Letter to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

I sent Imam Feisal this letter as my contribution to the conversation on his controversial Park51 Islamic Center, the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Dear Imam Feisal,

As a colleague in religious leadership, I wanted to write to you to express my support and solidarity, and to offer a little unsolicited advice. I pray you’ll be forbearing.

Perhaps I congratulate myself far too much in referring to myself as your colleague; I am rabbi of a small synagogue in Colorado Springs, hardly the peer of a religious leader of national stature who has embarked on a very bold, visible and controversial project in New York city.

Nevertheless, I claim the title ‘colleague.’ I do have a little experience in working with Muslim colleagues; while stationed in Germany as a US Air Force Chaplain, Imam Hamza al-Mubarak and I built a chapel and educational center for the joint use of our two communities. At a $550K budget for construction, it was obviously far more modest than your proposed Cordoba House in New York. Here in Colorado Springs, I consider my local Muslim colleague, Imam Arshad Yusoufi, to be a friend and confidant although we have not yet had the chance to get our communities together for any dialogue or activities. Ah, so much to do…but that’s something I surely needn’t tell you, this being the middle of Ramadan!

Imam Feisal, I hardly need to point out that prominence is a two-edged sword. It enables one to accomplish things that the relative unknown cannot. Of course a danger of prominence is that the fame can be intoxicating. And of course, the more dangerous aspect is that one can often unwittingly attract attention of the unwelcome kind: attention that questions one’s motives and integrity. I have experienced this, but on a very small scale. You, of course are now experiencing a tidal wave of such attention.

Of course, I refer to the firestorm of protests that seem to have consumed the nation for the last three weeks or so, since your proposal for Cordoba House has become such widely-reported news. Very strong words have come forth, impugning your intentions. Some of your supporters have suggested that the negative expressions represent a general anti-Muslim feeling – many call it, Islamophobia – that already existed in our land, and which the feelings that your project elicited have simply brought to the surface.

Being an attentive observer of the public discourse, and in particular being a Jew with roots in New York, I want to tell you that I don’t see America as being infected with Islamophobia, if such a thing could even be said to exist.

Americans tended to have very ambivalent feelings about my people, the Jews, and my religion, Judaism at least until the Second World War. So, what happened to change that? The war itself, of course – and the experience of so many Christian kids landing on Omaha Beach, marching across Europe, and diving into foxholes next to a Jewish kid from New York or Philadelphia. As that march across Europe wound toward its conclusion, those Christian kids saw the heartbreak of the Nazi concentration camps, and saw how deeply the sight affected their Jewish comrades – many of whom had only shallow roots in America and still had family in Europe.

If those Christian kids had any ambivalence about their Jewish fellow citizens left after those experiences, they vanished for most in the post-war years when so many ex-GIs crowded American colleges and universities, and began to move out of traditionally ethnic neighborhoods in America’s cities to settle in the new, and culturally-diverse suburbs. Thanks to all that history, we Jews are so accepted in the American scene that it is sometime breathtaking when one considers that before the war, we were not welcome in various businesses, clubs, and even whole towns across the land.

Imam, most Americans want to – and do – judge Muslims positively. Look at the proof. Since 1990, we have spilled our own blood no fewer than five times in order to help Muslim peoples in various parts of the world: Kuwait, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This has happened under administrations and congresses representing both our major political parties, conservatives and liberals, so our willingness to defend Muslims abroad is clearly not what one would call a ‘political’ issue – it transcends politics.

After the shocking and sad events of September 11th, 2001, what did President George W. Bush do? He told the nation unequivocally that we are at war, not with Islam or the Muslim people, but with a group that attacked and wants to destroy us in the name of Islam. He urged all Americans to look favorably upon their Muslim neighbors, to not hold them accountable for what had been done in the name of their religion. He took a lot of flak for his statements, which were interpreted in some circles as being an expression of ‘political correctness,’ itself an unfortunate element in our public discourse, and something of which you’re surely aware. For my part, I believe that Bush’s statements were straight from the heart, an expression of his deepest sense of what’s right. After all, even his detractors knew him as a devoutly religious man with a sincere respect for others’ religions as well as his own.

Of course, our current president has surpassed even his immediate predecessor in terms of outreach to, and expression of solidarity with, the Muslim world. That President Obama’s first television interview after his inauguration was to al Arabiya, and that his first trips abroad as president included Turkey and Egypt, were pregnant with meaning. They elicited, as with Bush’s post-9/11 statements, both praise and criticism.

No, Imam…our nation and our people are not Islamophobic, this despite the charges that have been made regularly in the left-wing commentariat over the last couple of weeks.

What we are is basically unfamiliar with the Islam of our neighbors, which unfortunately gets drowned out in the noise created by the Islam of Al Qaida, Hamas, and Ahmadinejad. We’re perplexed. Although Muslims are ubiquitous in American life, they occupy a fringe. In a sense, your people occupy a place in American life that is analogous to that of my people up until the war; they are recognized as being part of the fabric of American society, but are little understood because most Americans have not had a close friendship with one of their Muslim neighbors. And honestly, that’s not entirely the fault of non-Muslims. Frankly, you have not been all that good at being approachable, and telling your story to America.

But you surely know this, since the website for the Cordoba House suggests that the Park51 venue would be used specifically as a place where such connections could be made through creative and welcoming programs.

The problem of course, is that you’ve misread the mood of America in selecting 51 Park Place as the address of your new center. That it is located only yards from ‘Ground Zero’ and is in fact the site of a building that was severely damaged in the fall of the Twin Towers, has resulted in a majority of Americans (according to the most recent polling data) thinking negatively about your project.

The way I see it, your only ‘sin’ in all this is a lack of clairvoyance which caused you to act in miscalculation of what the national mood concerning this issue would be. But you have the power to turn this miscalculation into a tremendous public relations success, not to mention as my tradition would put it, a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of G-d’s name. How can you accomplish this? Easily: Call a press conference and announce that, while the law cannot prevent you from erecting your center at 51 Park Place, you wish to honor the sensibilities of America by deciding to build it on another site. Ask for assistance from local government and any groups with an interest, on selecting an alternate site. Imagine the goodwill that would result! And with that goodwill, your Cordoba House would be far better positioned to fulfill your prayers as to what it would accomplish. My fear is that, if you build it at 51 Park, it will only serve as a permanent symbol of division and rancor. And you surely deserve a better result for your most well-intentioned efforts to build bridges.

My best wishes for you as you return from travelling abroad and continue your days of fasting and introspection…

Rabbi Don Levy
Temple Beit Torah
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Bemidbar

Get Something Out of the Wilderness…
Then Get Out of the Wilderness!
A Sermon for Parashat Bemidbar
Donald A. Levy

This week’s portion, Bemidbar, opens the Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the five in the Written Torah. I know I offer this kind of knowledge repeatedly, but I’ll say it again. In larger circles we call the book, Numbers, because the theme that runs through the book is the taking of a census that will enable Moses and Aaron to organize the people Israel into an army of conquest. In Jewish circles we call the book – and therefore the book’s opening weekly portion – Bemidbar because the book opens with the words: “Vay’dabeir Adonai el Moshe bemidbar Sinai…” “Then Adonai spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai…” The word midbar is often translated “desert” because the Sinai certainly meets the description of a desert landscape: unpopulated, dry, hot in the summer days and cold in the winter and nights. But the word “wilderness” is something broader in scope, meaning a place of challenge and possibility.

So the people Israel were in the wilderness – during the 40 years’ wandering – when the events chronicled in this book took place. But the wilderness, through which they wandered, was more than just a physical wilderness.

After a lifetime in Egypt – a narrow place of limited horizons and possibilities – the people were not ready to enter the promised land and to be a free people under the sovereignty of God until they had spend time in a wilderness. They needed to stop clinging to the safe, the familiar, the limiting. They had to have the chutzpah to reach for the possible, to re-imagine themselves as free people in a free land.

Folks, we often wallow in our own Egypts, places of comfort and familiarity, places of settled routines and predictability, instead of experiencing our wilderness, truly as a wilderness – a place where a better person can be forged. These qualities – comfort, familiarity, settled routines, predictability – are not in and of themselves bad. All of the aforementioned, in certain amounts, give us the courage to move forward into unfamiliar ground. But when our hearts and minds remain in a narrow place, we preclude the wilderness from being able to help forge us into the people we have the potential to be.

Look, I know this theme, and some of the details I’ll now proceed to give, are familiar to many of you. I’ve propounded these ideas from the platform again and again. And I’ll keep doing so until I have evidence that most of you ‘get’ it.

The element that limits us to a ‘narrow’ place so often, is the mindset that we lack something that someone else has. We limit our own potential by seeing ourselves, who we are and what we’ve achieved in the shadow of what someone else is, and what they’ve achieved.

This week, I encountered someone who has incredible talents, talents that I wish I had. Talents that I can only dream of. But this person can only think of what she doesn’t have and she is therefore feeling miserable right now.

If only my kids were smarter, if only my salary were more generous, if only more people cooperated with me, if only my husband were more helpful. Please, please, please…don’t try to decode the identity of who I’m talking about. It could be any one of us!

Folks, I want to draw your attention to my face. Is it a nice face? Most people wouldn’t think so. Hollywood only casts men with faces like mine, as villains. Women with faces like mine? They don’t get cast at all! No matter what I do in life, no matter what goodness I spread or don’t…there’s a portion of humanity that will see my face and typecast me as loathsome.

I don’t say this to complain. Rather I want to point out that I am among the happiest people in this room. Why? Because I have learned to say, the hell with the ridiculous stereotype! I’m going to reach for the best that’s in me. Have I reached it? No, like everyone else in this room I’m a work in progress. Each day, I learn something new about what I can do and think about where God would have me go, what God would have me do. Every day is a blessing from God. Every day represents new opportunities. Every day I have a new opportunity to reach toward the person that I will eventually become. That’s the key to escaping from the narrow place, the limiting Egypt of our minds and letting our sojourn in the wilderness truly open us up and let us spread our wings.

So you want to be happy? Become a rabbi! Just kidding! Figure out what you’re supposed to become, and work your way toward that vision of yourselves by dropping the narrow vision of yourselves that you’re carrying around, and carrying around, and carrying around until your poor back is hunched under the oppressive weight of that vision!

Celebrate your kids, even though they’re insufferable, because they’re a gift from God. But at the same time, understand that they need you to be a parent – and sometimes that entails pushing them beyond their comfort zone.

Celebrate your profession, even if your salary isn’t as high as you’d like it to be, because it’s your calling. And if it’s not, find what is your calling and find a way to pursue it. Perhaps in so doing, you’ll end up achieving a higher salary. Or more likely, you’ll realize that the size of your salary isn’t nearly as important as any number of other things.

I know someone – actually, I’ve known several individuals – who actually moved from careers with higher salaries to careers with lower salaries in order to respond to the calling that was within them. In so doing, they had to live more modestly, but they became happier! For some, this entails leaving the business world for teaching. And that does not negate that for some, teaching feels limiting to them and they can only find their vocational happiness by leaving teaching behind for something else.

I have spoken before about the importance of weighing decisions, because when we choose between various alternatives that has a way of constricting our choices in the future. For example, what we do when we are young can limit our possibilities later. Want to be an astronaut? You have to be a military pilot first. So you want to be a military pilot? First, take those silly earbuds out of your ear, because you need perfect hearing to be accepted for pilot training. Also, don’t experiment with drugs, or get in any kind of trouble beyond a minor traffic violation or you won’t be accepted. And get your act in gear before the age of 27, because 27 is the maximum age to enter pilot training. If you want to be an astronaut, and therefore first a pilot, you’d best grow up fast, keep your nose squeaky clean, and focus yourself early.

Okay, so you didn’t do all those things…or perhaps you were born with some physical limitation that precludes you from military pilot training, or perhaps you tried but didn’t make the cut. If means you’re much less likely to be an astronaut. But maybe there’s something else within you, something that if you achieve it, it will also make you happy. But you’ll never find it if you spend your life feeling sorry for yourself because you couldn’t be an astronaut.

I mention this specific thing – being an astronaut – because I have a dear friend who dreamed of being one. And he was definitely on the way to becoming one. He was an Air Force fighter pilot, then a test pilot, earned a scientific master’s degree and even asked me to teach him Russian and sat many hours in my living room, conjugating Russian verbs with me. Ya lublyu. Ty lyubish. On lyubit. My lyubim. Vy lybitye. Ony lyubyut. And that’s not to mention aspect! Mne prosto zhal! Why did he want to learn Russian? Because of our partnership with the Russians in the International Space Station, he thought being able to speak some Russian would help him transcend other candidates for astronaut training.

Well, he never made the cut. But he went on to other things and has a very successful, happy life. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he went on to new challenges. He’s an executive in a big corporation, a Colonel in the Air Force reserve…and is running for the Indiana State House. One of his twins attends the Air Force Academy, and the other Purdue. What does he have to complain about? Nothing…so he doesn’t. But many of us, if put in his position would let the one thing we didn’t achieve, fester and annoy and ruin anything and everything else that we did achieve.

And what if he had become an astronaut. Well, this man probably would have found it fulfilling and happiness-inducing. But what about Lisa Nowak? Recognize the name? She was a young naval officer, a Captain – same as a full Colonel in the other armed services – who made the cut and became an astronaut. And yet she was incredibly unhappy, so much so that she lost it all by terrorizing a romantic rival. From being an elite of the elite, she ended up in a Florida jail among prostitutes and drug addicts because of the chip on her shoulder that blinded her to the happiness that she lacked but, by all accounts, should have enjoyed.

Friends, wilderness is a part of life. Each of us, at some time, must pass through a wilderness if we are to leave behind the narrow horizons that limit us. So we step into a wilderness to our choosing in hopes that it will forge us into the person we have the potential to become. But that transition – from what we are to what we may become – is not automatic! Until we’re ready to let our wilderness improve us, and let us grow, and open our eyes to what limits us so that we can leave it on the desert floor…then we’re going to remain stuck in the wilderness.

If we continue to feel sorry for ourselves because somebody out there is more attractive, or smarter, or makes a better salary, or has a nicer house or less debt or more savings…we will never achieve happiness. And the tragedy is that there is no limit in the number of happy lives possible in the world; like personal wealth, happiness is not rationed. That my neighbor achieved it, doesn’t give me one less chance to achieve it.

If you’re in a narrow place, step into the wilderness. And when you’re ready to allow the wilderness to do its work, then you’ll be ready to get out of the wilderness. The wilderness is a good place, because it can help us to become what we might become. But at some point, we must also have the courage to step out of the wilderness and into the garden of possibilities.

This transition – from narrow place to wilderness to garden of possibilities – took the Israelites 40 years. Each one of us has the ability to make the transition far faster. May each of us find within us the strength and courage to make that transition and thus become the happy people we can be.

Sermon for Vayetzei/Thanksgiving

The Power of Dreams
Rabbi Don Levy
Parashat Vayetzei
27 November 2009

I woke up violently in the middle of the night last night; I had had a nightmare. In it, I was in bed – and the bed was in the middle of a road. And a bus was bearing down on the bed. In the dream, I jumped to get out of bed. And as often happens in nightmares, I jumped physically as well, waking Clara and leaving me to explain that everything was okay, I’d just had a nightmare.

Afterward, the dream continued. The bus, it turned out, was a tour bus. It was there, because I had taken on the job of organizing a tour of some Jewish museums in Los Angeles. The job did not turn out well. Around every corner of the tour, I kept getting snowed under by details I hadn’t taken care of adequately.

Some dreams are easy to figure out, but this one was perplexing. I’ve organized a couple of tours, but never in LA – only to Israel. And neither tour was a disaster for lack of adequate planning, although there were glitches to be sure. The first one went off reasonably well, and the second one was a resounding success. I don’t say this to brag, only to point to the perplexing nature of my dream last night.

I remember when I was studying psychology in college, and we viewed a film entitled ‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream,’ about the phenomenon of dreams. The film made it clear that despite the title’s being taken from Hamlet’s famous ‘To Be or Not to Be’ soliloquy, there was no perchance in the equation. When we sleep, we dream. Period. All night. We only remember a small portion of our dreams: those which occur during a certain part of the sleep cycle, and those whose violence awakens us as did mine last night. But during our hours of sleep, we dream an almost-unbroken chain of dreams. These dreams, if remembered and recounted, can provide a valuable insight into our inner selves.

When I entered rabbinical school and began to study the Torah in depth, I was immediately fascinated by the portions which chronicle key characters’ dreaming. There is, of course, Jacob’s dream in this week’s portion, followed closely in the text by Joseph and Pharaoh’s dreams of which we’ll hear in the next few weeks. I remembered learning about the power of dreams in college psychology, and I was fascinated by the way the Ancient Rabbis grappled with the meanings of the dreams recorded in the Torah.

Jacob’s dream, the account of which I’ve just read from the Torah, is baffling. There’s a ladder that reaches to the heavens, and angels are ascending and descending. And Adonai seems to be overseeing it all. He comforts Jacob by telling him: “I am Adonai, G-d of Abraham and Isaac your forebears. I bequeath the land, upon which you lie, to you and your progeny. Your progeny will multiply like the sand of the earth, and you shall spread out west and east, north and south. All the families of the earth shall be blessed through you. I shall be with you, and will guard you in all your wanderings. And I shall bring you back to this land as I will not abandon you until I will have done as I have promised you.” And Jacob responded by proclaiming: “Adonai was in this place and I did not know it.”

The simple meaning of the dream is that Jacob is being torn away from his land of residence as he is fleeing from his brother Esau’s murderous wrath, and G-d is comforting him by telling him that all will be well with him. But as was their habit, the Rabbis saw deeper, more hidden meanings in the dream. They saw the angels as the great empires of history, and their ascent and descent of the ladder as the rise and fall of those empires while the progeny of Jacob – the people Israel – would endure and flourish even after all of the former had been vanquished to the history books.

The Rabbis’ real point was to comfort the people, who were suffering under the mighty power of Rome at the time the Midrash was framed. Rome would fall, as had Assyria before that as we know from the Hanukkah story, as had Egypt before that as we know from the Exodus story. And so human history would unfold, but the destiny of the people Israel would endure.

The British historian Paul Kennedy, who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers back in the 1980’s, would agree in part with the Rabbis’ interpretation. Kennedy saw in the pattern of human history the rise of one superpower, followed by its plateau and its decline, followed by the rise of another superpower to replace it. His point was clearly a warning to his ‘smug’ American cousins; their century would come to an end, and another great empire would take their place at the acme of humanity. Just as the American Empire had long since eclipsed that of his own country. Given the economic meltdown we’ve experienced, one might reasonably be inclined to accept Kennedy’s thesis and see in China the next great power on the ascent.

It is fashionable in some circles to see our country in the context of Kennedy’s thesis. We’re just another in a line of empires that had their day and then waned into relative insignificance as their stars dimmed. To this mindset, the idea of American Exceptionalism is but a mirage, a pie-in-the-sky notion that belies the reality. Those who hold that the American experiment is something unique in human history are just deluding themselves in the hope that our nation will uniquely break the pattern, and that our power will remain ascendant forever.

I guess it’s no secret to most in this room that I reject the idea of America’s fitting into this neat pattern. I believe with all my heart in the Exceptionalism of the American experience. I guess this comes in part from my long residencies in other countries, from my listening to citizens of those lands express the values of their nations and contrasting them to those that characterize America.

Those who see America as just another in a line of empires would like me and those who hold my view to focus on America’s flaws and see her as tainted by the faults of all empires from the get-go. We came, we saw, we conquered, we displaced, we despoiled…and now we’re on the wane. Why should we see ourselves as any different?

But the very holiday we have just celebrated points out the difference. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower, quirky though they might have been, came with a sublime vision of creating G-d’s Kingdom on these shores. They didn’t come to displace the natives who then very sparsely inhabited the continent. Rather, they sought harmony with them as they worked hard to pursue their own vision of a City on a hill – a phrase used in a famous sermon by John Winthrop, one of the leaders of the Pilgrim Fathers, borrowed from the Gospel according to St. Matthew and later borrowed by President Ronald Reagan. With lapses – no nation is perfect, after all – their progeny and those who joined them in fleeing the Old World kept alive this vision, and sought to build a society anchored by a different basis here. A number of you in this room, having been born elsewhere, can attest to and celebrate this difference. Even today, people flock to our land because it is different in a positive way. For every immigrant who succeeds in coming here there are many who unfortunately don’t make the cut and can only dream of coming here some day.

Does this view cast aspersions on other nations, as some would say? Of course not; it only recognizes on these shores a unique dynamic that continues to attract the best of the other nations who bring their unique contributions to the American enterprise. Each nation has its strengths, but America manages to uniquely assimilate the strengths that members of those nations bring when they join us. I can tell you first hand from my long sojourns abroad that the Turks, the Greeks, and the Germans are unable to do this. The British can to a certain extent. Our British cousins are far more able than most nations, to accept immigrants from other places and incorporate them in their nation and draw from their strengths. But they cannot match the energy of the American nation because – as I see it – they cannot define what is the essence of British-ness. When Britannia ruled the waves, she saw her mastery of the world as her essence. In the waning of her Empire, she has yet to define what her enduring values are. Britons struggle with this question – what are our values as a nation? – every day. America’s enduring values, while they were certainly highlighted during our reign as the world’s most powerful nation, are dependent on something other than being a world power.

Only Israel, tiny Israel, has a quality of destiny approaching that of America’s. Despite the insignificance to which her tiny size and beleaguered condition would logically consign her, Israel matters far out of proportion: in terms of creative energy, in terms of good works among the less-fortunate nations, in terms of assimilating each wave of immigrants in turn while at the same time being shaped by those immigrants’ unique contributions.

This really should come as no surprise. From the time of the Pilgrims, the thinkers who most shaped American life were students of the Torah and were imbued with a philo-Judaism that shaped their worldview and their plan for the American nation. It is fashionable – again, in some circles – to see the philo-Israelism of their contemporary counterparts as a desire for Israel to play a role in the playing-out of a certain apocalyptic vision of the Christian writings. But that’s not the attraction for Israel by some of our Christian neighbors. Rather, they see America as deliberately constructed in the mold in which G-d forged Israel – and blessed with power and influence because of it.

This unique tie-in of destinies – America’s and Israel’s – is what led to the unique relationship of our two nations. It is not the power of American Jews; we’re far too fractious a group to exert the kind of influence that our detractors often accuse us of wielding. When we read the account of Jacob’s dream this week and annually when we read the portion Vayetzei, we should take comfort from the Rabbis’ understanding of this passage. We can recognize now, as they did then, that the people Israel represent something unique in human history that will endure when all the other powers have waned. Likewise, we can look at the non-Jewish nations who have developed and celebrated a philo-Judaism: to an extent Great Britain but even more so the United States of America. We see in the assimilation of the lessons of ancient Israel, the source of our nation’s goodness and strength.

It is tempting to see America as just another in a chain of superpowers a la Paul Kennedy’s thesis in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. It takes a great onus off our backs. If we’re just another superpower on the wane, then we might as well forget the burdens we’ve taken on as a nation. Instead, like the Europeans, let’s become pragmatic and focus on prolonging our own affluence. We don’t have to feel a responsibility for less-fortunate peoples. Freed from the burden of being the World’s Policeman, we will have the resources to build a utopian, cradle-to-grave welfare state in the mold of Sweden. We can even turn our backs on Israel, and pragmatically seek the favor of her enemies in the Arab and Islamic world.

But perhaps the interesting convergence of the American festival of Thanksgiving, and the reading of the account of Jacob’s dream will serve to remind us of the two unique and yet dovetailing destinies that we as Jewish Americans enjoy. At least, I hope it will. Because it is true that the great nations of the world have historically, and will continue to, rise and fall. But G-d has promised that the tiny people Israel will endure because they matter far out of proportion to their numbers. America is much larger and more powerful and has ruled as the reigning superpower in the world for a number of decades. Perhaps our economic, political, and military power has been, or is in the process of being, eclipsed by that of China and even India. But if we Americans continue to make America mean something more, something far more divinely inspired, then our significance like that of tiny Israel will continue to matter. May this be so as we remember the dream of our Pilgrim Fathers and seek to keep it alive. Happy Thanksgiving and Shabbat Shalom.

Got Your Marching Orders?

Below is my D'var Torah for this week. Enjoy!

I grew up greatly admiring some of the great explorers of history. Vasco da Gama. Christopher Columbus. Ferdinand Magellan. James Cook. William Bligh. Okay, maybe not so much William Bligh; he was definitely a bold explorer, but his legacy is obviously mixed. Lewis and Clark. Roald Amundsen. Richard Byrd. Amelia Earhardt. Neil Armstrong. This isn’t an exhaustive list; there are many more!

Living lives that center so much on familiar ground and familiar routines, we admire those who are able to break free, who go forth boldly with confidence. But that’s not to say that we plan to emulate them. We wish we had their chutzpah, but our self-awareness informs us that we largely do not. We find comfort in the familiar. The great explorers of history are admirable primarily because they did what we know we cannot.

And yet most of us, at one time of another in the course of our lives, will venture into uncharted territory. Some will do it unintentionally. It will take us out of our ‘comfort zone.’ But when it happens and we end up acquitting ourselves well we can and should celebrate our accomplishment. Modest accomplishment is still accomplishment. Not all of us can be a Christopher Columbus, but each of us can rise to the occasion when forced out of our usual box.

In this week’s Torah portion, Abraham is forced out of his box. He didn’t set out to break new ground. But he received a call. G-d called him to step outside his box, to go forth in trust and confidence, to perform the audacious act of breaking with the patterns of his past. And he did. The reason we revere Abraham today, the reason we identify with him, is that he had the courage to step out and see the possibilities over the horizon.

Most of us would not ascribe to ourselves a Divine Call. Our rational sides don’t see G-d as interfering in our lives and charging us with a new mission. And yet, there are times in our lives when we see a clear vision of what we’re supposed to do. If those clear visions defy the existing, rational plans and notions of what we’re supposed to do with our lives, then our response is often to squelch the visions. Most of us try to stay on the rational side of life, and for good reason.
But sometimes the vision of what we’re supposed to do, despite being in conflict with accepted ‘wisdom,’ is so clear that we are compelled to follow it. I have to tell you that I made my best decisions in life, those which led to lasting good for myself and for others, when I defied reason and followed such visions. And that was certainly the case with Abraham.

Abraham’s life comes to us through the narrative largely as a life lived for good. If we’re reading only the simple text, we might take issue with him on a couple of points, but the Torah does not lend itself well to that sort of fundamentalist reading. No, we’re supposed to read between the lacunae and read the ‘story behind the story.’ That’s the enterprise called ‘midrash.’ Much midrash has already been done for us, but there is additional midrash to discover.

Abraham went forth on faith, and found his way to a land flowing with milk and honey, but that isn’t the end of the story. He then kept his retinue alive during a famine. And he took to the field at the head of an army to rescue his nephew, Lot and fellow residents of Sodom and Gomorrah in the war of the kings. And he later argued with G-d for the lives of those same people. And he was willing to give everything to G-d, even the son for whom he had prayed so long. Through it all, Abraham was imperfect – that is to say, human. But his legacy is a life lived large, a life that mattered, a life that impacted for the good on so many. And it started with his answering a call, responding positively to a specific vision.

Each of us will receive our call, our vision at a different time and to a different cause. Our task is not to be chomping at the bit to break free from the fetters of a predictable life. Rather, it is to be open to that vision when it comes. To discern that vision. To differentiate between the vision for good, and the interference of the desires of our eyes. It isn’t easy. It can be frightening. But if we are to reach our own potential, there will come a time when we will have to Go Forth.
There is a delightful midrash of a Rabbi Zusya, a midrash that I retell often. Zusya, nearing the end of his life, was ashamed of the smallness of his accomplishments and cried out to G-d: “I’m sorry I wasn’t an Abraham, I wasn’t a Moses!”

G-d’s response was: “I don’t blame you for not being Abraham or Moses. I blame you for not being Zusya.”

In other words, our clear vision of what we should do is not only a possibility – it is a sort of marching order. If we are true to ourselves, we will respond positively. Even if, and when, it is not convenient. Even when it is not comfortable. Even when conventional ‘wisdom’ would tell us to ignore it and take a different path. Because if we ignore it, we will not be able to rise to the greatest potential that is within us. Unlike Zusya, who pleased G-d simply by being not only Zusya but the best Zusya he could be. Who, at the end of his life, did not need to be ashamed of accomplishing more. Rather, when we don’t answer the call we will be forced to go through life thinking ‘if only.’

Don't Ask Don't Tell...Again

I want to start this post by telling you that this is not one of my hot-button issues. I believe that Don't Ask Don't Tell should be repealed, but I don't see it as one of the most compelling issues facing our country at this time. I think there are far more pressing things on the President's plate, on which he seems to be dithering. Afghanistan, for one. But having posted before my advocacy for repealing this law, and seeing that there has been some additional talk about its repeal, I feel compelled to comment on it again for the sake of clarity.

Earlier this month, President Obama declared in a speech before the Human Rights Campaign, a gay civil rights advocacy group: "I will end Don't Ask Don't Tell." This elicited a standing ovation, even though the President offered no promise of a timetable or specific steps he was planning to take toward the promised end. I'm sure he has learned the lesson of Presidnet Bill Clinton, who aimed to tackle the same issue - gays and lesbians serving openly in the military - at the very start of his presidency and got himself embroiled in the fight over the issue that produced the DADT Law to begin with! (I think it's good when a sitting president learns from his predecessors; I wish Obama would also have learned from Clinton's unhappy Health Care Reform experience, but it seems he has not. But I digress...)

Clearly, conservatives in general are not for the repeal of DADT, and in advocating for its repeal I have 'broken ranks.' But that does not bother me...I'm not running for election to any office, and frankly I find that conservatives tend to be far more independent-minded than liberals in any case.

If you remember from my original post on this subject, I expressed my opposition to DADT on two grounds: Ideological, and Pragmatic. Recent information from the Department of Defense has indicated that all the military services have exceeded their recruiting and retention goals in the recently-ended fiscal year. Many conservatives would argue that this kills the Pragmatic grounds for repealing DADT - if indeed it every existed. If all the services are exceeding their goals without the repeal of DADT, both in pure numbers and in terms of quality of manpower, then that kills the Pragmatic argument, doesn't it?

Perhaps. But the cases of Dan Choi and USAF Lt Colonel Victor Fehrenbach, among others, point to the fact that the armed forced are being denied services of highly decorated and esteemed troops because of sexual orientation.

And of course, this doesn't speak at all to the Ideological argument for repealing DADT. And I think that argument, made in my original post, is compelling.

I will be curious to see if President Obama's statement to the HRC will be the start of a congressional push to act legislatively on the issue. I hope so. It's a simple issue and won't require a 1000+ page bill!

Remember the Rainbow

This is my 'd'var Torah' I'm giving this evening at Temple Beit Torah. Enjoy!

When I was a rabbinical student, I had a student pulpit for two years in Niagara Falls, New York. As is the case with all work locations, this one had its ups and downs. One of the most aesthetically pleasing aspects of my visits to Niagara Falls, was that the hotel where I stayed was very close to the Falls themselves. I often had occasion to view spectacular rainbows, either from the park right outside my hotel, or sometimes, even from the window of my room.

In this week’s Torah portion we read that the rainbow is a symbol of G-d’s promise not to destroy all life with a flood ever again. It’s a sign of His ‘peace treaty’ with humanity. When we look upon the rainbow, we are supposed to take heart that G-d, no matter how badly provoked, will not destroy us and our world.

There is some midrash on why G-d choose specifically the rainbow as a this sign of His peaceful intent. The midrash focuses on the shape and orientation of the bow.

Of course, the bow shape alludes to a war bow, as in a bow-and-arrow. The rabbis noted that, at the end of a battle between two armies on the ground, the side suing for peace would unload and unstring their bows and hold them vertically as a sign of their peaceful intent. That way, the other side would not suspect trickery.

The word ‘rainbow’ does not appear in the text, just the Hebrew word ‘keshet’ which simply means ‘bow,’ as in something bow-shaped, which is the same word used for a war-bow. So there is some justification to see that symbolism in the rainbow.

Of course, most of us look upon a rainbow and see something entirely different. The moisture in the air, whether from rainfall or from the mist rising from a massive waterfall, acts as a prism that takes the light passing through it and splits it into the different colors since each color has a different wavelength. (I’m really pretty clueless about physics and the other natural sciences, but this is something I seem to remember from high school.)

So, when we look upon the rainbow, we see a natural phenomenon. And the scientific reason for the bands of color is that the light-waves are different lengths. The splitting of the visible light into the seven basic colors just shows us that those are the colors, from which all other shades and hues are made.

Or is it ‘just’?

In the natural world, at least when there is a lot of ambient light, we are presented with a dazzling array of color. But when we see all visible light broken down to the seven different hues of the rainbow – orange, indigo, violet, yellow, red, blue, green – then we are reminded of the completeness of our world. Even though on any given day we might see more grey or more white than we wish, the rainbow reminds us that everything is there, if only we will see it all. And the rainbow itself helps us to see ‘it all’ even if our tendency to see only what’s immediately apparent often gets in the way.

In other words, the rainbow can help us to see the essential completeness of the world around us.

We all know the Hebrew word for ‘peace’ – shalom. Guess what? The root of the word ‘shalom’ means ‘completeness.’ In other words, ‘shalom’ is not merely an absence of fighting – that’s an armistice, or ‘hafsakat yeri.’ “Cease fire’ would be a direct translation of the Hebrew. No, the real intent of the word ‘shalom’ is completeness, the presence of all that is necessary for one’s well-being. A cease-fire is usually a good thing – every military strategist knows that it can also be a bad thing if it merely gives the enemy an opportunity to recoup his losses and prepare for the next battle. But it is not ‘peace.’

Of course, anybody here who lived through the Sixties is aware of the equating of the rainbow with the concept of ‘peace.’ Perhaps after the sign of the broken cross, the rainbow was the most widely-used symbol of peace then, and now.

So, here’s one of those happy convergences where the traditionalist’s understanding of the origin of the rainbow, and the science-minded person’s very different understanding – lead to the same basic conclusion. The rainbow is a sign of peace- probably the Perfect Sign. And as such, it is a sign of hope. If your enemy has unstrung his bow and is pointing it upwards, that’s a sign of hope. If, during a rain squall one can discern that all the colors are present, that’s a sign of hope. Hope is, unfortunately something that is usually in short supply.

I didn’t see a rainbow today. But I read the Torah and came across the reference to the rainbow as a sign of peace and, therefore hope. Don’t fail to see the signs counseling hope around us – whether in the realm of nature, or in the Holy text we read. To have the hope, and to march forward confidently in its glow – that is the most important thing.

Town Hall in Colorado Springs

Yesterday I attended a town hall meeting - my first - conducted by my representative in the House of Representatives, Doug Lamborn of Colorado's Fifth Congressional District.

I have to admit that I attended already well-disposed toward Rep. Lamborn. I agree with many of his views and recently met him personally, walking away thinking him personable and thoughtful. I attended his town hall, planned to focus on the subject of health care reform (big surprise!), to offer my support and see what kind of dialogue would ensue (see my last post).

There was a crowd of hecklers, about ten percent of the crowd present according to the Colorado Springs Gazette reporter present, who choose to express their opposition to Lamborn's well-known views by shouting insults repeatedly. The rest of the crowd, split between supporters and detractors judging from signs the various individuals carried and the timing of applause, behaved themselves reasonably well.

Whenever Lamborn mentioned the cost of the Democrat Party initiatives, a number of the hecklers shouted repeated challenges concerning the costs of America's fighting two wars; they yelled to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. If you know me, you know that I'm in favor of both enterprises; even so, a agree that a case could be made against either war. But the heckling seemed pretty comical, considering that the Executive Branch of government (and not the House of Representatives) controls warfighting. I thought every graduate of seventh grade civics would know that.

All in all, I thought Doug lamborn did a good job conducting this town hall meeting. He maintained his composure, stood his ground, and yet fielded a number of unfriendly questioners with courtesy and seriousness. I'm proud to be represented by him in congress.