I cannot get the image our of my mind!
On a morning walk when I lived in Jerusalem, I could see minarets, church spires and the Western Wall of the ancient Temple courtyard.

I cannot get the sound out of my ears!
At this time of the year—this month of Elul that precedes Rosh Hashanah—I could hear the mingled sounds of shofars, church bells, and muezzin calls urging Muslims to prayer.

These persistent images and sounds represent harmony and mutual respect.

I treasure them.

Yet we all know that the realities of Jerusalem and those of the world at large are a far cry from the images and sounds that my heart holds fast.

And yet I cling to hope! We can do better!

The greatness of humanity is not that we have always lived up to our lofty ideals but that we have never failed to hold our ideals aloft.

Those words are not original with me (I would love it if a reader can point me too their source), but I wish they were.

It is easy to look at our world and launch into angry rants.

We can demand change in our government, protest many policies, and feel good that we are taking a stand for social justice. “It is (to quote Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address) altogether fitting and proper that we do this.” We hope our protests will bring change down the road.

But real change–immediate change—can begin in our own hearts and with our own actions.

This may not be the year that the images of  harmony, affirmation and respect that I treasure from Jerusalem become reality.

But …

• It can be the year when we express our own pain less and listen more to that of others.
•  It can be the year we spend less time on our business and more time with our loved ones.
• it can be the year we spend less on luxuries and more on helping others who have so little

It might not be the year that we change the world, but it can be the year that we change ourselves.

 

 

 

 

The song was originally recorded in 1941 as a message of hope in response to World War II bombings.
But it is the Doo Wop version by Willie Winfield and the Harptones
(1957) that runs through my head as Hurricane Irma wreaks havoc on Florida.
Certain Doo wop songs have the ability to touch my heart and bring me comfort in troubling times. This is one of them:
“Our home is in shambles
All I treasured is gone
The town seems deserted
Everyone’s so forlorn!
A storm came from up above
But somehow it missed
The Shrine of St Cecilia.

Irma, like Charley, Katrina and other disasters, has taken lives and left much of what we treasure in shambles.

Some have suffered greater loss than others. Regardless of the level of personal devastation, the key to our future is to find a “Shrine of St. Cecilia” in our hearts.
There are so many inspiring stories to hear and read of people coming together in the face of disaster to rebuild their lives and their dreams.
Not every story has a happy ending, but for those who have been spared it is the ability to cling to and build on hope that will determine the future.
The courage and resolve of many inspire me and, I pray, all of us, to do however little or much we can to bring hope and encouragement to others as the hurricane goes her way:

I kneel in my solitude
And silently pray
That Heaven will protect us dear,
And there’ll come a day
The storm will be over and
We’ll all meet again
At the Shrine of St. Cecilia.

Amen

 

Waiting is the hardest part!

I have never dealt with a hurricane so personally before, but waiting is excruciating. We are safe , thank God, in Connecticut because our children and others prevailed on us to postpone our journey to Sanibel until the storm passes, and the island is safe.

In checking with members of my new congregation most of them are safely elsewhere. Many have tales of what Charley did in 2004. Moods range from resigned and anxious to hopeful and upbeat.

I learn a lot from them!

TV reports are increasingly ominous. Fort Myers’ streets are deserted. The trees are swaying, and the waves are high. In Naples wind and rain are increasing rapidly. Similar reports come from Sanibel. It seems like a prelude to a frightening drama called:

STORM SURGE

A week ago that term was not even part of my vocabulary. Now I wait for it to unfold, and waiting is the hardest part.

Ecclesiastes teaches: לכל זמן ועת  L’chol zman et! “To everything there is a time. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

We were all psyched, almost packed and ready to move to the house in Sanibel that will be our home until May. I am eager to settle in, meet members of my new congregation, prepare for and welcome the New Year with them.

But now is the time to wait and to pray.

And waiting is the hardest part.

I have a new favorite movie.

I don’t go to movies much, but Vickie urged me to see the Zookeeper’s Wife that she saw on a plane to San Francisco. On the way home I watched it too.

IT IS SO POWERFUL!

It is about Antonina and Jan Zabinski who ran the zoo in Warsaw when the Nazi’s invaded Poland.

It is a beautifully told story about how this heroic couple saved 3000 Jews from the jaws of Nazi savagery.

The movie is “based on a true story.” I will research the details to sort reality from fiction, but I know there is enough truth in the story the movie depicts that the State of Israel has recognized the Zabinskis as “Righteous Among the Gentiles,” the highest honor the nation can bestow on non Jews for heroic feats of saving Jews during World War II.

The Holocaust testifies to the depths of bestiality to which human beings can descend. But stories like this testify to the heights of heroism to which we can aspire and attain.

The words of Psalm 8 come rushing to my mind.

“What is humanity that You are mindful of them … For You have made them little lower than the angels and have crowned them with honor and glory.” (Psalms 8:6)

Each of us has the potential to attain such a crown, but sometimes it takes courage that nearly defies the imagination to wear it.

In this month of Elul that leads up the sacred season of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our tradition urges each of us to seek the angel that resides in our soul. This month, more than any other, calls us to reach for and grasp hold of our best selves.

I don’t go to movies much, but I will watch this one again hoping it will help me to reach higher than I have to enhance the “Divine Image” (Genesis 1:26-28) in which each of us was created.

 

 

 

 

My mother-in-law is a genius! At 96 she lives independently and still does artwork for which she is justly renowned!

Yesterday, Vickie and I took her out to lunch. As we dropped her off I walked through her garage turned gallery where some of her wonderful works hang. I noted two lovely water colors of Vickie and her sister Claudia.

As her son-in-law for 43 years, I thought there should be one of me. So I asked her when she might do it?

Vickie gave me a dagger look, but Stephanie smiled and said, “How about now? Wait here.”

Five minutes later she returned with a towel, a brush, a few tubes of paint, a small dish of water and a small canvas.

“Sit here,” she instructed.

So I sat.

As she began dabbling with the paint, her face transformed. Years, even decades dropped away as she alternately tilted her head this way and that, looked up and down, and smiled. Her beautiful eyes sparkled.

Ten minutes later she handed me the photo at the top of this essay.

I was floored!

For years people have told me that I look like my mother who looked like her father (pictured next to me, above),  but I never saw it.

Now I do. Clearly!

With her unique eye and exquisite talent, Stefanie converged the generations. Through her genius I see my Poppy, my mother and me all at once.

Yesterday was the eleventh anniversary of my mother’s death. I miss her terribly. There is a tribute to her (just search for Florence Fuchs) on this blog.

My grandfather died when I was ten, and if you read my essay, “Poppy” (also on this blog), you will know how my mother and I both felt about him.

Now, miraculously, Stefanie has brought us all together again!

It is a priceless gift for which I shall always be grateful!

 

 

 

Ed with his wonderful daughter Ivy

 

For much of my life I have been around tennis courts. My experience including five full summers as a teaching pro convince me that I can learn more about people watching them play tennis—regardless of their skill level—than I could if I interviewed them for an hour face to face.

Even before I got to know Ed Kalin, I saw quite a bit of him on the tennis courts both from the sidelines and from the other side of the net. The test of character that every tennis player I see undergoes, whether he or she knows it or not, was a test Ed passed with flying colors.

He was intense and competitive, yet scrupulously fair. He was gracious in both victory and defeat. He carried himself with confidence but never with arrogance, and he never made excuses.

I got to know Ed much better when he studied with me for his adult Bar Mitzvah, an event in which he took great pride. He was less concerned with the mechanical aspects of reading the portions—although he did them flawlessly—than with what he could teach the congregation about what he had learned.

How proud he was just a few months ago when I asked him—in the middle of a lecture I gave in his new hometown of Scottsdale– to tell those in the audience what his Torah portion means to him today.

He spoke with reverence and enthusiasm, and I kvelled. I knew Ed would have no trouble doing so, and in so doing Ed played a major role in helping me drive home my major point that the stories in the Torah are really stories about us and our lives today.

Ed’s Torah portion fit him perfectly. It was about the Golden Calf, the idol our ancestors demanded Aaron make for them to worship at the foot of Mount Sinai.

Ed understood and cherished the opportunity to teach that idol worship is much more than bowing to graven images. Idol worship is when we put greed and selfishness above kindness, caring and compassion. For sure Ed Kalin never did that.

The lessons he taught from the Torah were the lessons he lived in his life. And they were the same lessons he exuded when I watched him play tennis.

Speaking of tennis, Ed found great joy and satisfaction in his post retirement career as a teaching pro. He loved giving lessons, and he loved seeing kids make progress.

Ed and his high school sweetheart, Maddy, shared almost 49 years loving marriage together. Their daughter Ivy, her husband Larry, and their twin grandchildren were the light of Ed’s life. He felt truly blessed to have them living close by.

There is something very unfair about watching a kind, caring man suffer and die the way Ed did. But Ed knew well, and we do well to remember, that life is not always fair.

Ed’s life testified to the lesson of the Rudyard Kipling, poem, If, a quotation from which hangs in the tunnel near the entrance to Center Court at Wimbledon:

        “If you can keep your head when all about you others are losing theirs    …

        If you can meet with triumph and disaster

        And treat those two imposters just the same…

       If you can fill the unforgiving minute

       With sixty seconds worth of distance run …

       Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it

       And—which is more—you’ll be a man my son!

 Ed Kalin was a man in the finest sense of the word! He was a man I was proud to know, and a man who taught me much about living and dying. He was the type of man I will always aspire to be, and his memory will endure for a blessing!

With all my heart I believe God chooses specific individuals for specific tasks. I believe God chose Abraham to begin the journey that created the Jewish people. I believe God chose Moses to lead us out of Egypt. I believe God chose William Harvey to teach humanity about the circulation of blood, and I believe God chose the Wright brothers to inaugurate the era of aviation.   I believe God chose Abraham Lincoln to end slavery in this country, and I believe God chose Martin Luther King to make the dream of racial equality more of a reality in our society.

If individuals can have destinies, why not peoples as a whole?

Just as God chooses individuals for certain tasks, so too does God choose peoples for certain tasks. As I look at history, I agree with an essay written by the late Professor of Labor Relations at Cornell, Milton R. Konvitz called, “Many are Called And Many are Chosen.”   He noted that God chose the ancient Greeks to bring the world an unprecedented sense of beauty, and God chose the Romans to teach the world new ideas about order.

God chose us Jews too. God chose us, as Thomas Cahill teaches in his best selling book Gifts of the Jews, to give the world a sense of the sanctity of time. Before we came along, Cahill notes, people perceived life as a series of repeating cyclical events.

“The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world…” Cahill’s book is nothing more—and nothing less—than a defense of the concept of chosenness. It is a book that can give Jew pride in the role our people play in history. It also is good that a gentile wrote the book because it might seem too prideful if one of us had.

Nearly three thousand years ago the Prophet Amos taught that we are not better than others, but that we have particular responsibilities. Amos wrote: “I have known you uniquely among the peoples of the earth. Therefore I will hold you accountable for every one of your transgressions.” (Amos 3:2)

No, to be chosen does not mean we consider ourselves better than anyone else.   Still, many Jews, both famous and ordinary, shy away from the concept of chosenness because they fear anti-Semitic reactions.

Do we really think we will mollify anti-Semites by disavowing our destiny as a people?

We shall not. Anti-Semitism is the responsibility of anti Semites, not the responsibility of us Jews.

Abandoning the idea that God has chosen us for the task of bringing the ideals based on Torah to the world will not stop either anti-Semites or anti-Semitism.

Jews do not hold exclusive rights to acts of goodness. God revealed Torah to us, the Midrash teaches, in the desert, so we would know that its ideals are open to everyone who wishes to embrace them. They are not the exclusive property of any one faith or people.

It is well and good that other peoples have adopted those ideals. Let them pursue them in their own ways, and let us acknowledge that often those ways inspire those who follow them to remarkable acts of caring and compassion that we do well to emulate.

Still, Judaism has done so much to civilize this world. It is no accident that Jews who represent less than ½ of one per cent of the worlds’ population have won more than 30% of the world’s Nobel Prizes.

No it is not an accident.

It is the product of a religious and cultural system that has stressed learning and literacy as ways of serving God.

It is the product of a religious and cultural system, which teaches us, Lo Toochal liheetalaym. You must not remain indifferent to the suffering of another even if the other is our enemy (Deuteronomy 22:3). It is the product of a religious system that calls on us to be “L’or Goyim, a light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6).

Look at the values and culture of the world around us. Look at the violence that stalks our schools, our cities and our towns. Look at the hatred which threatens to rip apart the very fabric of civilization.

Is it really time for us to turn away from a way of life that has done so much for humanity over the centuries? Can we really afford to be less particular in our Jewish practices and studies? Should we trade Jewish worship and practice for a generalized civil religion, which says, “just be a good person?”

No, let us cherish the belief that God singled us out to bring the ideas of Torah to the whole world.

Chosenness does not mean privilege, and choseness does not mean exclusiveness.

Still, there are people who want no part of it.   We have often been the targets of enemies, and many have looked at our history and our suffering and said with Tevye the Dairyman, “God if this is what it means to be chosen, please, choose someone else.”

And yet, we continue to persist and exist, and with God’s help we shall continue to do so.

Chosenness is a choice, a challenge and an achievement.

The choice to be chosen is ours to make or reject. Choosing to be chosen, I believe, is to believe that God cares deeply about the choices we make–not only as individuals but as a people whom God chose to bring the ideals of Torah to the constant attention of the world.