From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

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Shabbat Sermon: A Strategy for the Anxious with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Oct 15, 2022

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I recently attended a wedding where the bride and groom shared beautiful vows under the chuppah. Both of their words were poignant, but the bride’s words landed especially powerfully for me.

The bride offered that in general she is nervous. She is anxious. She is a worrier. She is nervous about money. Nervous about her career. Nervous about where they are going to live, what they are going to do. Nervous about health. But, she said, the one thing she has never been nervous about is marrying her beloved. She always knew that marrying him was just right, a rare oasis in an otherwise anxious world.

Talmud Class: What Do We Learn From the Corruption of King Solomon? Oct 15, 2022

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Should we be judged on the basis of our finest moments, our worst moments, or our final moments? Do our worst moments vitiate our finest? Or should we properly consider our worst moments part of a complex package of our flawed humanity—but without the power to diminish the good we have also done? Case in point: King Solomon, who starts out so bright, and ends up thoroughly corrupted.

Shabbat Sermon: Serendipity with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Oct 08, 2022

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Serendipity. When was the last time that you personally experienced serendipity?

Serendipity is defined as something good happening to you accidentally. The classic case is finding a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn in a while. When you find that twenty-dollar bill, you weren’t looking for it, you just find it, it sparks joy, maybe even the feeling that there is some benign force that has our back.

But is serendipity limited to something good happening to us accidentally? Is there any way to exercise some agency over serendipity? Is there any way for us to make serendipity happen?

Talmud Class: A Normal Rockwell Sukkot Oct 08, 2022

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Let’s draft off the energy of Yom Kippur. We are back in person on Shabbat morning. Please join us for coffee, conversation, and community as we discuss a Norman Rockwell Sukkot.

One of Norman Rockwell’s classic paintings—it commands its own room in the Norman Rockwell Museum in the Berkshires—is a family Thanksgiving feast entitled Freedom From Want. Follow this link.

A family gathered happily together. A turkey ready to be gobbled up. Fine china. Fine stemware. Big smiles. Warmth. Home. Safety. Security. Plenty.

There is only one problem. The year of the painting is 1943. America is in the middle of World War II. After Pearl Harbor. Before Omaha Beach. By the way, the Holocaust is happening.

How are we to think about this family’s feast in the middle of World War II and the Holocaust? Is their celebration of plenty the right move morally, or the wrong move? What impact should the war and the Shoah have had on their feast? Should they have feasted as if World War II and the Shoah were not occurring (which seems to be the case)? Look at the easy smiles on their faces. Should they have canceled their feast due to the sorrows of the world? Should they have had their feast, but done some readings to acknowledge the war and the Holocaust that were both happening that very day?

This theme—how do you do daily life when the world is in tumult—is a recurrent theme for Norman Rockwell. A companion painting, also a classic, entitled Freedom From Fear, shows parents putting children to bed, domestic tranquility, parents grounding their children in the serenity of home and hearth, while the father holds a newspaper that has headlines about the war. Follow this link.

Roll the film forward to 2022. Roll the film forward to Sukkot which begins Sunday night. If we sit in our Sukkah smiling and enjoying our festival meal, eating our fine food, drinking our fine wine, making pleasant conversation, is that a problem given the problems of the world? As just one small example, theNew York Times Daily catalogues the infinite misery engulfing Pakistan as a result of biblical-like floods that are causing death, devastation, and hunger on a massive scale. How do we think about enjoying our holiday when there is so much pain in the world?

What do Jewish sources teach us about navigating this tension between the world in grief and our world as sanctuary from the world in grief?

Yom Kippur Sermon: Show Up. Step Up. Clean Up. with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Oct 04, 2022

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This summer I studied with my 94-year-old father-in-love a classic text that I had encountered before, but seeing it at the age of 61, I saw something I had never seen before, which now seems obvious. We were studying Robert Frost’s poem about being at the crossroads which famously concludes:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

What I picked up this summer is the narrator’s lingering uncertainty, wistfulness, regret, about whether the decision at the crossroads was the right decision. The title jumped out at me this summer: The Road Not Taken. The sigh jumped out at me: I shall be telling this with a sigh. Maybe I messed up. Maybe I should have taken the road not taken.

Shabbat Sermon: The Power in Your Hand with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger Oct 01, 2022

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Erin Alexander sat crying in her car in the Target parking lot. Her beloved sister-in-love had just passed away suddenly, and she was overwhelmed with grief. When the worst of it had passed, she wiped away her tears and decided to stop by Starbucks to get some green tea before attempting to complete her errand.

As soon as she opened the Starbucks door, she could tell the barista was not having a good day. She kept explaining to customers that the espresso machine was broken and was trying her best to accommodate their caffeine requirements with workarounds, but was clearly stressed and struggling to keep up. When it was her turn in line, Erin smiled as brightly as she could and told the barista to “hang in there.”

A few minutes later, when she picked up her iced green tea, she was surprised to see a message scrawled on the side of the cup. “Erin,” it read, “your soul is golden.” That barista didn’t know her sister-in-love had died, she didn’t know how rough it had been to get through every day or the strength it was taking just to face an errand to Target, but that message meant everything to Erin. As she shared recently with the New York Times, “that little thing made the rest of my day.”

Shabbat Sermon: Setting Your Hallelujah Free with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Sep 26, 2022

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In October 1973, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen was hating his life. He struggled with depression. He struggled with drugs like acid and LSD. He had had a child with a woman to whom he was not married, and he struggled with monogamy. His creativity was stymied. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t find joy in performing. At 39 he felt he was past his prime, that he should retire. In his own words, that he should “shut up.”

As Leonard Cohen was in the throes of his mid-life crisis, Israel was attacked on Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973. Israel was unprepared for this war. The initial weeks were brutal. Israel’s air force, so dominant six years earlier, was dramatically undermined by new Russian anti-aircraft missiles. Israeli ground troops suffered horrendous casualties.

These two stories—Leonard Cohen’s personal crisis, and Israel’s national crisis—came together because somehow, in the midst of the war, Leonard Cohen decided to go to Israel. The day he arrived, he went to a Tel Aviv café to ponder his next steps. Just then, a group of Israeli singers walked by. One of the singers, named Ilana Rovina, recognized him. Are you Leonard Cohen? I am. What are you doing in Israel? I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I think I will go to a kibbutz. Why don’t you join us? We are going to the Sinai to sing to the fighters. We’d love you to join us.

I don’t have a guitar.

Shabbat Sermon: Just Listen with Rabbi Michelle Robinson Sep 24, 2022

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September 24, 2022

Shabbat Sermon: Everything Worthwhile is Uphill with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz Sep 17, 2022

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This summer Shira and I tried a new move. We started riding e-bikes. An e-bike is like a regular bike, with a seat, handlebars, two wheels, shifting gears. You pedal, and the bike moves. There is only one difference. The e in e-bike is for electricity. There are three settings, and you can give your bike a jolt of a little electricity, a moderate amount, or a whole lot of electricity when the going gets tough. All summer, I felt vaguely like this was not kosher. This was not authentic. A real cyclist would eschew an e-bike. I particularly felt this pang of inauthenticity while going uphill because the steeper the hill, the more electricity I summoned, with the result that it kind of felt like I was Lance Armstrong, climbing the steepest hills with ease, while all the while I knew it was the electricity, it was not me. It felt off, but I couldn’t place why it felt off—until this week.

This week I was listening to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. Andy Stanley, as I have shared before, is in my view the greatest religious thinker and speaker in America today, and he speaks not only about sacred texts, but also about leadership. In the most recent episode he was interviewing a leadership guru named John Maxwell. John Maxwell has sold 30 million books on leadership.

Maxwell is 75 years old. He has been teaching leadership for decades. He said something simple that really stuck with me.

He often asks people: what is the greatest life lesson you have ever learned?

Talmud Class: What Does Stephen Sondheim Mentoring a Young Singer Teach Us about Our Relationship With Israel? Sep 17, 2022

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For my money, the best, simplest, shortest expression of the complexity of Israel remains the opening chapter of Ari Shavit’s classic My Promised Land. Shavit’s grandfather was among the first Zionists who settled Eretz Yisrael. Shavit himself served in the Israeli army as a paratrooper. The book opens: “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear. Existential fear.” Two pages later: “For as long as I can remember, I remember occupation. Only a week after I asked my father whether the Arab nations were going to conquer Israel, Israel conquered the Arab-populated regions of the West Bank and Gaza.”

How do we, and our children and grandchildren, respond to this complexity?

One response is, it’s exhausting. We have enough problems here in America. Disconnection.

Another response is indictment. Using words like Apartheid. Hostility.

That is where a lot of American Jews (especially young American Jews) are, somewhere between disconnected and hostile.

Tomorrow we are going to consider a model of wisdom from an unlikely source: Stephen Sondheim mentoring a young singer in singing Send in the Clowns . Could this model a different move to keep American Jews in loving dialogue with Israel?

This clip of Sondheim working with a young singer embodies a classic source, Maimonides’ teaching on repentance, which is about a directional energy of moving towards in love rather than away from in anger. Maimonides offers: “Repentance brings near those who are far away.” What does this text about directional energy have to say about bringing our disconnected or hostile generations closer to Israel?

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From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

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