An Instant In An Eternity

After spending a month considering the approach of the Jewish New Year, the topic returns and returns in little ways. Rosh Hashanah is a time to remember. There are two reasons we do this. One so that we can look back at the good, the bad, the pain, the triumph, the mistakes, and the achievements of the past year. If we don't look back and evaluate, how can we build a plan to move forward? Two, it is to return farther back to our goals, hopes, and dreams of the previous year. We are to look at the larger picture of our life, our community, our country, our world and take stock. What are we trying to do on the larger, meta-macro level? What did we do and what remains to be done? It's a bit awkward to think about the start of the New Year as a time to be looking back. The secular New Year is a time to make resolutions and to plan for the future. Judaism teaches us that we can't move forward without the past. We must learn from our past, we must heal our past wrongs, we mu...

After quite a bit of time I finished reading a fascinating, thorough, and comprehensive history of pollution and environmental issues in Israel. Pollution in a Promised Land by Alon Tal is well worth the read if you can put your hands on the book - it's out of print, but of course you can grab a used copy on Amazon. Or come for a visit and borrow my copy! During the course of my reading I was struck often by so many amazing historical facts and anecdotes. Towards the end, which correlates to modern times, two quotes jumped out at me leaving behind significant impact to make me dog-ear the page to remember to return to the note (it was on Shabbat, so no other option to record it!) The first is in relation to efforts to build public or private projects, or some that are a bit of both, to convert public lands into developed areas. Initially the case was going in favor of the city officials and developers who wanted to build a marina in Herzliyah, an upscale, well-to do community ...

This is by no means a new topic. Technology is here to stay, well, here to advance and develop and take us along for the ride. We're not likely to get off this magical mystery tour any time soon, so best just get with the program, right? I'm not sure that works for me. If you know me, you know I do not have a smartphone. If you don't know me, you're probably about ready to close this webpage because, "what on earth? No smartphone?" One reason has to do with money - yeah, likely I'm on the cheap side here, but also because I'm not sure it's worth the money. It's a treadmill I'm not looking to get on because the only thing one loses is money each time around. It's also because I think they are damaging to us, to relationships, to the personal connectedness that we all need. Information is too readily available to us that we have to know it all and now. We have lost our sense of patience and adventure – who knows how to read a map anym...

Rosh Hashanah provides us a time to keep thinking, considering, pondering the world around us, our families, our communities. It is a start, not an end. One of the starts we have comes as we turn to the beginning of reading the Torah (Old Testament) in just a few weeks. The stories, morals, and guidance offered in this text are intense, complex, and insightful parables to help us evaluate and consider our lives and our relationships with others. I heard the following observation recently and have been contemplating it further. Abraham was forced into two difficult situations with the women who were the mothers of his children. First, Abraham was forced to send his first son, Ishmael, away into the wilderness. Sending away his son severed his relationship completely with Ishmael and Hagar. Second, Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his second son, Isaac. He almost completed the act and killed his son, as he felt he was instructed by G-d. There is much ambiguity in the text abou...

We've made it, almost, to the end of Elul and Rosh Hashanah. This came up recently in my Facebook feed. It's really wonderful. It's warm and lovely. It comes from the 92nd Street Y in NYC and a whole host of Reform communities and leaders. The message is just fantastic. Obviously I don't have enough superlative words for it. And it starts and ends with the amazing Angela Warnick, my old babysitter and friend! I was transported back to my post " That grey area " from a few weeks ago. This is the kind of beautiful messaging we get coming out of the grey area of Judaism. And I'm struck by how little of this we get from the black and white. I don't get it, I just don't. There's nothing offensive in the message - a new year, a sweet year, a year of hope, a year of goodness for all. But yet, it's not the kind of message coming from Aish HaTorah or Chabad or any of the yeshivot or midrashot educating the current generation of young Orthod...

Shimon Peres (z''l) left the world yesterday and shortly will be buried right before Rosh Hashanah. Many years ago when I was an intern with AIPAC I was assisting an Israeli member of Knesset at the policy conference. He had a meeting with Peres and was running late or needed to reschedule. He told me to call up to Peres' suite and take care of it. So I called and started to explain the situation to the person on the other end of the phone. Yep, it was Peres himself who answered the phone. He was so very nice to me and passed the phone to his scheduler to take care of whatever I had called about! He was a giant of a leader. He had the right kind of outlook and perspective. This. Just this. I leave it for you.

At the end of the day, even with all the frustrations and challenges that may come from our relationships with family, hopefully, there exists a foundation of love on which to rest. In those days when we have to face up to the fact that our family is imperfect, that our relationships are flawed, that something is lacking for us, having that foundation beneath us can help us keep standing. There are certainly families and relationships where that foundation of love is cracked, or even failing. So then the work that needs to be done is more intensive because repairing the foundation must either come first or together with the other work needed. That can be hard. And there are situations where the foundation is just flat out missing. If we can see what our foundation is - solid, cracking, damaged, failing, or missing altogether - that can help us as we work on the rest of our house. And hopefully someone has a pot of macaroni and cheese cooking on the stove top.