Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Fidel Castro.
Not to be missed.
Read it HERE
07 September 2010
06 September 2010
Above It All
27 Elul 5770
Monday run in the Park. On one of the lower traverses, beneath the bridge, I saw a red finch, a cardinal, and a robin. Everyone was very busy and their just-this-side-of-hysterical flightiness and it reminded me of the way I feel this time of year, before the New Year. Chipmunks darting about in my path didn't help either, cute little bastards.
I am aware that a cold is coming--the first that I can think of at Yuntef time, a minor annoyance for sure but I make a mental note to use at as teshuva material. (You deserve this cold, I think to myself, you who tell people to take care of themselves while never following your own advice! {Do What I Say, Don't Do What I Do, as they say...})
Oh, to float away into the beautiful sky, above it all!
Monday run in the Park. On one of the lower traverses, beneath the bridge, I saw a red finch, a cardinal, and a robin. Everyone was very busy and their just-this-side-of-hysterical flightiness and it reminded me of the way I feel this time of year, before the New Year. Chipmunks darting about in my path didn't help either, cute little bastards.
I am aware that a cold is coming--the first that I can think of at Yuntef time, a minor annoyance for sure but I make a mental note to use at as teshuva material. (You deserve this cold, I think to myself, you who tell people to take care of themselves while never following your own advice! {Do What I Say, Don't Do What I Do, as they say...})
Oh, to float away into the beautiful sky, above it all!
"Let go of this world for an hour or two--its hustle and bustle, its cunning deceptions, and all your earthly aspirations. Seclude yourself in privacy--go out into a forest if possible. Let yourself become a simple creature in God's world. With the sun, the moon, the birds and the trees, sing songs of praise to Him. Reveal the greatness of God to the world, and fill it with a sense of that greatness...Then you will know why Moshe prayed to become a bird in the sky after his passing: he yearned to sing praise to God as a simple creature before Him." Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
05 September 2010
That's the Look!
26 Elul 5770
A woman walks into my study on Sunday, a guest at a wedding.
She is in a bit of daze--and the wedding hasn't even started!
"I grew up here at Beth Elohim," she begins. And then words come out about her abiding love for the community, her wonderful childhood in Brooklyn, how much she admired her spiritual leader--Rabbi Eugene Sack, who retired in 1978. She remembered his kindness, his gentleness, his moral strength.
I would describe the smile on her face as peaceful and fulfilled to have experienced life's circle moving in a familiar pattern.
A kind of redemption in miniature so close to Rosh Hashanah, I thought.
That's the look.
A woman walks into my study on Sunday, a guest at a wedding.
She is in a bit of daze--and the wedding hasn't even started!
"I grew up here at Beth Elohim," she begins. And then words come out about her abiding love for the community, her wonderful childhood in Brooklyn, how much she admired her spiritual leader--Rabbi Eugene Sack, who retired in 1978. She remembered his kindness, his gentleness, his moral strength.
I would describe the smile on her face as peaceful and fulfilled to have experienced life's circle moving in a familiar pattern.
A kind of redemption in miniature so close to Rosh Hashanah, I thought.
That's the look.
04 September 2010
How Could We Not?
25 Elul 5770
Patterns of symmetry, cycles of return. This is what much of the High Holy Days season is about. Year after year we circle back on our awareness of the changing season; our desire for certain foods; the ritual of being with family, friends and community in certain settings; and for hearing certain words, certain melodies sung, and the sound of sounds, the Shofar's blast, to awaken ourselves to the reality of time moving on and our own inexorable march through that particularly Jewish continuum toward a greater understanding of life.
Here's one story of things coming around.
A few years ago, we received a request at CBE to host meetings for Gilda's Club of Park Slope, which we immediately agreed to do. Some of the participants' cancer treatments had made walking up large stairs difficult and at their other location, there were too many stairs to tackle so a request was made to use space at CBE on the first floor. For two years of evenings, once a week, several cancer patients and cancer survivors met in my study for a group therapy session. Each week several of the participants expressed warm gratitude and appreciation for the hospitality. "It's a mitzvah," I'd explain. "How could we not?"
At the time, B had just beaten back a scare with breast cancer and during that period of time, I learned alot from other survivors who I'd see on occasion about what B may be experiencing which helped my own understanding of what she was going through.
Eventually, Gilda' Club found another location even more convenient and the brief relationship wound down. We were proud to have helped in whatever way we could, however briefly.
About 18 months ago, with the breast cancer in remission, B received a diagnosis of lung cancer, advanced, and in the first twelve months the strategy was all about getting the right therapy while also coming to a very different existential and psychological understanding than was required for what seemed to be, in retrospect, a fairly mild form of breast cancer. During the first twelve months, I kept nudging B to head over to Gilda's Club in her neighborhood--it was literally three blocks away--but justifiably B said, "I'm not ready for that."
Then, one day, about six months, she announced to us that she had started going to meetings. And loved it. She took a Tai Chi class; attended group; and taught a basket weaving class (we have two afghans here at home courtesy of B; my desk at Shul is a maple table she and her mother stripped and refinished for my journey to Madison for college thirty years ago; and a number of needlepoints celebrating Wisconsin are scattered around our home. Her gardens were always alive with life.)
We were all tremendously relieved that the time had finally come to make new friends, comrades in battle, really, and the connections were obviously fortifying.
Last week B explained that as a result of diminished donations in a rough economy and some flooding at the Milwaukee branch, Gilda's Club was out of business. In a flash of fate, there would be no more. She was really concerned. But within twenty-four hours, the Milwaukee Jewish Community Center offered space for meeting and then this week local papers carried the story of Stan Kass, a Milwaukee area vending owner whose wife Lee had recently died of cancer, heroically stepped in make a large philanthropic gift to allow Gilda's Club to function at the JCC.
I wrote the JCC's Executive Director Mark Shapiro to thank him for the hospitality and his response was perfect: "It's a mitzvah."
How could it not be?
Each of us in the year ahead will face challenges large and small; some will be cataclysmic and seemingly insurmountable; others will be manageable. But either way, we will be tested again and again. And so looking back on the last year and looking ahead to the new year, to what degree will we able to simply answer the call to act with the notion of "mitzvah," of "commandedness," animated by the idea encoded in the words, "How could we not?"
The path to healing our world is, at times, in the words of Nachman of Breslov, a very narrow bridge. In not fearing that walk across the bridge, we act on the reality we know to be true. *Not* walking across the divide is simply not an option.
In awe, humility and gratitude, I thank the Kass family, Mark Shapiro and the Milwaukee JCC for their generosity of resource and spirit.
Patterns of symmetry, cycles of return. This is what much of the High Holy Days season is about. Year after year we circle back on our awareness of the changing season; our desire for certain foods; the ritual of being with family, friends and community in certain settings; and for hearing certain words, certain melodies sung, and the sound of sounds, the Shofar's blast, to awaken ourselves to the reality of time moving on and our own inexorable march through that particularly Jewish continuum toward a greater understanding of life.
Here's one story of things coming around.
A few years ago, we received a request at CBE to host meetings for Gilda's Club of Park Slope, which we immediately agreed to do. Some of the participants' cancer treatments had made walking up large stairs difficult and at their other location, there were too many stairs to tackle so a request was made to use space at CBE on the first floor. For two years of evenings, once a week, several cancer patients and cancer survivors met in my study for a group therapy session. Each week several of the participants expressed warm gratitude and appreciation for the hospitality. "It's a mitzvah," I'd explain. "How could we not?"
At the time, B had just beaten back a scare with breast cancer and during that period of time, I learned alot from other survivors who I'd see on occasion about what B may be experiencing which helped my own understanding of what she was going through.
Eventually, Gilda' Club found another location even more convenient and the brief relationship wound down. We were proud to have helped in whatever way we could, however briefly.
About 18 months ago, with the breast cancer in remission, B received a diagnosis of lung cancer, advanced, and in the first twelve months the strategy was all about getting the right therapy while also coming to a very different existential and psychological understanding than was required for what seemed to be, in retrospect, a fairly mild form of breast cancer. During the first twelve months, I kept nudging B to head over to Gilda's Club in her neighborhood--it was literally three blocks away--but justifiably B said, "I'm not ready for that."
Then, one day, about six months, she announced to us that she had started going to meetings. And loved it. She took a Tai Chi class; attended group; and taught a basket weaving class (we have two afghans here at home courtesy of B; my desk at Shul is a maple table she and her mother stripped and refinished for my journey to Madison for college thirty years ago; and a number of needlepoints celebrating Wisconsin are scattered around our home. Her gardens were always alive with life.)
We were all tremendously relieved that the time had finally come to make new friends, comrades in battle, really, and the connections were obviously fortifying.
Last week B explained that as a result of diminished donations in a rough economy and some flooding at the Milwaukee branch, Gilda's Club was out of business. In a flash of fate, there would be no more. She was really concerned. But within twenty-four hours, the Milwaukee Jewish Community Center offered space for meeting and then this week local papers carried the story of Stan Kass, a Milwaukee area vending owner whose wife Lee had recently died of cancer, heroically stepped in make a large philanthropic gift to allow Gilda's Club to function at the JCC.
I wrote the JCC's Executive Director Mark Shapiro to thank him for the hospitality and his response was perfect: "It's a mitzvah."
How could it not be?
Each of us in the year ahead will face challenges large and small; some will be cataclysmic and seemingly insurmountable; others will be manageable. But either way, we will be tested again and again. And so looking back on the last year and looking ahead to the new year, to what degree will we able to simply answer the call to act with the notion of "mitzvah," of "commandedness," animated by the idea encoded in the words, "How could we not?"
The path to healing our world is, at times, in the words of Nachman of Breslov, a very narrow bridge. In not fearing that walk across the bridge, we act on the reality we know to be true. *Not* walking across the divide is simply not an option.
In awe, humility and gratitude, I thank the Kass family, Mark Shapiro and the Milwaukee JCC for their generosity of resource and spirit.
03 September 2010
Vox Tablet at Mount Carmel Cemetery
24 Elul 5770
Sara Ivry and Julie Subrin's wonderful podcast tradition this week features a conversation with yours truly in the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. Molly Subrin adds beautiful photographs.
Vox Tablet, the award-winning production of Tablet Magazine, can be found HERE.
Sara Ivry and Julie Subrin's wonderful podcast tradition this week features a conversation with yours truly in the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. Molly Subrin adds beautiful photographs.
02 September 2010
"Let My Heavenly Lostness Overwhelm Me"
23 Elul 5770
No longer so easily visible at night, the moon recedes into darkness, its veiled oblivion as the year draws to a close. I went looking for it before bed, out walking with Nathan, but didn't find it. A brief panic overcame me--what if there were no light? The fear spread, the proposition too much to consider. Darkness has its place for me but I need light spaces, light rooms, light walk-ways.
But it's the shade and the darkness that allows for reflection, is it not? Shadows and diminished illumination evoke nature's and our own subtle realities that, certainly this time of year, require our attention.
A street lamp shone overhead as we walked the neighborhood, my dog and I, and we paused to consider a shadow cast on the pavement, the symmetrical design of a brownstone's front gate, spread across our path like a rug, slightly askew. I wanted to bend down to straighten it out.
We bend to straighten shadows, cast by our own design, we sculptors of our year of living imperfection.
It's fitting that the New Year begins on a New Moon, also barely discernible and certainly no torch in the light for those who dread darkness. Fitting that we call these the Days of Awe, because the darkness ought to overwhelm, humble, and re-establish an order to our lives. And a beautiful orchestration, certainly, that when the moon is full, lighting the sky, we live outdoors in huts, on Sukkot, under a fragile roof which casts shadows, courtesy of that "Lesser Light" of the night sky.
In his 1936 collection, A Further Range, Robert Frost describes a walk at night beneath a canopy of open clouds, just after a stormy rain.
No longer so easily visible at night, the moon recedes into darkness, its veiled oblivion as the year draws to a close. I went looking for it before bed, out walking with Nathan, but didn't find it. A brief panic overcame me--what if there were no light? The fear spread, the proposition too much to consider. Darkness has its place for me but I need light spaces, light rooms, light walk-ways.
But it's the shade and the darkness that allows for reflection, is it not? Shadows and diminished illumination evoke nature's and our own subtle realities that, certainly this time of year, require our attention.
A street lamp shone overhead as we walked the neighborhood, my dog and I, and we paused to consider a shadow cast on the pavement, the symmetrical design of a brownstone's front gate, spread across our path like a rug, slightly askew. I wanted to bend down to straighten it out.
We bend to straighten shadows, cast by our own design, we sculptors of our year of living imperfection.
It's fitting that the New Year begins on a New Moon, also barely discernible and certainly no torch in the light for those who dread darkness. Fitting that we call these the Days of Awe, because the darkness ought to overwhelm, humble, and re-establish an order to our lives. And a beautiful orchestration, certainly, that when the moon is full, lighting the sky, we live outdoors in huts, on Sukkot, under a fragile roof which casts shadows, courtesy of that "Lesser Light" of the night sky.
In his 1936 collection, A Further Range, Robert Frost describes a walk at night beneath a canopy of open clouds, just after a stormy rain.
Lost in HeavenWe sculptors of our year of living imperfection. Let's let our heavenly lostness overwhelm us. And in that humility, move to new light.
The clouds, the source of rain, one stormy night
Offered an opening to the source of dew;
Which I accepted with impatient sight,
Looking for my old skymarks in the blue.
But stars were scarce in that part of the sky,
And no two were of the same constellation~
No one was bright enough to identify;
So 'twas with not ungrateful consternation,
Seeing myself well lost once more, I sighed,
"Where, where in Heaven am I? But don't tell me!"
I warned the clouds, "by opening on me wide.
Let's let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me."
01 September 2010
Overpast
22 Elul 5770
It's been a year since the ceiling collapse necessitated our being the blessed recipient of our neighbor's generosity and so we'll welcome as a community time's shift into sacred reckoning not in the setting intended by those who founded our buildings in Park Slope but by others, who founded a Church for prayer, during a similarly vague and uncertain time at the turn of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century the specter of the First World War had yet to emerge, which means, logically, that there could be no Second World War either. Whole nations--for some, only dreams, for others, inconceivable, had yet to take their place on the maps we read.
"For Thy mercy is great unto the heavens,
And thy truth unto the skies
Be Thou exalted O God above the heavens;
Thy glory be above all the earth."
King David seemed to grasp, as he fled Saul in their epic battle for control of and destiny in shaping the Jewish nation, that forces beyond borders were guiding him.
I thought of the countless sick; the recently dead; those suddenly (or finally) in mourning. I thought of a Reverend memorizing a Psalm, encoding its words and message in partnership with his God, in order to order his life and commitments to the *nation* of those he serves. Above the heavens; above the earth. I thought of that lonely President of ours, trying with all his might to lead a nation so angry and lost and impatient, deeply impatient, for the addictive quick fixes of the last fifty years. I thought of King Abdullah, President Mubarak, Prime Minister Blair, Secretary Clinton, and Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, together at a table in the White House, breaking bread, staging the idea of peace.
"My soul is among lions, I do lie down among them that are aflame."
True leadership requires a faith we often can't fully articulate in polite circles but today, looking out across an empty Church, which in one week's time will be a full Synagogue welcoming the New Year, I wondered how more faith might sooner restore not only our buildings on 8th Avenue and Garfield Place but those who occupy them. Faith in God, faith in ourselves, faith in a vision, and faith in a direction--toward Knowledge, toward Love, toward Justice.
Come what may--lions and flames--we can see ourselves through. In relationships with those we love; with enemies with whom we are bloodied by hate; with nameless or faceless compatriots on the journey from here to there.
I was awed and humbled by the expression of hospitality we were shown a second year in a row; awed and humbled by a window into the delicate spiritual poetics of another's relationship to sacred text; awed and humbled by world leaders, breaking bread, and offering a dreamed for vision, a way forward into peace.
"Yea, in the shadow of Thy wings will I take refuge;
Until calamities be overpast."
No more calamities for a while, please.
Be gracious unto me, O God, be gracious unto me,If I understood him correctly, my friend Daniel said he is memorizing this Psalm, the 57th of 150 in King David's collection, in order to celebrate the year of his birth. I wasn't exactly sure what he said because I was lost in thought as I read it myself, at the lectern at Old First, during a brief walk-through ahead of our High Holy Days there again this year.
For in Thee hath my soul taken refuge;
Yea, in the shadow of Thy wings will I take refuge,
Until calamities be overpast.
I will cry unto God Most High;
Unto God that accomplisheth it for me,
When he that would swallow me up taunteth, Selah
God shall send forth His mercy and His truth.
My soul is among lions, I do lie down among them that are aflame;
Even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows,
And their tongue a sharp sword.
Be Thou exalted O God, above the heavens;
Thy glory be above all the earth.
They have prepared a net for my steps,
My soul is bowed down;
They have digged a pit before me,
They are fallen into the midst thereof themselves, Selah.
My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast;
I will sing, yea, I will sing praises.
Awake my glory, awake, psaltery and harp;
I will awake the dawn.
I will give thanks unto Thee, O Lord, among the peoples;
I will sing praises unto Thee among the nations.
For Thy mercy is great unto the heavens,
And thy truth unto the skies
Be Thou exalted O God above the heavens;
Thy glory be above all the earth.
==Psalm 57
It's been a year since the ceiling collapse necessitated our being the blessed recipient of our neighbor's generosity and so we'll welcome as a community time's shift into sacred reckoning not in the setting intended by those who founded our buildings in Park Slope but by others, who founded a Church for prayer, during a similarly vague and uncertain time at the turn of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century the specter of the First World War had yet to emerge, which means, logically, that there could be no Second World War either. Whole nations--for some, only dreams, for others, inconceivable, had yet to take their place on the maps we read.
"For Thy mercy is great unto the heavens,
And thy truth unto the skies
Be Thou exalted O God above the heavens;
Thy glory be above all the earth."
King David seemed to grasp, as he fled Saul in their epic battle for control of and destiny in shaping the Jewish nation, that forces beyond borders were guiding him.
I thought of the countless sick; the recently dead; those suddenly (or finally) in mourning. I thought of a Reverend memorizing a Psalm, encoding its words and message in partnership with his God, in order to order his life and commitments to the *nation* of those he serves. Above the heavens; above the earth. I thought of that lonely President of ours, trying with all his might to lead a nation so angry and lost and impatient, deeply impatient, for the addictive quick fixes of the last fifty years. I thought of King Abdullah, President Mubarak, Prime Minister Blair, Secretary Clinton, and Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, together at a table in the White House, breaking bread, staging the idea of peace.
"My soul is among lions, I do lie down among them that are aflame."
True leadership requires a faith we often can't fully articulate in polite circles but today, looking out across an empty Church, which in one week's time will be a full Synagogue welcoming the New Year, I wondered how more faith might sooner restore not only our buildings on 8th Avenue and Garfield Place but those who occupy them. Faith in God, faith in ourselves, faith in a vision, and faith in a direction--toward Knowledge, toward Love, toward Justice.
Come what may--lions and flames--we can see ourselves through. In relationships with those we love; with enemies with whom we are bloodied by hate; with nameless or faceless compatriots on the journey from here to there.
I was awed and humbled by the expression of hospitality we were shown a second year in a row; awed and humbled by a window into the delicate spiritual poetics of another's relationship to sacred text; awed and humbled by world leaders, breaking bread, and offering a dreamed for vision, a way forward into peace.
"Yea, in the shadow of Thy wings will I take refuge;
Until calamities be overpast."
No more calamities for a while, please.
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