Celebrating MLK, Interfaith Writings and a Flash Mob in Jerusalem

If you were at Beth Emet on Friday, January 13 for the Martin Luther King Shabbas dinner and conversation, you know that you were at a history-celebrating and history-making event. But if you couldn't be there, you can get a small taste of that night from text and links below.


I had the pleasure of contributing a personal story connecting King, to my father, to the civil rights movement, to the North Shore, and back to Beth Emet. Here is the text of that piece and the link to the radio interview that followed on Monday, January 16.  EBB

In 1958, 29-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr was a guest speaker at Beth Emet synagogue in Evanston. Admission was $1.75. The program says King was considered “one of the outstanding Negro leaders in the country.”

Five years later, in 1963, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, rhetoric that set the tone for the civil rights movement and ultimately earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.

…. A hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Negro is still not free.. 

Rabbi Andrea London and Reverend Mark Dennis at the WBEZ Studios 

That same year, my parents moved to Glencoe. In nearby Deerfield, town leaders were threatening to keep an integrated apartment building from being built by turning the area into a park. Eminent domain, they said. My father, a white, Jewish businessman, had been moved by King’s mission to end racial segregation and discrimination. So he went to the rally in that park to protest and brought me along. I was almost four.

What happened there has stayed with me since: I can still see the huge crowd forming a large circle. I can still feel my father’s hand in mine and see the smile from a tall, black man as he took my other hand. And I will always hear that chorus of men’s, women’s and children’s voices singing “We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome, someday…” 

….We need to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice…

Later that year, my dad, who at 29 had become active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was arrested at a demonstration at the Chicago Board of Education office. CORE was demanding the resignation of the superintendent who was authorizing the building of new schools in white neighborhoods but not black ones. My father and 36 others were arrested and jailed at this nonviolent sit-in. A photograph of my father being dragged off by police made the cover of the Chicago Daily News.

Race relations in the 1960s was less about talk and more about demonstrations…. rallies … sit-ins … jail time or violence. The worst of course was in 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot on the second floor balcony of a Memphis motel.

A few years ago, a recording of King’s synagogue speech was found in a congregant’s basement. Beth Emet’s Rabbi Andrea London asked Second Baptist Pastor Mark Dennis to co-host a Friday evening sabbath service on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Evanston Jews and Baptists prayed and sang together. Portions of King’s 1958 speech were played, followed by dinner and a table discussion between the congregations about the challenges and next steps for race relations in the community.

Today, Martin Luther King would have turned 83 years old.

Would he be disappointed that we are still talking about race relations? Or would he be pleased at how different it looks?

“I have a dream that the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream.” 

I have no way of knowing if the sons and daughters of former slaves and slave owners were in that room last Friday evening, but I do know that some fifty years after King first spoke about racial equality in this same community, his dream for blacks and whites to sit down at the table of brotherhood became a reality.

Ellen Blum Barish

In other news....


Several Beth Emet women - Marilyn Price, Betsy Fuchs and myself -  are featured in the launch of an online interfaith publication titled Creative Space, produced by the women of SoulSpace, a women's interfaith circle that celebrated 10 years in 2011.


Marilyn Gehant, founding mother of SoulSpace, writes, 


"We invite you to enter Creative Space and share the spiritual writing and images of our Jewish, Christian and Muslim contributors. The seeking spirit of women of faith is at work in our inaugural posting of Creative Space.  On the way to a wedding, in sacred spaces, through home ritual, women pray and make meaning of life’s gifts and challenges.  In the stillness of the woods and in the coolness of a swimming pool, they listen more deeply.  To earthquake shattered Pakistan and the holy places of Israel, they journey to form relationships in faith.  Waiting on the tarmac or sitting near a hospital bed or stirring a cup of coffee, women form images and expressions of souls searching the many manifestations of Adonai, God, Allah.  


Here's the link to read more:

http://soulspacecreative.blogspot.com/

And finally, because my daughter is en route back to college today from her first trip to Israel, I couldn't resist posting a link to this
wonderful Youtube video: a flash mob in Jerusalem. 
Enjoy.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhQuQGyulA&feature=share

Know Us by Our Names – and by Our Deeds

I have had a long-time fascination with synagogue names, how they came to be adopted, and how the name of the congregation and the values it reflects “play out” in the life of the congregation, if at all.  (I blogged about this three years ago on the Reform Judaism blog, at http://blogs.rj.org/blog/2009/01/26/god_and_man_at_shul/).  

Here at Beth Emet, our founding story remains familiar and our founding principles are embedded in our congregational culture, where all are free to express the truth (emet) as they see it.  And the story is memorialized on our website www.bethemet.org, so that any visitor can know what we stand for and how we came to be in the place where we are.

But it must be said that openness to truth and freedom of speech are both relatively passive, the terrain across which our journey takes place.  The Beth Emet journey, over these sixty-plus years, has been one of action, and our action theme for the current year is tzedek, tzedek tirdof, justice, justice you shall pursue.  This theme provides us with programmatic focus, putting an even greater emphasis on what has long been integral to our congregational DNA. 

The instruction to pursue justice comes out of Parashat Shoftim, but the parasha also reminds us of other values, including rachamim, mercy, shalom, peace, emet, truth, and ometz, courage.  Hopefully these too are part of our genetic makeup. 

Fusing our Beth Emet stress on tzedek with my personal interest in what temples call themselves, I decided to take a specific look at congregations that incorporate tzedek in their names.  Given the distinct emphasis Reform Judaism has historically given to social justice, one would expect to find more than half a dozen on our roster of 900 congregations.  But that’s all there are.  (This compares, on the one hand, with 16 Reform “emet” congregations, and with 14 Conservative “tzedek” congregations.)

So what do the tzedek congregations of the Reform movement do about pursuing justice, and about featuring its pursuit?  Although all have active social action programs, with mitzvah days and interfaith programming and soup kitchens among their activities, only one of the six provides visible attention to its commitment to justice. 

B’nai Tzedek, in Fountain Valley, CA, reminds its congregants and its visitors every time they enter the sanctuary of where they are.  On the right side of their bimah wall are the words "Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof" – “Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue.” On the left side of the bimah wall are the words "Marbeh Tzedakah Marbeh Shalom" – “The More Justice, the More Peace.”  Their website goes on to explain “Congregation B'nai Tzedek is committed to pursuing justice in synagogue life as well as in society at large. B'nai Tzedek means ‘Children of Justice.’"

We read in Tanchuma Vayakkhel:  Every man has three names: one by which his parents call him; another, by which he is known to the outside world; and a third, the most important, the name which his own deeds have procured for him. 

 

As it with people, so too it should be for synagogues:  they should be known not only by their names but by their deeds.  Our congregational names need to be more than identifiers – they need to be a starting point for our identities.  We read in Pirke Avot 1:18, The world stands on three things – on truth, on justice,* and on peace.  Much as I hope that every congregation lives up to the value its institutional parents inscribed in its name, and hopefully stresses it in some manner, no single one of our core values can be the only thing we do.   

*Full disclosure:  The Hebrew here is din, not tzedek, emphasizing law without the overtone of compassion inherent in tzedek.

Larry Kaufman

 

Talmudic Lessons for the Wanna-Be's

I was lucky enough to be in Boston recently on the day Elie Wiesel gave the second of his three annual lectures at Boston University, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend (especially since he was introduced by Deanna Klepper, chair of the BU Department of Religion and wife of Beth Emet’s former cantor, the renowned Jeff Klepper.)

Prof. Wiesel’s subject was Eliezer ben Hyrcanus—Eliezer the Great, one of the rabbis whose insights are found in the Talmud and well-documented in Pirke Avot, in which Rabbi Yochanon ben Zakkai essentially describes Rabbi Eliezer as smarter (or does he mean more worthy?) than his four other disciples put together. 

Yet Rabbi Eliezer was excommunicated following a dispute in which he steadfastly disagreed with the other sages--a strange situation for the same avot who set such store by the values of study, discussion, dissention, debate and interpretation. 

I have little doubt that Prof. Wiesel was actually making a crucial statement about what is happening too often in our political discourse here in the United States. And it should serve as a lesson to our leaders as they return to Washington for more Congressional shenannigans—as well as to us and our wanna-be leaders as we head into election season.

Legend has it that the debate that caused Rabbi Eliezer such trouble was over whether a certain oven was ritually pure. The oven was a special type, built in a certain way. Rabbi Eliezer argued rationally that it was pure, while all the others argued it was impure. Despite Torah’s requirements to comply with the rule of the majority, Rabbi Eliezer remained firm. When his rational arguments failed to convince them, Rabbi Eliezer turned to the supernatural. If this oven is pure, may this carob tree prove it, he said. And the tree was torn out by its roots and blown away. Still, his colleagues were unconvinced. May this stream of water prove it, he tried. And the stream flowed backward. With the others still unimpressed, he called on the walls of the building to prove his point, and they began to topple. But the other sages shamed the walls for interfering in an issue of law, and they ceased falling. Finally, Rabbi Eliezer called upon Heaven to verify his interpretation, and Heaven scolded the others for disagreeing with Rabbi Eliezer.

The sages, however, invoked the laws of Torah as the operative authority over “the celestial intruder” and, out of Rabbi Eliezer’s presence, declared all his earlier legal opinions regarding purification matters invalid, and then excommunicated him.

“Isn’t the Talmud based on dialogue?” Prof. Wiesel asked. “Isn’t that which makes it so glorious, transcending time and frontier and fashion? Which means, isn’t the Talmud a celebration of the right to be different? To demonstrate the beauty of discussion and dissention? Why then should the great Rabbi Eliezer be punished and ostracized… and ultimately expelled from the academy? Only because he believed in it and he had the courage to say in what he believed?...His voice is personal, solitary—so what?  Is it so bad to be a minority of one?”

His conclusion is that Rabbi Eliezer’s mistake “was to call upon heaven rather than on logic…Talmudic debates, as all debates, are, and must be, rational, logical. They must take place at the human level. Once you introduce the supernatural element, it dominates the discussion and in effect, eliminates the participants. Such an attitude is dangerous…They were angry not with his views, although they disagreed with them, but with his methods.” 

And those methods involved God’s opinion in a case that rested on points of law. “They were not arguing about mysticism, or poetry…” Prof. Wiesel said both sides should have argued legal issues. Rabbi Eliezer, he said, “should have reasoned with them, drawing on his knowledge and experience. He should have used filibuster tactics to prevail upon them…(seeking) evidence from different sources, formulating new interpretations” to convince his friends, rather than relying on supernatural and divine judgments.  

“The sages,” Prof. Wiesel noted, “sought to avoid conflicts, disputes, fragmentation. They were not against minority views, nor were they against different opinions. They were against fanatic opinions. And none is as fanatic as the one that claims to derive from heaven. Such attitudes inevitably provoke splits. And in those critical times, with the Temple ruins still in everyone’s memory, the Jewish people needed unity of purpose and an awareness of man’s duty and power in order to be able, literally to be able, to dream of the new glory and sovereignty.” 

Substitute a few words in that paragraph, like “World Trade Center” for Temple, and “American” for Jewish, and you have a contemporary lesson. Concluded Prof. Wiesel, “Had Rabbi Eliezer used his human qualities…he would have remained their friend and their teacher...”

Can someone please pass along his lesson to our Congress and the wanna-be’s?

Janet Reed

Justice and Evanston's Big Ten Ideas

Justice means different things to different people. Some focus on rules. Some look to results. Some even try to equate justice with ethics, although that may well lead down its own definitional rabbit hole. And it is probably true that what justice means may well depend on the context of the discussion. Are we talking social justice, economic justice, justice under the law, some other kind of justice?



I have been mulling about this because I was recently involved in a community wide exercise that, on reflection, turned out to be largely about justice. It did not start that way. What twenty-one of us were charged with doing was reviewing over two thousand ideas submitted by Evanstonians in an effort to develop ten big ideas for the improvement of our city. We were to act as jurors, evaluating the ideas, and then selecting the one hundred best for a community vote. We were then to take the thirty ideas receiving the most votes of the community and, with the other ideas in mind too, craft ten ideas for implementation in Evanston by 2013, the 150th anniversary of Evanston’s founding.



We did not talk a lot about Justice (or justice for that matter), but many of the ideas we developed, in retrospect, seem to address at least one aspect of just community, and that is the extent to which everyone should have a decent opportunity to participate in life’s game. We have urged the provision of affordable preschool for all, so that each child is prepared for kindergarten. We seek a youth center to encourage leadership development and appropriate experiences for growth. We would create a vocational co-op technical school as an alternative to college and a venue for job retraining. We want to establish fully functional neighborhood literacy centers in geographically diverse areas of Evanston to provide not only conventional library services but focus on teaching technology skills. We hope to develop a community health center for those who need it.



Imagine a place where all children learn before kindergarten, where teens have a safe haven and can learn leadership skills, where high-school graduates and adults can acquire skills in a trade that can provide a decent and honorable livelihood, where literacy is valued and modern technology is available for all, and where those in need can receive basic wellness treatment. That is a place worth trying to build, because it would be a community where impediments to individual growth are removed and each person has a chance to develop his or her talents.



Some have criticized our ten ideas because they do not know how they would be financed, and the economic challenges are real. But the critics do not deny the intrinsic value of the goals. So now, the question becomes one of creativity and will. If you are interested in helping to bring these ideas to fruition, to build this more just community, or if you want to know more about these or the other ideas we developed -- for instance, with respect to urban farms and community gardens, energy efficiency and conservation, water recreation, a year round farmers and artisans market, and bike lanes and walking paths -- you can access general and contact information at http://www.evanston150.org/ or just call 847-347-2013.





Roger Price

When the Matriarch Dies ...

When the matriarch dies who is left in charge? 

In this weeks’ parshah Chaya Sarah (the life of Sarah) we learn of the death of Sarah, the matriarch, the purchase of her burial place and the immediate need to find Isaac a wife.  All those things happen in this portion and more (Genesis 23:1 – 25:18).  Sarah the matriarch, it was said, lit the Shabbat candles with such conviction, such faith, such holiness that they remained lit all through the week.  Sarah the matriarch, may her memory be for a blessing, had her flaws but is remembered with reverence in this parshah and then we discover who her successor was to be as Rivka’s story will unfold.

What better time to think about handing down the maternal tasks than at Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States, although there are also celebrations in Liberia, the Netherlands and Norfolk Island.  The first Thanksgiving in Canada was in 1578, not to celebrate the harvest but the survival of Frobisher on his third dangerous journey from England through the storms and ice.  It was not just a feast but also a service of communion – the first held in the territory.  The Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October, which is the same day as the United States celebrates Columbus Day.

In the United States, the first Thanksgiving was marked in Florida in 1565 by Spanish explorers and at various times in other places and always as a celebration of a successful harvest and gratitude. Abraham Lincoln, influenced by Sarah Josepha Hale, in 1863 proclaimed that the date of Thanksgiving (as an attempt to unify the States) was to be the final Thursday in the month of November.  It remained that way until December 26, 1941 (under the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) when a bill was signed by Congress to make the fourth Thursday in November the official day in order to give the economy a boost.  And so it is!

Maybe it will work this year as well – the economic boost part!

Aside from the wonderful coincidence (or is it) of Sarah (Hale) persuading Abraham (Lincoln) to unify Thanksgiving, just what does this have to do with this lovely and important parshah?

It is on Thanksgiving that we gather together and pass on the traditions of family and friends.  It is a day of gratitude as we sit around the table or tables and eat recipes that have been handed down from generations.  I am thinking of my mom’s cauliflower salad, my sister-in-laws Jello mold, the stuffing from Aunt Tillie or the way my friend Joseph put an onion in the turkey’s hollow – all these things that we bring to the table and embellish with our stories. That is what makes this holiday ours.  And what has happened during the year, and who is no longer at the table, and who is new to the table and what we all have to be grateful about. 

Sarah the matriarch handed the torch to Rivka, although she never met her. But we know that Rivka moved into her house, her tent, and took on the task of continuing the family.  Gathered around the table in our house we use the silverware that was my grandma Mabel’s and the candlesticks that belonged to Roger’s mom.  I think of the cake that Belle Price made every year with a small piece missing from the corner as she couldn’t bear to think it wouldn’t taste good so she sampled it.  I see my father’s face smiling from my memory at his gathered clan and the descendants he didn’t know he would have that carry his name and joy of laughter.   And I struggle through his job of carving the turkey – highly inadequate but doing his job as best I can.

Thanksgiving is sacred in our house.  It has grown through the years to include the families that our family has grown and their extended ones as well.  The gathering of the harvest is the crop that is the family and friends we have nurtured through the years and we are grateful.  Thanksgiving is Sukkot in spirit and in plentitude.

So who is in charge when the matriarch dies?  Not just those who tend the house and environs, but all of us.  Sarai (Sarah) made the ultimate journey with Abram (Abraham) and it ends in this week’s parashah, but her progeny continued that trip. 

Another thing to give thanks for!

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Thanksgiving. 

Marilyn Price

In gratitude  

Cheshvan: The Bitter and the Sweet

We are entering the singular month of the Jewish calendar in which there are no holidays, festivals, fasts or observances other than Shabbat.

November is the month of Cheshvan, or what is known as mar Cheshvan, meaning bitter. After three months of preparation for, or observance of Elul, Selichot, Rosh Hashonah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah, it’s certainly understandable to feel a bit of post-holiday let down or even emptiness (hence the word bitter). But I’m guessing that many more of us may be ripe for a rest.

I know I was.

Enter Cheshvan. These weeks before we prepare for Hanukah (December 20) and then, winter (December 21) offer an opportunity to find ways to refuel, refresh and replenish.

I write this blog entry from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where I took a last minute weekend to leave town, quiet my electronic devices and catch the last of the fall colors before they fell to the ground.

View theses as a visual prompt to take Cheshvan up on its offerings.

And feel free to comment here about what that will look like or has looked like for you. I’d be interested to know ….

Ellen Blum Barish

Shake Your Lulav and Etrog

Like many aspects of Jewish life, the holiday of Sukkot has become much more widely observed by the Reform community than it was during my childhood.

Back then, as I recall, Sunday School students would make paper chains to hang in the temple sukkah, spend a bit of class time there waving the lulav and etrog, and then forget about it for the rest of the year.  Almost no Reform Jews put up their own sukkot, and few fulfilled the commandment to eat at least one meal there.

Our contemporary rediscovery of the joys of Sukkot  brings us back around to the understandings of the  ancient Israelites when they fulfilled the commandment:  

“The choice first fruits of your soil you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God.” (Exodus 34:26). 

Sukkot was one of the three pilgrimage holidays (along with Pesach and Shavuot), when our ancestors flocked to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem bringing offerings from their crops as sacrifices for God’s bounty. Sukkot was so important to our ancestors that it’s been suggested that the eight-day Chanukah holiday was, in fact, a belated celebration of Sukkot (plus Shmini Atzeret the next day ) once the Temple was restored.  Likewise,  the Pilgrims took to heart the commandments to recognize God’s role in providing for their needs in the New World:

“You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, of the first fruits of the wheat harvest; and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year” (Exodus 34:22) became the inspiration for that first Thanksgiving. But I think part of the reason the holiday has resonated over the course of history has to do with the poignancy of the sukkah itself. Sukkot(booths or huts) were the living quarters of our ancestors during harvest time, as well as their lodging during their wandering in the desert and on their pilgrimages to the Holy Temple. 

“Mark, on the 15^th day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the yield of your land, you shall observe the festival of the Lord seven days…You shall live in booths all seven days…in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt…” (Lev. 23:39-43).

But the sukkah is the perfect symbol for any fragile situation, and that, of course, is the history of the Jewish people. It could have been used throughout the ages to represent everything from our enslavement in Egypt to the Jewish plight during the Spanish Inquisition to life in the Warsaw Ghetto. (The sukkah’s fragility, in fact, begs the question of why there should be so many specific rules and regulations about constructing a temporary structure!)

Right now,  in an economic environment in which so many of our fellow citizens are homeless and hungry, recognizing the abundance of God’s gifts in the temporary shelter of a sukkah offers us a current context for its significance.  And might the sukkah not also speak to settlers in the West Bank?

So I’m glad that more Jews acknowledge and celebrate Sukkot—and  I’m looking forward to shaking the lulav and etrog just the same!

Janet Reed