Temple was standing. To me, our dining tables, which should be focal places for the interactions of our families and the transmission of our masoret, highlight that our homes are primary training grounds for kedushah, that then extend to “when we walk by the way,” and “at all times,” so that God may dwell among us.

That “light may be sown for the righteous” in a “community of holiness” means that “Or Zarua” and “Kehillat Kodesh” are appropriate names for congregations. But it will forever be a struggle to get these points across. Our “Am Kadosh” is too busy struggling against its own “kedushah.”

2003-01-31T12:30:00.000-05:00

MISHPATIM

Another of our contemporary clichés is “Whatever goes around comes around.” While I don’t know the source of this saying, I certainly hope it’s a truism. I have spent much of my professional and personal life helping people solve their personal problems, often “going out of my way” “above and beyond the call of duty,” connecting the out of work with my personal acquaintances in order to get them job interviews, being the crucial character witness as the congregant’s rabbi so that goals were achieved in some process that required references that were actually checked, being an advocate for people who “fell from grace” in some way in school or the workplace who helped keep them in place for second chances when the powers that be wanted to “kick them to the curb.” In the main, I can’t complain. My personal life has been truly blessed. (I don’t want to give myself an “eyn hara.”)

However, I would be less than honest, perhaps more than human, if I did not admit that I still feel the hurt and the sting of those whom I have helped significantly in their personal lives turning around and being very cavalier about my life. While my own sense of religiosity, imposed upon my base nature through Torah and conscious self-discipline, keeps suppressing my thoughts for appropriate painful and humiliating consequences for those who have done me wrong, I still harbor hopes for a kind of justice in the universe that takes care of the kinds of wrongdoings that are outside of the realm of a court of law.

Can we find anything like “what goes around comes around” in the Torah?

We have a suggestion of this notion in the parshah of Mishpatim. Mishpatim presents a series of both civil and criminal laws. I found a hint of “what goes around comes around” in the way the Talmud in Makkot interprets the precise wording of a particular law. “Va-asher lo tzadah v’haelokim inna l’yado; v’samti l’cha makom asher yanus shamma – But for one who had NOT lain in ambush and GOD HAD CAUSED IT to come to his hand; I shall provide you a place to which he can flee.” “God had caused it to come into his hand” – the person who caused the accidental murder was not guilty of negligence that the murder was caused through him. “God has made everything for his own purposes.” God uses many messengers to exact justice. The Talmud in Makkot sees the case referred to in the Torah verse as follows: Two people had committed murder in the past, one willfully (b’mezid), one accidentally (bishgaggah). There were no witnesses to either of these murders, so the court could not impose the appropriate sentences –death for the willful murder, exile to a “refuge city” for the accidental. God, in His own time and way, brings these two together in the same place. The latter accidentally kills the former, but this time in front of two witnesses. Thus, the willful murderer ultimately was “executed” and the accidental killer finally was sentenced to exile, his rightful atonement as well as his punishment. Neither got off the hook for their original crimes. “God has made everything for His own purposes.” I would say, “what goes around comes around.”

Remember what Hillel said in Pirke Avot when he saw a skull floating in the water? What goes around comes around.

It is up to me as a person aspiring to be religious to keep doing right by other people simply because it is the right thing to do. While it is impossible to forgive I try to keep the past hurts to myself by others behind me as I look to the future and other opportunities to do mitzvoth and in general try my best to be compassionate and helpful when the opportunities present themselves.

“God has made everything for His own purposes.” “What goes around comes around.” I may forget, but as to those who think they get away with bad behavior towards their fellows, there is no statute of limitations. I say to them, “Watch out for trolley cars!”

2003-01-24T13:49:00.000-05:00

YITRO

One of my joys is playing with my grandchildren at “my son, the Rabbi” Zvi’s apartment. On a few past occasions Zvi has picked me up in his car and we have gone to his home together. I noticed that when he comes to his apartment door, with his wife Shira and the kids inside, even though he has his key already inserted into the lock, he knocks to announce his presence. He doesn’t just open the door “stam.” Knowing my firstborn son the way I do, after nearly thirty years of close observation, I know that practically everything he does, as gestures that do not occur to me naturally, must be based upon a “pasuk” or a “maamar,” some kind of source in Torah.

Sure enough, while reviewing the parshah of Yitro, I serendipitously stumbled upon Rav Zvi’s source for knocking on his own door. To the passage “Ani chotencha Yitro ba elecha…I, your father-in-law Yitro have come to you…,” Sforno comments that Yitro announced his coming beforehand as an ethical act so that Moses could prepare for them…as our Sages say: ”Al tikanes l’vaitcha pit’om…Do not enter your home suddenly (unannounced), how much more so the home of your friend (Pesachim 112a).”

In truth, this whole little vignette is one of thousands of ways that both my sons, Zvi and Gadi – each in his own way according to his unique interests and personality, have been teachers to their father. I have grown more religious all during the years of their growing up. I learned second hand from them as their educations molded them in ways that provided me with the impetus for continued personal growth. As my own father has often put it, upon observing me calling up my sons for information relevant to their “specialties,” “The egg is teaching the chicken.” “You know what?” I tell my father. “It gives me a great deal of nachas that I can learn from my children.” I am proud of the way they turned out as men, and I have the utmost respect for their minds.

Yes, as their father, I have also been their teacher for many things in their growing up, both assimilated by them and rejected, as is the healthy nature of things. Traditionally, they are to think of me as “Avi, mori--my father, my teacher.” I have always admitted that I have gotten from my sons more “koved” than perhaps I deserve because of their own practice of the mitzvah of “kibud av va-em,” from Aseret Hadibrot also in the parshah of Yitro, that they brought back into their childhood home from their Jewish educations on the outside.

I, personally, have learned much from my father, from my teachers, from my colleagues, from my students. But most of all, I have learned from my children. To watch Zvi as he goes about his day is to experience “Torah hi v’lilmod ani tzarich…his very behavior is Torah and learn it I must.”

Believe me, it is a blessing from God that my son has become my rabbi.

2003-01-17T15:46:00.000-05:00

BESHALACH

Back in my California days, when I was young, single and a Rosh Edah at Camp Ramah in Ojai, I had occasion on a day off to take the Universal Studios tour at the real Universal Studios. As part of the tour, there was on the shoreline of a man-made pond a little spot that seemed to me to be hardly a foot square. The tour guide announced that this little spot with its mechanical “parting of the waters” was the special effect for the parting of the Red Sea in the movie “The Ten Commandments.” It was filmed and used as an enlarged, “blown up” background so that the actors would seem to walk through a cinematic “kriat yam suf.” Needless to say, this “discovery” was for me a big let down.

I first saw the movie “The Ten Commandments” when it was originally released to theaters in 1956. I was a not quite ten- year- old kid who was off from school for the “Easter-Pesach break.” The City Line Center Cinema in 1956 in Overbrook Park, Philadelphia, during the years when the neighborhood was still new, catered to a population of mostly Jews. Two things are forever emblazoned in my memory from that seminal experience. One: the sensation of sitting in a matinee during chol hamoed Pesach being tortured by the pervasive, tantalizing, chometzdigeh aroma of theater popcorn while I sat rattling my smuggled-in “Kosher for Passover” raspberry hard candies that came packaged in a glass jar. And, two: the spectacle of this big screen movie, with a script taken from the Bible with additions gleaned from the midrash via Ginsberg’s Legends of the Jews, forever imprinting in a young Jewish boy’s mind a visual image of the characters, scenery, artifacts, and interactions of the Biblical narrative from Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy.

To this day, when I sit at our Passover seders, I think of the movie. When we come to the sidra of Beshalach-Shabbat Shirah every year, I think of the movie. When I daven in P’sukey d’Zimra the “Az Yashir,” from this very parshah, I think of the little water- parting machine at Universal Studios!

My rational, quasi-learned adult Jewish mind knows that the images and script of “The Ten Commandments” are shallow, archeologically “inventive,” and often just plain silly compared to how the tensions of the Biblical narrative could have been presented. Yet, the movie is stuck in my mind. My brain has been branded!

In a lot of ways, however, the influence of a Hollywood spectacle and the willing suspension of disbelief involved in its special effects having such an impact on the formative years of my Jewish identity, is symptomatic, I think, of a larger American Jewish phenomenon in our generation. Much of our synagogue and communal Jewish life is theater, “smoke and mirrors,” and special effects. We can get away with it as rabbis because our congregants are so Jewishly ignorant, unobservant, and at best only willing to be entertained, if at all, by dramatically presented “Judaism Lite,” rather than encouraged to deeply study, observe the practices, and to “get real” as Jews. How much congregational “minhag” in our time has come about by rabbis’ uninformed answers to simple procedural questions by even more abysmally ignorant “ritual committees,” who democratically vote on congregational practice and custom? Most of it! How many congregants think of two rabbinic opinions, one validly halachic and one on the same subject just “made up” or coming from secular culture, as being two rabbinic “interpretations?” All of them do! How many congregants “shop” until they find the rabbi who is “understanding” and will “validate” as official ideology their straying from Torah in their personal and family lives? A good many do! They get upset when their “movements” are challenged intellectually and sociologically by observant Jews. How many congregants judge their religious leaders by show business standards at the high holidays services, rather than look inward to real self-improvement, real teshuvah? I am afraid nearly all of them do.

We have been ruined by the movies, by television, and, in general, by the “entertainment industry.” We are not conditioned to active, strenuous, sustained intellectual activity and growth, and we wish to confront our deepest values, practices, and communal norms as passive, amused, short attention span spectators rather than life-long participants. It’s like we think we are crossing the Red Sea when it is only the projection on a screen of something really very small and fake.

During my years in the pulpit rabbinate I tried my best to be “real” to an audience hardly able to tell the difference. Some may have been influenced for the better over the years. But even though as a rabbi I always saw myself as perhaps being on the “high end” of inadequacy, I know I didn’t have what it takes in my milieu to make a suburban congregation of disappearing Jews into a kehillah of Jews for the ages.

Perhaps the American rabbinate is endemically seen more as a “profession,” if not just “a job,” with the egocentric overlay of “career.” It is at this post-rabbinic, retirement stage of my life that I am endeavoring to immerse myself in what is “real” Jewishly, to continue to learn, and to recharge my inner life, before I can once again think of myself as someone who has something to teach and has found the way to get it through to fellow Jews.

What most of us lose sight of in our cinematic, special effects crossing of the Red Sea of Jewish life is the source of it all as exclaimed by Moses in the “Az Yashir,” The Song of the Sea:

“This is my God…!”

There is not much place for God in “Judaism Lite.” And I don’t mean God as played by the booming voice in “The Ten Commandments.”

2003-01-10T16:09:00.000-05:00

BO

“Yitziat Mitzraim,” the Exodus from Egypt, is thought of as “geulah,” redemption. I never really understood “redemption” until I retired from the pulpit rabbinate. Sometimes, I suppose, you have to totally leave a situation, even one that in large part defined an adult life, in order to grow and develop further an inner self. As with a root bound potted plant, the remedy is to change the pot to a bigger one with fresh, fertile potting soil to enable luxuriant growth (and perhaps even bloom) on the next, higher level. To stay in the smaller, depleted pot is to slowly wither and die from lack of space and nourishment.

Since leaving the pulpit rabbinate, I have established two households, both purchased though mortgaged, in two places of my choosing—Riverdale and Haifa—in precisely the apartments, with precisely the accoutrements, with precisely even the river and Mediterranean “views” that my wife and I had wanted on our personal wish lists. Liberty, “dror,” is defined by Rashi as the ability to live wherever one chooses. After an adult life living in congregational housing, after having to live walking distance from the job, in a house and a community that I otherwise would not have chosen to purchase or live, living in my own two homes (no less!) was the first essential condition of my personal liberation. So far, I have found my way in two new communities, in two different countries, living daily life in two different languages. I proved to myself that I could do it. The rest of the “transplant” will involve continued personal growth.

In Parshat Bo, the narrative of “Yitziat Mitzraim” is introduced as “This month shall be for you the beginning of months…” This section is considered the first “legal” section of the Torah. “This month…” in the Torah occasions midrashic discussion of Rosh Hodesh and the calculation of the Jewish calendar, truly “the catechism of the Jews.” Sforno, to this passage, adds a homiletical insight (as well as the “halachic” one that the earthly Bet Din declares the calendar and its holy days) by commenting that “This month shall be for YOU…” the months of the year are YOURS, to do with as you wish. During slavery, time did not belong to you, but to OTHERS to do their bidding. An important part of “geulah,” redemption, is that now your time belongs to you. You have free will to choose how you will use your time.

Since leaving the pulpit rabbinate, I now choose how I use my time. The first year of retirement was taken up in “full-time” transition of place (places!). Now, my days and weeks and months are my own. I have not given up on doing for others or going out into the community or forgetting people from my public past. But now I choose how I spend my time. Time is a necessary element both of my liberation and of my redemption.

In the Kiddush of Shabbat, the Sabbath is remembered in a two-fold way—for Creation and for “yitziat mitzraim,” the Exodus from Egypt. It seems that creativity and liberation go hand in hand. The Sabbath is a metaphor for the World to Come, the afterlife. I pray that in the “afterlife” of my retirement, I make creative, productive use of liberating place and time to grow to the next level of fulfillment in my new, personal “olam haba.”

2003-01-03T16:16:00.000-05:00

VAERA

A few years back, my wife Diane and I had occasion to stay overnight at a friend’s country home in the Catskills. This rural household included a dog that apparently had the run of the house, including all of the beds in all of the bedrooms.

I woke up in the middle of the night wheezing, congested, absolutely unable to breathe. Diane was ready to have me rushed to the hospital. It was an extreme allergic reaction to the presence of the dog, its dander, and whatever other doggie particles were imbedded in the pillows, the covers, and the sheets. I could catch my breath only by going outside the house to breathe the unconfined air of the outside world.

Over the years of my adulthood, I have been amazed at the unpredictability of my allergy to dogs and cats. It is an off and on again kind of thing.

In my parents’ home we had three cats during the period of my teens and twenties. I was not allergic to them until I went away to the Jewish Theological Seminary to study. I would be away from the cats for months at a time. When I would come back home to visit, I was all of a sudden extremely allergic to my home and my bedroom, all because of the cats. The itchy, watery red eyes I could manage, but not the shortness of breath!

I am not sure of the exact science of allergies. Something about histamines attacking foreign substances in the body. Blood vessels feel constricted as do air passageways in the lungs. At least, that is my reaction. I have noticed that my particular allergic reactions go away when I spend long periods of time away from close contact with cats and dogs, and then do not spend an overly long period of time in a house with these kinds of pets. If I spend hours, especially lying down in a bed where they have been before me, my allergic symptoms kick in with a vengeance. I can go for a decade sitting in pet owners’ living rooms on visits without incident even with the dog or cat present in the room. Then, whammo, the same kind of situation hits me all of a sudden wherein a little whistling in my chest becomes a struggle to breathe.

I was thinking of my allergic reactions upon reading the Torah portion of Vaera.
Moses is telling the Children of Israel that the God of their ancestors will redeem them from slavery in Egypt. But “they didn’t listen to Moses from ‘kotzer ruach’ and hard labor.” Rashi interprets “kotzer ruach” literally as “shortness of breath.” He sees their inattention to Moses’ message as the result of their heavy breathing caused by the exertions of their hard labor. Sforno and Ibn Ezra see “ruach” more as “spirit,” interpreting “kotzer ruach” either as impatience to listen to Moses’ words because of the length of their exile in Egypt or as a shortness of spirit, a lack of faith, a symptom of a dispirited slave mentality.

I think we all know fellow Jews who seem “allergic” to their own Jewishness, walking asthmatics of spiritual “kotzer ruach” sending out self loathing histamines to combat everything Jewish that might enter into their inner lives. I don’t know if some even suffer from an excess of bad exposure during their childhood educational experiences or in their parental homes. Some take years, and decades “off,” dropping out of their Jewish lives, until they have calmed down enough to engage themselves anew in Torah and the concerns and needs of the Jewish community in order to recover belatedly what was missing from their lives.

I, too, find myself in periods of relative “wax and wane” Jewishly. Between periods of great Jewish intensity at different ages and circumstances in my life, I also need periods to breathe a bit of different outside air as my way of changing cumulative, constrictive “kotzer ruach” to a renewed, expansive Jewish “neshamah.” I come back to Torah again, more enthusiastically, and able to freely breathe.

I do not wish “kotzer ruach” on anyone. I wish for everyone that I care about that they find their true “neshamah,” the breath of life.

2002-12-28T19:34:00.000-05:00

SHEMOT

My four-year-old granddaughter calls me “Bu.” Her baby brother has just started calling me Bu as he begins to assimilate his family traditions. Actually, when my granddaughter was born it was I who opted to be called Bu as my “grandfather name.” My mechutan, also a first-time grandfather, chose to be called “Zeidie.” My father, now a great-grandfather, was for years already called “Sabba.” I did not wish to co-opt his name, may God give him many more years of the kids calling him Sabba. “Grandpa” was also already taken by my wife’s father. Anyway, I am not the Norman Rockwell image of a Grandpa or a Gramps or a Poppi . Poppop was one of my own grandfathers, may he rest in peace, and he shall always be so in family lore. So I asked to be called “Bu,” short for “Abu Zvi,” “Father of Zvi,” taking, as some of the Arabs do, the name of the firstborn son, who also happened to be father of my first grandchild. To my grandchildren, I am “Bu.”

During her “threes,” my granddaughter used to get upset a little when her parents, my wife, or others would call me by “other” names in her presence. How could I be “Abba” when her father was “Abba?” She used to laugh when I explained that I was “Abba’s Abba.” My various other personal names when heard spoken by others used to drive her mad. “No. He’s called Bu.” She would correct them.

Actually, she is just beginning to understand that people have more than one name, and are called different things depending upon circumstance and relationship. I have so many names and different contexts to my life now that I often feel like an actor doing a one-man show of multiple sketches. On my birth certificate and U.S. passport I am “Judah Leonard Romm.” My Jewish name is Yehuda Leib. I was named after a great-grandfather who was called by his middle name and an honorific—“Reb Leib.” At home, when I was a child, my father would call me “Leibel.” In school, I was “Leonard.” “Lenny” is what the other kids called me as well as my parents in an “American” mode. My wife has several “pet” names for me. They are none of your business. Professionally and formally my name is “J. Leonard Romm.” It is how I sign my signature in English. On making aliyah, my name for the identity card, driver’s license, and Israeli passport, and all other accounts and documents is “Yehuda Leonard Romm.” I sign my name in Hebrew with two initials and my last name—“Yod Lamed Romm.” There are people in Israel who know me only as Yehuda Romm. The watchman at our Haifa apartment calls me “Yudeleh.” There are some in America and in Israel who still know me as “Rabbi Romm.” What can I do? It is hard to shake it off.

We all, I think, have multiple names as we live our lives that are exceedingly complex. The Torah portion of Shemot begins the Torah Book of Exodus. “These are the names of the Children of Israel who came down to Egypt.” The midrash claims that they stayed a people even in diaspora because they kept their distinctive costume, the Hebrew language, and their Hebrew names. While the observation is good sociology for ethnic group identity amongst a majority “other” population, we know that Joseph had more than one name. Probably since the beginning of time, people had many different names simultaneously throughout their lifetimes. Our goal throughout life, through our behavior and deeds, is to amalgamate all our names, all our many facets, and acquire a “good name,” a “shem tov.”

But if you should ask me what at this stage of my life is my favorite of all my names, I’d have to say: “I love most hearing little voices calling me ‘Bu’.”

2002-12-20T15:56:00.000-05:00

VAYECHI

An outsider to our family might see us as a little bit crazy. My wife and I still bless our sons at Shabbat evening dinner even though they are grown up, married, out of the house, and not physically present at the time of the blessings. Individually blessed, too, are our daughters-in-law and each of our grandchildren as well.

Of course, our sons began receiving their blessings from us at Shabbat dinner as soon as each came into the world. They grew up being formally blessed in person each week with the blessing in Hebrew from the Torah parshah of Vayechi: “Yesim’cha… May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe.” To this blessing from the Torah we added: “Shehtigdal…That you may grow to the study of Torah, to the marriage canopy, and to a life of good deeds.”

Each son married. We were thrilled with their choices of life’s partners and began including their wives in our parental blessings inasmuch as we loved them, too, as daughters. We blessed them even though they were not necessarily physically present at our table with: “Yesimaych…May God make you as Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, and Leah.” We could not bless married children with future hopes for “the marriage canopy,” so we concluded the married children’s blessings with the traditional Priestly Blessing: “Yevarech’cha… May God bless you and keep you….” We have never stopped blessing our sons and their brides and make this a formal event every Friday night.

Each grandchild born into the family extended the roll call of descendents receiving our Shabbat blessings, even when not physically present at our Friday night table. The little kids also renewed our blessing to them that they grow to a life of “Torah, Huppah, and good deeds.”

When our sons were young and present at the table, they were touched physically, emotionally, and mentally by our blessings on a formal, weekly basis over the years of their growing up in our home. They were touched by our absolute parental love, our desires that they incorporate into their lives all of the best of the values and beliefs that we cherish, and that they themselves be an active link in the “masoret,” the transmission of Torah and Jewish peoplehood from generation to generation. The weekly Shabbat blessing gave us the opportunity to formalize what all of our other life’s choices, decisions, and interpersonal interactions conveyed on a subconscious level to them.

As the family grew and yet another generation became part of our personal universe, our continuation of the blessing ritual, even though the recipients might not be physically present, still conveys our most heartfelt connection to each of them and the moral and spiritual legacy we bequeath to them.

I think, too, that this blessing ritual even in absentia also symbolizes to our generations that this legacy, this “masoret,” is something that we bestow as an eternal blessing to all our descendents, even though we will someday ourselves no longer be physically present in this world.

2002-12-14T19:36:00.000-05:00

VAYIGASH

It is a cliché of the “buddy movies” that the two central characters will express at some point: “He’s more than a friend. He’s like a brother to me.” I know what they are trying to say, but I think that they miss the mark and would be better off saying: “He’s much more than a brother to me. He’s my friend.”

Brothers have strange, often conflicting feelings towards one another. There are jealousy, rivalry, and enmity to name but a few. Financial and career disparities, differences in commitment and responsibility towards parents and to the extended family all add up to a volatile cocktail of real life conflict among brothers, especially if parents do not deftly handle these disparities among their offspring, do not give extra attention neither for the successful nor for the strugglers, and make it clear how each is to contribute fairly and equitably to the family or tribal whole. At extended family gatherings on holidays, grandchildren are often amazed at how their parents, middle-aged, act out childhood family scripts in the presence of the aged grandparents. Yet, their generation, too, has developed its own elaborate scripts among the siblings. “Like a brother” is not always such a compliment.

Joseph and his brothers are a case in point. Yes, I know that the Torah narrative and the midrash see the whole soap opera as God’s will to save the Children of Israel. Yet, if we permit ourselves to penetrate beyond the mindset that “these are all righteous men,” we discover a Jacob who as a father plays favorites just as his parents did, a Joseph who as Rachel’s firstborn and therefore father’s favorite is egocentric and insensitive to the smoldering resentments he is creating in his siblings, and a seething pot of personal agendas among the brothers, especially among the Leah sons Reuben, Simon, and Judah. We must also take note of how the brothers treat the youngest and second Rachel son Benjamin, in order to win for themselves their father’s love and undying appreciation.

In the Torah portion of Vayigash, we reach the denouement of the Joseph saga. The narrative since the beginning has been tracking the lives of both Joseph and Judah. Now these archetypes of the two future kingdoms of Israel, split after a civil war among “brothers,” confront each other. Joseph sees the brotherly interactions of his brothers towards each other and their absolute devotion to their father. They can unite when faced with a threat they believe to be coming from outside “the family.” Judah and the brothers are about to learn that Joseph, the brother they betrayed and exiled from the family, is willing to use his acquired power to preserve his family and protect them in Egypt.

Brothers do have strong bonds, after all, maybe even love, based upon common ancestry, genes, family traditions, loyalties, and even the baggage. They share some common history with one another. One hopes that all our personal “family stuff” ultimately proves to be God’s plan for the greater good. Maybe some day brothers might even rise to the level of friends.

2002-12-06T13:49:00.000-05:00

MIKETZ

In the language of our day, there is much talk about “closure” so that people can “move on” with their lives. Some final gesture – like placing a monument at the scene of a disaster, or pronouncing sentence on the perpetrator of a heinous, traumatic crime—is supposed to “close” the emotional file of memories and aftereffects of the suffering victims and allow them to move forward in their lives.

If there ever truly is such a thing as “closure,” coming to terms with and closing that emotional file, if there ever truly is such a thing as putting memories and feelings of loss behind one, I do not sense it intuitively. I think that each of life’s experiences, both good and bad, tends to be creating the work of art that each of us is throughout our entire lives. Every modification is permanent and layered into the whole, to be retrieved when needed from somewhere in our hard drive.

After Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream to mean seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, he is appointed to a ruling position in Egypt, takes a wife, and has two sons by her – quite a turnaround from slavery and false imprisonment! When naming his first-born Menashe, Joseph explains: “Ki nashani …God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s household.” At first, I thought that this was an expression of “closure,” of “getting over” past trauma and loss in order to “move on.” But has Joseph really forgotten all that has happened in the past including his family? Obviously not. And we know that his past is soon to catch up with him again when his brothers come down to Egypt during the years of famine. Everything that has happened, for good and for bad, was part of a larger picture of Joseph’s destiny, and the destiny of everyone touched by it.

Joseph is really saying: “Ki nashani… God has helped me let the pain of my defeats and troubles fade so as not to paralyze me emotionally and prevent me from growing throughout my life.” The proof of this is in the name Ephraim selected for his second-born: “Ki hifrani…for God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.” There is no “closure” on past suffering here, but being productive and “fruitful,” even in the midst of his suffering.

What helped Joseph? He got himself a job and threw himself into his work. That, too, was part of his destiny.

Our lives are a constantly “open file.” The trick to dealing with travail and trauma is how we “save as” to determine how that file will develop and grow.

2002-12-03T17:37:00.000-05:00

VAYESHEV

Parshat Vayeshev begins the “Joseph Saga” of the final chapters of the Book of Bereishith. It is as good a place as any to begin these musings.

On the subway this past week, I saw a young man reading an Egyptian newspaper. He was sitting directly across the aisle from me. While I do not read Arabic, I did make out a cartoon facing me from the back of his newspaper fold. It had President Bush sitting at his desk in the oval office talking to Ariel Sharon standing in front of the presidential desk. I did not know what the voice balloons had the two caricatures saying to one another, but the grotesque cartoon drawings of the two were definitely uncomplimentary. The whole cartoon telegraphed disapproval of the two depicted figures. The young man got off at the Columbia University stop, a place where a group of professors and students blame Israel for all kinds of immoral and criminal behavior. Should I make personal prejudicial claims and link this student and his newspaper to the phenomenon?

Joseph in Egypt refuses his master’s wife’s advances with a “shalsheleth,” a long Torah trope denoting “strong emphasis.” Joseph, in fact, has the moral high ground in avoiding the seduction desired by Potiphar’s wife. He is innocent and morally superior to his accuser, who claims that he tried to rape her. The accusation and the claim are actually a projection onto someone else of this woman’s own desires, lusts, and behavior.

So, too, we see this phenomenon in modern Egypt with its controlled, anti-Semitic press. Think of today’s Egypt with its racism, anti-feminism, anti-Coptic Christian abuse, governmental suppression of democracy and dissent, and an imperialistic desire to be the leader of the entire Arab world. Then think about the way the Egyptian media portray Jews and the State of Israel and the obsessive way they focus upon these topics. Do you think that we see projection onto “the other” of all of Egypt’s own sins and faults?

What I don’t understand is how the supposedly intelligent professors and students at our top universities, Jews among them, can be so gullible about a process of “projection” by the movements of the Arab and Muslim world. Their naïve yammerings and demonstrations I reject with a resounding “shalsheleth.”

2002-11-29T11:51:00.000-05:00

In Hebrew "kol romm" means "a loud voice." This site hopefully will be one in which issues of the day, both for the individual and for the greater community of the world, can be addressed. While Prophets spoke of a "still, small voice," we lesser lights probably need a louder one so that the "still, small voice" can be heard.