So Park Slope has a little Nazi.

A small, angry Nazi.

I met him this evening.

Returning from an unveiling at a Queens Cemetery, I was parking the car at 8th and Garfield. The little Teuton was crossing the street in front of Shul against the light and I gave him a gentle toot of the horn. He barked something about the procreative act; I leaned my head out the window of the car to inquire after his health and he said, in plain English, “There weren’t enough ovens to kill you. I’d like to finish you off.”

I didn’t have too much time to think, so offered what I could to the dialogue.

“Go to hell you little Hitler. Where’s your Nazi armband?”

He said, “I wish I had an armband. I’d like to finish you all off.”

(With an armband?)

Anyway, I replied that he didn’t have the biological chops to complete the task. But my language was slightly more off color.

I have to say, I remain amazed that someone went right from the “intersection to the ovens.” It seemed like an extreme move.

Extreme. A Nazi. Imagine.

Bucolic, urban idyll: Park Slope.

I can see the posters in the Real Estate Offices now: “Great schools; Prospect Park; 5th Avenue Shopping; We even have a Nazi!”

When I was student in Madison in the 80s, someone I once worked with said to me after hearing that I worked at a Jewish summer camp: “Jewish Summer Camp: What, do you teach the kids about gold and stuff?”

That was benevolent Prairie antisemitism.

This guy from tonight was either from Central Casting or a Rod Serling script.

Either way, it was weird.

I wish he could have really known that the reason I was driving around was because even the Rabbi can’t get special parking privileges in front of his own Shul. If only he knew–Jewish power is a myth!

But little Hitler scurried away before I could explain.

Next time…

This is a special Shabbat reserved for those of you with mommy and daddy issues.

From Kedoshim (Leviticus 19), the Eternal says, “Every person should revere his mother and father and you should keep my Shabbat, I am the Eternal your God.”

This one simple line, so seemingly uncomplex, gives rise to a variety of questions. One of them is: why are these two seemingly separate mitzvot linked in the text–to honor your mother and father and to honor the Shabbat?

The Hatam Sofer attempts to answer this question quite cleverly and with a hint toward all those future therapy bills that people would be paying.

Echoing a cry of distress from the Psalmist who wrote in Psalm 27, “for though my mother and my father have forsaken me, the Eternal will take me up,” the Hatam Sofer argues that one parents indeed bring a person into the world; but once we reach a certain critical age, isn’t it true that we navigate our moral universe “independently” or, in religious terms, with God?

And therefore, just as one leaves the original source of the “making,” namely the biological enterprise of the family home, we go out on our own to complete the work and do so by imitating God and resting from the work on the seventh day.

Shabbat completes for the individual, in existential terms, what was begun by the parents.

I see a kind of in-your-face marketing campaign: Grow up! It’s Shabbos!

The Hatam Sofer, appropriately, is more sober. He said that each complements the other in perfect form–the honor due to parents leading one to observe Shabbat; and the rest on Shabbat helping guide us back, in the sublime spirit of the day, to the wonder of creation and the birth of our existence in this world.

Each in relation to the other, in this portion, an expression of holiness, a trace of the Divine in the clear language of Torah.

Sophomore year in high school, everything began to shift for me.

It was the last hey-day of any illusions I had of being a basketball player, let’s just get that out there.

I was the starting point guard on a pretty good high school JV team that won its division on defense, good passing, and the skill of a relentless shooting guard who came from some hard knocks in the City of Milwaukee–”a transfer student”, which was the district’s special term for someone who was black.

He endured a family murder that season and kept on playing through it; I would double up in stomach pain in the locker room before games and fret about the players from the far west side of town German schools that chanted anti-Jewish slogans at us when we played them. I think my bourgeois angst amused him. After games we went to McDonalds, laughed at each other’s bullshit, and tried bravado on for size with an Earth, Wind and Fire soundtrack.

Could it be more Seventies? Most certainly not.

The shift in my own life took place on the court in slow motion and in the bus after games and in the classroom in real time. I saw life begin to pass before my eyes. Dreams of success gave way to life’s realities, to people’s lives, and while both resisting the change toward a deeper reality and regretting its inevitable swing back in my face like the older, wiser branch of a maple tree, I understood that I wouldn’t be a ballplayer. I always tell students, “I didn’t start reading books in earnest til I was 16.” This revelation allows me to share my own journey as well as the word “earnest.” So be it. I’m from Wisconsin. Get used to it.

There were first the Existentialists, then the Romantics. The Russians. And then, as the Eighties emerged (God, I hated the Eighties), there was Every book about Every thing that was Wrong with the World.

And in the third year of the Eighties, like the rhythmic punch line of a joke: Nineteen (one) Eighty (two) Three!!! (three) my dad’s heart gave out (BAM!) and everything changed.

My dream to succeed in Sports gave way to my dream to succeed in Politics which yielded to my life in Religion.

I had to say Kaddish for a dead father. And so my fate was sealed. He wasn’t killed like the Shooter’s. He just gave out, a failure of will and the tragic fragility of God’s genetic randomness.

Kaddish somehow recognized it all; and that’s how I kept the flame alive.

Nisan–the Hebrew month we are preparing to enter–is when it all went down back then; and so, just a few days away again, I feel that yahrzeit breathing down my neck like a full-court press and the score is tied and we need a basket and the crowd is screaming and the ball is in my hands and I’m looking for the Shooter, looking for the Shooter, looking for the Shooter. And in real life, his father’s been killed. But he’s smiling, losing his man, getting open, putting up the shot, winning the game. I gotta have more fun, despite it all. Stop taking things so seriously.

And so I learn from another kid who’s in 10th grade but living wisdom beyond his years.

Maybe it’s the March Madness, the pleasure of my two hometown teams in the NCAA’s. Pride–O Vanity of Vanities! But I think of my Shooter tonight as I talk Torah with my current 10th grade class, on the Wednesday before a double Bar Mitzvah with twins who play basketball. And while talking about Torah on Sinai (and the flames and the thunder on the moutain) and the flames (on the swords of the Cherubs) protecting the Garden of Eden and the students are arguing about the Fire of Torah and Free Will and Law and what it all means and they’re not talking about ANYTHING ELSE BUT TORAH and they’re so focused and they’re so proud of themselves and they’re so INTO IT and as their rabbi I’m so proud.

I start daydreaming: I’m in the gym in the basement of our Shul. And I’m alone. And I’m shooting free throws. And they’re going in, one shot at a time. And I know that sound. I’ll always know that sound. You could beat me, blindfold me, throw me down a flight of stairs and I’d know that sound, a rhythm as steady as the Shema Yisrael.

One, two, three, shoot, follow through, in.

The Jewish word for spiritual intention is Kavanah. Direction. As in toes on the line. As in bend your knees. As in follow-through.

One, two, three.

God, Torah, Israel.

One, two, three.

Thank God for Tenth Grade.

Ann Hulbert shares some insight from a recent Pew study on sexual and political principles of Gen Next that are worth a look in today’s Sunday Times Magazine.

It captures, certainly from my own experience, the rooted openness of a cross section of this generation. Though specifically geared toward views on gay marriage and abortion, the study sheds light on their independence of thought as well as their deep connections to their parents’ generation. And dovetails with one aspect that summarizes their essence: they are, without a doubt, charting something of a new path–wherever it leads, in American political life.

More in relationship to homosexuality than on the abortion question, one sees this study validated, which I suppose makes sense given the more public nature of seeing or knowing two gay people than knowing who had an abortion.

Hulbert writes, “On one level, Gen Nexters sound impatient with a strident stalemate between entrenched judgments of behavior; after all, experience tells them that in the case of both abortion and gay rights, life is complicated and intransigence has only impeded useful social and political compromises. At the same time, Gen Nexters give every indication of being attentive to the moral issues at stake: they aren’t willing to ignore what is troubling about abortion and what is equally troubling about intolerant exclusion. A hardheadedness, but also a high-mindedness and softheartedness, seems to be at work.”

My father used to say to my sisters that I was the sensitive one. “Like a deer in the woods who hears a twig snap,” which I guess meant I had a kind of high strung alertness.

I learned this after he died, twenty four years ago. And in my own personal mythology, that alertness is manifested in my “spirituality.”

And so here I sit in a heated car, on a hill just beneath his grave, on a fairly normal, heartlessly gray late afternoon in Milwaukee. I have come here to accuse him, pre-Shabbos, of the sin of anger and dying young, two things I sometimes fear will take control of me as they took control of him. That’s why, as a strategy for survival, I became a rabbi.

I’m just being honest.

Yes: those fears propelled me, practically against my will, into the rabbinate, after his anger and heart shot him from life on a heartlessly gray day in Milwaukee twenty four years ago. That’s 2 x 12 Tribes years ago for you crazy mystics out there.

And so I stand with freezing feet in the snow, heart broken in accusation. I try to heal it by singing him the Kabbalat Shabbat, a rest and comfort against loss. I see his name, etched in stone:

Monas S. Bachman
Father, Brother, Son

I sing to him of Shabbat and my favorite Psalms. It closes the loop from the only Hebrew he taught me—well, not quite Hebrew but the vague shapes of the letters I watched him trace for me when I huddled up against him and a borrowed tallis in synagogue on the rare occasions that he took me with his own father to say Kaddish for the dead ancestors I never knew.

“Thank you father for teaching me that there is a form to our language.
A linguistic structure I filled in at the Universities I attended in Madison and Jerusalem.
It was in those cities that the replacement fathers were found
After you collapsed on your bedroom floor.”

In the Mishnah these new fathers, Avot, are rabbis, and those were the fathers (and one mother) I sought and found over the course of the last twenty-four years.

And slowly, one by one, they all died too.

First there was George Mosse.
And then Irv Saposnik.
And then Arthur Hertzberg.
And now Lisa Goldberg.

Each a teacher. Each a conveyer of wisdom. Each an exemplar of some aspect of the kind of life I wanted for myself, for Rachel, for the kids.

This is the first time that I stood above my father’s grave, with the stark reality of my own mortality staring me in the face. No image on the grave, no Russian icons looking back in my direction. Just a name—BACHMAN—an accusation in its own right saying, “Sentenced to death, eventually.” I say, “You’re gone, Dad. George is gone. Irv is gone. Arthur’s gone. Lisa’s gone. It’s all down to me. It finally happened. It had to, eventually.”

That’s right.

We will all die one day.

And the measure of each of us is how honest we are, how good we are, how generous we are, in the every moment of the every step we take.

And in this prayer, in the cold, with hot tears of anger and sadness overwhelming me in the Milwaukee snow and the background hum of East-West commuters moving down the freeway that abuts the cemetery, I understand another level of my own anger:

That we live and die is so obvious as to dictate, for those who can grasp it, why certain pretensions of power and authority are ultimately absurd. So that’s why you want to change the world! It’s absurd NOT to!

When you’re younger, you’re supposed to buck against the bridle of authority. That’s part of the natural growth process. But what happens to those who keep staring death in the face, whose lives are made up of visiting the sick, of burying the dead, of listening to questions about God and the meaning of life? Are we supposed to put on suits and act the part of Men Who Are Together?

Or do we stare into the grave and discover a greater freedom from it all?

What happens when your teachers die and you’re left standing at the grave, singing songs?

Who teaches me what to do next? Who says, “Keep on fighting, son?”

Is there a book for this?

A leadership training seminar I can take?

Psalm 92, A Song for Shabbat:
It is good to give thanks to the Eternal.
To sing praises to Your Name Most High.
To speak of Your Lovingkindness in the morning.
And Your faithfulness at night.

If I had a harp or a lute I’d go on; but I’m freezing my ass off, so I head back to the car.

To my wife and kids and Shabbat.

Gray day in Milwaukee: A grave in the snowMy father used to say to my sisters that I was the sensitive one. “Like a deer in the woods who hears a twig snap,” which I guess meant I had a kind of high strung alertness.

I learned this after he died, twenty four years ago. And in my own personal mythology, that alertness is manifested in my “spirituality.”

And so here I sit in a heated car, on a hill just beneath his grave, on a fairly normal, heartlessly gray late afternoon in Milwaukee. I have come here to accuse him, pre-Shabbos, of the sin of anger and dying young, two things I sometimes fear will take control of me as they took control of him. That’s why, as a strategy for survival, I became a rabbi.

I’m just being honest.

Yes: those fears propelled me, practically against my will, into the rabbinate, after his anger and heart shot him from life on a heartlessly gray day in Milwaukee twenty four years ago. That’s 2 x 12 Tribes years ago for you crazy mystics out there.

And so I stand with freezing feet in the snow, heart broken in accusation. I try to heal it by singing him the Kabbalat Shabbat, a rest and comfort against loss. I see his name, etched in stone:

Monas S. Bachman
Father, Brother, Son

I sing to him of Shabbat and my favorite Psalms. It closes the loop from the only Hebrew he taught me—well, not quite Hebrew but the vague shapes of the letters I watched him trace for me when I huddled up against him and a borrowed tallis in synagogue on the rare occasions that he took me with his own father to say Kaddish for the dead ancestors I never knew.

“Thank you father for teaching me that there is a form to our language.
A linguistic structure I filled in at the Universities I attended in Madison and Jerusalem.
It was in those cities that the replacement fathers were found
After you collapsed on your bedroom floor.”

In the Mishnah these new fathers, Avot, are rabbis, and those were the fathers (and one mother) I sought and found over the course of the last twenty-four years.

And slowly, one by one, they all died too.

First there was George Mosse.
And then Irv Saposnik.
And then Arthur Hertzberg.
And now Lisa Goldberg.

Each a teacher. Each a conveyer of wisdom. Each an exemplar of some aspect of the kind of life I wanted for myself, for Rachel, for the kids.

This is the first time that I stood above my father’s grave, with the stark reality of my own mortality staring me in the face. No image on the grave, no Russian icons looking back in my direction. Just a name—BACHMAN—an accusation in its own right saying, “Sentenced to death, eventually.” I say, “You’re gone, Dad. George is gone. Irv is gone. Arthur’s gone. Lisa’s gone. It’s all down to me. It finally happened. It had to, eventually.”

That’s right.

We will all die one day.

And the measure of each of us is how honest we are, how good we are, how generous we are, in the every moment of the every step we take.

And in this prayer, in the cold, with hot tears of anger and sadness overwhelming me in the Milwaukee snow and the background hum of East-West commuters moving down the freeway that abuts the cemetery, I understand another level of my own anger:

That we live and die is so obvious as to dictate, for those who can grasp it, why certain pretensions of power and authority are ultimately absurd. So that’s why you want to change the world! It’s absurd NOT to!

When you’re younger, you’re supposed to buck against the bridle of authority. That’s part of the natural growth process. But what happens to those who keep staring death in the face, whose lives are made up of visiting the sick, of burying the dead, of listening to questions about God and the meaning of life? Are we supposed to put on suits and act the part of Men Who Are Together?

Or do we stare into the grave and discover a greater freedom from it all?

What happens when your teachers die and you’re left standing at the grave, singing songs?

Who teaches me what to do next? Who says, “Keep on fighting, son?”

Is there a book for this?

A leadership training seminar I can take?

Psalm 92, A Song for Shabbat:
It is good to give thanks to the Eternal.
To sing praises to Your Name Most High.
To speak of Your Lovingkindness in the morning.
And Your faithfulness at night.

If I had a harp or a lute I’d go on; but I’m freezing my ass off, so I head back to the car.

To my wife and kids and Shabbat.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

Giving honor to a place: The view from Mount SinaiIn commenting upon the unique relationship that Moses had with God atop Mount Sinai, the rabbis noticed a interesting thing about the text in Exodus. When Israel originally approaches the mountain, it is described simply as that – a mountain. But when Moses ascends, it is called The Mount of God, prompting the rabbis to come up with the phrase, “A person gives honor to a place.”

I have thought of this alot in the weeks leading up to the “apostasy” of the Golden Calf, the challenges this harsh object lesson poses to the reader. Listening to Bar and Bat Mitzvah students wrestle aloud with this text, one develops a certain kind of sympathy for their youthful impatience. They want, as teenagers are genetically disposed, what they want NOW. Patience, afterall, is a virtue, which, like most virtues, are developed by, not inherent to, individuals.

I don’t think I’m telling you something you don’t already know.

Patience takes practice, tolerance, generosity of spirit.

Interestingly, when Moses learns God’s name up on the Mountain, he learns that God’s name has many attributes: Eternal, Eternal, God of Compassion and Gracious, Slow to Anger, Abounding in Kindness and Faithfulness, Extending Kindness to the thousandth generation, Forgiving Iniquity, Transgression and Sins.

Big name.

“Slow to Anger” is literally translatable as Long Nosed (Jewish, obviously) meaning Patient. A short, fiery nose in the Biblical poetry is a sign of impatience. So, beneath the humor there is the idea that patience is a key to understanding the apostasy of the people’s desire to make a God they could see.

How do we know? When do we find this information?

After the sin of the Golden Calf – when Moses comes down from his second trip up the Mountain after having destroyed the first set of tablets in a fit of anger. He goes to the second set and is so enamored of the experience of speaking to God face to face that he himself desires to “see” God. Here is the famous passage, at the end of Exodus 33 where God says, “You cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live.”

Even Moses expresses that very human desire to “see” the Divine.

And he’s answered in Exodus 34 with a “vision” that is a name, a complex name, with many diverse attributes, one of which is long-nosed patience.

Final thought: a person gives honor to a place. Translating “honor” literally, one may offer “a person gives ‘weight’ to a place.”

Gives weight.

What’s heavier than a statue of gold?

The virtue of patience.

Moses gets it himself, finally, and his reward, at the end of Exodus 34, is that God renews the Covenant.

And from then on, after Moses goes to speak with God, he veils himself before the people, modifying and mediating the direct contact with the Divine. With the veil, we learn that more can be seen when less is seen. That the idol is the need for the immediate, the instant gratification.

And that patience wins in the end.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

Boots on the ground: A war protest during the 2004 Democratic National ConventionMembers of my community are asking about the Iraq War and whether or not our congregation should be encouraging discussion on what is, arguably, the most important moral issue of our day.

It turns out the Reform Movement, of which we are a part, is asking us to do just that.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has posted the most recent Resolution on the War in Iraq and the Social Action Commission of the Union for Reform Judaism asks Congregations to read them, discuss them, and consider supporting them.

In essence, the latest resolution opposes the President’s “troop surge” and calls upon the President to announce a real timeline for withdrawal.

I encourage you to read the resolution and weigh in.

Though a undoubtedly a terribly difficult dilemma, it does not mean we shouldn’t talk about and seek, if possible, to reach a consensus on what we think as a community about this war.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

“Is it not from ‘trifles’ that emerge all the important collections of national objects? One must begin by first loving that which is small and modest…that which does not attract because of its majesty and collosal forms…but where are hidden the characteristic traits of the nation, hidden by the futile modes of despotism, ignorance, and persecution.” — from Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov in 1878 (cited by Richard Cohen in “Self-Image Through Objects: Toward a Social History of Jewish Art Collecting and Jewish Museums” for Jack Wertheimer’s Uses of Tradition, New York: JTS, 1992 )

I spent the first two hours of my day in the Temple library, a repository of some real gems of American Jewish culture.

Today’s highlights include a walk through early and mid-twentieth century bookplates, a real aesthetic shot in the arm for those who get sentimental about certain manifestations of Judaica. Our Temple has had a few different bookplates in the last hundred years, my favorite a sky blue one that tastefully boasts of being the “Eighth Avenue Temple B’klyn.” The Shul is known by many names: “Garfield Temple” or “Beth Elohim” or “CBE” or “Beit Elohim.” Even the “Shul with the Pool.” But “Eighth Avenue Temple B’klyn” is new. Or old. And so new. You get the point.

It graces a 1930 publication of Sholom Ash’s Tragedy in Three Acts, “Sabbatai Zevi,” an inspiring work about false messiahs that may require a twenty-first century public reading soon–maybe for Purim–at the Eighth Avenue Temple B’klyn:

Sarah: To you, the Messiah has not come! To us, he is coming, to us! He is coming from the East! Him will I serve; his dust will I kiss; I will burn candles for him; I will sing his praise; I will weave curtains for him. His feet will I kiss and I will wipe them with my hair. (She droops her head and–all in ecstasy–is silent for some time. The crowd is terror stricken.)

Terror stricken, indeed.

We also found “Judaism in a Changing World,” designed in a very 1939 black, silver and green, edited by Rabbi Leo Jung, and includes a beautifully personal inscription from the author to a friend. That Judaism was in a changing world in 1939 is an understatement. Its preface opens with the line: “Jewish life everywhere has well-nigh lost its optimistic hue of yesterday. The horizon of Israel is covered with the clouds of fear.”

Nearly 70 years later and how much of the terms changed? How much have they remained the same?

On the other end of the spectrum is the absurdly narcissistic autobiography by the artist Judy Chicago, whose book, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist contains the hilariously regrettable painting, “Cunt as Temple, Tomb, Cave or Flower.” I don’t know. I’d rather hear a vagina monologue on Broadway than be subjected yet again to the 70s–but that’s just me.

Particularly fascinating is how the worlds of Jewishness and non-Jewishness are still very separate in 1939. Jung’s book concerns itself with Judaism and Science; Judaism and Psychology; Judaism and Christianity. In the 60s and 70s, the books in the Shul library were about an awakening and celebration of consciousness. Today, distinctions have blurred to the point of plurality being the rule; mixtures and eclecticism and melding of ideas and structures rule the debate.

Yet that’s just the discourse, the way into the conversation.

The challenges, like the solutions, are eternally stable.

And each can be found, dusty and ready for reading, in a synagogue library.

[Note: This post is a continuation of Rabbi Andy Bachman's "Confronting Shabbat" argument.]

By the 1870s in America, the one aspect of Shabbat observance that was perceived of as within the “rabbinic reach” of liberal leadership was attendance at Shabbat services. And so, the “radical remedial measures were the consequence of this dilemma, and both were for some time the cause for bitter intramural controversy,” according to Gunther Plaut. The measures that Plaut refers to are Sunday worship (an eventual loser) and Friday night services.

(As an aside, in a 1994 survey done by the Reform movement’s Commission on Synagogue Music, average attendance for Friday evening services in synagogues was at approximately 100 people. Our synagogue, which averages a range of about 50-80, ranks among 20-30% of the congregations of our size. On special nights, like Junior Choir or a speaker, the number rises.)

One effect of moving programming to Sunday, though it failed for worship, was the innovation of “Sunday School” or what Beth Elohim has historically referred to as “Religious School.”

I like to joke that if you were to ask kids on Sunday mornings if they want to be either “religious” or in “school,” you know what the answer is going to be. So at the very least, that institution needs a commission of its own for a new name!

Still, one deeply negative result of this 140 year old tradition is the greater distancing it causes between congregants and Shabbat. Especially in liberal, non-orthodox communities–where one is choosing not being commanded to observe tradition–few people are going to come to synagogue on Friday night, again on Saturday morning, and yet again for education (I mean school) on Sunday.

No way, no how.

I would argue for a another set of radical, remedial measures, namely flipping the model and making Saturday the central experience of the week for families in their journey to educate their children in the Jewish tradition. Two programs I’ve begun are meant to begin to address this.

One, Shir L’Shabbat, which is a Shabbat morning song session with a wonderful young teacher named Evan Schultz. This is geared toward kids between the ages 0-7 and their parents. It’s casual, on the bima, with guitar, songs, challah and grape juice. People, I think it’s fair to say, love it.

The other is moving the traditional Religious School grade service from Friday nights (that would be one of the nights where attendance swells to one hundred) to Saturday mornings. This was done with the specific goal in mind of breaking the cycle of families scrambling to attend Saturday morning services a few times in the months leading up to Bar/Bat Mitzvah, never to really return again.

Saturday morning grade services allow families to experience Shabbat time over a longer, slower time; it expands the accordian, if you will, and creates space to be in Shabbat, as opposed to simply “do” Shabbat at the beginning on Friday night and then watch it recede into the rear view mirror of the weekend’s other jumble of activity.

These are not new arguments. Felix Levy, addressing the 1936 Central Conference of American Rabbis, challenged his colleagues with these words: “First and foremost we should free ourselves and others of the prevailing notion that Sabbath observance means exclusively attendance at Temple service.”

In other words, you don’t have to be in shul, fool.

The table at home on Friday night is a “mikdash me’at,” a miniature altar akin to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem upon which sacrifices were made. The social fabric of a home cooked meal; candles; songs; a ritualized relaxation and celebration–these are the eternal pedagogic building blocks of Ahad Ha’am’s famous dictum: “More than Israel has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept Israel.” It acknowledges the intimacy, the utterly personal aspects of identity formation and moral development and roots it in the home.

It may seem counter-intuitive at first but the rush to a large program on Friday night has, more often than not, wiped the slate clean on Saturday morning, leaving that time for the ritual of Bar/Bat Mitzvah, while everyone else goes about their business.

Plaut, in 1965, saw a window and argued before his colleagues that the arrival on the seen of the Saturday morning Bar/Bat Mitzvah service. “We do not always like what comes along with this reincarnation, but I say frankly that it may turn out to be the formerly unwelcome Bar Mitzvah who with his breaking voice, imperfect Hebrew and his man relatives (?) and friends has given us an entirely new lease on Sabbath celebration. The least he will have done is to have given us a new basis for development, for he has reopened the doors to synagogue on Sabbath mornings and, even more important, has caused Jews to remember the Sabbath in ways they had not remembered it for some time.”

One of the things I say to kids on the bima each Shabbat after they’ve chanted their Bar/Bat Mitzvah portion, is “I hope you come back and chant for us again…” which is what most of us rabbis say. But if every Shabbat is a new kid with a hundred new people who never come again, when will that kid come back? And to what?

In order to mean what we say, we have to develop the ground for some new trees to take root.

So that “Shabbat Shalom” isn’t Hi and Goodbye on Friday night, we should be fearless in our pursuit of new forms and new ideas.

Jacob Wrestles the Angel Jacob is a paradigmatic figure for our own spiritual growth.

At the early stages of his life, he is led to his legacy by a powerful parent, played off another parent, something of an academic goody-goody (the rabbis of the Talmud argue that while Esau was out worshipping idols, Jacob was in the Beit Midrash studying Torah–good boy!)

For sake of argument, he was given a nice Bar Mitzvah, aced his Torah reading, and sent packing by the hot pursuit of an angry brother for sucker punching the life out of the family dynamic. He took what he could get and ran.

On the way, in last week’s Torah reading, Jacob “happens upon” a place and discovers God. He didn’t know God could or would be there and he begins to discern that there is a randomness, a spontaneity to one’s relationship to the Divine that is beyond the powers of human manipulation. The radical surprise element that in its inherent unpredicatability is, also, inherently humbling.

Some things are beyond even our power. The armor of his arrogance is pierced.

This week, Jacob wrestles an angel. Here too one may see that arrogance: to think one can even wrestle God; to demand from God a blessing (as opposed to, I suppose, a feeling of gratitude for even surviving such a terrifying moment.)

For many commentators, this transition–from achieving birthright and blessing through deceit (the beginning of the Jacob and Esau story) to authority (wrestling it from a divine being) is an expression of Jacob’s evolution which, even after the encounter with the angel, is still not complete since Jacob leaves the dream walking with a limp. A price is physically exacted upon Jacob for his as yet redeemed relationship with Esau.

Unlike some commentators who see in this struggle an ongoing conflict with Gentiles, I prefer a more internalized struggle in which, just as Jacob walks away from the dream with a limp, we understand that even on the most physical of levels, we are ultimately humbled by our encounters with the Divine.

Our spiritual arrogance can be seen in the first dream at the ladder–angels accompany us, working day and night shifts to protect us in our knowledge of the birthright.

Our spriitual humility can be seen in the second dream with the angel–it’s true that we wrestle to a draw but in our physical engagement, but we come away flawed, with a limp.

This limp is an eternal reminder that our direct action in the world (the performance of mitzvot) is a physically manifested expression of our spirituality that both links us to the Divine while simultaneously reminding us that our own “authority” is ultimately, a humbling reality.

Speaking before his colleagues in 1965, Rabbi Gunther Plaut argued in favor of a Reform movement restoration of the Sabbath that, forty years later, has yet to be achieved. This probably comes as no surprise to people, given the Reform movement’s location on the most permissive end of the Jewish religious spectrum. After all, with no “law” obligating one to observe Shabbat, one simply “chooses” whether or not to observe it among a variety of choices one has for spending time between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.

That was the case forty, fifty and one hundred years ago as well, though exact circumstances varied from generation to generation–but generally, this was the case. In his talk, Plaut articulates the varieties of solutions offered to practicing Reform Jews, including Isaac Mayer Wise’s “invention” of the Friday evening service, the decision to read Torah on Friday nights (since a growing, assimilating Jewish population would be at work on Saturdays) as well as, in some instances, Sabbath services on Sunday (a kind of early German Jewish attempt in some cities to keep up with the Joneses.

Plaut decried his colleagues having given up on the idea of returning Shabbat to Saturday morning, to pushing for a greater centrality of its observance in the life of liberal Jews. We do any manner of programs on Friday nights to lure people into the synagogue, depriving them of the one proven enduring manifestation of Shabbat that has sustained us for over two thousand years: the songs and ritual of the Shabbat table at home on Friday night–only then to be followed the next day with attendance and participation at synagogue on Saturday morning.

Saturday morning? Am I nuts?

Farmers Market at Grand Army Plaza; yoga studios to the north and south; Park Slope Food Co-Op shifts to work; Little League; soccer; the week’s chores, like shopping & housekeeping; and, still for some (though certainly fewer than one or two generations ago) work.

This is the reality I face while allowing myself to feel very adequately worked in the job. There are still an average of 70-90 people in attendance most Friday nights; a Bar or Bat Mitzvah service on Saturday mornings; and, another 15-20 people in a separate Shabbat morning minyan ( so as not to be overwhelmed in their own prayer experience by the new Bar/Bat Mitzvah guests each week).

But beneath the surface is another reality. There are virtually no kids and families on Friday nights; the twenty to thirty somethings are seeking an altogether different expression of Friday evening spirituality than what we currently “officially offer;” and, if you take away the Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, you’re left with 15-20 adults in synagogue on Saturday mornings.

So I ask Rabbi Plaut’s question that he put to his colleagues forty years ago:

Is Shabbat, he asked, “beyond our power of confrontation?”

I intend to devote the next few posts to this topic and will make Rabbi Plaut’s talk available to anyone who wants to pick it up at shul in the days ahead. If you want me to send you a copy, just let me know.

In the meantime, let’s start confronting.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

By the 1870s in America, the one aspect of Shabbat observance that was perceived of as within the “rabbinic reach” of liberal leadership was attendance at Shabbat services. And so, the “radical remedial measures were the consequence of this dilemma, and both were for some time the cause for bitter intramural controversy,” according to Gunther Plaut. The measures that Plaut refers to are Sunday worship (an eventual loser) and Friday night services.

(As an aside, in a 1994 survey done by the Reform movement’s Commission on Synagogue Music, average attendance for Friday evening services in synagogues was at approximately 100 people. Our synagogue, which averages a range of about 50-80, ranks among 20-30% of the congregations of our size. On special nights, like Junior Choir or a speaker, the number rises.)

One effect of moving programming to Sunday, though it failed for worship, was the innovation of “Sunday School” or what Beth Elohim has historically referred to as “Religious School.”

I like to joke that if you were to ask kids on Sunday mornings if they want to be either “religious” or in “school,” you know what the answer is going to be. So at the very least, that institution needs a commission of its own for a new name!

Still, one deeply negative result of this 140 year old tradition is the greater distancing it causes between congregants and Shabbat. Especially in liberal, non-orthodox communities–where one is choosing not being commanded to observe tradition–few people are going to come to synagogue on Friday night, again on Saturday morning, and yet again for education (I mean school) on Sunday.

No way, no how.

I would argue for a another set of radical, remedial measures, namely flipping the model and making Saturday the central experience of the week for families in their journey to educate their children in the Jewish tradition. Two programs I’ve begun are meant to begin to address this.

One, Shir L’Shabbat, which is a Shabbat morning song session with a wonderful young teacher named Evan Schultz. This is geared toward kids between the ages 0-7 and their parents. It’s casual, on the bima, with guitar, songs, challah and grape juice. People, I think it’s fair to say, love it.

The other is moving the traditional Religious School grade service from Friday nights (that would be one of the nights where attendance swells to one hundred) to Saturday mornings. This was done with the specific goal in mind of breaking the cycle of families scrambling to attend Saturday morning services a few times in the months leading up to Bar/Bat Mitzvah, never to really return again.

Saturday morning grade services allow families to experience Shabbat time over a longer, slower time; it expands the accordian, if you will, and creates space to be in Shabbat, as opposed to simply “do” Shabbat at the beginning on Friday night and then watch it recede into the rear view mirror of the weekend’s other jumble of activity.

These are not new arguments. Felix Levy, addressing the 1936 Central Conference of American Rabbis, challenged his colleagues with these words: “First and foremost we should free ourselves and others of the prevailing notion that Sabbath observance means exclusively attendance at Temple service.”

In other words, you don’t have to be in shul, fool.

The table at home on Friday night is a “mikdash me’at,” a miniature altar akin to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem upon which sacrifices were made. The social fabric of a home cooked meal; candles; songs; a ritualized relaxation and celebration–these are the eternal pedagogic building blocks of Ahad Ha’am’s famous dictum: “More than Israel has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept Israel.” It acknowledges the intimacy, the utterly personal aspects of identity formation and moral development and roots it in the home.

It may seem counter-intuitive at first but the rush to a large program on Friday night has, more often than not, wiped the slate clean on Saturday morning, leaving that time for the ritual of Bar/Bat Mitzvah, while everyone else goes about their business.

Plaut, in 1965, saw a window and argued before his colleagues that the arrival on the seen of the Saturday morning Bar/Bat Mitzvah service. “We do not always like what comes along with this reincarnation, but I say frankly that it may turn out to be the formerly unwelcome Bar Mitzvah who with his breaking voice, imperfect Hebrew and his man relatives (?) and friends has given us an entirely new lease on Sabbath celebration. The least he will have done is to have given us a new basis for development, for he has reopened the doors to synagogue on Sabbath mornings and, even more important, has caused Jews to remember the Sabbath in ways they had not remembered it for some time.”

One of the things I say to kids on the bima each Shabbat after they’ve chanted their Bar/Bat Mitzvah portion, is “I hope you come back and chant for us again…” which is what most of us rabbis say. But if every Shabbat is a new kid with a hundred new people who never come again, when will that kid come back? And to what?

In order to mean what we say, we have to develop the ground for some new trees to take root.

So that “Shabbat Shalom” isn’t Hi and Goodbye on Friday night, we should be fearless in our pursuit of new forms and new ideas.

Jeffrey GoldbergNote: This post has been reprinted, with permission, from Rabbi Andy Bachman's Brooklyn Jews blog.

If you’ve followed his writing in the New Yorker these past several years, then you’ll certainly enjoy his new book.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Washington correspondant for New Yorker Magazine, has written our generation’s first great book on Israel, Prisoners: A Muslim and A Jew Across the Middle East Divide.

The emblematic voice of the post-Boomer writer is in full force–the unencumbered realism of a terrible conflict; utopian hopes filtered through sarcastic recollections of a jaded youth on Long Island; terrible and terrifying dilemmas in service to Israel; and a clear-headed ability to describe the humane and indivuated dream for a way out of the hatred and war through the powerful metaphor of the title of the book: for those who are left who care about Israel, we begin with the premise that we’re prisoners of the conflict.

Maybe it’s the first post-modern American Jewish memoir about Israel, where ideology is broken down as soon as its built up: the Jewish kid escapes the shallow and stupid anti-semitism of his Long Island suburb; briefly finds comfort in the Zionist youth movement; is immediately brought back to earth by the reality of immigration to Israel; and, finally, attempts to make sense of the war between Jew and Arab in the fundamental values of family and friendship. Diplomacy and killing have failed: why not try removing the divide with simple, consistent contact?

The book opens where it closes–with a friendship that Goldberg developed with a Palestinian named Rafiq while doing his Army duty serving in Ketziot, an Israeli prison set up in the biblical Wilderness of Zin, near Kadesh Barnea, areas of the post-Exodus desert where our ancestors got bogged down, as it were.

Goldberg the soldier and Rafiq the prisoner meet with a fence between them and their connection transcends, ultimately, a conflict that has made them both prisoners. And fully aware of how pathetic it is, the redemptive gesture of hope comes from the fact that by the end of the book, where Goldberg visits Rafiq in Abu Dhabi. There, dramatically, they can admit their friendship with one another:

“We were having coffee. I had been thinking, in the most rational way, that if Rafiq and I could allow friendship to triumph over anger, then it wasn’t impossible to believe that the rest of Isaac’s children, and the rest of Ishmael’s children, could stop their long and dismal war.”

[Note: This post has been excerpted, with permission, from Rabbi Andy Bachman's Brooklyn Jews' blog "Ideas."] 

I know people are saying the “blogosphere” is aglow with comments on Congressman Foley and Congressman Hastert and what whose office knew about whom when. So allow me to weigh in.

Let me put it this way: if my kid’s principal had information about a teacher that exchanged the kind of emails that Foley did with high school students and didn’t do anything about it, I’d demand he or she be fired.

Our democracy and House of Representatives deserves no less.

With people walking into schools and killing other people for sport, could these jokers stop playing with power and focus their attention on the deterioration of our society?

How debased must we become before people understand?

And while I’m at it, do I have to look at another picture of Rudy Giuliani smiling for the camera at Fox Sports’ Patriotism Commercial during the seventh innning of every baseball playoff game? Will Rudy be at Shea Stadium tomorrow, too? God I hope not.

Let me be pedantic and remind people that the United States instituted anthems at sports games during times of war; that this notion of singing God Bless America in the 7th inning at playoff time started after 9-11 and now supports what exactly?

We should have a moment of silence in the seventh inning: for gluttony, for hypocrisy, for the innocent dead all over our country and all over the world.

(Yom Kippur always fires me up.)