Dorshei Derekh 5777 Special Events!

Jacob Staub's Op-Ed: Spirituality Contributes to Contented, Meaningful Life

Enjoy Jacob Staub's op-ed "Spirituality Contributes to Contented, Meaningful Life" in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

'Humans plan, and God laughs."

This Yiddish proverb is not as impious as it might seem at first glance. It declares succinctly an undeniable truth of the human condition: We are not in control. No matter how meticulously we plan, there are innumerable variables for which we can't fully account.

Often enough, we plan, and things turn out the way we want. And then we are tempted to believe that we are in control after all.

Our behavior certainly affects outcomes. If I consistently consume fewer calories, there is an excellent chance that I will lose weight. If you treat another person with kindness and compassion, you are far more likely to make a friend than if you are cruel. If your work performance is skillful and conscientious, your job security is likely to increase.

But not necessarily.

Bechukotai - Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner on Inherited Fears and Trauma

Mazel tov to newly ordained Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner. Here is the davar torah she presented on the shabbat preceding her ordinationat RRC, connecting the curses of the parshah - being fearful even when threats are not there - with her experience as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
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Parshat Bechukotai opens with a statement of conditional love. God announces:
אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י תֵּלֵ֑כוּ וְאֶת־מִצְו‍ֹתַ֣י תִּשְׁמְר֔וּ וַֽעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָֽם

“If you follow My statutes and observe My commandments and perform them: I will give your rains in their time, the Land will yield its produce, and the tree of the field will give forth its fruit. And I will grant peace in the Land, and you will lie down with no one to frighten [you]… I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be My people.”

BUT, God then says:

“If you do not listen to Me and do not perform these commandments,
and if you despise My statutes and reject My ordinances and break My covenant
then I too, will do the same to you; I will order upon you shock, consumption, fever, and diseases of hopeless longing and depression. I will break the pride of your strength and make your skies like iron and your land like copper. I will incite the wild beasts of the field against you, and they will utterly destroy your livestock and diminish you. Your roads will become desolate. I will bring upon you an army, and you will be delivered into the enemy's hands.” This ancient litany of curses, known as the Tochecha, encompasses physical and mental illness, natural disaster and war. These plagues exist in our own time, of course, and I think that’s partly why the curses of Bechukotai speak real fear into our modern ears. But for me, what’s most poignant in the Tochecha is a more subtle threat that appears towards the end of the list, when God announces: “And those of you who survive I will bring fear into your hearts… the sound of a rustling leaf will pursue you; you will flee as one flees the sword, but there will be no pursuer.” The feeling of being pursued in the absence of a pursuer – fear unrooted in fact – is something I’ve been reflecting on lately, as I’ve begun to pay closer attention to my own experiences of fear and fearfulness. For me, fear lives in the belly, a lump of low-level dread. And sometimes, when I am particularly frightened of some imagined future, it radiates up into my throat. When I first began examining this fear in therapy a couple years ago, my therapist asked me: “What are you afraid of?” And, without planning on it, without any conscious thought behind my answer, I opened my mouth, and I said: “I’m worried everyone I love will be taken away from me and killed.” To be clear: My fear is utterly irrational, ungrounded in my actual experiences of life and loss. I grew up loved in a safe, middle-class home in Toronto, never persecuted for my religion, never experiencing war or trauma. But, but: I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. In recent years, researchers have been working on better understanding something called epigenetic inheritance: the fact that an individual’s lived experiences can leave genetic alterations in their DNA that can get passed on to subsequent generations.  In one surprising study that confirmed the existence of epigenetic inheritance, researchers gave male lab mice electric shocks every time the mice were exposed to the smell of orange blossoms. The Pavlovian result was that the mice eventually grew to shudder at even a hint of the smell. This was predictable. The surprise, however, was that the children and grandchildren of these traumatized mice also instinctively feared the smell of orange blossoms, even though they had never received any shocks, any sort of negative conditioning. Only last year, another study analyzed the genes of 32 Jews who had either been interned in a concentration camp, witnessed or experienced torture, or who had had to hide during the Holocaust. It then analyzed the genes of their children and grandchildren, and found identical increased mutations for stress disorders in the survivors and their offspring. It seems likely, then, that I didn’t only inherit my straight hair from my mother, or my light eyes from my mother’s father. I also inherited the memories of a trauma that I can never claim as my own. In the words of Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, “I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah, I wasn’t even among the survivors. No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me by night and by day.” So: it seems I bear the bodily wounds of a trauma I never lived, always anticipating, on some level, an enemy who is not there. And this is why Bechukotai is so heartbreaking for me –because curses– even curses that come true -are one thing. But to live in a fear that is rooted in belly and bone – a fear that does not protect us, precisely because there is nothing to be protected from – is a burden that no one should have to know, but so many of us do. In reflecting on the nature of fear – how it lives inside, how it feels in the body – I’ve noticed that fear can act like a horse’s blinders – preventing us from looking up, looking around, noticing the blessings of our lives. When we do not feel safe – when we are curled into ourselves like an involute – we can lose the ability to feel that we are blessed, even if our lives are awash in blessing. So what is the way forward? How do we honour inheritance, without allowing ourselves to dwell indefinitely in fear? I want to bring you back to the parsha – because I think it offers us two possible ways out of the darkness of ungrounded fear. Bechukotai opens with a list of blessings. But being blessed is not enough. To counteract fear, we also need gratitude – but not facile gratitude, not running through the streets lobbing thank-yous like bouquets of flowers. True gratitude requires and invites us to stop, look up, and notice blessing – to not be so focused on the imagined fears of the present, on the future we are so frightened of. If we can get out of the fear long enough to be present, to notice that we are, actually, all right, we can unclench. And breathe. So that’s one way out of fear – through seeing blessing, through light. The other way is to engage with the dark. In Hebrew, the word for curse is klala. But the root of this word – kuf lamed lamed, kalal – is also the Hebrew verb to burnish - to polish to a shine. If we allow tragedy to touch us – to not always live in fear of rustling leaf and the imagined blow, but rather to unclench and let the sting and the sweetness wash over us as they come – we have the opportunity to be slowly transformed. Loss and grief and sadness are the effects of our modern curses, and the cost that comes with loving people. But loss and grief and sadness offer us the opportunity to let life rub against us, wearing down our rough edges, our spikes that we pushed out in anticipation of pain. Life, if we let it, can polish us to a sheen. From the beauty of our burnished selves, we can shine and reflect light to others. And see ourselves more clearly, the darkness and the light that surrounds us. ~Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner, June 4, 2016

Fair Trade Shabbat - Parshat Kedoshim: Expanding Mitzvot in the Supply Chain

Kippah Crocheter Angelica Marta works 

with MayanHands, supporting herself and 

her family. Photo: Dina Tanners

Kedoshim: A Favorite Pick-and-Choose Parshah

May 14, 2016 - Betsy Teutsch

This shabbat is designated Fair Trade Shabbat, coinciding with World Fair Trade Day. Some of you know I am on the Fair Trade Judaica Advisory Board, so I was eager to take on linking today's Parshah, Kedoshim, with Fair Trade Principles. And of course I provided slave-free Equal Exchange Kosher Fair Trade Chocolate to amplify my teaching. [IF you're reading this rather than hearing it in person... go shopping!]

Kedoshim, Leviticus 19:1-20:27) is about an elusive topic, holiness. We sense holiness, but it is hard to define. Social justice advocates love this parshah because of its justice-promoting chestnuts, but there are also opaque and baffling instructions, as well as some we moderns find offensive.

First, some easy ones:

• Peah – Leave the corners of your field for the poor. There is no upward limit. You could harvest a chevron shape, where the corners are the same size as the field, making it 50/50
• No gathering of fallen fruits, they are for the poor and the stranger
• No defrauding
• No withholding of wages.
• You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old
• No falsifying of weights
• You shall not wrong a stranger that resides in your land

Some less obvious paths to holiness:

• You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed (though it does not forbid companion-planting, where one pairs two different kinds of plants, a beneficial practice , a standard in permaculture and sustainable agriculture)
• You shall not mix two kinds of cloth (shatnez)
• You shall not destroy the sidegrowth of your beard

And then the ones that are 180 from where we are today: inappropriate prohibitions, such as the one against male-male unions. In our world they are not only legal, but a celebrated source of holiness for those in loving unions, in many Jewish communities.

The text does not define holiness; we are to be holy, set apart, for God.

I would submit that holiness is , l’havdil, like pornography. You know it when you see it. You feel it.

Clearly achieving this holiness requires a lot of every day, ordinary attention to behavior in the material world. It is woven into our interactions with others. If we were to make up a list of ways to achieve holiness as we live our daily lives, some of these Levitical principles would likely make our list; others would disappear.

Here we are 2500 years later in a complex globalized world of 7 billion people. We can’t leave the corners of our fields for the poor, since we mostly don’t raise our own food, and the world's poorest people, many of whom do raise our food, concentrate in the Global South.

The Fair Trade movement seeks to utilize our everyday market transactions to help the poor improve their lives, according them dignity and ensuring they can meet their basic needs. The opposite? Said Zach Teutsch, when I first described fair trade coffee a decade or so ago, must be unfair trade.

Initially the movement has been known for coffee production,  Fair Trade products include many others kinds of consumable food, flowers, clothing, housewares, crafts, and even Judaica like Fair Trade Judaica's Bar/Bat Mitzvah Collection, kippot and tallitot.

There are ten basic principles of Fair Trade. They expand the holiness in our daily consumption – creating more kedushah and allow us to help people help themselves out of extreme deprivation, Rambam's highest level of tsedakah. Here are a few examples:

Transparency throughout the supply chain. It is easy to take advantage of people who are unaware of the retail value of their products. Asymmetrical information is a form of exploitation, the opposite of fair.

No child labor. This is not prohibited by Torah, it was the pre-industrial norm. It is illegal, now, but not uncommon. Likewise no slave labor. Fair Trade certification is an extension of kashrut supervision, which applies to food.

Safe work conditions, setting forth goals which co-ops can work to attain. Cheap clothes et al are produced in factories that cut every possible corner. (Contrast that with leaving the corners open for the needy….)

FT guarantees equal rights regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, HIV status. This is a much higher standard than Torah or secular law.

Environmental standards are integrated into FT, unlike the conventional food supply chain where workers, the land and water and ultimate consumers are exposed to pesticides. This too is a higher standard, and missing from conventional kashrut supervision.

Q) How might we integrate Fair Trade standards, a sort of “consumption kashrut”, into our personal and household lives? Does having worker justice, environmental protection, and gender equity guarantees feel like holiness? Is this a spiritual practice, or just a form of consumption tax? Or tsedakah?

Q) How to we integrate fairly traded products into Dorshei Derekh and our shul?

Sometimes FairTrade is costly – it cuts out the middle-men so can be competitive, but products are usually higher quality, ergo costlier.

Q) How to we resolve conflicting Value Based Decision Making – local vs. buying a fair trade product from far away, or cost, or kashrut labeling? Organic, for example, does not equal Fair Trade. Or a FT product might not have kosher certification. My husband David loves his Starbucks French Roast. It's kosher, but not Fair Trade. 

PS - Elite Chocolate has no supervision of its supply chain. You can help a recent Ashira Abramowitz, a recent Bat Mitzvah girl in Israel, petition Elite to raise its standards, 

Purim's GJC Tsedakah Collective 2016 - Please Participate!

This Purim, GJC and Minyan Dorshei Derekh will once again run our Mishloah Manot tzedakah collective project, continuing a tradition of over a decade. It allows us all to fulfill two of the important mitzvot of Purim: mishloah manot (giving treats to our friends) and matanot la’evyonim (giving gifts to the poor).

Here’s how it works:

• You donate to the project – suggested minimum, $18, no maximum!
• Donations can be made via PayPal or by sending a check made out to “Germantown Jewish Centre, earmarked for the Purim Tsedakah Project, to the office
• The bulk of the proceeds is donated as tzedakah to three local organizations providing direct support to the needy.
• A small percentage of the proceeds will be used to provide aFair Trade Equal Exchange Chocolate bar + clementine  each household attending the Charry Megillah Reading and/or the Dorshei Derekh evening Purim celebration Wednesday night, March 23.
• We are dispensing with the tradition of clementine cartons filled with goodies; families have been reluctant to take them. Rather than waste food, we are “minimizing the waste and maximizing the mitzvah“. By purchasing Fair Trade chocolate, the mitzvah of helping the poor support themselves is integrated into the ritual of mishloach manot!

1. We will once again be supporting a Weavers Way Community Program, the community garden at Stenton Family Manor, a homeless shelter in Germantown.  The grant  helps a farm educator teach residents how to raise food.  The produce raised is used directly in the kitchen to feed residents.

2. We will be contributing to refugee resettlement, via the

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS-PA. 

3. We will also support The Center For Returning Citizens, whose head Jondhi Harrell spoke at the Stefan Presser Social Justice Shabbat this past January.

The Center for Returning Citizens (TCRC) assists returning citizens in the transition from incarceration to society by providing job training, housing assistance, counseling services, legal aid, and referrals. TCRC helps individuals, families and communities with the adverse impacts of incarceration.

Mass Incarceration: Injustice in America, a Jewish Response

Dorshei Derekh hosts an annual Shabbat focused on social justice in memory of Stefan Presser, a minyan member committed to social justice and proud head of the ACLU. Stefan passed away at age 52, from a brain tumor, in 2005. We have picked a topic each year to learn more about, spurring individual and collective action.

This year's event was very well-attended with both of our speakers providing both inspring as well as deeply distrubing presentations - there is a lot of work to be done. 

Below, Rabbi Malka Binah Klein has provided links for further information.

Kudos and thanks to our chair, Donald Joseph, and the committee - Rabbi Michele Greenfield, Rabbi Malka Binah Klein, David Mosenkis, and Betsy Teutsch.

Jondhi Harrell's organization is The Center for ReturningCitizens, Philadelphia  

Miriam Grossman is an intern at T'ruah: The Rabbinic Callfor Human Rights.  You can sign up for action alerts at  truah.org

To sign up at The Marshall Project to receive news reports about the criminal justice system

Learn about ways to get involved in the campaign to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania at DecarceratePA.into 

Learn about prisoner advocacy at Prison Society.

Abigail Weinberg taught a wonderful Linda Hirschorn chant, Circle Round for Freedom. Naomi Hirsch has supplied the lyrics and a YouTube.
Circle round for freedom,
Circle round for peace.
For all of us imprisoned,
Circle for release.
Circle for the planet,
Circle for each soul.
For the children of our children,
Keep the circle whole.

Click to hear Linda Hirschhorn singing her composition:

Rabbi Robert Tabak on Jonah: Endings to the Story

Minyan Dorshei Derekh, Germantown Jewish Centre, Philadelphia

Mincha Yom Kippur, 2015

Rabbi Robert Tabak

Jonah: Endings to the Story

This dvar Torah is dedicated to the memory of my father, Sol Tabak z”l who for many years read the Jonah story in English at his congregation, Adat Shalom, in San Diego.

Rabbi Gail Diamond, quoting Uriel Simon asks, if teshuvah (repentance) is at the center of the book of Jonah, where is it in first 2 chapters – the prophet fleeing , the boat, great fish, etc.?  The sailors are presented as good, moral people. Jonah is fleeing God and also declares his awe of God.  But no one is called on to repent.

However, teshuvah is at the center of the story, and at the center of Jonah’s anger in the last two chapters.

The Rabbis teach that teshuvah is one of seven things created prior to creation – (BT  Nedarim 39b/Pesachim 54b)

  שבעה דברים נבראו קודם שנברא העולם, ואלו הן תורה

 תשובה וגן עדן וגיהנם וכסא

הכבוד ובית המקדש ושמו של משיח.  

   - *תשובה - 

   "**בְּטֶרֶם הָרִים יֻלָּדוּ...  וַתֹּאמֶר 'שׁוּבוּ בְנֵי אָדָם!'*".

Seven things were created before the world, viz., The Torah, repentance, the Garden of Eden, Gehenna, the Throne of Glory, the Temple, and the name of the Messiah….Repentance, for it is written, Before the mountains came into being [yuladu-were born], before you formed the earth and the world . . . You return humans to dust, you decreed “Return [shuvu] you mortals.” (Ps 90:2-3, “Tefila l’moshe ish ha-elohim”)

In this list of seven things – one of them is not like the others – only teshuvah is a quality, or potential quality, of human life, for all people.

At the end of chapter 4, why is Jonah angry? He says, I knew you were El rahum (A merciful God) , using the same language as Exodus 33-34 after the Golden Calf.

Again: Why did Jonah leave the city? (4:1-4) the text says, because he sees that God is forgiving . Jonah wants a God of absolute justice, of din (at least for gentiles).” Please take my life from me” (twice!)– God  asks (as Rabbi David Steinberg notes, seemingly with sarcasm) “Are you that deeply grieved”? and again after the plant dies.

Ruth Loew asked me a great question:  What happened to Jonah next?  The biblical story ends with the people of Nineveh changing and God telling Jonah about God’s compassion . We don’t hear anything of Jonah’s life after his mission to Nineveh.  Is there a capacity for Jonah to change as well?

Our interactions with others change us – something that I learned in many years working as a chaplain.

The rabbis taught in Leviticus Rabbah (34:8) It was taught in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua:  The poor person does more for the householder (who gives tzedakah) than the householder does for the poor person. (trans from Danny Siegel, Where Heaven and Earth Touch vol 1, no.53) Sometimes we think we are “helping” others, and we will be helped, or changed, more by that interaction than the other person will be.

Once when I was a chaplain, I met a minister and a rabbi who were both hospital patients on a transplant floor.  Both were from South Jersey, but they had hardly known each other – meeting only once or twice at clergy meetings.  The minister heard that the rabbi was getting sicker and sicker and needed a kidney donor.  She said to herself, maybe I can do this.  She was tested, they matched, and both were in the hospital for the transplant. (They also told their story to the newspapers, so it is not confidential).  I don’t know if my visits as a chaplain to each of them helped them or not.  But these visits affected me and made me see how deeply hesed (lovingkindness) can affect people who hardly knew one another.  We may all not be able to be organ donors, but we can show kindness even to those we do not know.

The story of Jonah as written ends with God admonishing Jonah, with teshuvah possible, even for the evil deeds (hamas –  violence or theft) of the city of Nineveh.  At the end of the book we just read this afternoon, the sukkah is gone. The plant is dead.  The king and people have changed.

And presumably Jonah makes the long journey back from Nineveh to the land of Israel.  What is in an imaginary Chapter 5?

I don’t want to give a single answer, but will share a few possibilities for Jonah, Chapter 5

1)      Jonah returns home, and is still resentful of the hesed (lovingkindness) of God, which overruled strict justice.  He goes around grumbling, and saying “Nineveh, its king and citizens were probably faking.  They didn’t mean it—they just wanted to save their necks.  The first chance they get they will cheat and will probably attack Israel, too.”

Jonah was a messenger who still did not believe in the message he had carried.

2)      Version 2.  Jonah returns home, deeply affected by his encounter with human transformation.  He is overwhelmed, even smitten, by hesed/lovingkindness.  The people of Nineveh, he realizes, did not repent because of his great oratory or skills (he spoke in a foreign accent) but because somehow the content reached their hearts.     On the long, hot road home, Jonah thinks about the dead plant he had been willing to die about, and realizes that all of God’s creatures – human and beast, Israel and gentiles, and even plants that die in a day are somehow connected to a wider reality.  Even the thief who steals his donkey and backpack one night is one of God’s beloved creatures.

3)      Version 3.  Jonah returns home.  He realizes that people can change, and that God can forgive. He also knows that not all the people of Israel, not all the people of Nineveh, not all the beasts are kind and loving.  He knows some are capable of great evil. But people are also capable of good, and more significantly, capable of transformation.  Jonah realizes that he is not the center of the story.  At most, he is a messenger.  Jonah has to confront his own anger that God is el rachum v’hanun  (a God merciful and forgiving), that God who somehow forgave the Golden Calf and the Ninevites might forgive him, and might forgive Israel, if they truly change.

I  want to conclude by sharing a midrash that connects three essential qualities (tzedakah, teshuvah, tefillah ) of the Days of Awe to one verse that we don’t often read, from Second Chronicles when King Solomon dedicates the First Temple in Jerusalem :  (Pesikta d’rav Kahana, BaYom HaShemini Atzeret 28:3).

Rabbi Yudan said in the name of Rabbi Elazar:

Three things-

prayer, Tzedakah, and turning-to-Menschlichkeit [Teshuvah]

eliminate [unfavorable heavenly] decrees. (shelosha hen she-matbilin et ha-gezerah).

and all three can be derived from a single verse:

“When My people, who bear My name,

humble themselves, pray,

seek out My face,

and turn from their evil ways,

I will hear in My heavens,

and will forgive their sins,

and heal their land.” (II Chronicles 7:14)

“pray” (va’yitpallelu)- this refers to prayer

“seek out My face”—this refers to Tzedakah

as it is written elsewhere “I through Tzedakah (tzedek) shall see your face.” (Psalm 17:15)

and “turn from their evil ways”—this is turning-to-Menschlichkeit [Teshuvah]

And what is the conclusion of the verse?

“I will hear in My heavens

and forgive their sins…”

[R.Tabak adds the final words of the verse, not quoted in the midrash: “And I will heal their land.” (v’arapeh et artzam)]

trans:  Danny Siegel, Where Heaven and Earth Touch vol. 3, no.38) 

  

I can’t tell you the ending of the Jonah story.  We have to try to write our own endings, with our life stories, as best we can, with help from one another.

Song:  K’chu imachem d’varim  v’shuvu el-hashem (Hosea 14 – haftarah for Shabbat Shuva)– Take words with you and return to Hashem.