ARZA mourns the loss of Shimon Peres

The following press release appeared this morning from the Association of Reform Zionists of America, the Zionist arm of the Reform movement comprising 1.5 million Jews. As the national chair of the ARZA Board, I share this with sadness over the passing of Shimon Peres, but also with the hope that his vision of a two states for two peoples peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come about soon.

 

The Association of Reform Zionists of America joins the people of Israel and people of good faith around the world in mourning Shimon Peres, former Prime Minister and President of the State of Israel. President Peres suffered a debilitating stroke on September 13, the 23rd anniversary of the day when he signed the Oslo Peace Accords on the White House lawn alongside Yitzhak Rabin z”l and Yasser Arafat.

Shimon Peres was one of the last remaining leaders of the founding generation of the State of Israel. First elected in 1959, he served as a Member of Knesset for a nearly unbroken streak of 48 years before being elected President in June 2007.

As a political leader, he placed the good-being of Israel, the unity of the Jewish people, and hopeful prospects for future peace as his guiding lights. He was a committed disciple of David Ben-Gurion, of whom Peres said, “I knew him well, and I am bound to say that not only did I see him as the greatest Jew of our generation, but my admiration for him continued to grow throughout the years of our acquaintance.” Under Ben Gurion’s tutelage, Peres ascended the ranks of Mapai, a precursor to today’s Labor Party.

His political views evolved over the years. Early in his career, Peres was perceived as a military hawk. A protégée of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, and an alumnus of the Haganah, he developed crucial strategic alliances for Israel throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He served as the Deputy Defense Minister in 1965 and held various other ministerial posts throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974 he became the Minister of Defense in Prime Minister Rabin’s government.

Peres’s and Rabin’s destinies were often linked together, and each was often perceived as the other’s nemesis. He succeeded Rabin as party leader in 1977, and when Likud won the subsequent election, Peres became the opposition leader.

Eventually, he developed into a political dove and one of the most eloquent proponents of peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world. In the 1980s, he served a rotating shift as Prime Minister with Yitzhak Shamir in the Labor-Likud unity government. By the 1990s, he was forcefully articulating his vision of peace in what he called “The New Middle East.”

In President Peres’s vision, economic development and partnerships were the keys to transcending longstanding territorial grievances between Jews and Arabs. With his disciple Yossi Beilin, he was one of the key architects of secret peace negotiations with the Palestinians, which culminated with the Oslo Accords in 1993. As Rabin’s Foreign Minister, he often urged the ambivalent Prime Minister to take risks for peace. On September 13, 1993, Rabin, Peres, and Arafat signed the accords at a White House ceremony with President Clinton. The three of them received the Nobel Prize for Peace for their willingness to embrace Peres’s vision of a New Middle East.

On that historic day, Shimon Peres said:

We live in an ancient land, and as our land is small, so must our reconciliation be great. As our wars have been long, so must our healing be swift… I want to tell the Palestinian delegation that we are sincere, that we mean business. We do not seek to shape your lives or determine your destiny. Let all of us turn from bullets to ballots, from guns to shovels… We shall offer you our help in making Gaza prosper and Jericho blossom again.

Tragically, we know that peace did not blossom in the 1990s. Violence and terrorism erupted as the peace process staggered. In November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a Jewish assassin at a Tel Aviv peace rally, and Peres once more stepped in as Israel’s Prime Minister.

In subsequent years, he vigorously led those who would continue to envision peace, even during brutal days of terror. He founded and led the Peres Center for Peace, which works to build the infrastructures of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. When he retired from the presidency of Israel in 2014, he was the world’s oldest head of state.

Shimon Peres was an intimate and committed friend of the Reform Jewish movement. Throughout his life, he was an outspoken advocate for Klal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people. He was an ally who supported of the Israel Movement for Progressive and Reform Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism here in North America, and Reform Jews around the globe.

In 2007, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion awarded him the Dr. Bernard Heller Prize for his lifelong leadership and pursuit of a peaceful future for the Middle East. At that time he said, “What I appreciate in Reform Judaism is its accommodation of the best of higher Jewish values with the modern world.”

That description could apply to Shimon Peres himself. Jewish history and destiny were in his DNA. Born into a secular family in Wisniew, Poland in 1923, he was tutored in Talmud by his grandfather, a scion of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin. He developed a passionate love of Israel and Yiddishkeit. His family made aliyah in 1934 when Shimon was 11 years old; all his family members who did not leave Poland for Palestine were murdered in the Shoah. Once, when President Clinton asked him how Jews were able to survive over 2,000 years of exile and oppression, he replied, “Our Sabbath saved us.”

With the loss of Shimon Peres, the extraordinary generation of Israel’s founding leaders leaves the world stage. We join with our people and people of good faith around the world in sharing our condolences to his family and all of Israel.

And in our grieving, we pray for leaders everywhere who will inherit his mantle and have the courage to envision a new “New Middle East” for us all.

Zichrono Livracha – May his memory be a blessing.

Elie Wiesel – Personal memories and a tribute

Elie Wiesel belonged to humanity. Though he was a Jew first, he transcended tribal and national boundaries and spoke on behalf of everyone who knows the despair that comes from cruelty and indifference.

I met Elie Wiesel twice. The first time was in 1972 at the Brandeis Camp Institute (now the Brandeis-Bardin Institute of the American Jewish University) while a senior at UC Berkeley. He and I spoke briefly then, but he wrote me a little hand-written note the following month that I cherish and that has motivated so much of what I do and believe as a rabbi. It reads simply “Remember to be a witness.”

I met him a second time in 1987 when I served as the Associate Rabbi at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, DC. My wife Barbara was serving then on the National Board of the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN). Along with her on that board was Mary-Anne White, the wife of the former American Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White (z’l – he died last year from complications of prostate cancer).

Ambassador White was the one who identified the four murdered American nuns. He was serving as well in El Salvador when Archbishop Romero was assassinated in his church.

Ambassador White, appointed by President Carter to stop a revolution in that tortured land, described Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of the death squads, as a “pathological killer.” When President Reagan took office, one of his first acts was to fire Ambassador White because of his public accusations against the Salvadoran regime that had tolerated and supported D’Aubuisson’s death squads. Unfortunately, this ended White’s diplomatic career, but he grew in the hearts and minds of the Salvadoran people because he spoke “truth to power” as Elie Wiesel did in the White House publicly to his friend President Reagan because the President was preparing to visit the graves of Nazis at Bitburg, Germany as a favor to the German leadership. He told President Reagan that his place was at the graves of the victims, not the murderers.

Together, Barbara and Mary-Anne White (who was then the President of the Girl Scouts of America) teamed up and brought Elie Wiesel to CARECEN’s cause. He became a significant supporter of their efforts.

As Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Price he said – “No human being is illegal!” That quote became the tag-line of CARECEN in its efforts on behalf of El Salvadoran refugees seeking political asylum in the United States.

In light of the millions of refugees seeking safe shelter in the world today, Elie Wiesel was then, as always, prescient. His words, conscience and compassion as a witness has been lost tragically on millions of Americans spurred on by the hateful, hard-hearted and exclusionary rhetoric of one presidential candidate who would bar these tempest tossed human beings from ever coming into America and finding safe haven here.

May this Fourth of July celebrating American freedom remind us of the blessings of liberty and democracy that we enjoy, and of the conscience of this blessed man that graced and served humankind that is at the core of the American spirit.

Zecher tzadik livracha! May the memory of this righteous human being be a blessing for us all and for the generations to come. Amen!

“Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love” – and a prayer for the ages

As I watched Lin-Manuel Miranda accept the Tony Award for best musical “Hamilton” in New York on Sunday, I was struck not only by the beauty of his sonnet but by the passionate effect of his eight-time repetition of that simple four-letter word – “LOVE”:

“…When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers,
Remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
cannot be killed or swept aside…
Now fill the world with music, love and pride.”

Love knocked this week upon a calcified door and walked through reminding us who we are and ought to be.

Thousands lined up to give blood. Restaurants brought food. Hands touched hands and eyes beheld eyes. Hearts melded into one in Orlando and throughout the land.

The destruction of life by the hateful assassin begets profound mourning among us all, and it stimulates the resolve of all decent people to resist the hate and fear spewed forth by the politician’s crass and heartless rhetoric.

The truth is that love eclipses hate every time.

It happens that in this week’s Torah portion Naso, there appears the oldest blessing in Jewish recorded history:

“May God bless you and keep you;
May God’s light shine upon you and be gracious to you;
May God lift up the Divine countenance upon you and grant you shalom – wholeness and peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26)

Known as the Birkat Kohanim, the blessing of the priests, it is at least 3000 years old. The oldest copy of this ancient text was unearthed in the City of David in Jerusalem and is estimated have been written down around 900 BCE.

Rabbinic tradition of later centuries developed a rich mythology about the use of this blessing. The midrashim say that these words were invoked by God when contemplating the writing of the Torah and the creation of the universe, when the first humans emerged from the dust and were infused with Divine breath, and when Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai.

The Kohanim (priests) and many rabbis today raise their hands in the form of the Hebrew letter shin (the first letter of one of God’s names – Shaddai) and bless the congregation on Shabbat and holidays, at a brit milah and the naming of a baby girl, upon b’nai mitzvah, Jews by-choice, and marriage couples under the chuppah at their weddings.

This blessing acknowledges the creation of something absolutely new, that never existed before, a blessing of hope and faith, a hedge against cynicism and despair.

Rabbinic tradition requires that the priest (and rabbis today) say these words ONLY when they love the people and the community upon whom they invoke this blessing. If there is even one person present about whom the priest feels no love and/or bears animus, that priest must defer to another priest to say the blessing.

Lin Manuel-Miranda had it exactly right – “And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”

Leonard Nimoy internationalized the hands of the priests in an iconic gesture of shalom in his greeting as Mr. Spock in Star Trek with the accompanying phrase “Live long and prosper.”

Leonard fondly remembered going to shul on Shabbos in South Boston as a child with his grandfather who told him to cover his eyes when the Kohanim ascended the bimah and invoked God’s blessing upon the congregation.

Leonard asked me years ago why his grandfather told him to cover his eyes, and I explained that at that moment of blessing tradition says that the “Shekhina” (the feminine Divine presence) enters the congregation. Torah warns that no human being can glimpse the Divine presence and remain alive, and so we cover our eyes as does the priest under the tallit when saying the blessing, much as Indiana Jones did when the Ark of the Covenant was opened in Steven Spielberg’s film “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Leonard, as a gifted photographer, was inspired to embark on a project that he called “Shekhina” in which he photographed nude women in ethereal poses wearing the tallis and t’fillin. I have one of Leonard’s photos hanging in my synagogue study, and I’m inspired every time I look at it, and my love for this man is rekindled.

“Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside,” ever!

Shabbat shalom!

Pearl Harbor – A Journal of a Wartime Physician Serving Wounded Soldiers in the Pacific

On December 8, 1941, a day after Japanese forces attacked the American military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, my father, a physician, re-enlisted with the US Navy department. Within a few weeks he was sailing on the U.S.S. President Hayes bound for Hawaii where he would serve for the next year followed by another year on Midway Island.

Between December 11, 1941 and January 25, 1944 he wrote 45 letters to cousins in Philadelphia (who saved the letters) and he kept a journal until the Navy prohibited its personnel to write diaries. His letters and writings are a remarkable record of a wartime physician serving wounded soldiers in the Pacific theater. They reveal his instinctual call to duty, his loyalty to country and his ready compliance to orders, all of which are virtues that Tom Brokaw characterized as emblematic of the “greatest generation of Americans.”

Recently, my brother painstakingly transcribed and annotated our father’s journal entries and letters after having found them in a box at the back of a closet in our mother’s apartment when we moved her to assisted living three years ago. These writings are far more than a series of personal anecdotes of our father’s years in the service. They offer a moving historic account of one of the most traumatic events in 20th century American history.

For my generation, the two Kennedy and King assassinations were transformative. For my sons’ generation, 9/11 was the historic turning point. For my parents, it was the Great Depression, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and World War II that changed their lives.

As the 74th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor approaches next week, I offer my father’s words as a memorial to those who died in World War II.

Journal Entry –– Monday, February 2, 1942 

“We started into … Pearl Harbor at noon. Before leaving San Diego we had heard of the damage done…but the sight of the wreckage of part of our fleet left us all in a very sad and solemn mood… We have heard many stories first hand from the men who were actually here and went through the dreadful blitz of Dec 7, 1941. These men, most of them quiet, reserved, humble in their narrations are the first great and unsung heroes of our second world war…”

What follows is part of a summary of what our father had heard directly from these witnesses:

“The Oklahoma was hit first. Four torpedoes tore into her sides and in a few moments, before her men had time to man her guns or get onto the deck she heaved and turned completely over on her top with her bare hull just showing above water. Practically all the men aboard were drowned – and many of the bodies are still there. … [Immediately] the Arizona, California, and New Mexico were attacked. [On] The Nevada…a torpedo hit her amid ship on the port side and she started to list. The engine crew stayed on their jobs, every man hadn’t any thought apparently of getting out or saving his own life…the Japs flew low…and dropped a torpedo on the fore-deck, ripping a hole clear through to the hold of the ship…and machine-gunned the men. One man I talked to was thrown from the deck by the explosion, fell into the thick oil water and started to swim, saw the Arizona…reached the anchor chain of another ship, started to climb, only to see airplanes diving in his direction, machine-gunning — he fell back into the water, finally climbed ashore, and continued to fight on the Nevada until it was all over. The ships were ablaze, the water, covered with oil soon caught fire burning many struggling sailors….

…There was a chap [below] on the great aircraft carrier Saratoga, who when the ship was hit by a torpedo…water [was] pouring in. He ran to close the water tight doors to his compartment, then ran to the next and closed it, found the next compartment already closed so [he] couldn’t get out. He called the officer, “Sir, I have closed the water tight doors to two compartments, the water is coming in her pretty fast but I think there is still time for me to get out of here if you will open the next compartment and let me out; …the reply came back, “I’m sorry, son, you know the rules, the safety of this ship depends upon those doors remaining closed. We probably couldn’t close them after you.” “Yes, sir, I understand, sir, but could you please put someone on the phone to keep talking to me. I’d appreciate it very much, sir.” His request was granted, the lad kept talking while the water roared in from the outside – 3 minutes later his voice died away…”

This was, of course, just the beginning. Between 1941 and 1945, 405,399 Americans died in battle in the Pacific and Europe. In total, in addition to the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their henchmen, over 60 million people died in that war making it the deadliest military conflict in history.

On this 74th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, it is upon us to pause in reverence of those who gave their lives in defense of the United States and the innocent of all nations, and we remember the horrors that are always unleashed in war.

Note: The above quotations are taken from “An American Physician in the World War II Pacific: The Correspondence and Diary of Leon Rosove, MD” edited and annotated by Michael H. Rosove. Privately issued. Santa Monica, CA. 2015.

Remembering Leonard Nimoy – Eulogy

(What follows is a portion of my eulogy at Leonard’s funeral on Sunday morning, March 1. He was married to my dear first cousin, Susan)

Leonard shared with me after he and Susan married 26 years ago that he had never met a woman like her, never had he loved anyone so dearly and passionately, that she’d saved his life and lifted him from darkness and unhappiness in ways he never thought possible. His love, appreciation, respect, and gratitude for her transformed him and enabled him to begin his life anew.

Susan – you were a stellar, loving and brilliant life-partner for your Leib. He knew it and in loving you he learned how to love his own children and grandchildren more deeply, and he came to recognize that his family was his greatest treasure and gift.

At the moment Leonard’s soul left him on Friday morning, his family had gathered around him in a ring of love. Leonard smiled, and then he was gone. It was gentle passing, as easy as a “hair being lifted from a cup of milk,” as the Talmud describes the moment of death.

What did Leonard see? We can’t know, but Susan imagines that he beheld his beloved cocker spaniel Molly, an angelic presence in life and now in death.

My wife Barbara and I shared much with Susan and Leonard over the years, in LA and in so many spectacular places around the world – so many joys and not a few challenges, and through it all we grew to love Leonard as a dear member of our family and were honored that he felt towards us as members of his own family.

At his 80th birthday celebration three years ago, I publicly thanked him for all he’d meant to my family and me, for being the love of Susan’s life, and for bringing her so much happiness.

Kind-hearted, gentle, patient, refined, and keenly intelligent was he.

As I listened to NPR’s story of his passing on Friday, I was struck by how uniquely recognizable to the world was his voice, not only because of its innate resonance and gentle tone, but because it emanated who he was as a man and as a mensch.

He was unflappably honest and warm-hearted. He embodied integrity and decency. He was humble and a gentleman. His sensitivity and intuition connected him with the world and offered him keen insight into the human condition. Whatever he said and did was compelling, inspiring and provocative. He strove always for excellence.

Leonard’s Hebrew name was Yehudah Lev, meaning “a Jew with a heart.” His interests and concerns were founded upon his faith and belief in the inherent dignity of every human being, and he treated everyone regardless of station, friend or stranger, with kindness and respect. His world view was enriched by his Jewish spirit and experience.

Leonard was nurtured in the Yiddish-speaking culture of his childhood on the West End of Boston, yet he transcended the particular categories with which he was raised. He cared about the Jews of the former Soviet Union, about Jews everywhere, and he was concerned for all people as well.

Because he grew up as a minority in his neighborhood, even sensing at times that he was an outcast living on the margins (which is what his Spock character was all about), Leonard ventured out from the conservative home and culture of his youth, courageously at a very young age, into the world where he sought greater truth and understanding. He was curious about everything and was a life-long learner.

Leonard appreciated his success, never taking his fame and good fortune for granted. He was generous with family, friends and so many good causes often contributing without being asked, quietly and under the radar, to individuals and causes selflessly, without need of acknowledgment or credit. In his later years, he learned that by fixing his name to some gifts, he could inspire others to give as well.

Over the years, from the time he performed in the Yiddish theater as a young actor, Leonard was particularly drawn to Jewish roles in film, television, stage, and radio. Most enduringly he brought the gesture of the Biblical High Priest to the world’s attention as an iconic symbol of blessing. He was amused that his fans unsuspectingly blessed each other as they held up their hands and said, “Live long and prosper!”

Most recently, Leonard created magnificent mystical images of feminine Godliness in his Shechinah photographs, one of which he gave to me as a gift graces my synagogue study and adds a spiritual dimension for me of everything I do in my life as a rabbi.

One year Leonard asked me what I thought of his accepting an invitation from Germany to speak before thousands of Star Trek fans. He told me that he’d been asked before but always turned the invitation down due to his own discomfort about setting foot in a country that had murdered six million Jews.

I told him that I thought it was time that he went, and that he take the opportunity to inform a new generation of Germans about who he was as a Jew and about the Jewish dimension of Spock’s personality and outlook. He liked the idea, and so on that basis accepted the invitation.

When he returned he told me that he had shared with the audience his own Jewish story and that Spock’s hand gesture was that of the Jewish High Priest blessing the Jewish community, an image he remembered from his early childhood attending shul with his grandfather in West Boston on Shabbes morning and peeking out from under his grandfather’s tallis at the Kohanim-Priests as they raised their hands in blessing over the congregation.

He told me that when he finished his talk he received a sustained standing ovation, an experience that was among the most moving in his public life.

There’s another incident worth recalling.

The Soviet Film Institute had invited Leonard in the mid 1980s to come to Moscow to speak about “Star Trek IV,” which he had directed. Leonard agreed to come on the condition that he be granted free passage to Zaslov, Ukraine to visit Nimoy relatives he’d never met. The Soviet officials refused, so Leonard declined. Then they had a change of heart and caved, and he and Susan visited the Ukrainian Nimoys thus reuniting two branches of his family tree divided eighty years earlier. Who else but Leonard Nimoy could stare down the former Soviet Union and win!?

Over time Leonard became one of the most positive Jewish role models in the world. He cared about all the right things, about promoting the Jewish arts, about peace and reconciliation between people and nations, and about greater justice in our own society.

He and I talked frequently about our love for Israel and its need for peace. He understood that a democratic Jewish state could survive only alongside a peaceful Palestinian state. He was disgusted by terrorism and war, disheartened by Israeli and Palestinian inability and recalcitrance to find compromise and a way forward towards a two-state solution and peace, and he was infuriated by continuing Israeli West Bank settlement construction and by both Islamic and Jewish fundamentalist extremism.

Though keenly aware of, knowledgeable about and savvy when it came to national and world politics and history, Leonard was at his core a humanitarian and an artist, and that was the lens through which he viewed the world.

Among his favorite quotations was that spoken by the 19th century actor Edwin Booth who claimed to have heard the solemn whisper of the god of all arts:

“I shall give you hunger and pain and sleepless nights, also beauty and satisfaction known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these shall you have continually, and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold.”

Leonard did indeed glimpse the heavenly life in his artistic pursuits and in his love for his family and friends.

In thinking of him, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s words:

“Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Act III, Scene 2

I’ve never known anyone like Leonard – he was utterly unique. I loved him and will cherish his memory always.

Zecher tzaddik livracha – May the memory of this righteous man be a blessing.

50th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King at Temple Israel of Hollywood

On February 25, 1965, only seventy-five days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, only four days after Malcolm X was assassinated in New York, and two months before his march from Selma to Montgomery, Dr. King spoke in the Sanctuary of my synagogue, Temple Israel of Hollywood under very tight security before fifteen hundred congregants about the state of race relations in America, the struggle for freedom, for equal rights and voting rights, and the need for partnership among all peoples of faith and good will to attain the goals promised to all Americans as declared the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the United States Constitution.

Dr. King was introduced by my esteemed predecessor, Rabbi Max Nussbaum, a refugee from Berlin who had fled in the middle of the night in 1940 to Amsterdam and then to the US with his wife Ruth to avoid arrest the following morning by the Nazi SS.

Rabbi Nussbaum was one of our g’dolei dor (the great rabbinic leaders of his generation), a brilliant scholar, activist and orator as was Dr. King, and they had much in common reflecting the common struggle of African Americans and the Jewish people in history.

This past Sunday evening, January 18, our synagogue joined with the diverse interfaith and inter-ethnic community of Los Angeles including Christians, Muslims, African Americans, Koreans, Latinos, and peoples from the Middle East to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. King’s appearance at Temple Israel as well as his work, spirit and legacy.

I shared with the assembled 1400 people that just as Dr. King and Rabbi Nussbaum met at a difficult time in American history, we too were meeting at a difficult time filled still with so much injustice and poverty, alienation and insecurity, war and violence here and around the world, and that despite the passage of a half-century since Dr. King spoke to our community, and despite the many achievements made in promoting greater justice and human rights for Americans and peoples around the world, that we are in dire need still of the courageous and loving spirit of Dr. King, that it may penetrate our hearts, minds, and souls and stir us and all people to action that we may bend the arc of justice even further on behalf of others.

Dr. King understood that a people that fought for its rights was only as honorable as was its concern for the rights of all people, which is why we joined together earlier this week – to act on behalf of the rights of all people in America and around the world.

We were graced on Sunday evening with the presence of many distinguished clergy, community leaders and public officials including Father Ian Davies, Canon, of St Thomas Episcopal Church in Hollywood, Imam Sheikh Asim Buyuksoy of the Islamic Center of Los Angeles, the Reverend Dr. Ignacio Castuera of the United Methodist Church, Dr. John B. Cobb Jr., Professor Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology and at Claremont Graduate University, Pastor Alan Wright of the Word Center Church in South LA, Pastor Sam Koh of Hillside Ministry of the Los Angeles Christian Presbyterian Church, Pastor Greg Bellamy of One Church International in mid-Los Angeles, Hyepin Im, President and CEO of Korean Churches for Community Development, West Hollywood Mayor John D’Amica, Cameron Onumah representing Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, who greeted us with special eloquence. NPR talk show host and author Tavis Smiley delivered the keynote address.

The evening was filled with music led by 86 voices of the Temple Israel of Hollywood Choir, the Leimert Park Choir and the Life Choir. We listened to the ethnic music of the Persian Lian Ensemble, a Mozart Mass performed by the Luminai String quartet and two sopranos, and the music of the Mexican ensemble Cambalache. We were treated to traditional Korean dance by beautifully costumed women and young girls from the Jung Im Lee Dance Academy.

All conceived, directed and produced by our synagogue’s Vice President of the Arts, Michael Skloff, a composer of Broadway and television music (e.g. the theme song for NBCs long-running hit “Friends”) and a video montage of the participating clergy overlaid with photographs and film footage from the civil rights movement and other American and worldwide human rights struggles as filmed and edited by documentary film-makers and Temple Israel members Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain.

The highlight of the evening was a tape-recording of Dr. King’s speech delivered fifty years ago in our Sanctuary (made possible then by Leo Wainschul who also captured the iconic image of Rabbi Nussbaum and Dr. King shaking hands together). I have transcribed Dr. King’s entire speech and it can be heard at this link – http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlktempleisraelhollywood.htm.

For those wishing to watch the program itself, click https://new.livestream.com/tioh.

The event was covered in The Los Angeles Times – see http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-temple-israel-martin-luther-king-jr-20150118-story.html

and The Los Angeles Jewish Journal – http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/50_years_after_his_visit_a_multicultural_homage_to_mlk

We partnered on this King Holiday with “Big Sunday,” conceived and born at Temple Israel. Each Martin Luther King Holiday Big Sunday, led by founder David Levinson, hosts a breakfast and clothing drive at its offices on Melrose Avenue attended on Monday by 400  volunteers who provided clothing to nearly 6000 individuals.

It was a memorable day, punctuated by love and calling us all to renewed action on behalf of others.

 

The Difference Between an Optimist and a Pessimist – D’var Torah Vayechi

The optimist says, “This is the best of all worlds.”

The pessimist says, “You’re right!”

As we enter 2015 there is much for which we can be thankful: our lives, our health (hopefully), our families, friends, and community, the people of Israel, and our friendships with peoples of all faith, ethnic and national traditions.

Of course, there’s much about which to worry as well: hard-heartedness, selfishness, alienation, polarization, poverty, inequality, injustice, violence, and war.

A thousand mourners  filled the Sanctuary of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles last Sunday to memorialize the congregation’s founding Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman, which they did with uncommon love and respect for his brilliance, wisdom, kindness, love for Jews, the state of Israel, all people, and a higher moral order.

Throughout his life, Leonard’s dogged determination to keep the fires of love, compassion and justice burning elevated the rest of us by virtue of the nobility of his spirit. So many people from a variety of religious communities depended upon Leonard to help them set the direction of their moral compass. He was a spiritual and moral “north star” that pointed his community in the direction he thought it ought to be traveling.

Surely, Rabbi Leonard Beerman was a unique human being and an exceptional rabbi, and I for one feel lonelier in our world now that he is gone. As I indicated in my remembrance last week, I didn’t see Leonard all that frequently (much more in recent years than before), but I knew he was there holding a moral and spiritual torch high for so many of his chassidim, who may not always have agreed with him on this position or that, or who thought about ethics a bit differently than he did, but who took him and what he once called his “notions” very seriously indeed.

Leonard was laid to rest during this week in which we are reading Parashat Vayechi, the final portion in the book of Genesis when Jacob blessed his sons and grandsons.

The portion opens while Jacob’s family is in Egypt, a constricted place defined by injustice, slavery, brutality, insensitivity, and exile. Among the darkest of Torah portions, it begins unlike any other portion in all of Torah.

Rashi asked, “Why is this section completely closed? Why isn’t there a space of nine letters between the end of the preceding parashah and the beginning of this one, as it is in every other Torah portion?”

Rashi says: “When Jacob our father died, the eyes and hearts of Israel were closed because of the affliction of the bondage with which the Egyptians began to enslave them.”

The Midrash explains that “Jacob desired to reveal the end (i.e. the time of the final redemption) to his sons, but it was closed from him.” (B’reishit Rabba)

This suggests that the hardship, distress and violence of Egypt (or any constricted life) blind the eye, harden the heart and oppress the soul. Torah reminds us that we can never become resigned to a world of dog-eat-dog. Rather, because we were created “b’tzelem Elohim – in the divine image” every human being is infused with infinite value and worth. As such, we are meant to dream big dreams, to climb Jacob’s stairway to heaven, to reclaim our best angels, and to remember who we are and what is our purpose on earth as Jews – namely, to sanctify life, to walk humbly before God, and to care with compassion for all of God’s creatures.

Parshat Veyechi is a story about opposites – impending hardship vs blessing, despair vs hope, hard-heartedness vs elevated dreams. Tradition teaches us Jews to embrace both extremes, but to reach higher than what circumstances seem to allow.

Such was the nature of Jacob’s times. Such is the nature of our times. Such was the nature of Rabbi Leonard Beerman’s life.

Jacob wanted so badly to reveal the end of days to his children, but “nistam mimenu – it was closed to him.” Sadly, It remains closed to us as well.

“Lamrot hakol – despite everything” Leonard sought the light as we Jews seek the light, and he prayed for the peace of Jerusalem and for justice and security for Israel and the Palestinians, for common decency for all humankind, as we Jews must also pray.

Next week begins the reading of the book of Exodus when we witness the beginnings of the spiritual nationhood of the Jewish people at Mount Sinai as we entered into a sacred covenant with God.

Because we see reflected sparks of divinity in the human condition, we Jews are essentially optimists who regard the half-full glass and seek to fill that which is empty.

May this secular New Year 2015 be a time when we continue the work to help facilitate greater kindness, compassion, justice, healing, and peace for us in our own lives, families and communities, for the Jewish people and for all of God’s children.

Remembering Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman (1921-2014)

Rabbi Leonard Beerman has been in my life since I was 12 years old, and his death this past week at 93 years represents a huge moment in the life of this community, the Jewish world, and the personal lives of many, including me.

One of our g’dolei dor (great ones of this generation), Leonard inspired me and so many in my generation to engage as young teens in the civil rights movement, to protest American military involvement in Vietnam, to apply for Conscientious Objector status during that war, to protest nuclear weapons proliferation, to engage in interfaith dialogue, to join coalitions of decency on behalf of just causes, and to support the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people for a state of their own alongside a secure Israel despite (as Leonard put it many years ago) Palestinian “cruelty and stupidity.”

He was, in my young eyes, larger than life. He was brave and smart, eloquent and passionate. We were not close when I was growing up – that would come much later – but he was a force that shaped my moral conscience and sensibility.

Leonard enlisted in the Marines during World War II and was a rabbinic student in 1948 studying in Jerusalem when the War of Independence began. He enlisted while there with the Haganah to fight in that war. Those two war experiences persuaded him to become a pacifist, an unpopular position in the Jewish community following the Shoah.

For the last 65 years since his ordination at the Hebrew Union College, Leonard has been a uniquely courageous voice in the American Rabbinate advocating for peace, justice, compassion, and human rights.

Leonard’s message of moral responsibility was as provocative a message as there was in American Judaism during all these years. I grew up hearing the gentle resonance of his voice and the prophetic power of his words. He believed that speaking his truth as a pacifist was more important than feeding his community what they wanted to hear. People loved him or they walked away. He once remarked that unless at least one person resigned from his congregation after the High Holidays he had failed. When I think of him, I am reminded of the 19th century Rabbi Israel Salanter’s words: “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is no rabbi. A rabbi who fears his community is no mensch.” He was a great rabbi because he was honest and fearless, and he spoke his truth without hesitation.

Over the past few years, Leonard and I began meeting for lunch every few months to talk, share stories and thoughts about issues great and small, personal, Jewish, and worldly. These were precious times for me. Leonard generously told me how much he treasured our time together as well, that I made him feel young again and gave him hope, that he was proud of me because I took the battle for justice, compassion and peace so seriously. I told him that he was my standard bearer of rabbinic leadership and that I was merely emulating him, that anything I may ever have said or done pales by comparison with his words and deeds over a lifetime.

Leonard’s humility, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, honesty, courage, and principled activism are, indeed, a beacon of light of rabbinic leadership for me and for so many of my colleagues.

In advance of the High Holidays this past August, Leonard and I met for lunch, and we commiserated about the terrorism, missiles, bombings, destruction, and loss of innocent life that occurred during this past summer’s Hamas-Israeli War, as well as the harm the war likely did to the future of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which we both so deeply believed is the only way to assure Israel’s security, democracy and future.

In emphasizing the brutality of war, Leonard referred me to a passage in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brother’s Karamazov” in which two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, discussed the death of a child:

“Tell me straight out…answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, … a child … and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? ….

No, I would not agree, ….

And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the … blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?”

No I cannot admit it brother…”

As we parted, knowing that I would be speaking about the Gaza war on Rosh Hashanah to my congregation, as he would to his, Leonard said to me, “John, remember to be moral!” I assured him that I would, but I knew that my “morality” and his would look different concerning that war.

Leonard sent me a copy of that sermon, the last he would ever deliver to the Leo Baeck community on Yom Kippur morning. I was moved and provoked as I always was when I heard him, but I did not agree with his emphasis. I thought he did not take into consideration nearly enough the context in which Israel acted, and that he was overly harsh in his criticism of the IDF.

I sent him my sermon as well. He complemented me on the writing, though he wrote, “We do not agree about Gaza,” which, of course, I knew.

Leonard was a lover of great literature and poetry, and he gave me a gift one day of a poem called “My Promised Land” by Carl Dennis, which reflects our shared dream about the land and state of Israel:

“The land of Israel my mother loves
Gets by without the luxury of existence
And still wins followers,
Though it can’t be found on the map
West of Jordan or south of Lebanon,
Though what can be found
bears the same name,
Making for confusion.
Not the land I fought her about for years
But the one untarnished by the smoke of history,
Where no one informs the people of Hebron or Jericho
They’re squatting on property that isn’t theirs,
Where every settler can remember wandering.

The dinners I spoiled with shouting
Could have been saved,
Both of us lingering quietly in our chairs,
If I’d guessed the truth that now is obvious,
That she wasn’t lavishing all her love
On the country that doesn’t deserve so rich a gift
But on the one that does, the one not there,
That she hoped good news would reach its borders.

And cross into the land of the righteous and merciful
That the Prophets spoke of in their hopeful moods,
That was loved by the red-eyed rabbis of Galicia
Who studied every word of the book and prayed
To get one thread of the meaning right;
The promised Land where the great and small
Hurry to school and the wise are waiting.”

Were he here now, Leonard would remind us to keep fighting for justice and for the realization of the ideal. I promise that I will do so, in his memory, and I will hold his compassionate, just and prophetic voice close to my heart and soul now and always.

The words of Samuel have resonated in my mind and heart this past week: “Eich naflu hagiborim – How the mighty has fallen!”

Zicharon tzadik livracha – May the memory of this righteous and great man be a perpetual benediction.

[Note: An interview of Leonard was recorded a few years ago and can be found at this link – http://vimeo.com/17542880]

 

Kindnesses That Last Forever

When I was in Central Europe last month with thirty of my congregants touring formerly great Jewish centers of life in Budapest, Prague and Berlin, the Holocaust was everywhere we went. Memories of the cruelty and brutality so oppressed members of our group that many of us reflected that, despite how worthwhile our tour was, we had never returned from travel feeling as demoralized, depressed and sad as we did from this trip.

Since our return I recalled an act of kindness once shown to me by one of my rabbinical school professors. It took place forty years ago, but his loving concern for me has never faded from my heart and memory. Juxtaposed to what we experienced in Central Europe, what he did for me is a stark contrast to what we witnessed in the cities of our recent travel.

One of my Talmud teachers at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles was Dr. Abraham Zygelboim (z’l). As a rabbinic student in my mid-20s, I had suffered a painful break-up with my then-girlfriend, and I was emotionally devastated. Between classes one day I needed to take a few minutes for myself, so I walked outside, sat against a wall and wept.

Out of nowhere Dr. Zygelboim approached me quietly and kissed my forehead without ever saying a word. His sweetness stays with me and will all the days of my life.

Dr. Zygelboim was a gentle man, a Polish Holocaust survivor whose brother, Szmul Zygelboim, was a political leader in the Jewish community of Warsaw before the Nazi occupation. Szmul managed to escape Poland and advocated on behalf of the persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe as powerfully as he could in the United States and Great Britain. Deeply frustrated that the allies were neglecting to stop the slaughter of the Jewish people, and as a public act of protest, Szmul set himself on fire in front of the Parliament in London on May 12, 1943.

Szmul’s brother, my teacher, never spoke to us, his students, of his experience in the Shoah or of his brother’s ultimate and courageous act of protest. But we knew of it.

Dr. Zygelboim knew Talmud, and I was lucky to learn with him. But frankly, I do not remember the specifics of any particular lesson he taught me forty years ago, though I remember the sections of Talmud we learned with him – but I do remember his kiss on my forehead.

We are, each of us, powerful beings, and we often underestimate our capacity to touch others. Indeed, how we treat others and the way we speak to them defines not only our relationships with them, but our nature and the measure of our character.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said towards the end of his life: “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

It is, of course, not always easy to be kind – especially when confronted by obstinate, difficult and offensive individuals. The moralist and essayist Joseph Joubert offered this in such circumstances, “Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.”

Leo Buscaglia offers this certain truth: “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

My Tribute to Leibel Fein

Leonard Leibel Fein’s death is a particularly painful loss to the liberal social activist progressive Zionist world. He spoke and wrote always the truth as he understood it, inspired by a deeply Jewish vision, with an eloquence and a precision of language that inspired, opened the heart and renewed a sense of purpose and hope in anyone who was open and receptive enough to resonate with his message.

I first met Leibel 44 years ago when I was a college student at the summer Aliyah of then Brandeis Camp Institute (now Brandeis-Bardin) in Simi Valley, California, where he had come to spend a month with us 70+ young people from all over the country and world. He spoke to us and with us, lecturing about American Jewish life and religion, God, Israel, Zionism, Soviet Jewry, and social justice.

Those were the heady euphoric years after Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 Six-Days War, yet Leibel (an early scholar of the Israeli enterprise at Brandeis University) understood intuitively that the great victory of three years earlier on the battlefield that resulted in the reunification of Jerusalem and the acquisition of the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai desert, did not address the deeper far more complex moral challenges that confronted the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

He emphasized that there were at least four significant challenges confronting Israel and world Jewry at that time; (1) the 1967 war would not be the last war Israel would be forced to fight; (2) Israel’s Jewish culture, moral and democratic character would be defined in part by how it settled the Arab-Israeli conflict, how it conducted itself as an occupier of more than a two and a half million hostile Palestinian Arabs then living in the West Bank and Gaza, and whether it treated Israeli-Palestinian citizens of the state as equal citizens with Israeli Jews; (3) what would be the fate of the three million Soviet Jews then trapped behind the iron curtain, and (4) looking us in the eye, what we young American and Canadian Jews (and a couple of Israelis), then in our late teens and early twenties, would become as American Jewish leaders.

For some reason, Leibel singled me out all those years ago (he was only 36 at the time), gently but assuredly, and privately challenged me to become engaged seriously with the American Jewish community as a Zionist and a leader. In that way, Leibl became one of my earliest Zionist mentors.

I read nearly everything he would subsequently write, and so often over the decades he focused my thinking and redirected how I considered the great issues facing America and the Jewish people. He never lost his intellectual, moral and compassionate verve. As this last column (link below) that Leibel wrote for The Forward so eloquently and movingly expresses, with its introductory note by the Forward’s editors, what made Leibel Fein’s thought so deeply Jewish was that the prophetic tradition was always his proof text and he led as much from the heart as from the mind.

As Leibel battled his own demons over the years, suffered the tragic loss of his daughter, and finally illness that seemed to plague him for far too long, he never lost what made him that unique and compelling thought leader.

I will miss him, though we only saw each other at J Street conferences in recent years, but he is embedded in my heart as he is in the hearts of so many of us.

Zichrono livracha. May his memory abide as a blessing.

http://forward.com/articles/204190/from-gaza-to-sderot-trauma-marks-the-past-and-t/#ixzz3AcSJiiW2