6 Elul

From Rabbi David Wolpe

Everything is temporary and everything is reborn: the grass withers and the flower fades but in time there are budding blades and fresh flowers. Monday morning: set aside what was, for today the world is made anew.

(BGL)

5 Elul

Ben Folds sings a song called, “Best Imitation of Myself,” in which he defends his personality and style against an apparent critic who wants him to be someone else.  During the bridge he seems to wonder if the critic is right, singing, “Maybe I’m thinking myself in a hole, wondering who I am when I ought to know.”  This is probably something we all wonder from time to time, if we are being true to ourselves.  A relatively well-known Hasidic teaching has a rabbi named Zusya being asked by his students on his deathbed if he worries God will ask him why he was not more like Moses.  He responds, “No, I will worry that God will ask me why I was not more like Zusya” (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim).

The month of Elul gives us the opportunity to explore who we are when we ought to know, so that when the High Holy Days arrive and we come to our Day of Judgment we can easily say, “This year I will be more like me.”

(DNY)

3/4 Elul

In the interest of not posting on Shabbat, here are the Elul Thoughts for Friday and Saturday:

3 Elul/August 9

A quote often attributed to David Mamet: The difference between a good person and everyone else can be summed up like this: a good person, when walking down the street and glimpsing a house on fire, hopes it is his/her own.  How have you been good in 5773?  How do you aspire not to do good but to be good in 5774?

(BGL)

4 Elul/August 10

On the exterior wall of the synagogue where I grew up in Queens, NY, a quote from the prophet Micah was emblazoned in a beautiful mosaic, “It has been told to you, oh human, what is good and what God requires of you.  Only that you do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)  These words were also carved into the façade of the old UAHC offices on 5^th Avenue in New York City, now a multi-million dollar apartment building.  In the Talmud (Makkot 23b-24a) it is quoted as one of the summaries of all Jewish teaching, encompassing all of Judaism’s obligations for how we act in our world.  Each of the three exhortations is open to our own individual interpretations.  How would you define these three commandments?  Do you practice them in some form?  How might you incorporate them into your daily life?

(DNT)

2 Elul

Do you play a musical instrument? Do you like playing sports or are you a gym nut?

I ask because all of these take preparation. Before running a 5k, you warm-up, walking briskly to get your muscles prepared for the jaunt ahead. Before a concert, you play scales on your instrument, tuning it and going over some riffs before the conductor raises the baton.

This month of Elul is our warmup.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur can be likened to the race, or the concert. They are the events we are training for. These 30 days of Elul help us to spiritually warm ourselves up so that we will be ready.

The High Holidays are meant to be the culminating days of an experiencing that starts now.

Let us remember to do our spiritual stretches on each of these days of Elul.

(EGL)

1 Elul 5773/Aug. 7 2013

The month of Elul precedes the High Holidays. Its 28 days are meant as a time for introspection, learning and growth. Judaism teaches that we don’t just walk into the Rosh Hashanah service, all ready to go. Elul is a ‘warm-up’ time, allowing us to spiritually stretch ourselves to prepare for the intensity (and joy) of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  For the last few years, some colleagues and I have collaborated on a project that we call “Elul Thoughts.”  As I mentioned in the August bulletin, every day during the Hebrew month of Elul you will receive a brief message in your inbox from me with one of these thoughts.  The purpose of these messages is to get us ready for the High Holy Days, just as Elul provides this readiness for the Jewish people all over the world.

This year’s Elul Thoughts represent a compilation of brief teachings from Rabbi Rachel G. Greengrass from Temple Beth Am in Miami, Florida; Rabbi Bradley G. Levenberg from Temple Sinai in Atlanta, Georgia; Rabbi Eric G. Linder from Temple Israel in Athens, Georgia; Rabbi Alan E. Litwak from Temple Sinai in North Miami Beach, Florida; Rabbi Daniel N. Treiser from Temple B’nai Israel in Clearwater, Florida; and Rabbi David N. Young from Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley, California. 

 

Observant Jews:

When the Jewish community talks about Jews being "observant," it usually means that they follow the mitzvot - those sacred obligations that define us as Jews.  One of the rabbis that I studied with this summer made the following play on words: "Most American Jews are observant . . . all they do is observe, not participate." 

The month of Elul is a time to reassess who we are and what we are doing.  This can mean repairing our interpersonal relationships.  We can use the month to evaluate our work situation.  You can skip the December/January rush and not just make some new resolutions, but actually accomplish them.  You can find deep meaning in living a Jewish life.  The key to all of this is participation; not standing by the sidelines watching others do it.

(AEL)

Looking To Make Your Story Ours

This is a copy of the Weekly Email we send to members of Congregation B'nai Tzedek. Please feel free to share: 

 

On NPR a few months ago they ran a story about a magazine that challenges famous people to write six-word stories about their own life.  They published six-word stories from people like Gloria Steinam (“Life is one big editorial meeting”) and Molly Ringwald (“Acting is not all I am”).  At the end of the story they challenged listeners to come up with their own six-word autobiographies, and over the next few months they would often read submissions that were of interest (“Oh Dear. I am my mother”), or even that inspired other NPR stories (“Ask who I am, not what”).

The Torah is characterized by its terseness.  Contrasting the Torah’s verbal economy is the typical rabbi’s loquaciousness (if you hadn’t already noticed).  This makes for a great challenge when trying to tell my own story in only six words.  For now I will go with:

Father, husband, rabbi, seeking CBT’s stories.

That’s my story for now—learning our story.  I really want to know who you are as a person and who we are as a congregation.  To make this happen, I offer you two chances to write a six-word story. 

First, send your own autobiography in six words.  I look forward to reading these and getting to know you briefly before we can start connecting on a deeper level.

Second, please send a six-word story about CBT.  Think about what it means to you, why you come here to worship, learn, and/or socialize.  Why do you belong to this community?  This is a contest that comes with a surprise, so please send your entries in as soon as possible.  Encourage your children to participate.  Tell your friends who might not open emails that they should send in their entry.

Please send all your entries to me at rabbiyoung@cbtfv.org by Wednesday, August 7.  The top entries will be posted (without names) in the following week’s Weekly Email, and you will have a chance to vote on which one you like best.

I am so excited to learn your story, and to begin writing ours together.

Rabbi David N. Young

Do Not Forget

“No good film is too long.  No bad movie is short enough.” –Roger Ebert

On Thursday, Roger Ebert succumbed to his 10-year battle with cancer.  For the last two days the news has been inundated with stories of Ebert and the lives he touched.  There was an incredibly touching eulogy for him in the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper for which he reviewed movies for 46 years.  I heard NPR’s movie critic remember him tenderly this morning in place of the usual Friday morning film critique.  Even those who would rather experience the movies than listen to the critics (like me) will notice a hole next week when his reviews are no longer there.  Roger Ebert and his iconic thumb have been all over the media for the past two days.

But something else started two days ago that has gotten significantly less press.

Two days ago, teens from Miami, New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and all over America left for a ten day journey from which none of them will return quite as they left.  Right now, more than 10,000 students from all over North America are in Poland, participating in the March of the Living.  This year is the 25th March of the Living, as well as the 65th Anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, and the 70th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  This Sunday evening will begin Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, inaugurated in 1953 by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

The participants in the March will walk from Aushwitz to Birkenau, a silent, 3-Kilometer walk that follows the same path the Nazis forced over 750,000 prisoners to take toward the end of WWII.  As the web site explains, “The March of the Living serves as a hopeful counterpoint to the experience of hundreds of thousands of [prisoners] forced by the Nazis to cross vast expanses of European terrain under the harshest of conditions where many of them perished.”

I do not need to stand here and retell the atrocities committed in the concentration camps and ghettos of WWII Europe.  The Holocaust has had such an impact on Jewish life today that it served as the reason my parents sent me to Religious School—so the Holocaust will never happen again.  In the Reform movement our practice for reciting Mourners’ Kaddish was changed by the Holocaust—we all stand together for those who have no one left to stand for them.  The Jewish people regularly remember the 6 million on Yom Hashoah.

On Sunday and Monday, the students in our religious school and day school will participate in memorial ceremonies for Yom Hashoah.  My father-in-law, a Holocaust Survivor himself, will speak to our students about his experiences.  Every year at Yad Vashem, six survivors are chosen to light memorial torches, one for each million who perished.  The Holocaust Documentation and Education Center is constantly trying to record the memories of survivors, as is Steven Spielberg’s Film and Video Archive of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.  We are at a critical moment in history.  Survivors are more and more willing to tell their stories as fewer and fewer of them remain to tell them.  Soon we will have only their memories in the form of their children and grandchildren relaying their stories.

And telling stories is what we do best.  From the Torah to today, Jews have thrived on our stories.  We love to tell tales of good vanquishing evil, the few overcoming the many, and the small defeating the large, to paraphrase our own liturgy.  So perhaps it is fitting that Roger Ebert would leave this world on a week when we are remembering so many stories.  He reviewed over 300 moving stories a year, and very often got to the heart in only a few paragraphs.

To quote from three reviews in particular, we can understand how he related the message he took from the movies and made it applicable and poignant to modern viewers:

"Life Is Beautiful is not about Nazis and Fascists, but about the human spirit. It is about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful from the wreckage of dreams" (Chicago Sun-Times, 1998).

“There has not again been evil on the scale of 1939-1945. [But] The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not only about Germany during the war…. It is about a value system that survives like a virus” (Chicago Sun-Times, 2008).

“The film's message is that one man did something, while in the face of the Holocaust others were paralyzed. Perhaps it took a Schindler, enigmatic and reckless, without a plan, heedless of risk, a con man, to do what he did. No rational man with a sensible plan would have gotten as far” (Chicago Sun-Times, 1993).

In his own way, Ebert reminded us, “Do not forget.”

Zichornam Livracha.  May all of the individuals from the six million martyrs to the Schindlers among them be remembered for a blessing.  May those who follow in Roger Ebert’s footsteps continue to tell our story, and allow us to honor theirs.