Journey of Renewal – Unit Three: Seek Connection and Integration
Day Fifteen (September 21)
Working on yourself
Design Your Own Life’s Curriculum
Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Make of your life a work of art.” From birth through our formal schooling years, our parents and teachers design our life’s curriculum. The classes we go to in school are meant to give us the skills to get a job but also teach us the life skills to be contributing citizens of the world. What we get in the classroom is supplemented by extracurricular activities. Sports teach us the values of teamwork, resilience in the face of adversity, and physical courage. Music lessons teach us about discipline over time and develop in us an appreciation for beauty.
But what happens when our formal schooling ends? We never outgrow the need for personal growth and development. But, as adults, we no longer have the guiding structures of our childhood and adolescence to help us. That’s where are Jewish Tradition steps in. It provides us with tools to create our own life’s curriculum, one that will enable us to continually reach new levels of growth.
Every Saturday night, when we perform the ceremony of havdalah, we visualize ourselves as creative partners with God. Being created in the image of God means that we are creative, as God is creative. And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that the greatest thing we will create in our lifetime is ourselves.
God is our model and guide in this creative enterprise. As God did, we have the capacity to do. When God created the world, God did it with deliberate intention, imagining first what God wanted to create, doing it, standing back and evaluating, and only then moving on to the next stage of Creation.
God doesn’t just throw up random brushstrokes on a canvas. There is a plan for each day. And each day must fit into a larger whole. So that when God creates light, God ‘saw that it was good’ before continuing. But, when God has completed all six days of creation, God saw that it was ‘very good.’
There is tremendous diversity within God’s creative masterpiece—rivers and mountains, sea creatures and birds. Yet, there is something that pulls it all together. There is a unity to this creation. And one gets the impression that this is the way God wants us to live our lives. If we are lucky, we will get to experience from the wide variety of what life has to offer. Yet, to live a truly fulfilled and meaningful life means that our own life should mirror God’s creation. There should be a sense of unity, a sense that our lives constitute a meaningful whole.
Often, this sense of a unified whole or integrated story of our life does not emerge right away. It can take many years. For example, consider the Joseph story. We don’t know how he would describe the story of his life when he was seventeen years old. We do know that after experiencing kidnapping, near death and slavery in Egypt, rise to prominence and a re-union with his family, he came to see the vastly different parts of his life as the twists and turns of a meaningful and unified narrative reflecting God’s purpose for him.
At first, Joseph was tempted to separate the two major parts of his life from each other—his life in Canaan and his life in Egypt. But his brothers’ unexpected reemergence in his life motivated him to see both the triumphs and the pain in his life as part of one story. What about you? How do you see your story?
Reflection
- Identify as many parts of your life as you can: work, play, home and family, national identity, Jewish connection, leisure activities
- What connects these different parts of your life to each other?
- As you look at the varied experiences of your own life, do any common themes emerge?
- Identify the different stages of your life, your childhood, your adolescence, your middle age. What connects these stages of your life to each other?
- If you were telling the story of your life today, how might you tie the pieces together?
- As an artist who is working on a painting might say, “I need a little more blue in this corner, a little more red in that corner.” As you look at your own life as an as yet unfinished work of art, what do you think you can add, subtract or change to make the ‘art’ more representative of what you’d like to say to the world?
- What do you think you need to learn this year?
- What would broaden you? What would deepen you? What would expand you? What would make you a more complete person?
- What new skills would you like to learn?
- What new knowledge would you like to acquire?
- What do you need to learn in order to be a better person? A better husband/wife, brother/sister, child to your parents, grandparent, friend?
Tzedakah/Tikkun Olam
Black Christian-Jewish Relations
- Building Black and Jewish Beloved Community
BBJBC is revitalizing the historic Black Christian-Jewish relationship. Through interactive, truthful and passionate conversation, they are building trusting relationships to create a new future together. Based in Seattle, this national Black Christian-Jewish monthly Bible study group now in its sixth year engages clergy from nine American cities. Black-jewishcommunity.org. Or for more information, contact Rabbi Rosenbaum, rabbirosenbaum@h-nt.org
Connecting Jewishly
Jeremiah Lockwood
Scholar and musician Jeremiah Lockwood is known for his melding of traditional “hazzanus” with masterful Piedmont Blues chops. Below is a link to his version of the High Holiday piyyut “Adiray Ayuma”. For more information about his book and recordings, check out www.jeremiahlockwood.com. Adiray Ayuma (Jeremiah Lockwood): https://youtu.be/Cj2wXu_0Z3E?feature=shared
Day Sixteen (September 22)
Working on yourself
Tell Your Story in a New Way
When two people or two nations disagree, it has become a commonplace for people to say: “Well, everyone has their own narrative. You have yours, I have mine. And it’s a waste of time to try to change anyone’s narrative.”
But it’s not true. We can choose to change our narrative. We do it all the time. And, when we do, we change our lives.
Again, we look to Joseph. If you could have asked the twenty-year-old Joseph to tell the story of his life, it probably would have gone something like this: “I am the most talented and gifted of my brothers. They knew it and hated me for it. They tried to stop me by selling me into slavery. But they will not succeed. In spite of their treachery, I will triumph and I will become the great leader I was always destined to be. Men will bow to me when they recognize my superiority.”
But, over time, Joseph changed. His suffering humbled him. He became wiser, more empathetic. And, twenty years later, touched by a courage he never expected to see in his brothers he tells this story instead:
“Do not grieve that you did me harm. It was not you who sent me to Egypt, but God. God had a plan for me to serve humanity—to save a great nation from starvation and to reconcile with my family.”
Nothing about Joseph’s history made this generous narrative of his life inevitable. He could easily have chosen a more self-serving story and no one could have blamed him. But Joseph’s choice of the more humble story made the difference between endless hatred and a family morally transformed and uplifted.
All of us in the world today face that same choice. We can choose a narrative that serves our ego but perpetuates hatred. Or we can write the story differently. A great example of this re-writing was Vatican 2. The Catholic Church re-wrote the story of the Jewish people saying that the Jewish people as a collective are not to be held responsible for the death of Jesus, nor are the Jewish people despised by God for rejecting Jesus. Rather, the Jews took another path from Christians and God blesses both paths.
The Church could have said of its traditional narrative “This has been our narrative for 2,000 years and we’re sticking to it. Narratives cannot change. This is our belief. If our view of the world is a problem for the Jews, it’s not our problem. We can’t change reality.
But that’s not what the Church did. The Church didn’t deny that the Jewish people did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. Instead, the Church realized that we all have some measure of choice in how we tell our story. We can’t change facts. But we can change how we understand the meaning of an event, in this case, the meaning of the Jewish people choosing another path. And, if one way of telling our story (seeing the Jewish path as betrayal) leads to hatred and another (seeing the Jewish path as standing for their own convictions) leads to reconciliation, we bear responsibility for the choice we make.
Reflection
- What was the story you told yourself about your life when you were 17? How would it be different today?
- How has America wrestled with how to tell its story? Why does it matter?
- What other stories in the world would you like to rewrite if you could?
- What have been the stories the Jewish people has told about itself? Which of them have been in conflict with each other?
- What might it look like for the Jewish people to write a new story about itself today?
Tzedakah/Tikkun Olam
- Roots(Israel)
Roots is a unique network of local Palestinians and Israelis who have come to see each other as the partners we both need to make changes to end our conflict. Based on a mutual recognition of each People’s connection to the Land, they are developing understanding and solidarity despite their ideological differences. Friendsofroots.net
- Hand in Hand (Israel)
Hand in Hand is building inclusion and equality between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel through a growing network of bilingual, integrated schools and communities. The curricula in Hand in Hand’s schools are based on values that reflect both cultures and languages, oriented in multiculturalism and shared and equal citizenship. Hebrew and Arabic have equal status, as do both cultures and national narratives. Handinhandk12.org
Connecting Jewishly
I am indebted to Beth Huppin for suggesting the texts and readings in Days 16-20.
Jewish text and reading material
- Alan Lew’s book, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared has a beautiful section on Rosh HaShanah and on Yom Kippur. It’s great preparation material for the high holidays. It’s available in hard copy or in digital form at amazon.com
- Jonathan Sacks’s Future Tense is one of the best articulations of the message of Judaism to the world that has ever been written. It’s also available on amazon.com.
Day Seventeen (September 23)
Working on yourself
Connect the seemingly unconnectable
Jewish Tradition teaches us not only to value peace, but to be a ‘rodef shalom/a pursuer of peace.’ This means that we have to take the initiative and go to great lengths even to create harmony between people who we regard as implacable enemies. Isaiah expressed this with his vision of a day in the Messianic future when ‘the wolf will lie down with the lamb.’
Rashi says that when we recite the words of the Shema twice a day proclaiming the unity of God, we are dreaming aloud of the day when all of God’s children, even people who are as different from each other as the wolf in the lamb will feel a common connection with each other. To recite the Shema and to proclaim our faith in the God of opposites, day and night, fire and hail, is to do more than dream. It’s to proclaim our intention to do our part to connect the seemingly unconnectable, as God is the common ground of the seemingly unconnected.
This doesn’t mean we should send flowers to neo-Nazis. It does mean that the pursuit of human connection even where it seems highly unlikely (and maybe especially so) is a core Jewish value.
One of the most powerful stories in the Torah is the story of Joseph and his brothers. Who would have thought that men who kidnapped their brother, tried to kill him and then sold him into slavery could one day so deeply regret their actions that they would offer themselves as slaves to save what they thought was their remaining brother? Who would have thought brothers who hated each other so much could be reconciled? The overcoming of the distance between these brothers is one of the most moving moments in the entire Bible. And it is moving precisely because it is so unlikely.
So central to Judaism is this value of connecting the unconnectable that it forms the foundation of Torah study itself. The ‘game’ of Torah study goes like this. We start with two ideas that are so distant from each other that connecting them would seem impossible. But connect them we do.
Here is a famous example. The Rabbis said that Yom Kippurim can be understood as Yom K’Purim, a day like Purim! What were the Rabbis smoking? Yom Kippur is a day to fast and deprive ourselves of the pleasures of the senses. Purim is a day to go wild, dress up in outlandish costumes, and get so drunk we don’t know the difference between Haman and Mordecai. What could these holidays possibly have in common?
But the Rabbis found numerous connections. For example, Purim celebrates the moment Esther took off her mask, revealed who she really was to the king and saved the Jewish people. Yom Kippur is a day when we have the courage to take off our ‘masks’ before God, reveal who we really are with all of our flaws, in the hope of transforming ourselves into something we’ve never been before.
The Rabbis knew exactly what they were doing. They believed that if we can create harmony between two seemingly unconnected stories, we can connect two seemingly unconnectable human beings. By training us on a weekly basis to find unlikely connections in the Torah, we are habituating ourselves to constantly be open to unexpected connection in our human relationships.
Action
Think of ways in which you already connect with people who are profoundly different than you:
- It could be age that separates you: you have relationships with your parents, your children and your grandchildren. Think how different you are from each other.
- You may have friends of different races and religions. How are you different from each other? Do you take some pride in connecting across difference?
- You may have friends who have very different political views than you do (though this is becoming less and less common). How do you maintain your connection in spite of those differences?
- You may have friends who are the complete opposite from you in personality, and who have very different interests from you. How do you explain your connection?
Now that you can see how you already connect the seemingly unconnectable, how can you extend this quality, broaden it and deepen it?
- Make an effort to get to know someone who you wouldn’t ordinarily seek out as a friend. See if you can find points of connection where you didn’t think they existed.
- Make a conscious effort to reach out to someone from a different race or religion who is not naturally part of your social circle. See what you might learn from this experience.
- Braver Angels is a national group devoted to creating honest and respectful dialogue on political issues among people on opposite sides of the political spectrum, liberals and conservatives. We have a Braver Angels Conversation at Herzl-Ner Tamid. A group of ten liberals and conservatives get together monthly to discuss key moral and political issues of our day with the goal of understanding each other better and connecting personally with each other. If you are interested in joining our group, contact Rabbi Rosenbaum.
Tzedakah/Tikkun Olam
- The Shaharit Institute (Israel)
The Shaharit Institute is a think-and-do tank dedicated to the common good of all of the diverse communities of Israeli society. They combine the conceptual infrastructure, diverse leadership and training for community organizers and social entrepreneurs. They are fostering a new social partnership between all communities in Israeli society, to build a shared future across the divides, based on empathy, trust, and a desire to listen and collaborate. Shaharit.org.il
- The Fourth Quarter (Israel)
The Fourth Quarter is a democratic movement comprising citizens from all sectors of Israeli society and across the political spectrum. What unites them is their belonging to the Israeli center of gravity—while each member holds firm ideological positions, they all recognize the need for a shared society with those holding differing views. q4.org.il
Connecting Jewishly
The Meaning of the Shofar: Three Interpretations
These three articles were written a year ago, but they have stood the test of time:
- Hearing a Mother’s Pain on Rosh Hashanah, Shai Held
Read Rabbi Held’s article: https://www.hadar.org/about/news/hearing-mothers-pain-rosh-hashanah-shai-held-forward
- Some members of the Jewish community have said that we have not sufficiently acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza that resulted from the Israeli response to the attack on October 7th.
- Do you think Rabbi Held would agree? Why or why not? What is your own opinion?
- Listening to the Voices of the Shofar, Sharon Cohen-Annisfeld
Read Rabbi Cohen-Annisfeld’s article: https://www.jewishboston.com/read/listening-to-the-call-of-the-shofar/
- What does Rabbi Cohen-Annisfeld add to Rabbi Held’s interpretation?
- What “thickets” in your own life are you navigating—situations where only one outcome seems possible? How might you listen for a different ending?
- Can you think of other situations where Rabbi Cohen-Annisfeld’s suggestion that we see differently might be useful?
- Disorienting Tears: A Biblical Trio and the Shofar this Year, Aaron Frank
Read Rabbi Frank’s article: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/disorienting-tears-a-biblical-trio-and-the-shofar-this-year/
- What insight does Rabbi Frank add to the previous two interpretations of the shofar?
- Does Rabbi Frank’s paradigm fit the recent history of the Jewish people?
- Is it relevant to your life?