Filmmaker Jeremy Sarachan Features Dorshei Derekh

Facing the filmmaker - Reena, Jane, Betsy, Avruhm, Bobbi, George

Last summer an intriguing email landed in my in-box, from a filmmaker. Jeremy Sarachan, a Rochester-based professor, explained: “While on Sabbatical this fall, I hope to visit several synagogues throughout the United States to capture the spirituality and community associated with Reconstructionist Judaism.” He added that while he happily attends a Reform congregation, he identifies as a Reconstructionist, making this project a voyage of self-discovery.

We were pleased to be included in his travels. The Delaware Valley is rich ground for such a project, given the presence of RRC, numerous Reconstructionist communities, including Minyan Dorshei Derekh, and scores of RRC-ordained rabbis. Filming on shabbat was not an option, so we planned a Havdalah get-together on December 6^th. Jeremy first joined us at shabbat services, chatted with attendees over kiddush, and decided to not just film the Havdalah ritual, lead by Rabbi Malkah Binah Klein, but also to capture a discussion amongst us.

If you’ve seen one Reconstructionist community, you’ve seen one Reconstructionist community. There are many hallmarks of our movement; uniformity is not one of them. Jeremy was surprised at the amount of Hebrew in our service, as well as the level of literacy. The presence of a dozen+ rabbis in our midst contributes to that, and also helps attract Jewishly literate lay Jews.

Rabbi Tamara Cohen pointed out, at Havdalah, that while Reconstructionists make distinctions, we don’t privilege one distinction over another. We eliminate the traditional phrase marking the difference between Israel and all the other peoples. We note the difference between the sacred and the everyday, and appreciate both.

We reconvened in a circle, naturally, and responded to the prompts Jeremy provided. Reflects Rabbi George Stern, “Most exciting for me was the opportunity to listen both to Dorshei members with much more background about our minyan than I and to newer members who provided new insights. The conversation revived my enthusiasm about our wonderful minyan and its devoted and caring members.” We mentioned that our Chesed Committee has been very active, in response to our minyan aging in place and more people needing healing prayers and active support. Jeremy noted the high level of compassion echoing through our service.

Many expressed how impactful the Reconstructionist Prayerbook, Kol Haneshamah (many of its creators attend our minyan, as does the editor-in-chief, Rabbi David Teutsch) is on their prayer experience, providing so many different appellations for God, as well as its inspiring commentary and beautiful poetry.

Dick Goldberg, a newer member, was struck by “the depth and richness that exist within our minyan—depth of Jewish knowledge, of commitment to engaging with the world, of genuine compassion, and of inclusivity, as we genuinely believe that all are created in the image of God; and richness when it comes to the different Jewish paths that have brought us together, variety of life experience, and unique ways of being in the world.”

We are very proud of the role Mark Pinsky plays at RRC, where he serves as Treasurer of the Board. He and Jennifer were introduced to Dorshei Derekh by his colleague Adina Abramowitz z”l and have become pillars of our minyan. Mark’s takeaway: “We don’t usually sit around talking about Reconstructionism, so it was fascinating and uplifting to spend a few hours listening to a cross section of Dorshei Derekh. We discussed what makes it meaningful to us and what we appreciate about our community. It felt like an affirmation of the choices Dorshei has made over the decades.”

People treasure the variety of styles and approaches that change weekly. I observed how rarely a member assigned a task had not made it to shul. Maybe a half dozen times in the nearly forty years I have been attending? That’s barely once a decade! We are very committed to one another; people show up.

We are, of course, excited to see how many of our exchanges make the cut and appear in Jeremy’s film. Regardless, as Debbie Weinstein points out, “the film shoot provided us with the additional benefit of a wonderful opportunity for us to share amongst ourselves our appreciation for the Dorshei Derekh Minyan community.”

Thanks, Jeremy! We are excited about your film. Thanks for helping us see ourselves in a new light.

Mark Pinsky: Parshat V'Yikra - And He Called

We begin Nisan & Leviticus this week with parashah Vayikra… And He called.

The Israelites are riding high, so to speak, or at least as high as Israelites can ride. Sure, there was that Golden Calf incident, but Adonai had rescued and freed them from slavery, parted the Reed Sea for them, and given them His Commandments. Then He promised to dwell among them in the mishkan. And the cloud lifted—in the narrative, at least. 

How were the Israelites feeling? How would we be feeling? Grateful? Absolutely! Elevated? Sure. Divinely selected? Probably. Chosen? It would have been tempting… hubris is seductive.

A traditional reading of Vayikra says the small aleph ending the word “vayikra” is a reminder of Moses’ humility, and so a kavanah for all of us to live and lead with humility. That lesson seems particularly important now in the face of unprecedented Presidential hubris.

Let’s don’t forget that hubris is the first giant misstep toward failure. Because are several steps from hubris to failure, though, we know there is time and space there today for humility. We do not have to succumb to hubris–not in ourselves and not in our President. Humility is a step toward hope. And change.

Our own Bobbi Breitman offered a drash at Minyan Dorshei Derekh in late 2020 (that Evolve published soon after) on the “Ethical Imperative of Hope.” She asked and answered a question, which I am paraphrasing today: How do we go on when everything around us feels hopeless? She drew her answer from a midrash she had heard about Noah, Moses, Joseph, and Mordechai: “It was because they could see a new world.”

Another teaching I have leaned on for decades is the Stockdale Paradox.

Admiral Jim Stockdale was the ranking U.S. military officer in the Hanoi Hilton—the North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp—during the Vietnam War. By the way, if you’re in need of some humility, the Vietnamese call it the American War.

Military protocol made it Stockdale’s primary responsibility to help his men survive. What he learned and practiced—what became the Stockdale Paradox—is that the men who survived saw the harsh reality in front of them with brutal honesty yet never stopped believing that they would prevail.

“Oh,” someone once asked him, “you mean the optimists?”

No, Stockdale explained, the optimists all died of broken hearts. They kept telling themselves they would be released soon—by Pesach or by the 4th of July or by Christmas. The pessimists, meanwhile, could not imagine that things might get better; they died of despair, the absence of hope.

Those who survived could envision a different, better world.

When I said that hubris is the first step toward failure, I did not mean that as an abstraction.

I am an avid student of Jim Collins, who studies success and failure. During the the Great Recession, he published a book on organizational failure following success called “How the Mighty Fall.”

They fall in five steps:

First, they embrace hubris born of success. Can you think of a kid who inherited millions of dollars as well as his father’s successful housing business but tells everyone he lifted himself by his bootstraps?

The second step is the reckless pursuit of “more.” Elon Musk keeps coming up for me here.

Third, denial of risk and peril. The Republican Party.

At this point—and this is the point I assume we all fear we as a nation are today or will soon be—recovery is still possible.

The fourth step toward failure is grasping for salvation. Panic is not a strategy.

Some of us fear that we as a nation are already grasping for salvation. But the fact that we are talking, writing, resisting, and protesting about the risks and perils is proof that we are not giving in.

Organized people can and will make the difference.

The final, fifth step to failure is capitulating to irrelevance.

So How DO we Reconstructionist Jews keep ourselves relevant?—Boldly relevant, in fact! How do we hold onto hope?…  and What hopes do we hold on to when we see, with brutal honesty, the irrevocable harm being done to people we know, people we don’t know, our economy, our nation, and all the people and nations who rely on us?

I believe that experience is not what happens to us but what we do with what happens to us. We are humble, we are responsible, we see the facts before us with brutal honesty, and we never stop believing that we will prevail.

As we prepare for Pesach—and so for ALL the times when impossible things are possible—I offer Bobbi Breitman’s words as a blessing:

“May the light of these holy days help us see with new eyes, as we find the strength and courage to bring forth the world in which we hope to live and pass on to our children and grandchildren, an olam hadash,” a renewed World.

Dibarti.

Mark Pinsky serves as Treasurer to the Board of Directors of Reconstructing Judaism

 

Jennifer Paget - Honoring Your Parents: Interrupting Inherited Patterns of Ancestral Trauma

Yasher koachacheykh, Kudos, to Jennifer Paget on the publication of her Dorshei Derekh davar in Evolve: Groundbreaking Conversations, the Reconstructionist journal of big ideas, edited by our own Jacob Staub.

[Based on the devar Torah delivered by the author at Reconstructionist Minyan Dorshei Derekh in Philadelphia on the occasion of her chanting from the Torah scroll for the first time on Shabbat Nakhamu.]

Honor your father and your mother, as your God יהוה has commanded you, that you may long endure, and that you may fare well, in the land that your God יהוה is assigning to you. (Deuteronomy 5:16)

Second-century Rabbi Shimon Bar Yokhai remarked that the commandment to honor one’s father and mother is the most difficult commandment to observe. For me, it became difficult to honor my father after I left home for college and beyond, when he began drinking heavily and refused our family’s pleas to get help. I needed to stay away and did so for several years. I will come back to that story later.

Addressing the often-difficult relationships between parents and children, various commentaries declare that honoring your parents doesn’t have to require loving them. Caring for them in their old age counts as honoring them, for example. I found a new perspective on honoring your parents this year when, at my daughter’s urging, I took a course called Yachatz, Healing Jewish Ancestral Trauma. The course centered on the impact of collective traumatic history on American Ashkenazi Jews. Here are two passages from the website, Transcending Jewish Trauma, created by Jo Kent Katz, that describe a key premise of the course.

While the impact of trauma on individuals may vary significantly, the impact of trauma on a group of people with a shared history of navigating systemic oppression can often be tracked collectively. We can refer to this as collective trauma. 

It can be a profound awakening to recognize the depth to which our thoughts, emotions, and actions are impacted by our lived and inherited experiences with trauma and oppression. Originally, these behaviors were brilliantly adaptive responses; acute, refined, definitive attempts at securing the survival of our People. They were often the very tactic that kept us alive, that kept our People alive. We can call them ancestrally proven best practices. By noticing and reflecting on these inherited practices, we can make more conscious decisions about whether they still serve us today.

When we try to understand our parents, there may be reasons for their behavior that can’t be found in their individual stories, but rather in ancestral experiences. Jo Kent Katz created a tool called The Transcending Jewish Trauma Map. It’s a helpful way to explore a wide range of behaviors that result from Ashkenazi ancestral experiences of terror and otherness. Offering a personal example, Jo Kent Katz describes inheriting a pattern of urgency. She feels she is never going fast enough, getting enough done, is always on the move and others are never moving fast enough. She is often impatient with her partner, friends and co-workers, etc.

Her ancestral history sheds light on this urgency. Her grandmother had to flee Russia under great threat after seeing her parents killed by the Cossacks and suffered undiagnosed PTSD for the rest of her life. Katz connects her persistent sense of urgency to her grandmother’s traumatic escape. Urgency enabled her grandmother to survive. And then it was passed down to her mother and herself as a generalized way to live. Noticing and reflecting about the traumatic origins of the generalized urgency that drives her helps her interrupt practices that don’t serve her and may be harmful to the people around her.

Her story resonated with me immediately. I do not have Ashkenazi ancestry, but my husband Mark is 100% Ashkenazi. His Russian-born grandfather experienced a similar trauma. His grandfather saw his father, a rabbi, killed by the Cossacks after declaring that God would protect him.

Mark and I relate very differently to time. He runs early. I run late. I often feel rushed by him. He is often frustrated that I am not reliable about time, and he can’t predict when I will be ready.

With Mark’s permission, let me describe his airport practices and compare his airport practices to mine and my father’s. Mark considers his airport practices reasonable and appropriate. From my perspective, he clicks into semi-panic mode at the airport. He urgently works to be as far forward in every line that he can, as if he might lose his spot on the flight. If he doesn’t push forward, other people will take his place.

But there is another dimension to this. He feels responsible to be as efficient as possible, such as when going through security, so that as many people as possible can get through as quickly as possible. In this way he feels himself to be part of a collective and his behavior is for the good of all. Can you imagine how this might have been passed down to him by immigrant grandparents who were forced to flee?

Meanwhile, I am all “Lah-di-da!…It’s okay if I am not all that organized….If I drop something… or it takes a minute to find my license….or if I struggle to take my laptop out…It isn’t a matter of life or death!” I have an underlying unconscious trust that the system likes me, protects me. I am not under threat. There is no need to rush. Sadly, I don’t carry Mark’s sense of responsibility for the collective.

As I grew up, my family’s way of functioning, under my father’s control, was to always be running for the gate. We usually made it on at the last minute, adrenaline pumping.

For my father, getting to the airport early was for the uptight, for the people who didn’t know how to enjoy life. Whatever amount of time you were early was time out of your life, time that other people controlled. Never mind that this caused problems for the people around him. We missed flights, and we made other people miss flights. Furthermore, he demeaned people who tried to be prompt or, God forbid, early. In addition, he expected people to help him out of whatever jams he got into, to bend the rules for him.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I come from a lineage of oppressors. That is, my father’s family came to the U.S. in the 17th century and held slaves until the Civil War. I clearly need a different map. Using the concept, though, I looked for historical context that might shed light on my father’s patterns and my own. I know only a few stories, but they seem to hold clues. Here’s one:

My father’s mother, Louise, lived in Mexico with her parents from about the time she was eight until she was 23, when suddenly they had to flee. We were told there was a train trip in which the only things they took with them were two porcelain pigeons that they carried on their laps. (Like Shabbat candlesticks?) My great grandfather had been an executive at an American copper mining company in Mexico. They were expelled during the Mexican Revolution in about 1914.

They were on the perpetrating side of an oppressive system whose time had run out. Even so, I image this had a traumatic effect on my grandmother.  I wonder how my grandmother may have imposed an undue sense of danger and urgency into ordinary life. Was this the cause my father’s life-long habit of digging in his heels and refusing to be rushed or to acknowledge risk? My grandmother escaped to a safe place where her family was part of the white ruling class. Safe, in a lasting way. I imagine that she didn’t suffer repeated trauma as she resettled in the same way Jewish immigrants did. As a result, my father had the luxury of privilege and safety that allowed him to rebel. Rebellion didn’t come at much of a price. For him, the greater threat was to be controlled, to lose power, to not hold a special status in society.

I have a procrastinating pattern that I think is related to this, coming from ancestors most concerned with maintaining power, on which they considered their survival to depend. People tell me I am a perfectionist. Maybe so, but it is a different kind of perfectionism than people with an Ashkenazi background might have. This is hard to say, but I think it has felt safer to me to delay action than to reveal myself as less than superior, lest I lose the esteem of others, lest I lose status and power. It is a pattern that has been born of privilege and protected and perpetuated by privilege–white privilege of the kind that my ancestors enjoyed and perpetuated.

This all leads me to think my father was afraid of losing power or control to his children. I was the oldest, the first to challenge him at every point of development. If he had lived longer, we might have navigated through that.

When I was 29, I began to fear my father might die soon. He was a life-long smoker as well as a heavy drinker. This pushed me to find a way to reconcile and repair. We began meeting. He would drive to Manhattan from Connecticut, where he had recently moved, to meet me.

We had a series of monthly lunches, from noon to one, my lunch hour, close to where I was working. As I’ve described, this kind of regularity was not his pattern. He was not an on-time or reliable person. I didn’t know he could do it. At the second meeting, he arrived quite late.  (His explanation, ironically, was that he had stopped to buy my brother an alarm clock so that he could get to work on time.) I only had an hour-long lunch break, which left us no more than 15 minutes. As tempted as I was to stay beyond that hour, I couldn’t. He almost couldn’t believe it. He had a good reason for being late, after all! After that, though, he was on time for every lunch.

During those meetings, we laid the past aside and talked only of what was happening in our lives. The conversations were delicate and tender, cautious, but full of love for the fact that they were happening at all.

Key to the healing effect of these meetings for me was his honoring of the structure, timeliness and reliability that I needed. I hadn’t even known I needed them or that I could ask for them.

We only met about six times and then he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He was estimated to have 18 months to live, but he caught pneumonia and died soon after. By way of honoring him, I want to acknowledge that for those six meetings, he tamed that instinct to maintain power and found a way to be on time and reliable, and to interrupt the survival pattern that drove him so often in life. Those meetings meant the world to me after he died and have been deeply consoling ever since.

Chanting Torah today was an expression of belonging as a Jew in this community. As I took this step, I was made more aware of how I am different because of my non-Jewish parentage and ancestry. This moment wouldn’t have had a le-dor va-dor (connecting Torah chanting to past and future generations) resonance for my parents were they still alive. And it doesn’t connect me to mysterious, unknown ancestors. But it does connect me to you, this community, to other dear friends who are Jews, to my Jewish children, to a community that has taught me about caring for the collective and trusting the collective.

Dorshei Derekh Pandemic Purim 2121

What a year - with Zoom replacing regular meeting, bringing many new "virtual" people to our community.
The Presser Committee usually plans one social justice event a year, but this year we are on a roll.  We've planned many Purim events to help us stay connected.

Thanks to all who have helped pull this off!

Chag Sameach from the Presser Gang:

    Malkah Binah Klein, chair

    Donald Joseph, Chair Emeritus

    Michael Blackman

    Debrah Cohen

    Mark Pinsky

    Atenea Rosado

    Betsy Teutsch

Here is how we've organized the four mitzvot of Purim

1. Mishloach Manot (Gifts of food to our friends)

Bags of love, in the form of goodies, are being picked up today by those who sent back the form.

Coordinator: Betsy Teutsch

Co-Assembling: Margaret Shapiro

Bakers:

Levanah Cohen

Fredi Cooper (thanks for the recipe!)

Dayle Friedman

Penina Kelberg, and Ellie and Kayla Kelberg-Gross

Pesha Leichter

Bob Tabak and Ruth Loew

Jennifer Paget

Allison Pokras

Genie Ravital

Heather Shafner

Howard Spodek (see his note on the baklava!)

Elyse Wechterman and Sharon Nerenberg

        Delivery Elves: Michael Blackman, Mark Pinsky, Donald Joseph, Betsy Teutsch

        Artwork: Micaiah Kimmelman-DeVries

2. Matanot L’evyonim (Gifts to the poor)

Dorshei Derekh has donated $500 to each of the following three local organizations.  We encourage you to learn about these organizations and lend your support: 

Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network (http://philashelter.org)

Germantown Fridge (https://www.germantowncommunityfridge.com)

Philadelphia Bail Fund (https://www.phillybailfund.org)

Additionally Debrah Cohen is delivering 15 bags of goodies (our bakers really outdid themselves!) to her clients and to the Germantown Fridge, with a note explaning Purim gifts.

3. Reading the Megillah

We encourage you to join GJC for Megillah reading on Purim night, February 25, and on Purim morning, February 26.  See GJC emails for timing and details.  In addition, Dorshei will be hosting a Melaveh Malkah (a special gathering for escorting Queen Shabbat on Saturday night) on February 20 to prepare for reading the Megillah.

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Saturday evening, February 20, 2021, 7PM, begins with havdalah

Listening for the Voice of Queen Esther

Join Rabbi Malkah Binah Klein for an intimate evening of creative encounters with Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story known for her courage, beauty, connection with spirit, and friendship.   Bring pen and paper, as there will be opportunities for writing, and if you are so moved, wear some jewels or a crown.  

4. Purim Day Seudah/Feast

We won’t literally be feasting together this year; however, we will be coming together as a community for a feast of joy, on Purim Day, just before Shabbat.  Join us, even if you have traditionally thought that Purim isn’t your thing.

Friday afternoon, February 26, 4PM

Dorshei Zoom Purim Party Extravaganza

Come sing, play, and laugh, and most of all, let loose your inner, zany child with special guests Rebekka and Gedalia.  Silly hats/costumes are welcome. The Zoom link has been shared.

 

Mark Pinsky on Parshat Vayechi: Hope & Faith After There is an After

Parashah Vayechi: Hope & Faith After There is an After

    Offered by Mark Pinsky, Minyan Dorshei Derekh - January 2, 2021

My thoughts today on parashah Vayechi go to the hopes of the Israelites at the end of the parashah, after Joseph died, and what they might teach us about our own hopes and faith as we start the new year.

In 2020, “Hope” became a focus at Dorshei Derekh, inspired by Bobbi Breitman’s powerful call to action. Hope helped us see a different and better time and believe we could get there.

In fact, hope is on the rise in America. According to a new Axios public opinion poll out this week, “63% of poll respondents said they’re more hopeful than fearful about what 2021 holds in store for the world, while 36% said they’re more fearful.” This is a significant improvement over the prior Axios poll, when 51% were hopeful and 48% were fearful.

It is tempting to explain the rise in Hope by the election of Joe Biden, but the data don’t back that up. Remarkably, what is lifting our hopes is COVID--apparently, our can-do attitude that we will prevail over COVID.

To keep it in context, however. Axios headlined the story, “America Hopes 2021 Will be Less Terrible.”

And while nothing in our lives during COVID gives us easy beginnings or decisive ends, we binge-watch mini-series, re-watch movies with their prequels and sequels, and take comfort in the orderly resolves of Hollywood endings.

Vayechi delivers a great Hollywood ending to a great melodrama, the story of Joseph. The parashah, which begins with Jacob’s final moments, ends neatly with Joseph’s death, the final scene in the book of B’reishit and, profoundly, the final curtain on the story of our Patriarchs.

Before Jacob dies, he blesses his grandsons Menashe and Ephraim and then blesses his 12 sons--if you can call his critical assessments “blessings”--to make the 12 tribes of Israel. He makes Joseph swear to return his body to the Promised Land so he can rejoin Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Leah. Of course, Joseph does so with help from his brothers and Pharaoh.

 Returning to Egypt, Joseph reassures his brothers he has only good intentions and explains that God is with them, through him.

“Do not be afraid,” he comforts them. “For I am in the place of God. Even if you meant to do evil, God meant it for good, in order to bring about what is at present, in order to keep a numerous nation alive. And now, do not be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.”

Later, as Jospeh lays ill, he sketches in light strokes that the “numerous nation’s” destiny is in the Promised Land:

“I am dying,” he says. “And God will surely remember you again one day and bring you up out of this land to the land which God swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Finally, echoing their father, his confidence waning with his breath, Joseph asks his brothers to return his body, too, to the Promised Land. “If God will remember you again one day, then you shall bring my bones up from this place.”

Fade. Cut. Print. That’s a wrap!

I have to tell you now that I struggle with Hollywood endings. Inevitably there is something facile in their solutions, some point at which the story conveniently overtakes the true meaning. If that sort of ending gives us hope, too often it’s false hope.

Studying Vayechi, I found myself focusing on the questions that are not answered, the tensions that are left unresolved, and the parts of the story around Vayechi that we cannot see or know. There is a big gap--maybe even a 430-year gap--between the end of Genesis and the first major action in Exodus. I am interested in what happened during that time between Genesis and Exodus because I want to know what the surviving Israelites experienced, felt, and thought.

What gave them hope? They kept their faith without living patriarchs or Torah. How?

Adina Abramowitz has taught us to recognize the time, in the words of Rabbi Arthur Waskow and his children David and Shoshana, “before there was a before.”

Vayechi raises for me questions about what goes on with and to and among the Israelites in the time “after there is an after” … after the Israelites mourn the loss of Joseph …  and before there is the next “before” … leading to the birth of Moses.

We don’t know whether the surviving Israelites understood what it meant that the Patriarchy had ended. Did that scare them? Did it cause a power struggle? As Sheila said eloquently last week, the Patriarchy produced a historically dysfunctional family.

What did they make of Jacob’s blessing of Menashe and Ephraim? Were Joseph’s brothers resentful? Distrusting? What did it mean to them that Jacob favored the younger, Ephraim, over his elder brother? We know they regretted what they had done to Joseph. I imagine they remembered that Jacob had outmaneuvered Esau since we know there are no family secrets in this story. What had they learned?

What did they make of Joseph’s promise that "G‑d will surely remember you, and bring you up out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob”? Did they hear self-doubt in Joseph’s words?

How did they fear what the loss of Joseph (who was providing for them) would mean for them, their families, their tribes, and the Israelites? Without Joseph, Egypt ran differently.

Did they foresee the troubles ahead in Egypt? Did it occur to them that Joseph could not say WHEN they would return to Canaan or HOW? Surely that was on the Israelites’ minds--when to pack up to return to Canaan … to emigrate?

And how did they recall the conditional nature of Joseph’s request--“If God will remember you again one day, then you shall bring my bones up from this place,” he said. “If.”

I don’t know about you, but I would be feeling pretty nervous. I imagine the Israelites felt their faith and hope tested... Perhaps as WE do NOW. We live suspended in an uncertain and indeterminate present.

We are living in a time that is “after many afters” and “before many befores.”

With each moment we experience the amorphous time after COVID-19 took control of the world as we knew it and before the time we will conquer it.

Each of us in our own ways has sensed the fact that COVID-19 is a species-changing event, as I heard Ameet Ravital say a few months ago, and yet we must make decisions and choices about our futures before we know how different life will be after the pandemic.

We watch in unsettled anxiety after the 2020 Presidential elections and before we know...

-       Which party will control the Senate;

-       Whether Donald Trump will assault the Constitution one final time by refusing to leave office; and,

-       Whether democracy as we knew it will recover?

We wake up each day knowing that Climate Change has us descending quickly toward an unsustainable future, hoping that we can help produce systemic changes in how the world runs, fearing what will happen if we do not.

And we go about our lives after we have recognized that racial and other structural and systemic injustices define our world … and before we know how to be part of the healing or what life could be like when we are.

So what helped the Israelites find the hope and keep the faith to carry them across the narrow bridge that links the time after the last “after” in Genesis to the time before there is a new before in Exodus?

Of course, they remembered the Patriarchs, Joseph and his brothers delivered Jacob’s body to the Cave of Machpelah, and the Israelites delivered Joseph’s body--eventually--to the Promised Land.

The complex and perplexing sequence of Jacob blessing his grandsons before he blesses his sons seemed to give them faith and hope, too--as it gives us hope and faith still.

First Jacob claimed the boys as his own, telling Joseph, “Now, your two sons who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt, shall be mine; Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine no less than Reuben and Simon.”

Jacob claims them as his lineage apparently to cast the Patriarchal lineage and the covenants the Patriarchs made with Adonai beyond, or after, Joseph. “In them may my name be recalled,” Jacob explains, “And the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac.”

And then Jacob blesses his sons.

In a sense, Jacob passed on hope through his sons that the nations of Israel would continue what God had promised the Patriarchs. And he passed on faith through his blessing of Ephraim and Menashe and the Matriarchs, a weekly reminder that God was with the Israelites just as the Shechinah is with us as we enter 2021.

In the final cut, as good as Joseph’s story is, you can look at Joseph ultimately as a transitional character in it--as we all are in our own stories. If Adonai caused Joseph’s brothers to do wrong so that they would all get to Egypt, you might wonder if Adonai needed Joseph so that Jacob’s blessing of Ephriam and Menashe would sustain our faith after ever after. 

Discussion

-       What gives you hope and what sustains your faith as you prepare for the time “after there is an after” in our pandemic world? In our government and our nation? In our environment? In our society?

-       Did your parents or your grandparents give you something to carry across your lifespan so that the descendants of yours that you will never know will keep their faith?

Closing

My grandfather--my father’s father--always told his 12 grandchildren, “It’s deyn America”--”It’s YOUR America.” The older grandkids heard it as a judgement on their lifestyles and choices. The youngest of us, however, took it as a call to social action and civic responsibility. Shroyal, as everyone called him, still is a source of hope and faith for me, though he’s been gone almost 48 years.

 In his memory, I want to report that peaceful transitions of power DO still happen.

 Congratulations to Beth, who has cycled into the role of Outgoing Coordinator. Beth’s trust, confidence, and skills led us through tests in 2020 we never could have imagined.

I am sure we will all rally to support Ruth Loew, as she becomes Coordinator, and Mike Gross, as he joins the Mazkirut. Dorshei could not be in better hearts and hands.

Last, I want to thank everyone in our community for the kindness, support, and love you have shown me in my three years on the Mazkirut. I am grateful beyond words to you all.

 

 

 

 

Our Own Mark Pinsky on Modern Day Slavery: Supply Chains Meet Passover

http://boundlessimpact.net/wp-content/uploads/LaborLensInvesting.pdf