What is this thing we call fear?

My friend Richard

One of my dearest friends is Richard Walden. Rich is a member of our congregation and has served on the board for several years. Before that he and his wife both taught Hebrew on Sunday mornings (Susan is coming back to the faculty this year!) He studied the classics and ended up becoming a banker. But every Friday, he boards an early afternoon train from New York to be back in time for our 6:00 p.m. Shabbat service. He is back in the morning for our 8:00 a.m. service. He is generous and an all around mensch. I am biased, but I dare you to find someone to disagree! 

Several times a year, he volunteers to read Torah at our service when there is not a 14 year old reprising their Bar or Bat Mitzvah parshah. And when he reads, Rich also likes to give the D'var Torah. This past Shabbat was one of those days. Rich nailed the chanting - he is not a musician but he has a deep resonant voice that brings the emotion of the text right off the page and into your kishkes. And here is his D'var Torah. I felt the need to share. Yasher koach Richard!

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What is this thing we call fear? It is an incredibly complex emotion that is woven into Torah in many ways and has been with us from Eden right on through our 40 years of wandering. So what is fear? Is it lack of courage? Is it all about rational or irrational phobias?

This week is parashat Devarim, the opening of Deuteronomy, the book in which Moses retells our journey. In this section Moses recalls the spies who are sent to check out the land promised to us by God. As luck would have it, I met them just a few weeks ago when I stood in as Rabbi for the Friday night service at parashat Shlach. Well, I am with the spies once more and we are getting ready to cross the Jordan. Once again we go out and once again we learn that the land is indeed flowing with milk and honey. Oh but we silly, silly spies. We never learn, and we return, still filled with fear about the giants who live there.

Once again God is angry with us, and sure enough, God punishes us for not trusting—40 years of wandering in the desert AND no one but Joshua will enter the promised land.

So, what is FEAR in Torah? After eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve hide their nakedness from God in fear (Gen 3:10). God tells Abraham to “fear not” when he is sent on his journey in Lech Lecha (Gen: 15:1). At the shores of the Red Sea we are told not to fear Pharaoh’s army (Ex 14:13) and endlessly elsewhere it seems we are told to have no fear.

Does God want us to have the ability to look physical or emotional stress in the eye and say, ‘no big deal, I can take it’? We are tough, we don’t fear anything? We are told in this week’s portion that the spies Moses sent to reconnoiter the promised land “have taken the heart out of us, saying ‘we saw there a people stronger and taller…large cities with walls sky-high.” (Deut. 1:28). Is that what fear is, lack of courage in the physical world?

Well wait one minute. That can’t quite be it. Throughout Torah we are absolutely told to fear God. Later on in Deuteronomy we get the classic turn of the Ve’ahavta to love God “with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might”—but FEAR “lest the anger of the Lord your God blaze forth” (Deut. 6:4). We were told directly in Leviticus “you shall fear your God: I am the Lord” (Lev 19:14). It would seem that just as many times as we are told to have no fear, we are told also to be very, very afraid.

Maybe fear is more about a lack of trust. Is that what Torah is getting at? We should have complete confidence in God without any need for evidence or support other than ‘God said so’. If we learn to truly trust God, we will have no fear. We do see this theme regularly in Torah. Think about when Moses is told to talk to the rock to bring forth water, but instead, hits it twice. He is punished for this and we are never told why, but it would seem to be because Moses did not trust in the words and needed that physical manifestation of power.

Torah gives us some interesting juxtapositions about fear, courage and trust. Should we have blind faith in God and complete trust only in the divine? Or, is there some level of human free will that plays a role in any enterprise? Where do the physical and divine worlds of trust and fear meet? We still need to drive our cars, we can’t trust in God to steer a car. It would be unheard of in Judaism to substitute prayer for medical assistance—work to save a life is expressly permitted on Shabbat—even if we believe in prayers of healing. Torah recognizes human action and free will, even while demanding trust in God.

Ok, so let’s recap. We need to stand in awe of God and fear God, but we need to trust completely and have no fear, because if God is on our side we shouldn’t fear. But we need to be responsible for our own actions in the world and can’t rely on God to fix things even if we have complete trust and no fear of God. Got that? Simultaneously we need to be fearful, trusting and courageous and take action into our own hands but leave everything to God. Is that it?

For me, the epitome of this amalgam of emotions and actions is the image of Abraham with his knife raised over Isaac, that moment in the Akedah when he is prepared to sacrifice his son at God’s request. He knew very well that to swing down would end his son’s life, yet he has complete trust in God. That agonizing moment just before any movement of the knife he must have been living all those emotions of fear and courage and trust in that same crazed mix that Torah demands of us. The razor’s edge that is the balance between all those values and commandments…and after all, God did send an angel to Abraham at the last moment.

Ok, if that is what Torah says and means, what do we think of it? How can we possibly have this quantum mechanic ability to maintain completely opposite positions at the same time? What is this idealized state of trust and fear balancing against one another?

In that characterization it doesn’t feel much different than all the other themes in Torah. We are always balancing darkness and light; male and female; kashrut and treyf; Shabbat and work; one God versus idols; destiny and free will; Egypt versus the promised land. All of our stories and lessons from Torah are about that cutting edge where all these things exist and don’t exist, all those places and moments where we are all and none.

The archetypal moment is of course Shabbat. The pause after and before everything. That space between that bridges us from trust to courage or from this world to the realm of the divine. Remember, God is not in the noise and rush of the storm on the mountain, but in that pause just after.

Do I really fear God? Do I really trust God? I am sure that at moments I have had both emotions held in limbo simultaneously, but the sad truth is that most of the time I am just working my way through the world and can neither fear nor love, neither trust nor think of God. Clearly Shabbat is important to me, I keep coming back erev and boker looking for some divine connection. What I find is respite from work, the pleasure of a Jewish community, a little learning and every now and then something divine. Maybe the moments in which we are simultaneously fearful and courageous, trusting and doubtful are meant to be few and fleeting. Perhaps instead, we are meant to keep working at it. The balance is found on the journey not at the destination.

The spies only got one chance and they focused on the wrong aspect—they only thought of the destination and forgot that God was on the journey with them. Unlike the spies, we get endless chances to reach out and find those magic, fleeting moments when we can be one with the divine, or even just one with a fellow traveler. This Shabbat, let’s not be spies feeling like grasshoppers with giants ready to crush us. Instead, let’s see if we can take one moment of trust, or one moment of courage and turn it into something divine, our own personal promised land without fear. 

Shabbat Shalom.

Daniel Gordis: Time to Change the Israel Conversation

Nearly every time I open the e-mail with the latest post from Daniel Gordis, I find myself thinking. A lot. I don't always agree with him. But he always makes me think, and I am better for the exercise. Same thing today. I will cut to the chase, but only if you promise to read to the end. For a variety of reasons, which Gordis enumerates below, he and I believe it is time to have an old conversation all over again: Why do the Jews need our own state and what should its values be? This conversation often is set aside to focus on existential threats. But it is actually the thing we all need to be worried about. 

I (and I hope many of you) care deeply about Israel and see it as central to my Jewish identity. When I speak to Jewish adults my age and younger (I am 51) I do not find that to be the norm. I imagine there are many reasons for ambivalence toward Israel by Jews. I suspect one of them is battle fatigue. Too many fights. Between Arab nations and Israelis. Between Israeli Arabs and Jews. Between Palestinians and Israelis. Between Jews and Jews. For some, I suspect it has to do with actions or inactions of Israeli governments, settlers or protesters. (Trying to allow for all political approaches, but probably failing.) And some have just stopped paying attention because they are focused on things closer to home.

In any case, I agree with Gordis. Let's dream about what the Jewish state can be. As Jews living Chutz l'aretz (outside of the land of Israel), let's re-engage and become part of the process. And let's figure out what that means, both to us and to Israelis. After all, if you will it, it is no dream.

Click here to read the original posting and comment on Daniel Gordis' page.

-Ira

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Time to Change the Israel Conversation
Posted by Daniel Gordis on June 21, 2013 | 10 responses
Naftali Bennett, not long ago the election season’s “candidate to watch” and today the economy and trade minister, declared the two-state solution at a “dead end” this week, and said, memorably, that “never in Jewish history have so many people talked so much and expended so much energy on something so futile.” Bennett’s controversial comments were, in part, pandering to the the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, before whom he was speaking. But he’s held these views for a long time; his famous election campaign video, still widely available on YouTube, said precisely the same thing.

Reasonable minds can differ as to whether saying publicly that the two-state solution is dead is healthy for Israel’s standing in the international community, especially at this delicate moment when US Secretary of State John Kerry is amassing frequent flyer miles as he seeks, as have many before him, to get the process unstuck. But reasonable minds should agree – though they will not – that Bennett is right. Even were there no Israeli resistance to the idea of the two-state solution, longstanding Palestinian incalcitrance would doom the project anyway. 

The world will take much more note of Bennett’s two-minute remarks than it will of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s longstanding refusal to negotiate. When US President Barack Obama pressured Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into a building freeze that lasted for 10 months in 2010, Abbas refused to come to the table.
Now, with Kerry determined not to fail, Abbas is still complaining aloud about the relentless pressure being placed on him to do so. But if Abbas wanted a deal, why would any pressure be necessary? And even if Abbas were to change his tune, there’s still Hamas. Let’s not conveniently forget the comment by Mousa Abu Marzook, considered Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official, who said Hamas would see any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians – even one ratified by Palestinian referendum – not as a peace treaty, but as nothing more than a hudna, or cease-fire.

Bennett may be right, and he may be wrong. More likely than not, the conflict will muddle along towards some slightly altered reality over the course of many years without the fanfare of a “deal” signed on the White House lawn. Yet though all this will undoubtedly leave much of the Jewish world – in Israel, America and beyond – in a fit of desperate hand-wringing, it should actually come as a relief, and as the harbinger of a significant new Jewish opportunity.

Before us now lies an opportunity to have, at long last, a renewed conversation about why the Jews need a state and the values on which is ought to be based. For far too long, 90 percent of Jewish conversations about Israel have been about Israel’s enemies. Eavesdrop at almost any Shabbat table in New York or Los Angeles, Sydney or Melbourne, London or Paris, and the conversation about Israel is almost invariably a conversation about the Palestinians, or Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We discuss, ad nauseum, how to preserve the Jewish state, without ever asking ourselves why it matters in the first place. 

But this is a self-defeating conversation. To a generation of Jews who witnessed or survived the Holocaust, or to those can still feel in their bones the dread of May 1967 around the Six Day War or the terror of the first days of the Yom Kippur War, the need for a Jewish state seems patently obvious. To those born later, however, this is decreasingly true. More and more, a younger generation of Jews, tired of a conversation about a conflict that they intuit is not going to end, bored to the point of resentment by a discussion that never elicits anything new or inspiring about the Jewish state, feels that it has had enough. 

If every comment about Israel is really about Gaza or Syria or nuclear weapons, what’s the point? THAT IS why Bennett’s remarks actually present an opportunity, even to those who wish matters were different. If there is no “deal” to be had, then there is really little point talking about it. What we can – and should – be speaking about is why the Jewish state matters in the first place.

Ironically, we now have the opportunity to initiate a conversation that instead of dividing us to the point of not being able to speak to each other, can actually unite us in a shared enterprise. What religious and secular, Left and Right, young and old can almost certainly agree on is that if we are to have a Jewish state, its society and values ought to be a reflection of the ideas and values that the Jewish people has long held dear.

But what are those values? What does the Jewish tradition have to say about balancing our need to welcome refugees who are fleeing genocide with our obligation to protect the safety of our own citizens on the streets of Tel Aviv? How do we raise a generation of young Israelis who will remain willing to risk everything to defend the Jewish state, yet who do not hate Arabs, despite the fact that we are intermittently at war with the Arab world? 

How do we balance the need to let 1,000 Jewish flowers bloom, and let Jews pray where and how they wish to pray, and teach their children what they believe they need to know, and still maintain – or create – a sufficiently cohesive public square that makes Israel not an accident of different people sharing the cities, but a meaningful collective enterprise? Conversations such as these would get us to open both and Western books. They would invite the input of secular along with religious, of progressives along with conservatives, for Jewish ideas are not the sole province of any one segment of the Jewish world.

Conversations of this sort would remind us all that the business the Jews have been in for the past several millennia is the business of ideas – imagining a world in which human life flourishes, and trying to then make that world real.
In 1762, more than a century before Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in Emile, said, “I shall never believe I have heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools and universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we know what they have to say.” Today, we have a free state. We have schools and universities. But we’re not having the conversation that Rousseau imagined we would. The casual observer of our conversations about Israel would imagine that when we converse about Israel, all we really talk about is Arabs.

It’s time for a change. It’s time to prove Rousseau right, and to remind ourselves – and a listening world – that the Jewish conversation is actually much deeper and richer than that. Ironically, being liberated from any hope that peace is around the corner may actually make possible a much more important and enduring conversation.

"School as camp?" We can do better!

Jeff Kress has been my colleague in the Leadership Institute for the past nine years. He has taught me and many others a great deal about Social and Emotional and Experiential Learning. For the past year I have been part of and SEL study group with him, Evie Rotstein and a small group of congregation-based educators. We have spent our time exploring different aspect of how focusing on these types of learning can be effective. Yesterday, Jeff published the article below on eJewishPhilanthropy.com.

I am not going to add anything today except to say I think it is worth all of our time to read it, and that I have collected a small group of links to articles that relate to this topic at the end of the posting.

Click here for the original posting on eJP and to read other comments.

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A More Accurate Analogy?
Thinking About Synagogues, not Schools, and Camps
Posted on June 16, 2013 
by Jeffrey S. Kress, PhD

It seems that the idea of making supplemental schools more “camp-like” has gained even more momentum over the past year. In that time, I have engaged in many conversations with practitioners and researchers who shared my mix of hopefulness and skepticism about the idea. The hopefulness often springs from the freedom to think creatively about education while at the same time maintaining a developmental-growth framework to inform new initiatives. Skepticism, on the other hand, often emerges from pointing out the ways in which schools were not like camps (camps being seen as voluntary, having more contact hours, etc.).

Korach's Call For Sameness Diminishes The Equality Of Difference

Rabbi Daniel Grossman

Rabbi Daniel Grossman  is an old friend from a dozen or more CAJE conferences. Today I had the thrill of seeing him once again and learning from him at the Matan Institute for Synagogue Educators. The Institute includes interactive sessions on differentiated instruction, positive behavioral supports, organizational change theory, executive functioning, first-person experiences, concrete “ready-to-implement” ideas, resources and so much more. The article below is from the Jewish Week's blog, "The New Normal" which focuses on the the needs of Jews with special needs. BTW, Korach was my Torah portion when I became a Bar Mitzvah 39 years ago!

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This week’s parasha focuses on the rebellion of Korach. Korach’s attempt to take power from Moses rests on what at first appears to be an appeal to equality and democracy. “All the community is holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation?”

If all of Israel is equal, why should Moses have more authority than others? The problem with Korach’s argument is that to say all are equal in the eyes of God, is not to say we are all the same in our abilities before God.

Multiple Intelligences?We've Known About Them Since Sinai!

My friend and Teacher Raphael Zarum taught me that the Hagadah is nothing more than a teachers guide for teaching about Yetziat Mitzrayim - the Exodus from Egypt. He brilliantly pointed out that traditional Hagadot do not actually contain the original version from Exodus, while spending a great deal of time teaching how others have taught the story - like the five rabbis in B'nei Brak, hiding underground from Hadrian's legions.

I and others have long taught the the four children (sons if you insist) in the Pesach Hagadah are there to teach us about how we need to teach the story of the Exodus to each learner in the way they will best understand. Howard Gardner came along and gave this concept a name: Multiple Intelligences.

The Jewish Week has a newish blog called The New Normal. In this week's edition, Rabbi Daniel Grossman (a wonderful teacher I know from CAJE conferences) drashes on this week's parsha, Emor, and brings a similar lesson that takes us even deeper. Enjoy, comment and Shabbat Shalom!

Even God, even at Sinai,
spoke differently to the priests and to the people. Fotolia

Moses Taught the Priests One Way, The People Another

In this week's Torah portion, Emor, we find this sentence in the very beginning:

“And the Lord spoke to Moses: Speak to the priest, the sons of Aaron and speak to them . . .” (Leviticus 21:1)
The Rabbis in the Talmud ask the question, “Why is the word ‘speak’ used twice? If every word of the Torah is significant, why does the word speak appeartwice, when once would be enough?”

65 More Things I Love About Israel

Benji Lovett,
a really funny guy!

My friend and colleague Robyn Faintich introduced me to comedian and oleh Benji Lovitt when we were in Israel at the Lookstein Center at Bar Ilan on the Jim Joseph Fellowship. He is really funny over kubeh soup and chumus. I have yet to see him on stage, but I hear he really kills there as well! Since making aliyah in 2006, Benji has published his list of reasons why he loves Israel every year. Some of the things he lists are funny to all of us. Others will only be funny to insiders - people who live in Israel or visit a lot. I consider it my duty - and I hope yours - to focus on the ones that I don't quite get and to make that a focus of my next visit or phone call. If I truly want to be connected, I need to learn why its funny. I realize some things may require aliyah. It is good to have challenges. This was published for Yom Ha'atzmaut at the Times of Israel. 

Benji Lovitt has performed stand-up comedy for groups including Hillels, Masa Israel Journey, Birthright Israel, the Jewish Federations of North America, and more. His perspectives on aliyah and life in Israel have been featured on Israeli television, radio, and in print media. For a stand-up comedy show or educational workshop about Israeli society, contact him at benji@benjilovitt.com.

It’s that time of year again, when comedian Benji Lovitt lists things he loves about Israel, and this year’s list (all new, every year) is 65 things long in honor of Israel’s 65^th birthday. Enjoy, share the love, and Happy Independence Day from The Times of Israel!

1. I love that 45 minutes is considered a long drive in this tiny country but that people will drive three hours to Acco to eat at Chumus Said.
2. I love Tel Aviv babes riding scooters. Chicks-on-bikes: like disk-on-key but with skirts.
3. I love that the Neot Kdumim Biblical Reserve teaches team-building and leadership via shepherding goats and sheep.

A business Model for the Jewish People? Let's try Imagineering!

Yesterday, I watched a video of an ELI talk at the recommendation of Lisa Colton. It featured Sam Glassenberg and he was brilliant. Sam is the CEO of Funtactix – Israel’s top video game studio and world-leading publisher of social games for high-profile entertainment properties.

Lisa  recommended it not only because of the content, but because she was going to have a live chat today with Sam. (Video of the chat is at the end of this posting) It was a very interesting conversation. And those of us watching were able to participate via twitter. I would like to invite you to first watch Sam's initial video above. Then check out the conversation they had. If you would like to follow the twitter conversation, look up the hashtag #ELITalks for March 20, 2013. And join the conversation. On Twitter. Here. Or on ELITalks facebook page. Or the Darim Online Bookclub on Twitter. Or pick up the phone. There have been a number of responses to Sam's original video on eJewishPhilanthropy. You can see them here.

Sam talked about how J Date has turned the Jewish world upside down and how those of us in the organized part of the Jewish world are not even aware of it.