When you have to deliver a sermon every week, in order to survive the unrelenting pressure of coming up with fresh, relevant and well-presented topics, you become a keen listener and observer.  Ideas present themselves in the most unexpected places.  The trick is to be open to hearing and seeing them.

When last I wrote, I was looking for a framework for addressing the recent summit in Annapolis between Israel and the Palestinians.  I’m always reluctant to speak to issues like that without grounding them in some way in Torah.  If I fail to do that, I feel like I’m betraying the authority that gives me the right to be speaking from the pulpit altogether, and I become just another talking head, of which there are more than enough.  So…

This past Friday morning, I had the pleasure of being an invited guest to our wonderful Nursery School’s weekly Shabbat celebration.  Every week, there is a Shabbat Abba and Ema (mother and father) for each class, and in addition to being guests in the class, they also attend the group celebration of Shabbat in our sanctuary.  I can’t get there every week- Fridays are invariably frantic days, especially at this time of year when the days are so short- but our school’s director makes sure that, at the very least before holidays, I check in with the kids and talk to them a bit about what’s coming up in the Jewish calendar.

Since Chanukkah begins in just a few days, this Friday was the right time for a pre-holiday visit, and I was excited.  In fact, I had decided that, after more than two years of guitar lessons, I was ready to play and sing with the children, something I had always dreamed of being able to do.  I never saw myself- and still don’t- as the classic caricature of the guitar-playing rabbi whose guitar is part of everything he does.  Too new-age for me, I must admit.  

But particularly with very young children, it seemed to me to be the perfect opportunity to use this new skill.  So I reviewed a few Chanukkah songs, and went off to do my thing.

Because it was my first time playing for them, I explained that this was something new for me, and I hoped that it might teach them that even people like their parents, and older than their parents, are capable of learning new things.   Simple enough, yes?  Well, one of the guest families had brought along an older sibling- maybe seven or eight, I would guess- who immediately raised his hand and asked “Is this what they mean when they say that an old dog can learn new tricks?”   The question made me feel just a little like a big old basset hound with droopy ears- not the feeling I was looking for, per se- but it was such a precious moment!

And then later, when I was back in my office, I started thinking…. Old dogs, new tricks.  I’d always wondered how Jacob, who suffered so from his parents having played favorites with him and his brother Esau, could turn around and do something very similar with Joseph, with predictably disastrous results.  Are learned behaviors necessarily destiny?  Can you teach an old dog new tricks?  And I thought further still… Are Ehud Olmert and Abu Mazen (and, more importantly, the constituencies they represent) able to learn new ways to relate to each other, or are they too stuck in learned patterns of behavior, incapable of learning and teaching “new tricks?”

It was worth a few minutes of feeling like a basset hound.

PermaLink

Rocks and Hard Places /  Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik

A lot of my time, and every congregational rabbi's time, is spent trying to figure out how to be a good rabbi to the very different constituencies in my synagogue. 

There are people who crave change, and others who, with equal passion, want things to stay exactly as they have been.  There are liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the more observant and the less observant, and almost every shading in-between. 

The hackneyed old joke about the Jew who builds two synagogues so that he can always have one not to go to has survived all these years because, in no insignificant measure, it's true.  We Jews are a contentious lot, and we love our arguments.  How appropriate that the Talmud is such an important study text for us; its volumes are built on the idea of machloket, of disagreement.  Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Akivah and Rabbi Yishmael- as long as the argument is considered to be l'shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven, it is not, in and of itself, considered a bad thing.  That's how Jews think, and work things out. 

On no one issue does this occasionally unnerving tendency to loudly argue things out figure more prominently than the security of Israel and its general state of being.  

As this week's peace conference in Annapolis convened and adjourned before we knew too much of what was really happening, I could hear familiar voices from my congregational family speaking (loudly?) in my figurative ear.  That's what happens when you serve the same community for twenty-seven years; you can almost construct the arguments without the benefit of the presence of the arguers! 

"Remember Oslo!"  "Look what happened when they gave back Gaza!"  "Remember the intifada(s)!"  That was in my left ear (or maybe I should say my right ear?). 

In the other ear, I could hear the quieter but nonetheless insistent voice of members who refuse to lose their hope that a peace worth having might yet be achieved, and who lament Israel's reluctance to move more forthrightly in the direction of further concessions.  One person posted on our synagogue listserv that he was going to Annapolis to stand and be counted in support of the conference and what it represents.  He invited others to come with him.  I don't know if he got any takers- my sense was that far more of our members were skeptical than hopeful- but I was glad to "hear his voice."

Woe unto us when we lose the capacity to dream of something better for Israel than endless hostility.

I'm just wondering about my own voice.  I have my opinions, to be sure, but "preaching my opinions" as more correct or valid than anyone else's is a tricky business at best.  I am hardly the sole possessor of any elevated wisdom, and I would never begrudge the right my members to disagree with me no matter how misguided I might think them.   To the extent that I might know the reality of Israel better than many of them, I certainly have both the right and the responsibility to help shape their opinions.  But there will always be the people talking in my other ear.

I'm wondering what I'm going to say this Shabbat…

PermaLink

PermaLink