Weepers of the Faith by Aliza Davidovit

Many holy books lay open before me. My old friends, we have missed each other. The ancient teachings held me spellbound me as the words seemed to lift from the pages and enwrap me like a cyclone pulling me into the vortex of their depths offering wisdom and insight to stir my soul.  But being a writer who has put down her pen for too long--since my mother took ill--nothing I read was able to inspire the first few words to begin this article. Like my mother, I too seemed to be half-paralyzed, at least scripturally.

I plucked myself from the depths, put my books aside momentarily and checked in on my mother to see how she was enjoying the movie I had rented for her. Suddenly, the title of the film unfurled the path that my words would follow. It was titled “Born Yesterday.” In it a loud-mouthed ill-bred gangster hires a journalist to serve as a tutor for his ditzy girlfriend to “smarten her up,” to help her better fit into the upper echelons he himself seeks to enter only to later corrupt. But the ironic twist of the tale is she turns out to be quite the student whose mind is opened up and ethics finely tweaked to see the ugly truth about herself, her boyfriend and the immoral life she is living.   She tosses out the old and starts her life anew as if she was just born yesterday.

I thank Hollywood for the title, but I thank the Torah for the wisdom. For contrary to the condescending implications that comes with the phrase “born yesterday,” in Judaism, it’s a blessing and an obligation to be born yesterday--and today and tomorrow and the day after that.  When a Jew is living as a proper Jew, he aims to be reborn every day as a better version of himself and as a better servant of God. OUCH! The word servant bothered you. I felt it. You wanted to stop reading then and there. But be certain that in this life YOU WILL SERVE, and if it won’t be God by your choice, He will arrange that you serve much harsher taskmasters: enemies, bosses, creditors, unpleasant family members, doctors, the IRS, etc. If you don’t believe the Torah, then maybe you’ll believe Bob Dylan: “Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord/But you're gonna’ have to serve somebody.”

Our calling to our faith does not end after our fancy bar/bat mitzvahs or after we put down the prayer books on the High Holidays. Our duty is to keep refining ourselves and to up the game in our observance of Judaism. I’m aware most people don’t want to be preached at and at this point will be saying “Thanks, but no thanks-- I’m already a good Jew.” And then they will proffer their self-serving and self-created definition of what constitutes being a good Jew which usually involves liking blintzes, fasting on Yom Kippur and feeling bad when Israelis get killed in acts of terror. Sorry, but that is tantamount to a doctor saying he’s a good doctor because he likes hospital cafeteria food, he dispenses band aids and feels bad when patients die. If you want to know what a good Jew looks like, you may want to read the God-given instruction manual.

By every other metric of our lives, such as our health, finances, beauty, etc., we aim to be better than we were last year, last month, even yesterday. It is only when it comes to being Jews that we dare not strive and have no drive to be better. Instead of being keepers of the faith, we are weepers of the faith--always crying how hard it is to keep God’s laws. “I’m a good Jew. I do enough, believe me. Too many rules.”

Sorry again, but if you are not “born yesterday” and every day as a Jew, then you are dying every day as a Jew and you are taking your children and a nation down with you. The rabbis teach that every Jew is a letter in the Torah. We also know that if a single letter is missing or damaged in the Torah, the entire scroll is not kosher and we are prohibited from reading it. What letter are you in the Torah? Bold and strong, faded and broken, or simply gone?  Will we have to stop reading because of you? What will happen to our precious Torah and the Jewish people if we are on self-delete? Shabbat candles, kosher, charity, praying…there must be something you CAN do or do better.

  

“Ah leave me alone, I’m happy,” you say. No, you’re not happy. If you were happy the self-help market and the life-coaching industry wouldn’t be a booming multibillion-dollar industry. We are scrambling in the darkness seeking artificial lighting to help us get through the uncertain night.  Sometimes life drags us down so deep, indeed to where it is pitch black, and we’re not even sure we’ll survive to see the morrow. And who is the you that shows up tomorrow anyway? The same you that brought you to the darkness to begin with, or the one who is proficient at the blame game? Perhaps it’s time to examine the root of who you are. Stop using the flattering glowing light of a dimmer when looking your Judaism and your life in the face.  Turn up the Torah in your life and you will shine in unimaginable ways and find a source of lasting strength to sustain you and those around you.  

Let’s learn from the approaching holiday of Chanukah called the Festival of Lights:

The Jewish people are like a symmetrical wing of the menorah. In order to soar we must “flap” in synchronicity. 
🕎 Just like the menorah’s light must not be hidden for personal convenient use, a Jew must also bring light to the outside world, not by flashing one’s Rolex, but by being a shining example of ethics, honesty, philanthropy, kindness, hospitality, etc.

🕎 Just as the menorah light is “reborn” every night in a crescendo of illumination, a Jew too must strive every day with the mentality that yesterday wasn’t good enough. Today we must shine brighter.

🕎 Just like the menorah consumes 36 lights (double chai) by the end of Chanukah—symbolic of the 36 righteous people who sustain the world—a Jew has to constantly know that s/he has been Divinely chosen to be a sustaining light among the nations.

It is no secret that Jews claim a disproportionate amount of Nobel Prizes—in 2017 alone, 22.5% of the winners were Jews even though the total Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population. To us, it is a statistic; to a statistician it is a miracle for “throughout the [entire] 20th century, Jews, more so than any other minority, ethnic or cultural group, have been recipients of the Nobel Prize.” 

It is no coincidence of fate. The Jewish people are mandated not to merely see the light, but to BE the light. “The soul of man is God’s candle,” Proverbs teaches.  The Torah itself—the ultimate battery pack-- is compared to a fire; by keeping its commandments, we become powerful eternal flames, not merely candles in the wind or glow-in-the-dark wands that burn out while the party’s still on.

Be wise. When tomorrow comes, be proud to say, “I was born yesterday!” Don't try so hard to fit in when you were destined to stand out--and shine!

Did We Help Kill Ari Fuld?

Kol Yisrael Aravim Zeh Bazeh: All Israel Is Responsible for One Another

It used to be that the hardest thing to say was, “I’m sorry.” That’s apparently not the case anymore, since now we are all perfect we have nothing to be sorry about. Our new self-proclaimed perfection accompanied by its dastardly cohort, pride, now makes “I need you” and “Can you help me?” the hardest things to say.  After all, we are the smarter one, the better one, the more deserving one, and since God mistakenly gave you what he should have really given me, I say, “Keep your favors; keep your advice; keep your money; keep your opinion.”  And furthermore, “You may think you’re great and perfect, but it's not true, because really, I am.”  

And that is why my beloved Jews, we will continue to cry and suffer as a Jewish nation: because we don’t know how to be brothers and sisters, friends and cousins, neighbors and fellow citizens. We begrudge seeing the value in the other, and as such we don’t know how to be mensches. When the ancient Israelites were counted in a national census they were tabulated by half shekels, not whole ones. One reason it was performed as such was to emphasize that we each are just fragments of a whole, single letters in a holy Torah that only have purpose and meaning when united.

When we come to the humbling realization that we do need each other and that you have something that makes me complete and I have something that makes you better-- all so by God’s design--then and only then can we begin to be sorry and hopefully embarrassed for thinking we are perfect. Only then, when there is humility and love and regard for others, can God’s blessings be upon us.

The English poet John Donne wrote in the 1600s that “no man is an island” and we’ve oft repeated it, after all, it sounds poetic and not “too Jewish.” However, over a thousand years before Donne’s popular phrase was inked, the Talmud told us that “all Jews are responsible for one another”—we simply can’t go it alone.  Yet that Jewish obligation is not only relegated to tangible responsibilities, i.e., giving charity, offering a helping hand, it is true on a spiritual level as well. When one Jew sins, he or she not only affects his or her own fate, but that of every other Jew. In fact, when a Jew sins he or she brings down the entire creation. Okay, so here’s where you get turned off, right? Sounds too rabbinical and slightly too esoteric. Yet funny how even though there are few lepidopterists among us, no one ever dismisses the Butterfly Effect: the posit that the gentle flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world will precipitate a tornado in another part. Be on storm watch my beloved people, for if you flutter in the gutter, God will clip the wings of your fellow Jews and, as a result, we will all come crashing down. A nation meant to soar, will plummet.

The Talmud teaches that we are so connected as a people that the righteous among us suffer as atonement for the sins of his generation. And then Ari Fuld was murdered by an Arab terrorist. Yes, the killer perpetrated the lethal wound, but from all the reviews I’ve read, which echo my own heart-piercing emotions, Ari was a saint, a hero, a lion of Zion, a modern-day David and a national hero of the likes of Yonni Netanyahu. And yet, probably like me, most of you knew him only through social media and like me, you probably wept upon hearing the news as if he was your brother, your son, your friend. Then you searched online for hours seeking answers and also for ways to help. Why? Because all of Am Israel is ONE. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk said, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” Once again as a people we became whole with one broken heart. Is this what it takes, again, to unite us? If it is, please don’t tell God and give Him any more ideas.

In Ari Fuld’s last live talk on the weekly parasha, less than 48 hours before he was murdered, he said that a leader is only as good as his followers.  What does that make him? What does that make us?

His mind boggling fame around the world, the love he garnered which was more than he or we realized and also the time he was taken from us, in the shadow of Yom Kippur, compels us to ask ourselves a million questions and one among them must be, “What have we done wrong as a people that Ari Fuld is dead?” Many blame the terrorist; I do too. But the blame can’t begin and end there. If he was as righteous as we say he was-- and I believe he was-- then we must ask that very hard follow-up question. Did he die for our sins? I know in my heart losing him sure feels like a punishment.

“The righteous man has perished, but no one takes it to heart, and men of kindness are taken away, with no one understanding that because of the evil the righteous man has been taken away.” (Isaiah 57:1)

My fellow Jews, each year after we finish fasting and praying, we tend to return to our old ways. Don’t be so selfish. Realize we need each other. We hold each other's lives in our hands. Try just a little harder to add a new mitzvah to your life, whether it is Shabbat candles, or saying a prayer before you eat or after. Don't just be a "cardiac Jew," a Jew at heart, be a Jew in your words and in your deeds. And don't turn your back on my problems just because you have your own. 

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Israel’s former Chief Rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, reminds us in his autobiography that the German’s motto for their death camp, Buchenwald, was Jedem das seine--each man to his fate! That is the Nazi's way; it is not the Jewish way—our God is one, our land is one, our Torah is one and our fate is one! Don’t be so perfect. I need you. You need me. Our lives depend on it.

Oh, You Mean "Those" Jews?©

Rabbi Hillel once asked:  "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

But this rhetorical question does not just apply to the individual; it also applies to the Jewish people as a nation. Despite our differences, we are ONE people under ONE G-d. If we are not for each other, who will be for us? History has provided us with the bloody answer.  The rabbis have indeed taught that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, groundless hatred for one another. It makes perfect sense. How can a can a temple or any structure stand when its supporting stones fight between themselves? And further, how do Jews expect anyone to like them or respect them when they are so busy hating each other?
Click to read more...  http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/not-that-kind-of-jew/
Often on the blogosphere I will see conservative Jews asked by others why Jews tend to vote Liberal and their proud reply is: “Because they are self-destructive idiots.” Or a Liberal Jew will be asked why Orthodox Jews don’t serve in Israel’s Defense Forces, and the tart reply will be: “Because they are Nazis.”  And, as if Jews don’t have enough people calling them lovely names, the adjectives that come to define the Jew become ever-darkened by lazy, irresponsible, stigmatic name calling sealed by the fact that another Jew said it. Maybe the Liberals vote as they do because of a history or persecution; maybe the religious won’t serve in the military because of certain religious beliefs and indoctrination. Maybe our fellow Jews’ positions deserve a little more respect than simply selling them out with a derogation so others will accept us, or to make ourselves look better, or to safely distance ourselves publically from what we regard as idiocy. The loose definitions that we throw into the blogosphere, Twittersphere or any sphere to define the “other” Jew who is not like us marks not only the intended target but every Jew.  We may deem ourselves as a sharpshooter but the boomerang effect is inevitable. A spot on any Jewish face is a blemish on our collective face.

After President Obama won the election and re-election, many “accused” the Jews of delivering him victory. I’m a Jew; I surely didn’t vote for him and many other Jews didn’t as well. Nonetheless, the collective Jew put him in the White House.  When Madoff was arrested every Jew was a Ponzi schemer; when Pollard was arrested every Jew was a spy with dual loyalties; after the Six Day War, every Jew was a hero.  Whether “modern” Jews want to believe it or not the Talmud was right: "Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la-zeh” (all Jews are responsible for one another).

What has set me off in particular most recently was the attempt to ban gay Jews from marching in the Israel Day Parade.  Now as an Orthodox woman myself, I’m not an advocate of homosexuality—not because of any visceral reaction against it, just as I have no visceral reaction against shopping on the Sabbath. What deems them both wrong to me is simply the fact that the Torah says so. That being said, I did have a visceral reaction to this exclusionary effort pitting Jew against Jew.  The Mishna says, “Hevei mekabel et kol adam b'sever panim yafot (greet every person pleasantly with a kind face).”  I was not aware that the Talmud has since been revised.  

This week’s Torah portion is named Korach, a name which comes from the Hebrew word קרח meaning “division” or “split.”  And According to Maimonides division is contrary to the whole purpose of the Torah. We are one people, am echad! 

Are gays not Jews too? If those against participation by the gay community needed life-saving surgery and only a gay Jewish doctor could save their life, would they pick death instead? We don't have to condone homosexuality, but the Talmud teaches that we don't know which sin or mitzvah is the biggest or smallest. So would they ban people who don't go to mikvah from marching or those who don't keep kosher? Those too are sins. There are gay Israeli soldiers risking their lives daily so that we can have the freedom to practice our religion and be Jews. Were these opponents there to stand with gavel in hand to judge who was Jewish enough for them to march for Israel? I strongly maintain that if we were all Jewish enough for Hitler to kill, then we should be Jewish enough for each other.

This article is not meant to do advocacy for homosexuality. It is meant to advocate ahavas yisroel (Jew loving Jew). If we are to survive as a people, let's make our good great and our bad better and stand only in judgment of ourselves. That is the Jewish way! United we stand and divided we end up lighting more yahrzeit candles.

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