The Strength to Discern

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On Sunday evening I offered a tiny pearl of introduction to this year’s high holiday theme of gevurah. Yesterday morning we talked about the strength it takes to help each other find hope.

Today our exploration of gevurah comes via the Torah reading for this morning. 

Our mystics taught that God’s infinity is revealed in creation through a series of sefirot, divine qualities or emanations. These are the channels through which God’s infinite energy flows into the world, and we associate each one with a quality that we and God share. Like chesed, lovingkindness — last year’s high holiday theme. And gevurah, boundaries and strength and power and discernment — this year’s theme.

When our mystics look at the figures in Torah, they associate different characters in Torah with each of the sefirot. Abraham is associated with chesed, lovingkindness. His tent was open on all sides, he rushed to prepare a feast for visitors, he represents flowing love.  And his son Isaac is associated with gevurah.

One of the reasons why Isaac is associated with this spiritual quality is surely the story we just heard, the “binding of Isaac.” How do we see Isaac’s strength in this story? Arguably, what we see is him holding still and letting himself be bound. Maybe he feels powerless, or overwhelmed, or out of control: we don’t know, because Torah doesn’t tell us! But to me, his gevurah has a kind of stoic, silent perseverance to it. He holds still and trusts that he will make it through somehow.

Abraham showed tremendous gevurah earlier in Torah. In midrash, we learn that his father was a builder of idols, and young Avram smashed them. It’s a great story: Terach comes home, all of the idols in his shop are smashed save one, and the biggest one has a stick in its hand. And he yells, what did you do?! and Avram says, “oh, it wasn’t me, dad, the big one did it.” And his father says, “You know they’re just stone. They can’t move!” and Avram retorts, “so why do you worship them, then?” It took gevurah to stand up to his dad.

Or earlier in Genesis, when God disclosed intentions to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember, Avraham pushed back: what if there are fifty righteous there, what if there are forty, all the way down to ten. But when it comes to Sarah casting-out Ishmael in yesterday’s Torah reading, Avraham doesn’t do much. He tells God he doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t challenge it. And in today’s story, God makes an outrageous request and Avraham just… does it. As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg notes, he’s a hero when it comes to the outside world, but with his own sons, he falls far short of offering the protection they need.

One of my favorite ways of reading Torah is to place ourselves in the shoes of everyone in the story. Through the lens of Torah we can see ourselves refracted in new ways. And in empathizing with everyone in Torah’s story, we strengthen our capacity to stand in the shoes of another. 

How does it feel to empathize with each figure in today’s story, to feel-into where they are?

Maybe Isaac’s kind of gevurah resonates for us, eighteen months into this pandemic. The pandemic has highlighted so many ways we aren’t in control. We don’t have the power to make COVID-19 go away, and we don’t have the power to require other people to do what’s right. But we can use our strength to accept our circumstances and make the best of the hand we’re dealt.

Isaac must have also felt fear. His father had the knife raised for the strike before the angel intervened. We too feel fear in these pandemic times. What might it mean to follow in Isaac’s footsteps and do what life’s situation asks of us, even when we feel afraid?

I don’t especially want to empathize with today’s portrait of Avraham. But like Avraham who followed instructions in today’s story, we too hear voices — day and night, over the internet and cable news and social media — telling us what to do and why. We may be more like Avraham than we want to realize. 

Today’s Torah reading begins with the words, “After these things, God tested Avraham.” in English we call this the “Binding of Isaac,” but Torah calls this a test. I’ve always felt that Avraham failed the test: he should have pushed back. He didn’t exercise the discernment to recognize that God’s instruction here was wrong. Discernment is part of gevurah, too. 

Gevurah asks us to discern when the voices we’re listening to are giving us good advice and when they’re not. Sometimes the voices we hear are self-serving or toxic. Some voices today declare that the masks we wear to protect against airborne infection are “muzzles” that take away our freedom. Other voices proclaim that as human beings in a society we have a responsibility to take care of each other. What voices will we heed in 5782? 

Recently, as I was studying this story again, my son asked me what I was learning. His Hebrew name is after my maternal grandfather, Isaac — in Hebrew, Yitzchak, the name of the son whom Avraham almost sacrificed. I realized he didn’t really know this story yet. So I told it to him, in outline, curious to know how it would land with him.

(And yes, he gave me permission to tell this story to you today.)

His first reaction was: God — He, or She, or They — probably isn’t giving us the full story here. “God is giving us pieces and parts to figure out for ourselves, but God might overestimate or underestimate us.” And then he said, “Loyalty to God is a good thing, but Abraham could have found a loophole. We have choices. We need to feel in our jellies when we’re treating people wrong or making a wrong choice.” 

I said, “You mean, we need to learn to use our discernment?” Yes, he said. That’s a good word for it. 

We need to use our discernment to know when the voices we’re following are aligned with our highest values — and when they’re not. Discernment is another way of saying, gevurah. 

It’s also noteworthy who’s not in this story. Sarah appears nowhere in this part of the narrative. The next thing we read, after this story, is that Sarah died at 127. From that juxtaposition  one midrash imagines her hearing the news from afar, perhaps in a garbled form indicating that her husband actually sacrificed their son, and dying on the spot.

After the way we saw Sarah behave yesterday — banishing Hagar and Ishmael into the desert — I don’t especially want to empathize with Sarah, either! But when I place myself in her shoes, I can feel her grief and horror at the news of her child’s death. (Of course, that news turns out to be wrong. Fake news, as it were. But she still grieves — and dies.)

It takes gevurah to place ourselves in someone else’s situation. It takes gevurah to rein in our own reactivity so we can empathize with someone’s heartbreak even if their past behaviors made us angry. Empathy might seem like an expression of chesed, lovingkindness — but I think it requires our gevurah.

Maybe this feels a little bit uncomfortable. Maybe we don’t want to empathize with people who we perceive made bad choices. That’s a very human response. To our ancestors, it was also an angelic one! 

We see this in a midrash on part of the Exodus story. When we crossed the sea, Talmud says, the angels rejoiced when the waves crashed in and washed away the Egyptians. This is Pharaoh and his army we’re talking about. They had caused unimaginable suffering. And God says, “the works of My hands are dying, and you want to sing praises?!” Like — what’s the matter with you; develop some empathy, would you?! For this reason we pour out drops of juice or wine, symbol of joy, from our second cup at seder. We diminish our joy because someone else suffered in our journey to liberation. 

Not wanting to empathize with someone we don’t like or don’t agree with is a very human reaction… and that midrash comes to teach us that Jewish values ask us to rise above that reaction. 

Gevurah is how we balance between feeling our righteous anger, and reining in our anger so that we don’t lose empathy. Gevurah is in how we exercise judgment, especially when it comes to which voices we will heed and amplify. Gevurah is in the strength to be still and trust sometimes, and the strength to take bold action sometimes, and the discernment to know which times are which. 

And gevurah is what allows us to be alert for possibilities of hope that we hadn’t previously considered — like the ram that appears at the last second in today’s Torah reading, the source of hope that was waiting just outside our vision’s frame.

This is Rabbi Rachel’s d’varling from the second morning of Rosh Hashanah (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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The Strength to Help Each Other Hope

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(Note: the first part of this sermon is adapted from an article that JTA asked me to write. Then it goes off into new territory — expanding and completing the ideas I articulated for JTA.)

All summer long, I struggled to find the words for this sermon. 

The enormity of what’s broken in the world feels paralyzing. Unprecedented heat and wildfires, a flaming oil spill turning the Gulf of Mexico into an inferno, and extreme flooding across Europe and China and Louisiana and New York: “Who by fire, who by water” lands differently this year. Dayenu, that could be enough — and there’s more.

The past eighteen months were hard even for those of us who have it easy (a job, a place to live, no illness). For many the isolation was crushing, or numbing. For many without stable income or a roof overhead, the pandemic has been unimaginably worse. So too for frontline workers and those who jobs are “essential” and often unseen.

When vaccines became available, my heart soared on wings of hope. I felt certain we would be together safely at Rosh Hashanah this year. But I hadn’t reckoned with the power of social media influencers lying about the putative risks of the vaccine, or lying about the virus. The New York Times reported recently that disinformation is now a booming business. As a result, countless thousands are now refusing vaccination, claiming “personal freedom” at the expense of the collective good. 

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I keep thinking of the parable of the guy in the boat drilling a hole under his own seat. He doesn’t seem to notice that his personal freedom is going to drown everyone else. As a parable, it’s tart and a little bit funny. In real life, it’s horrifying. Dayenu: that too could be enough to spark despair. And wait, there’s more.

Several governors have made it illegal for municipalities to require masks. To many, masks have become a symbol of government control. To me, a mask is literally the least we can do to protect the immunocompromised (and children.) Refusing to wear a mask during this pandemic is like leaving your lights on during the London Blitz.

 Between the anti-maskers, and the anti-vaxxers, and the new Delta variant, cases are rising again. We’re facing another long winter of mounting death counts — and it didn’t have to be this way.

Between what we’re doing to our planet (disproportionately harming those who are most vulnerable), and the impact of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers on public health (ditto), and the persistence of the Big Lie that the presidential election was “stolen,” it’s hard not to despair. How could I write sermons from this place? I’m pretty sure no one comes to High Holiday services to hear their rabbi say she’s given up.

I poured out my heart about this to my hevruta partner, who reminded me that in Torah even God despaired of humanity sometimes. When God despaired of us, it was our ancestors’ job to push back and remind God of reasons to hope for humanity’s future. This is part of why we live (and learn!) in community: to help each other find hope when our hearts despair.

Our Torah readings for today and tomorrow cue up that inner journey. We just read about the casting-out of Hagar and Ishmael, a tale of how jealousy almost caused a child’s death in the desert. Tomorrow, the stakes may feel even higher with the binding of Isaac. And yet these same Torah stories also remind us of hope in tough times. An angel opens Hagar’s eyes to a flowing spring, and she and her son are saved. An angel opens Abraham’s eyes to the ram caught in the thicket, and Isaac’s life is spared.

The Days of Awe open the door to new beginnings, even when (or especially when) we can’t see our own way back to hope for change. Our job is to be be those Biblical angels for each other: helping each other reach the hope a that we can’t find alone. 

Our Torah stories for Rosh Hashanah are stories of courage and strength. Hagar needed courage and strength when she set out into the wilderness with her son and a single skin of water on her back. Isaac needed courage and strength when he lay down on his father’s altar on the mountaintop. In Hebrew, one word for this kind of courage and strength is gevurah: our theme for this year’s Days of Awe.

We’ve seen a lot of gevurah in this difficult year. In the firefighters battling horrific blazes across the Pacific Northwest and California and Turkey and Greece — in the doctors and nurses working in every covid ICU — in the police officers who defended the US Capitol from an angry mob. Those are extraordinary forms of strength and courage. 

I want to name and uplift a different kind of gevurah. I mostly didn’t watch the Olympics this year. (That’s not the courageous part.) I just couldn’t get excited about the pageantry or the competition this time around. But Simone Biles caught my attention even so.

Simone

Everyone seems to agree that she’s one of the most extraordinary gymnasts of all time. I can’t do a cartwheel to save my life, so I think all gymnasts are pretty amazing, but I can see that she’s more amazing even than most of her peers. And right before the individual all-around gymnastics competition, she withdrew from competition in order to focus on her mental health. 

It takes courage to say I’m not okay right now, and I need to do some inner work so I can get where I need to be. A lot of us are not okay right now. Global pandemic, an almost unthinkable amount of death, the climate crisis, the rise in misinformation, the deep divisions in our body politic — the world is not okay right now.

Simone Biles said she “got the twisties,” a condition in which an athlete loses their spatial awareness and can’t tell up from down. Given the kind of literal acrobatics involved in Olympic gymnastics routines, losing her spatial awareness could be deadly. But reading about it, I realized it’s an apt description of how a lot of us are feeling emotionally and spiritually. We’ve lost access to some of the certainties that oriented us. It’s hard to trust in things that used to seem stable. I think we all “have the twisties” a little bit this year. 

I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that none of us can do the gymnastics routines that Simone Biles can do. But all of us can follow the courageous example she set. And she didn’t make that decision in a vacuum. She said she was inspired by Naomi Osaka, the pro tennis player who withdrew from the French Open in order to tend to her mental health. Using our Torah metaphor, Naomi Osaka was Simone Biles’ “angel” — the messenger whose words and actions helped Simone admit that she wasn’t okay and begin to work toward healing. 

Because here’s the thing: we’re not in this alone. Even if we feel fundamentally alone sometimes, we have each other. This is why we live (and learn) in community: so we can help each other find the flowing spring that will sustain us in the wilderness, or the ram whose presence will save the day, caught in a thicket just beyond where we ourselves can see. We live in community so we can inspire each other to hope and to build. We live in community so we can strengthen each other.

Hope

The activist Mariame Kaba offers some deep wisdom about hope. “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger,” she says. “Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline.” She goes on to say:

Hope is a discipline and… we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way.

When she says hope is a discipline, what I hear is that it’s a practice — like a yoga practice or a spiritual practice. And the more we practice it, the stronger we become. She names this as a choice: we can choose to let despair overwhelm us, or we can choose to strengthen our hope. This, too, is gevurah. 

5781 was not an easy year. I don’t know what 5782 will bring, but I’m pretty sure the challenges of the old year will follow us into the new one. What can we do for each other to give each other courage, to help each other hope? Jewish tradition teaches that even those who receive tzedakah are also obligated to give it. In other words: even if I’m in need of assistance myself, I’m obligated to give what I can to someone else in need. I love this because it breaks down the binary between giver and receiver. And it works as a teaching about intangibles, too. Even if I need emotional support, I can still offer support to others. 

Helping others is part of Jewish spiritual practice. Focusing on “ugh, who’s going to help me through this” sometimes is normal, but it’s also self-centered, and it can lead to feeling more alone. Focusing instead on “how can I help someone else” lightens our hearts. Helping others is good for the soul.  If you prefer, here’s a social science framing: studies show that when we help others, we feel more energetic, stronger, and more hopeful!  And that’s true whether we’re doing organized volunteer work, or “just” offering a listening ear over the phone or Zoom. 

Helping each other cultivate hope does not change the realities of pandemic or injustice or fires and floods. But it can help us be resilient in the face of those realities. It can help us make meaning in the face of those realities. This is our work: to use our gevurah to support and uplift and strengthen each other, so that together we can resist despair and keep working toward a better world. 

This is Rabbi Rachel’s sermon from the first morning of Rosh Hashanah (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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A Year of Strength

Each year I choose a theme for the Days of Awe at CBI. Some months ago I chose the theme of gevurah, which means strength, power, heroism, courage, boundaries, determination. People were getting vaccinated. The weather was warming up and we were about to begin offering safe outdoor / hybrid services at CBI. I could already imagine writing my high holiday sermons this year about the strength it took for us to stay apart last year to keep each other safe, and the heroism of medical professionals in every COVID ICU around the world, and how our determination had brought us safely through this pandemic. 

“Man plans, and God laughs,” the saying goes. Though this year it feels more apt to me to say “humanity plans, and God weeps.” I imagine God has been weeping a lot over the last fifteen months. Whatever we hoped for a year ago, I think it’s safe to say that we haven’t made it there yet, and the path from here to there feels fraught and uncertain. 

And our theme for the year couldn’t be more apt. Wow do we need gevurah this year. 

We need strength: the strength to keep going when the path ahead feels uncertain, when we don’t know the right thing to do, when we don’t know how to keep each other safe. We need the strength to help each other find hope, especially when the world feels dark. We need the strength to discern what’s right, and which voices we should be heeding. We need the strength to forgive ourselves and each other, especially in these difficult pandemic times — especially because we’ve moved from “this difficult pandemic year” to something longer and of more uncertain duration. We need the strength to see the world differently than we have before, so that we can live into that vision, making the world better than it was before. (Stay tuned; that’s a sneak preview of sermons to come!)  

Gevurah helps us be courageous: it helps us strengthen our hearts and keep our resolve firm even when we’re frustrated that this pandemic is becoming endemic.

Gevurah helps us have good boundaries. Gevurah reminds us that we never know what difficulty another person is facing, so our sacred task is always ladun l’chaf z’chut, to give one another the benefit of the doubt and see one another through generous eyes — even as we strive to hold ourselves and each other to the highest ethical standards. 

Gevurah gives us strength to speak up for what’s ethical and just, and the courage to protect the most vulnerable among us. Gevurah helps us be giborim, heroes, for and with each other as we lift each other up and keep each other safe. 

And gevurah is a necessary part of teshuvah: repentance, return, re-alignment, turning ourselves around to live out our best and highest purpose in the year now beginning. 

May the spiritual journey of this High Holiday season open our hearts, deepen our resolve, and give us the gevurah we need to make 5782 a year of holiness and strength, a year of community and connectedness, a year of justice and joy. 

This is the very brief d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at our erev Rosh Hashanah Zoom seder. (Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi) Stay tuned for actual sermons in days to come.

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Congregation Beth Israel North Adams

Help CBI thrive

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Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

It scarcely seems possible, but the Days of Awe are right around the corner. On August 28 we’ll officially enter into the high holiday season with Selichot, our annual service of forgiveness prayers to stir the soul, high holiday melodies to open the heart, and an opportunity to write down some of the places where we’ve missed the mark in the last year — a first step toward letting them go and committing to change. That service will be offered both onsite and online; if you’re joining us onsite, please wear a mask (we’ll be in the building, socially distanced, with doors and windows open.)

Preparing for this year’s Days of Awe has been unlike any other year — even last year. Last year, it was clear that the correct course of action was to shelter-in-place and make our homes holy. This year has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs, from the cresting of hope when vaccinations became available to the emotional plummet when the Delta variant reached our community. The CBI Board and I spent all summer planning for three possibilities simultaneously; consulting with the URJ and with other congregations both locally and regionally; discussing risks with medical professionals; and always circling back to to our sacred path of mitzvot and to the Jewish values that guide us. I believe that our current plan will allow us both to protect the vulnerable and to give those who wish to be onsite an opportunity to do so… and I’m mindful that if the situation worsens in the coming weeks, we may need to pivot again. 

Last year when the Days of Awe were over, you told us that our Zoom services helped you feel connected; that our time together on Zoom felt real; that you appreciated the interweaving of ancient words and modern technology; that you were moved by the opportunity to see each other on Zoom; that you felt like you were part of a community even though we weren’t all in the same room. I hope and pray that this year will be equally uplifting. I’m excited to share some new things with you — including new music to carry us through the season, hopefully some piano accompaniment on Yom Kippur morning thanks to one of our new members, and a brand-new Jonah play for Yom Kippur afternoon. And I’m also looking forward to continuing our longstanding traditions, the words and melodies and modes of prayer that have sustained us for generations.

Hopefully if you wish to attend a service onsite during the holidays, you’ve already filled out our online registration form and indicated which service you would most want to attend onsite. That registration form will close at the end of the day on August 25 so that we can turn to figuring out how to (hopefully) enable each member who wishes to be onsite to attend one of their top-ranked services onsite. Of course, all of our offerings will be open to you online throughout the season. 

We’re also preparing now for the coming Hebrew school year, which is slated to be onsite and masked just like local schools. We’re planning a series of monthly Family Programs, from an apple orchard outing in September to midwinter Saturday afternoon pajama parties with storytime and havdalah. If there is interest, we can reconvene our monthly Shabbat Zoom dinners to stay connected over the winter. And of course we will continue to offer Shabbat services and festival observances all year long, as always.

Your donations make all of this possible. We can’t operate on revenue from dues alone; that revenue does not fully support the work of our synagogue. Your contributions make up the difference and allow us to do all of the things we do, including offering memberships to those who cannot afford to pay full dues. In Torah we read that each Israelite gave a half-shekel to support the spiritual life of the community. We also read that many Israelites gave a t’rumah offering, a freewill offering from the heart over and above the half-shekel that everyone was obligated to provide. Regardless of amount, supporting spiritual community is a Jewish obligation. Giving is a religious act, and our sages teach that when we give tzedakah, we prime the pump of blessing to flow into the world.

Please support CBI.

Thank you.

Thank you for being a part of our synagogue community. Thank you for gathering with us, learning with us, and praying with us. (Please encourage farflung friends and family to join our email list so that they can join us for Zoom Days of Awe!) And thank you for your support of the synagogue of northern Berkshire county. Please give as you are able. We need your support especially in these difficult pandemic times. The only donation that’s too small is none at all.

Looking forward to being with you soon during the Days of Awe. May the rest of this month of Elul open our hearts and souls to transformation, and may the spiritual updraft of the holidays lift us ever higher.

Blessings to all —

Rabbi Rachel 

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Update from the CBI Board about the Days of Awe

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Dear Congregation Beth Israel Members and Friends,

The CBI Board and Rabbi just met to discuss current COVID rates in our constituent towns and across the county, and to re-evaluate our high holiday plan in light of current realities. As of now, our plan for the Days of Awe is as follows: 

  1. We will be holding hybrid / multi-access services, limiting capacity to ~45 so that pods can be 6 feet apart. Masks are required, with no exceptions. As a reminder, our erev Rosh Hashanah offering will be a Rosh Hashanah seder, held online only; here’s a list of items to have on hand for that digital community experience.
  2. All onsite participants over the age of 12 must be vaccinated. Parents who want to bring unvaccinated children (under the age of 12) with them into the service may do so, as long as the children remain masked and socially distanced, and as long as they are pre-registered for a seat or can sit on a parent’s lap. We will not require proof of vaccination; we trust our members to be truthful.  We will check people off the registration list at the door so that we can facilitate contract tracing in the event of a COVID diagnosis. 
  3. Childrens’ services will be held outdoors at 10am on Rosh Hashanah morning 1 and on Yom Kippur morning, with masks and social distancing. Please register with the CBI Office if you are bringing child/ren to the childrens’ service so we know how many kids to expect. (If there is mist or light rain, bring an umbrella or rain jacket to childrens’ services! If the weather is truly inclement, we will not be able to hold childrens’ services — in that case we will post on the CBI Facebook that morning to let everyone know.) 
  4. All are welcome to join us online in the synagogue Zoom room. We will offer a robust Zoom option so that those participating online can fully take part in our high holiday experience. This allows us to welcome those who are immunocompromised, those who are at greater medical risk, and those who are homebound to participate in our Days of Awe — as well as those who aren’t on the onsite list for any given service. 

Our guiding Jewish values in this decision are pikuach nefesh (saving life) and kol Yisrael arevim zah bazeh (all of us are responsible for each other; we are responsible for our community together.) Our job, as Rabbi and Board, is to serve this community and to keep this community safe. This is our best sense of how to live up to those values.

Now that we have evaluated recent local COVID levels and reached this plan, we will work on figuring out who can come to each service onsite, based on your responses to our registration form (sent in July and in every weekly announcements email since.) If you have not yet responded, please do so by August 25. Registering and ranking your preferred services is the only way to get on the registration list for onsite services. We may not be able to give everyone their first choice. We will do our best. We are compiling registration lists now for each service, and we will be in touch to share those lists so you know which service(s), if any, you will be attending onsite.

Some have asked why we’re not renting a tent. When we explored that option early in the summer, we learned that in order to proceed with a tent, we would need to reserve and pay for one immediately. The expense would be large, and we would still be limited in space / configuration because of the layout of our available land. At that time, the Delta variant had not reached us. Based on these factors, and based on the results from our survey of the membership about what people wanted, we made the decision then to forego the tent. 

This is our current plan, crafted with our deepest hopes for a sweet and meaningful holiday season. And, as we’ve learned in the past year, we need to be prepared to pivot if the situation shifts. Please continue to keep an eye out for communications from CBI. If the COVID situation worsens, we will move to offering all-digital services as we did last year.  

Wishing you blessings as we approach the Days of Awe,

The CBI Board of Directors 

(Chris Kelly, President; Natalie Matus, Vice-President; Michael Smith, Treasurer;  Paulette Wein, Clerk; Joe Apkin, David Lane, Darlene Radin, and Ben Rudin) 

and Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

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Getting closer…

Dear Congregation Beth iIsrael members and friends,

The moon of Elul is waxing. In a short two and a half weeks we’ll celebrate Rosh Hashanah. The Days of Awe are coming soon!

Roadmap of the season — our spiritual runway to transformation.

Coming up

Join us for Selichot at 8pm on August 28 — the service that launches the high holiday season with music, contemplation, and an opportunity to write down the places where we missed the mark in the old year so that we can begin to let them go and prepare to change. (Onsite and online.)

Join us for our annual cemetery service at 2pm on August 29 at the CBI cemetery. (Onsite only.)

And join us for an erev Rosh Hashanah seder at 7pm on September 6 as we enter the new year together. (Online only.) Our full schedule of high holiday offerings is here.

Preparing for Rosh Hashanah

Our Erev Rosh Hashanah celebration this year will once again be a Rosh Hashanah seder interwoven with the evening service, featuring symbolic foods and drinks to cue up the inner journey of entering the new year. Many of you told me that last year’s Rosh Hashanah seder was a meaningful way to launch the new year together from our dining tables. I’m looking forward to being with you on Zoom for that experience this year.

If you are joining us on Zoom on Rosh Hashanah eve (7pm on Monday, September 6), these are the ideal items to have on hand:

  • candles,
  • wine or grape juice,
  • a round challah or cracker,
  • some apple slices and honey,
  • something bitter or spicy (wasabi paste, an onion slice, a spoonful of vinegar),
  • and dates or anything sweet (any dried fruit would work well, or in a pinch, even just a little bit of sugar.)

And if there are items on this list that you can’t find or don’t have, don’t worry about it: we will make it work with whatever we’ve got!

And one final note

If you are waiting to hear back from us about which service/s you may attend onsite, please bear with us.

The CBI Board is meeting tonight to look at local COVID data and information from other congregations, and will make a final determination about our plans. Once we have that information, we’ll work on figuring out how each service will unfold, and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience as we navigate shifting pandemic realities and public health guidance.

Blessings to all for a meaningful journey through Elul —

Rabbi Rachel

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On the runway

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The runway. Right now we’re in the Seven Weeks of Consolation.

Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

This past weekend we observed Tisha b’Av, the spiritual low point of our year. Deep thanks go to Jen Burt and family for setting up the “ruined” sanctuary in which we sang Lamentations and opened our hearts to grief — to Rabbi David Markus and the TBE community for joining with us — to everyone who participated onsite and online, for willingness to be real together — and to all of our onsite participants for so quickly and sweetly helping us restore our prayer space to its usual shape and form as part of our ritual of repair.

Tisha b’Av is an experience of descent for the sake of ascent. We open ourselves to grief (both historical and present-day) in order to feel the depths — not for the sake of wallowing, but because this tradition encapsulates a deep spiritual truth. Only when we allow ourselves to feel grief can we also open ourselves to healing, to hope, and to joy. Tisha b’Av is the springboard that launches us on our journey to the Days of Awe. Now we journey through the Seven Weeks of Consolation as we prepare ourselves for the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

The High Holidays offer us a journey of heart and soul. Stirred by the ancient melodies of that holy season, roused by the call of the shofar and by Torah’s timeless questions, we will ask ourselves: who have we been, and who do we want to become? What in our lives is “working,” and what needs repair? Which of our patterns serve us well, and which need to change? What work do we need to do in our relationships with each other, with our communities, with our traditions, with our Source, in order to be whole enough to heal our broken world?

In seven short weeks we’ll gather together, both onsite and online, for the Days of Awe 5782. (If you haven’t yet filled out our survey to indicate which services you want to attend onsite, please do so — priority will be given to CBI members. If you can’t find the survey, contact the office and Ollie can re-send it to you.) Between now and then, here are two weekly opportunities for learning and reflection:

Lifting Higher: Weekly Teshuvah Practice for the High Holy Days  

Sundays 8:00-8:30 pm (with after-schmooze time) July 18 – August 29

Join Rabbi David Markus and Dr. Shari Berkowitz for a weekly kabbalistic (mystical) journey up the Tree of Life for seven weeks leading to Rosh Hashanah. Each week will be themed to the sefirot (just like the seven weeks of counting Omer, except in reverse), with inner practices to support preparation for the High Holy Days. Free to all. No experience necessary. 

RSVP by email to [email protected].

And:

Reverse Omer Group With Jen Burt

Join Jen Burt as we begin in Malchut (Presence) and work our way back to Chesed (Lovingkindness) while studying the haftarot of consolation and moving from summer into fall and the start of high holidays. The group will meet over Zoom for 7 consecutive Tuesdays from 5pm to 6pm beginning July 20. During this time, Jen would like to encourage you to consider the reconnection and social, political and business “re-opening” we are experiencing with their positive and negative impacts as this overlaps with our spiritual season change.

If you are interested in attending or would like more information about this group, please email Jen at [email protected].

May our journey toward the new year open our hearts to new possibilities and strengthen our readiness to work toward a better world. I can’t wait to ring in 5782 with all of you.

With blessings to all,

Rabbi Rachel

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The Days of Awe at CBI 5782 / 2021

Onsite: 45 people maximum (pre-register via High Holiday Registration google form by 8/25), masked. Please note that first priority for onsite seats will be given to CBI members.

Online: in the CBI Zoom room, open to all of our members and friends.

The Runway

Tisha b’Av, Sat. July 17, 8:30pm, onsite & online

Selichot (“Forgiveness“) service, Sat. Aug. 28, 8-9pm, onsite & online

Cemetery Service , Walker Street, Sun. Aug. 29, 2-2:30pm, onsite only

Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah First Evening Service and Seder, Mon. September 6, 7pm, online only

Rosh Hashanah First Day morning service, Tues. September 7, 10am, onsite & online

Children’s service, 10am, outdoors, onsite only (cancelled in event of heavy rain)

Tashlich (casting bread upon the waters) to follow at Tourists suspension bridge

Contemplative Second Day morning service, Weds.Sept 8, 10am, onsite & online

Yom Kippur

Kol Nidre Weds. September 15, 6:30pm, onsite & online

Music Before Kol Nidre – starting at 6pm. Before Kol Nidre, our new member R. will play contemplative / classical music on the synagogue piano for half an hour. Please join us on Zoom for music streamed from the sanctuary to open the heart before we enter into Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur Morning service, Thursday September 16, 10am, onsite & online

Children’s service, 10am, outdoors, onsite only (cancelled in event of heavy rain)

Yizkor /Memorial Service will take place at the end of the morning service

 (all afternoon, all are welcome to enjoy our labyrinth and pollinator garden)

Yom Kippur Mincha and Avodah service, 4:30-6pm, onsite & online

Yom Kippur Ne’ilah service, 6:30-7:30pm (sundown: 7pm), onsite & online

Sukkot

Shabbat Sukkot Celebration in the Sukkah, Fri. Sept 24, 5:30pm, onsite & online

Please RSVP by Yom Kippur. 

Shemini Atzeret services, with Yizkor, Tues. Sept. 28, 10am, online only

 

cbiweb.org, www.facebook.com/CBINorthAdams, 413-663-5830, [email protected]

Congregation Beth Israel: 53 Lois Street, North Adams MA 01247

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Looking ahead to the Days of Awe

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Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

Please take a few moments to read and respond to this survey about the High Holidays this year. We ask that you please respond by 5pm on Sunday so that we can move forward knowing what would work best for you.

Blessings to all,

Rabbi Rachel and the CBI Board

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What Can We Do, In Love

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Screen Shot 2020-09-02 at 5.12.41 PM

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpWpqQBiaWI]

I gave my sermon “live” on Zoom in realtime, and also pre-recorded it to go live with this blog post around the time I was offering it. If you prefer to watch the sermon, it’s above (and here on YouTube.) If you prefer to read it, the text appears below.

 

A few weeks ago, a congregant said to me: you know, it’s weird. Sometimes, especially reading Facebook, it feels like life is normal. We’re seeing everybody’s first day of school pictures, even if school is “from home” this fall. There are pictures of new kids or grandkids. Life seems to be continuing. And then other times I wake up and I’m immediately swamped by fear about the future of democracy, despair about the pandemic, and anxiety about totalitarianism, and nothing feels normal anymore at all.

I was really struck by that description of the disjunction between first-day-of-school pictures and creeping anxiety about what our world might be becoming.

I think we’ve all been living in that disjunction. It’s a normal day — and here are the latest case numbers in the global pandemic. It’s a normal day — and the news headlines are so outrageous that I feel numb. It’s a normal day — and nothing feels normal at all… As Rafia Zakaria wrote recently, “We live constantly with the weight of these juxtapositions between the banal and the utterly devastating.”

In pastoral conversations over the last six months, I’ve heard a lot of anxiety. About illness and covid-19 and our children and everything that’s happening in our world. About the coming election, and fears of authoritarianism, and the future of democracy, and a sense that everything could be about to unravel right before our eyes, and about whether this nation is a safe place to be Jewish, and whether anywhere in the world is safe. Colleagues who are therapists tell me they’re hearing all of these anxieties, too.

Several of you have asked me: if things really are that bad, then what can we do?

Here’s my answer: if things are really that bad, then we take care of each other. We protect the most vulnerable among us. We stand up for those who are more at-risk than we are. And we cultivate hope for a better world, and do what we can to get closer to that ideal in our lifetime.

And what if things aren’t that bad? If our democracy is actually pretty robust, and there isn’t going to be a civil war, and we’re not staring down the barrel of totalitarianism, and modern medicine finds an excellent vaccine for covid-19 and good government policies make it available to everyone, and together we can pursue the dream of a more perfect union with liberty and justice for all?

My answers don’t actually change.

We still need to take care of each other. And protect the most vulnerable among us. And stand up for those who are more at-risk than we are. And cultivate hope, and do what we can to build a better world. That’s our responsibility as Jews and as human beings, in the worst of times and in the best of times.

Over the last year, several friends and I have been studying the writings of the rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto, R’ Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, sometimes known as the Piazeczyner.

The Piazeczyner was writing under incredibly difficult circumstances. The community he served was confined to the ghetto and their rights were being continually diminished. (Eventually, of course, they would be rounded up and taken to the camps… though he didn’t know that when he was writing these weekly commentaries.) Although he wrote these divrei Torah some eighty years ago, I have found his words to be deeply relevant to the spiritual needs of this moment.

The Piazeczyner writes that when times are tough, we feel “exiled” or distant from God, and those times are precisely when we feel the most powerful longing for God. (Aish Kodesh on Shabbat Ha-Gadol, 1941.) I think we can understand this as: when times are tough we despair, and we feel frightened about the world around us, and we yearn for safety and hope.

And, he says, when we “accept the yoke of the mitzvot” — when we accept our obligations to each other and to God — we grow in holiness. And when we do, it’s as though God’s own self becomes greater and more active in the world, because in our spiritual growth we become greater and more active in the world.

He could have said, these are terrible times. The world is broken, and we are not safe, and God has abandoned us. Instead, he said: the world is broken, that very brokenness arouses our yearning for a better world, and our yearning is the first step toward making it real. He said, remember the Exodus from Egypt. Remember the story of walking into the waters of the sea. Only when the waters reached our nostrils did the seas part.

The story of crossing the sea reminds us that we have to keep going “day and night.” We have to keep trying, and doing mitzvot, and building a better world. Even in times of pain and fear. Even — he wrote this in 1940 — when we’re confined to home and “commerce is brought to a standstill and businesses are closed, God forbid.” (Aish Kodesh on Beshalach, 1940.)

Torah tells us that when our spiritual ancestors wandered in the wilderness, a pillar of cloud went before us by day and a pillar of fire by night. The Piazeczyner teaches that this isn’t just a literal teaching, but also a spiritual one. The fire that we need to light our way forward is here for us, if only we will open our eyes. We need to hold on to our Source of strength and hope, and that will carry us through. In the words of Psalm 27, which we read each year at this season, “Keep hope in the One. Be strong and open your heart wide, and keep hoping in the One!”

I know that for some of us the word “God” is … complicated. Maybe we don’t believe in a God Who will step in and save us. Early in the pandemic, my son overheard me studying the Piazeczyner late one night with some colleagues. We were reading a commentary on how when the Israelites cried out in the hardships of slavery, God heard our cries and saved us. And my kid came into my study and said, “Mom, if we’re still the children of Israel, why isn’t God saving us from covid-19? Are we just not crying out enough?”

So we talked about whether God reaches into the world and changes things for us, or whether God acts in the world through our actions, or whether we find God — as Mister Rogers famously taught — “in the helpers,” in the doctors and nurses and scientists working to help people with covid-19. And I remember thinking: this may be the moment when his childhood theology falls away.

Even so, the psalmist’s instruction to be strong, open our hearts, and keep hoping is good spiritual medicine. And so is the Piazeczyner’s reminder that we have the inner resources to get through even the most difficult of times — and that the “yoke of the mitzvot” makes us responsible for and to one another. The mitzvot ask us to “be the helpers.”

As my friend and study partner Rabbi David Markus teaches, love is an action, not just a feeling. This is why the mitzvot commit us to taking care of each other: because love reaches its fullest potential when we not only feel, but also act.

Memory too is an action. The traditional silent Yizkor memorial prayer includes an explicit invitation to act. It says that we will give tzedakah in the memory of those who have died: tzedakah, not “charity” but a kind of giving that is rooted in tzedek, justice.  (The version of the prayer we will say this morning pledges to “live justly and lovingly” in their memory.) That’s the Jewish way to remember: giving, and justice, and action.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg z”l died on the cusp of Rosh Hashanah. During these Ten Days of Teshuvah many of you have shared with me your grief at her passing, and your heightened fear of rights being eroded now that she’s gone. I feel those things too.

Justice Ginsburg will be remembered for standing up for the rights of women, from the right to have a credit card in my own name to the right to control my own body. She’ll be remembered for dissenting against stripping federal protections from voters of color. She’ll be remembered for asserting the full humanity of people with disabilities. What kind of giving, justice, and action might we undertake in her memory?

In the days since her death, I keep returning to these words that she offered to law students:

If you are going to be a lawyer and just practice your profession, you have a skill—very much like a plumber. But if you want to be a true professional, you will do something outside yourself, something to repair tears in your community, something that makes life a little better for people less fortunate than you.

That’s our Jewish obligation and our human calling: to do something that makes life better for people less fortunate than we. That obligation feels more important than ever before.

So many of the prayers we recite today are written in the plural: not “I,” but “we.” Torah also frames our obligations to each other in the plural. No matter what comes, we have responsibilities to each other.

Whether or not the world is spiraling out of control, our work of repairing the world, caring for the vulnerable, and pursuing justice doesn’t change. And maybe in fulfilling our obligations to each other, we can become for each other the pillar of fire that the Piaceczyner evoked: a beacon shining in the darkness, lighting each others’ path.

 

This is Rabbi Rachel’s Yom Kippur morning sermon (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)

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