by Rabbi Larry Karol

“Do you see people who are skilled in their work? They will serve before royalty; they will not serve before obscure people.” -Proverbs 22:29

When we came upon this verse in our congregational Proverbs study group, I was taken aback for more than a moment. There is something in this verse that points to greatness, but it seems to do so with a tinge of elitism. One could interpret this verse to mean that people do their work well only if they end up serving the most important leaders in society, who have greater value than the “common people.”

This bothered me, partially because I have served for most of my rabbinate in small congregations. There may tend to be a lingering sense in American life that “large” means great. Some people still may believe that larger synagogues in larger metropolitan areas are necessarily great due to their size and location. They may very well be great, but greatness is not tied only to the size of a community.

My years spent serving congregations of 100-150 families have taught me, over and over, the positive impact that a few people, or even one person, can have on the lives of others, or on my life. Over the years, there have been many fulfilling and spiritual moments in prayer and song and ah-ha insights that emerged from “small but mighty” study groups.   While I have officiated at the same number of bar and bat Mitzvah services during 28 years as some large congregations have in the course of two years, working with every student has been a joy. Small congregations and communities offer the possibility of minimal distance between clergy and congregant. While no city where I have served has had a population greater than 200,000 people, I have had a chance to meet Senators, congressional representatives, governors, members of the President’s cabinet, one future president, mayors, and other individuals who made significant contributions to American life.

However, none of those encounters with public officials are the essence of my rabbinate.l If I and other rabbis serving small congregations and communities are doing our tasks well and with skill, then, in light of the Proverbs verse, we must be serving royalty. We can take this verse to mean that every one of our members has the potential to make a valuable contribution to the well-being of a congregation and to our lives. I would like to think that no one is obscure – and that serving with skill means finding a way to be sure that no one feels obscure or insignificant.

In recent days, magazines such as Newsweek and websites such as MyJewishLearning.com have compiled lists of America’s “top rabbis.” I see these efforts of ranking rabbis as productive when those lists include some of the very rabbis who have taught me some of the most valuable lessons I have learned.

Still, I find myself trying to reconcile the “top rabbis” list with Proverbs 22:29. When I do, it takes the verse to a place where I don’t really want it to go in creating a narrow measure of success. Then I turn to Rami Shapiro’s translation of Proverbs 22:29, which can be helpful to all of us in defining our own greatness: “A hard worker can stand tall before kings; there is no greater  honor than honest labor.

And, finally, there is this Talmudic saying that puts us all on the same level:

“I am a creature of God and my neighbor is also a creature of God.
I work in the city and my neighbor lives in the country.
I rise early for my work and my neighbor rises early for work.
Just as my neighbor cannot excel in my work,
I cannot excel in my neighbor’s work.
Will you say that I do great things and my neighbor does small things?
We have learned that it does not matter whether a person does
much or little as long as one directs one’s heart to Heaven.”

Every day, may we see the royalty and greatness in those we serve and within ourselves as we continue to do our work with dedication, enthusiasm and sincerity.

Rabbi Larry Karol was ordained at HUC -JIR in Cincinnati in 1981 and has served congregations in Dayton, OH; Topeka, KS; Dover, NH; and now at Temple Beth-El in Las Cruces, NM. He and his wife Rhonda have a son, Adam, who is Digital Communications Manager at URJ.

Originally posted at Rabbi Larry Karol

On the first Sunday of the first day of religious school, I challenge my seventh grade students: How do you have a conversation with God in the 21st century? Do you have a conversation at all? How do you come to God when life is good? More, how do you come to God in times of anger or sadness or despair, when all you want to do is curse at God?

Being a fan of symmetry, on the last Sunday of the last day of religious school, I asked them: “What is it that connects you? To Judaism, to God? Are you connected? What does it mean to be a Jew?”

I don’t know that I have answers any more now than I did when I started that year. For that matter,  any more than I did when I lost God, when I was convinced that God had lost me, or any more than when I felt sheltered and carried gently in the palm of God’s hand. But I know now, I think, what connects me. I know, now, what binds me to my faith.

Hooray for me (she said, somewhat drily – after all, this is not about me). But still, I ask myself: “Have I done enough? Have I, have we, the community that surrounds and supports these questing, growing, questioning minds – have we given them enough, to anchor them in their doubt and disbelief, to strengthen them in their journey to adulthood? Will they, too, become Jews by choice?”

I look at my son, who, at 13,  is right there: a jumble of belief and doubt and cynicism and hope, so ready to believe, so fearful of his honest disbelief. What can I give him, that he will choose to be a Jew? Around and around I go, on my own merry-go-round of ask-and-answer. Every so often, I’m lucky enough to stop long enough to hear enough from others who ride their own merry-go-rounds of hope and doubt and faith and love.

It lets me know, if nothing else, that I’m asking the right questions. At least, that we are all asking a lot of the same questions.  And we’re finding, if not answers, at least a little bit of clarity. And so I can say: What does it take to be enough? And I can start to hear the tinny calliope of an answer coming back to me: It’s about passion, I think. My passion. Our passion. The passion and joy and exuberance of being Jewish: of study and community and service and prayer and family and God. It’s choosing and being engaged in the choice. It’s mindful and sometimes difficult and sometimes frustrating and always, always, it is OK to be passionate. It’s good to find the wonder and sense the awe. Judaism can be an intellectual pursuit, but it is so much more, can be so much more – if we allow it, if we let it. How can we not show that? How can we not share that?

But wait! There’s more (she said with a cockeyed smile). It’s also about obligation. We spend so much time sheltering our young, giving and teaching and doing for them, that we don’t always remember to teach them their obligation to us, their community. We don’t always show them that there is as much joy, as much passion in obligation and service outwards as there is in being served. God knows that lesson well: We are commanded to serve, we are bound by our obligations one to another, to our community and to God. It is that obligation that helps give us all a framework of connection that can transcend doubt or disbelief.

Passion. Obligation. Joy. God. Beginning the conversation. Being caught in the act of choosing, every day, to be a Jew. What else, what else, what else? What am I missing? What are we missing?  I don’t know it all, not by a long shot, but I’ve learned that there are those who can fill in the blanks, if I ask. There are those who can help me find the questions, if I listen.

I’m asking. I’m listening. Is it enough?  Is there joy enough, wonder enough to bridge the doubt? What connects us? What will bind us, one to another and to God? What words do I give to my son, so that he can find his own way to choose, every day, to be a Jew?

And finally, I offer a small prayer of my own: that we can all listen in wonder, ask in joy, choose in faith, dance with God. Amen.

Stacey Zisook Robinson is a member of Beth Emet The Free Synagogue in Evanston, IL, and Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe, IL.

Originally posted on Stumbling toward meaning: Stacey’s Blog as a follow-up to her post “Jew by Choice.”

I am a Jew by choice.

And before you ask – both my parents are Jewish. One of my earliest memories is of being with my grandfather, sheltered by his tallit, as he gave the benediction to his congregation on Rosh HaShanah. We celebrated the major Jewish holidays – Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, Chanukah, and Pesach, anything else being an esoteric holdover of a bygone age – mainly with a meal. Occasionally, we even made it to synagogue.

I was educated as a Jew, the full complement: Sunday and Hebrew school, bat mitzvah and confirmation class. I was dropped off and sent inside while my parents had a quiet Sunday morning, or a free hour or two on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the late afternoon. I sat, every Saturday morning for almost a year, reading ancient Hebrew and what seemed like even more ancient English, littered with “thees” and “thous” and flowery beyond belief, alone among a handful of old men, as required by the dictates of my upcoming bat mitzvah. Alone, because my parents had other things to do.

I devoured religious school. I felt as if I had found the place where I belonged, had always belonged, a familiar and sheltering home, as we navigated through Jewish history and holidays. I ran through all the primers for Hebrew that our rabbi could throw at me, such that by the time my family switched synagogues, I was a year ahead of the rest of the kids in my secular school grade. And it wasn’t just schooling: There was youth group and music, too. Debbie Friedman’s (z”l) songs were fresh and new and grabbed something inside us, got our hands clapping and hearts soaring. We sang a new song to God, and we did it with joy.

When I became a bat mitzvah (although, when I became a bat mitzvah, we still had a bat mitzvah; there was none of this “becoming” stuff), – from the bima I gave a bat mitzvah speech that I declared my parents to be “Lox and Bagel Jews,” people who ate their way through Jewish culture, but who, when push came to shove, really felt more comfortable on the golf course than the sanctuary floor on a Saturday morning. I further declared that I would never be like them (remember, I was a teenager). Most importantly, I declared my intention and desire to become a rabbi.

All of my fervent declarations were met with a hearty chuckle, most especially from my parents. Although they were willing to play along with my more participatory adventures in Judaism, they drew the line at the rabbinate. “That’s really not a job for a nice Jewish girl,” they told me. Funny thing, it had nothing to do with the fact that I was a girl – after all, we were living in the modern world of 1974, and women could do anything (sort of). No, they didn’t think the calling appropriate because they figured I’d never make enough money by praying professionally.

Like most teenagers, I was adamant, intractable, supercilious and superior. At 13, I knew the answers to life, the universe and everything.

By 15, though, I knew there was no God and that religion – specifically Judaism – was nonsense. I refused to participate because I refused to be a hypocrite. Of course, I still took off from school, and later, work, for all the major Jewish holidays, and I ate all the major Jewish meals at their appointed times, each in its season. A girl has to eat, right?

From then until my early forties, I was a Jew by birth, and that was about it. I did not disavow my Judaism and I did not seek other religious option, though I flirted with alcohol as an emergency spiritual plan and then with a kind of universal (not to be confused with Universalist) just-be-a-good-person, peace-and-love kind of amorphous spirituality that had no form – and certainly no God. It was easier for me to be disconnected and contemptuous, and so I was.

Somewhere along my way, something happened, something changed. Getting sober helped. Getting married certainly didn’t hurt. Having a child pushed me over the edge, turned my contempt into something quite like hope. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled upon a grace note of faith.

And now? Now I am a Jew by choice. Every day – let me repeat that: every day – I choose to be a Jew. I choose to engage and connect and participate and act and worship and pray as a Jew. It is a conscious act, like the King who says to Scheherazade: “Good story. I guess I won’t kill you today. Maybe tomorrow.” Some days, I am the King; some, Scheherazade. I must both act and choose. With that, I find a measure of peace, a sense of wonder, the joy of obligation and the freedom of service.

I still like riotous, raucous, chaotic family meals to celebrate the holidays, but there is so much more, for me, to being Jewish: It is family tradition and ritual, faith and intent. It is cultural and religious and social. It is how I live my life as an individual and as a member of a community. It is family meals and silent prayer. It is difficult and simple and resonates within me and fills me with light.

I am a Jew because I act. I am a Jew because I choose.

Stacey Zisook Robinson is a member of Beth Emet The Free Synagogue in Evanston, IL, and Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe, IL. This post originally appeared on her blog, Stumbling towards meaning:  Stacey’s Blog.

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When my son was born, I cradled him against my heart, arms wrapped gently yet surely around his small and fragile body. I would stand, holding him, our breaths mingled, our hearts beating in an elegant call and response, one beat to the next, and I would sway, a slow and gentle side-to-side rock that lasted for the eternity that exists between heartbeats. I could feel his body relax into the motion, like oceans, like drifting, like peace. I loved the simplicity of that rhythm, the warmth of him, the smell of his newness and his infinite possibilities. As he drifted, as he gentled, my own body would react in kind, and I followed him.

These moments became our own Fibonacci sequence: the delicate curve of our bodies, in motion, at rest, in motion again, twined in an eternal spiral, more intimate than a lover’s kiss, repeated again and again and again (world without end, Amen).
So, when I found God again…

No.  When I found the need to find a communal God…

No again. When I found the need to be part of a community in order to engage and have a conversation with God as part of that community, I began to pray more formally. I began, as it were, to daven. In earnest.

It started with Friday nights, happy, joyous celebrations that welcomed in the Sabbath Bride.  With music and prayer (and clapping, with an occasional crash of cymbal or the downbeat of a drum), we ushered in Shabbat, remembering the light of creation, the promise of wholeness and completion. I needed the community raucousness, the loud holiness of erev Shabbat to ease me into a different kind of worship.  My voice was rusty after years of disuse; there was comfort in the foot-stomping, toe-tapping, almost giddy prayer of those nights.

Saturday mornings came later for me, when I learned how to be still, when I learned that listening was as much a part of prayer as words and song.  They were all about quiet joy. Intense, but soft and gentle. If Friday nights were all a communal romp at play in the fields of the Lord, Saturday mornings (and, later, festival mornings) were a way to find individual sacredness in the midst of a holy community.

As I prayed, as I found my voice, something surfaced for me. It was so familiar, a recognition that washed over me like pools of light: warm and gentle and cleansing. As a child, I had seen my grandfather daven often enough. In shul, he and his congregation would shuckle as they bentsched, a quick, rhythmic motion back and forth, as if they were all about to walk forward but were rooted in their places. The more impassioned their prayer, the faster they moved.  Now, decades later, I found an odd connection to my grandfather: a choreography in holy time. Prayer moved me, not just emotionally, but physically as well.

There was a difference, though. Where my grandfather rocked, forward and back, so ready to be propelled outwards, or upwards, to soar wherever it was that his prayer led him, my dance was different. Mine was that gentle sway, the side-to-side rhythm I had found in my son’s infancy. Unlike the shuckling of my grandfather’s generation, my sway seemed to be centered, to be grounded. Don’t get me wrong: one was not better than the other. Just different. I was not meant to be propelled, but to flow. Like oceans or time.  Like light.

I cannot shake the feeling that there is something holy in that movement. I can lose myself in that tidal sway, let the sacred wash over me and through me. I can believe, in those moments, that the movement itself, that easy to-and-fro, is a prayer.

In fact, I know that it is: sacred and holy and eternal. Like oceans or time. Like light.

Like love.

My son is preparing to become a bar mitzvah. To be fair, he is a bar mitzvah, having passed his thirteenth birthday just last month. But in fine American Jewish tradition, he is preparing to lead a service, chant from Torah, teach us something about what he chants. As I’ve tried to teach him, now, not only does the community have something to offer him, he now has something to offer the community. It’s a two-way street, and he has obligations to fulfill as he steps onto the path of burgeoning adulthood.

But as he prepares, I’ve really tried to stay out of it. I’m his mom: I drive him to his tutor’s, I remind him to practice (I remind him again to practice), I nag him a little about practicing, I’m planning the social festivities of the day itself (and thinking a lot about wardrobe.  Mine, not his.) But I am not his teacher — not for this. Let others help him prepare. I have, I hope, laid the foundation and given him guidance enough for him to follow his own path. But there is a community upon whom he can depend, who have so much to teach and share with him. Let him learn this lesson as well (I pray).

So I was surprised one day, when I reminded him, but had not reached the level of nagging at him, to practice, and he asked if I would chant with him. Would I chant with him? Would I pray with him?  Would I?

I held as still as I knew how, as if a delicate butterfly had lit upon my finger, shyly flapping its gossamer wings, so ready to take flight again. I held my breath and nodded, hoping I appeared calm and nonchalant, while inwardly doing my little happy-dance-of-joy. I did not want to frighten him away.

Would I pray with him?

And he came to me while I sat at the table, my not-so-tall boy, my almost man. He came and stood and nestled his body next to mine, so that our hearts beat in time together, a gentle call and response. And we prayed, my son and I, and we swayed, he cradled next to me, a simple back and forth, that gentle back and forth, slow and stately, a dance in holy time. Like oceans, like time. Like light.

Sacred and holy and eternal, like love. Exactly like love.

Stacey Zisook Robinson is a member of  Beth Emet The Free Synagogue in Evanston, IL and Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe, IL.  This post originally appeared on her blog, Stumbling towards meaning:  Stacey’s Blog.

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by Mark Wendel

My Rabbi motions me to come up to the bemah.
I am reading a Psalm in front of the congregation.
The week before we were worshiping in a church
I had actually looked forward to being in a church -
the first time in decades.

I remember Dad reading Psalms in front of our congregation
back when I was a Christian.
Because of Dad I am now part of a religion again,
I never even cared to talk to him about religion
back when I was anti-religious.
Last year we had plenty to talk about.
This year he is gone.

Now I am reading a Psalm at the Yizkor service
where we remember our loved ones who have died the past year.
I recall telling Mom the day before.
She loved to hear how we remember our loved ones
and how I am honoring Dad at my congregation.
Yesterday I read the Psalm to her -
the Psalm she remembers so well from her religion.
Today I read the same Psalm from my religion.

She knows the politics of religion as well as any Pastors’ wife -
(or any group of more than two people for that matter).
She knows why the Church officials changed their mind.
Neither of us understand why it was so sudden -
last minute cancellation – the day before Yom Kippur.
Last week we were worshiping with Clergy from Mom’s religion.
This week I cannot find any.

I remember this moment.
I actually dreamed it many years ago.
Never saw this gym until today,
but from my dream I remember it.
Instead of being anxious like in my dream,
I am now calm.

Some time after I sit back down,
my Rabbi reads the names of those who departed this past year.
As he reads my dad’s name, I am almost startled.
Not because I am not expecting it,
but because it is aloud.
As I come back to reality,
I am unexpectedly moved to tears.
Not just because he says my dad’s name, but because he first says “Pastor”.

We might not have a Christian Cleric physically with us at this moment,
but Dad is part of our present memories,
and Pastors and Priests are still part of my Rabbi’s friendships.

Mark Wendel completed his conversion to Judaism on Shevat 18, 5769 (February 12, 2009) at Temple Beth El in San Antonio, Texas. He is currently a member of Temple Beth Shalom in Austin, Texas, and is involved in the congregation’s Brotherhood and Interfaith committee.

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Did you know that when you breathe you are connecting to God? Or you could be if you were aware of what you were doing. Really.

As part of our experimental Jewish Spiritual Journey Facebook Group, one participant asked me, “Does the word SHEMA have something to do with our breath?” I love the question. Here’s how I answered him:

Shema absolutely has to do with the breathe because it twice invokes the name we call God, the four letter name Yud Hey Vav Hey which we often pronounce as Adonai. Adonai is just a euphemism for Yud Hey Vav Hey, meaning “my Lord”.  My Lord was once considered a very high honorific in human society, thus that’s what we used to call God (today we would choose something like “Celestial CEO”).

But this four letter name of God Yud Hey Vav Hey is really unpronounceable, as it consists of four expulsions of breath from the mouth or throat. Yud occurs back where the hanging thing in the back of your throat is. There is no sound unless combined with a vowel. Try making a “y” sound without a vowel attached. Hey, twice appearing is just the expulsion of breath through the open throat. Unless accompanied by a vowel, it just is the unsounding sound of breath release. Finally, Vav stands for the “O” or “OO”, neither of which really make a sound beyond the stop and start of the breath in the mouth.

So when we twice say Yud Hey Vav Hey during the Shema, we are saying that the Breathe that makes no sound IS God, or at least where God resides. God resides in the breathe. God is the breath.

That breath is echad, one, the oneness or unity that unites all life and all creation.

So I ask all of you: Do you connect spirituality and/or breathing with Shema? Do you find yourself more spiritual when you are connected to your breath or breathing?

—

BTW: Our Jewish Spirituality Journey Facebook group is a closed group (meaning the answers do not appear in the Facebook pages of non-participants). Anyone can join the discussion. Just go on Facebook and ask Paul Kipnes to add you to the group. Of course, you have to Facebook Friend me first. Join in. We have already had some great discussions.

Article was also posted at Or Am I?

Share your story! Help us to create a community of communities – amovement of a million and a half Reform Jews, listening, caring, and finding meaning ineach other’s words. Submit your stories to the Sacred Conversations project for possible inclusion on the RJ Blog.