From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

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Israel's 75th Anniversary Sermon: Two Questions That Heal with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Apr 15, 2023

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For some reason--I don’t know why it happens, I just know that it happens--tensions seem to rise in a family before a big milestone or family simcha. People tend to argue. To bicker. To get into negative energy patterns. The classic example of weird negative energy preceding what should be a happy family time is a wedding. If you have ever planned a wedding, you know this. As the day draws near, anxiety rises. Lists proliferate. Who is going to go to Costco to get the bottled water and the small bags of Cape Cod potato chips? Who is going to the hotels to drop off the gifts baskets? We just had a Covid cancellation. We need to redo table 11.

Simcha anxiety is such a well-known phenomenon that I tell every couple that I have ever worked with for their wedding to get out of the wedding business a week before their wedding—no more wedding details, no more wedding to do lists—so that they can spend that last week focusing on what matters: their love for one another.

We the Jewish people are now having a case of simcha anxiety on steroids. Just 10 days from now—today is April 15, on the evening of April 25—we will mark what should be the most joyful milestone imaginable for our people: Israel’s 75th anniversary. This should be the happiest, or among the happiest, moments in Jewish history, but it is not. Three years after the Holocaust, three years after one-third of our people perished in the flames, three years after our lowest low, the State of Israel was founded, and we were recreated as a people. It is not just that there was a new Jewish state, but a new Jew: a Jew who was strong and vigorous, who had a home, who was not subject to pogroms and massacres. The State of Israel would provide not only a safe home, a sanctuary, for the Jewish people, but also a place of Jewish thriving, a renaissance of Jewish culture and letters and music and language. It would be a place where the finest Jewish values of our prophets and rabbis could be actually fulfilled in a sovereign state. Against all odds, what a miracle, Israel was created, and it is here 75 years later.

And yet, like the joyful family milestone where the joy is not felt, but the bickering, the worrying, the quarreling, the joy of Israel is largely not being felt in this season of its 75th anniversary.

Pesach Day 8 Sermon: The Quilt with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger Apr 13, 2023

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When I was home for Thanksgiving this year, my mom and I were going through some old boxes at the bottom of a closet when we came across a bag of colorful fabrics.

“What’s this?” I asked my mom.

With a funny look on her face, my mom took the bag and started looking through it. “This is the quilt I was going to make you when you were a baby.”

Apparently, when I was born, my mom didn’t want to just be a stay-at-home caretaker. She wanted to feel productive. To be able to show something beyond a growing baby for the time she was spending at home. Naturally, she decided to make a baby quilt. She went to the fabric store and picked out a book of quilt patterns, she bought fabric and washed it, and then every day, when she would put me down for a nap, she would go and work on that quilt. It all seemed to be going well until it came time to put the squares together. Then, somehow, they wouldn’t fit. At the time, my mom was so sleep-deprived that she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. She threw those squares into a bag in frustration, and that bag of fabric squares and scraps has been sitting at the bottom of her closet for the last 33 years.

When it was time to head back to Boston, I absconded with the bag intending to finish the quilt my mom started all those years ago. I thought it would be a beautiful surprise for her and a gift for our baby—a quilt made over two generations. I didn’t realize the quilt would come to teach me about what it means to honor legacy and to transmit values over the course of generations.

Pesach Day 7 Sermon: The Things We Do For Love with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Apr 12, 2023

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For those of you hearty enough to come to shul on the seventh day of Pesach, I want to share with you a love story—in fact a Pesach double love story. But to appreciate this double love story, we need first to talk about halakha, Jewish law. When was the last time that happened in a sermon?

The Torah commands us to have no chametz in our possession during the holiday of Pesach. Chametz is defined as five species of grain: wheat, barley, spelt, rye, and oats. It is not just that we can’t eat chametz. It is also that we cannot have chametz, cannot own chametz. Our homes have to be chametz-free.

Now we have all had the experience, when cleaning our house for Pesach, of finding in the back of the food pantry a stale box of crackers with the expiration date of February 2020. We happily dispose of the stale crackers grateful for the impetus Pesach gives us to do a deep cleaning of our kitchen once a year.

But what do we do with all the chametz that is fresh, the fresh boxes of pasta and crackers? It would be wasteful to throw out perfectly good food. So our tradition has evolved this legal fiction called mechirat chametz, selling our chametz to a gentile, to a person who is not commanded to have no chametz in their home. Dan loves this mitzvah. Starting around Thanksgiving, he will announce that it is time to start selling our chametz for Pesach. This year Dan sold our chametz to our wonderful receptionist Rhiannon. Since she is not Jewish, she is allowed to own as much chametz as she wants. She owns the chametz of the members of Temple Emanuel who empowered Dan to sell to her. Theoretically Rhiannon is legally allowed to enter your home, go to your basement, eat your crackers and pretzels, drink your beer, imbibe your scotch. But it is a legal fiction. It would never happen. The point of this legal fiction is to gesture towards two competing values. One, no chametz during Pesach. Two, don’t waste food. When the holiday is over tomorrow night, Dan will buy back your chametz from Rhiannon. As a result of this legal maneuver, you did not own any chametz on Pesach, and you did not waste perfectly good food.

What does this dry legalism have to do with a love story? Last week the Journal had a story about the halachic problems posed by observant dog owners during Pesach. Dog food is rife with chametz. It is made of forbidden grains. It is true of course that we don’t eat dog food. But the legal prohibition is not just not to eat it, but also not to have it in our possession. Feeding our beloved dog Rover means having chametz in our homes. What is an observant dog owner to do?

Shabbat Sermon: Make Space or Take Up Space? with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Apr 08, 2023

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I recently heard a teaching that I experienced as an epiphany. The context was the Spark mission to Israel to celebrate its 75th anniversary leaving in a few weeks. Three hundred people from Greater Jewish Boston are going on nine buses. Marc Baker, the CEO of CJP, was speaking to the folks who were leading each of these buses.

He shared that when he was still at Gann Academy, he was hired by CJP to lead a mission of young Jewish leaders from Boston called Acharai. The first thing he did was to change his title. He was hired to be a scholar. He did not want to be a scholar. He wanted to be a Jewish journey facilitator. The purpose of a scholar is to share facts. The purpose of a Jewish journey facilitator is to work with, to walk with, the people in your group to help them make meaning of the experience that they are in the middle of.

He shared that on one very hard day the group went to one of the Nazi concentration camps. After confronting this unimaginable inhumanity, they were on the grounds outside the camp. All they wanted was space and silence to process the enormity of what they had just seen. But there was a concentration camp tour guide who started talking at them. Facts and factoids and figures about the camp. This talking head went over very badly.

Marc cautioned us not to be that kind of talking head, who does not read the room, who sees their job as a one-way path of transmitting content and not as a two-way relationship of making sense of complexity. Then Marc shared a question that I have been turning over in my head ever since:

Do you make space, or do you take up space?

Pesach Day 2 Sermon: Stocking Boxes to Freedom with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger Apr 07, 2023

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Lhakpa Sherpa grew up impoverished in the shadow of Mount Everest. Her father worked as a shepherd and her mother raised her along with her ten siblings. They were dirt poor. So poor that they couldn’t afford to buy shoes for the children, let alone to send Lhakpa to school. Instead, she spent her days wandering barefoot through the mountains.

Ever since she was little, Lhakpa has had one dream: she wanted to climb Mount Everest. At the time, women were not welcome to try. Every climber was male, every Sherpa porter was male, and even the thought of a woman trying to climb Mount Everest was enough to make experienced mountaineers laugh out loud. When Lhakpa was about 15, she started hanging around base camp and begging the Sherpa porters there to give her a chance. She spent two years pleading, begging, lobbying, and trying to persuade them before Babu Chhiri Sherpa, a legend in his own right who once spent a record-breaking 21 hours on the top of Mount Everest without oxygen, agreed to give her a chance.

She quickly rose through the ranks. She started as a regular porter, just carrying wealthy tourists’ oxygen canisters and tents and supplies and then became a “kitchen boy.” She would rise before the tourists, hike with all the supplies to the next base camp, set up camp, and then cook dinner all so that when the tourists arrived, they could have a hot meal and go to sleep.

But that wasn’t enough for Lhakpa.

Shabbat Sermon: The Keystone Habit We All Need Now with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Apr 01, 2023

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Israel. The images of civil unrest playing out in Israel this past Monday are images we never thought we would see. Demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of Israelis; counter demonstrations; the airport closed; IDF soldiers and reservists and pilots refusing to serve; general strikes; universities closing; ambassadors resigning; a high government official, Yoav Gallant, fired for speaking his mind and asking for dialogue. All this happening just as Israel is about to celebrate its 75th anniversary.

And all this happening just as we are about to sit down to our seders Wednesday and Thursday nights. How, if at all, do we talk about Israel at our seders?

Talmud Class with Rachel Korazim: The Wadi Salib Riots of 1959 Apr 01, 2023

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“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - William Faulkner

Faulkner’s famous quotation underlies all of Rachel Korazim’s sessions in this series about the crisis in Israel today. To understand the push for reform, and the protests against reform, we went back to the Altalena incident in 1948 (March 18 Talmud class) and to what Arabs in Israel have come to call their naqba, also 1948 (March 25 Talmud class). Rachel takes us to the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa on July 9, 1959, when police shot and wounded a man named Yaakov Elkarif, as a result of which riots ensued. These riots were fueled by tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrachis—all of which is brought to life by the poems we will consider tomorrow. The tensions today are in part fueled by unresolved tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrachis. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. We here may not be able to solve the tensions at play on the streets of Israel today. But Rachel’s teaching will enable us to better understand them. Learning is always good.

Shabbat Sermon: Once Upon a Cruise Ship with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger Mar 25, 2023

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How can you make sure to have the most meaningful and impactful Passover? Is it about preparation? The extent to which you clean out every cabinet and kasher your kitchen? Is it about the Seder itself—the Haggadah you choose and the activities you plan for the Seder?

In the spring of 2014, I was in my second year of rabbinical school and got a gig as a cruise-ship rabbi. Given that this was my first real gig as a rabbi, I was determined to create the most meaningful Passover experience ever. I researched for months leading up to Pesach and put together a folder of midrashim and teachings for every part of the Seder.

Little did I know what the cruise had in store for me.....

Talmud Class: Rachel Korazim on Naqba Mar 25, 2023

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Talk to any Israeli, talk to any American who has recently been to Israel, and the words one hears are: depressing, very concerning, unprecedented, I’m afraid. I don’t know how this ends.

How did we get here? Where does this story begin?

Last week, Rachel Korazim, our Israeli teacher of Israeli poetry, made a point that is so simple, so profound, and so important. The conflicts playing out in Israel did not just spontaneously happen in year 75. They have been cooking for 75 years. Their roots go back to the beginning of Israel’s existence. Last week she talked about how the Altalena conflict evinced deep conflicts among Jewish Israelis that continue to play out on the streets today.

This week, Rachel is going to go back to 1948 again, to what Palestinians call the Naqba, as reflected in this poetry. There is no more urgent issue for American Jews than Israel. There is no better teacher on Israel than Rachel Korazim. Let’s learn together.

Shabbat Sermon: Off Script with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Mar 18, 2023

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I am not proud of it, but one day while on a recent long flight, to make the time pass, I found myself reading a rom com, total beach reading. There were so many other worthier things I could have read. I could have read an analysis of the impasse on judicial reform in Israel. Or I could have done daf yomi, the study of a daily page of Talmud. Or with Passover coming up, I could have studied the Haggadah to get ready for the seders. But no, I read a rom com, light and breezy. I know it would be wrong to evade taking responsibility for this choice. I did it. I own it. I would never want to blame anyone else. I would never want to blame my wife Shira, for example. Even though Shira read it first and seemed to be thoroughly engaged while reading it. Even though Shira downloaded it on our family Kindle. Even though when I asked Shira for a recommendation, she pointed me to this book. Still reading the rom com is on me.

The novel features a woman named Nora who writes love stories produced on The Romance Channel. All of her stories follow a script. In fact, so much so, that she challenges one of the characters to offer her some random facts, from which she will fashion one of her scripted stories. She says to this other character:

Give me a gender, a location, and a career.

Okay…female, Chicago, real estate developer.

Okay, easy. Stephanie, a young urban real estate developer, takes a trip to rural

Illinois to look into buying a dairy farm and turning it into a corporate retreat center.

The young handsome owner of the farm doesn’t want to sell, and they butt heads. But

as she spends more time on the farm, she sees how important it is to the community, and

they fall in love….One day she gets a call that she needs to shut down the farm immediately

or lose her job. She leaves for Chicago. He is heartbroken.

Oh, no.

Oh, yes. But wait…one day he’s plugging along, and who comes back? Stephanie!

Yes!

She’s gone back to Chicago and has realized big city living isn’t for her. She’s going

to stay out in the sticks, and oh, P.S., she has a brilliant idea for how to save the farm.

The end.

Nora generates story after story that follows the script, each gets produced as a movie on The Romance Channel, and so it goes until her own husband, and the father of their two young children, walks out on her, leaving her a single mother. The writer of scripts is now living a life off script. Thus the title of this rom com is Nora Goes Off Script.

Why do I mention this just now? Because the theme of this rom com connects directly with both our Torah reading—and our lives.