Bearing Witness - Parashat Va-et'chanan

Within the next week, the National Organization for Marriage (Discrimination) will be making three stops within the State of Minnesota as part of their nationwide tour of intolerance and discrimination. The National Organization for marriage, as Michael Crawford has noted in his article Avoiding NOM's Trap, written for the Huffington Post, has even gone so far as to claim that denying others access to marriage is an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. You read that correctly, they are claiming that denying others their rights is the logical next step of the civil rights movement. At their rally in Trenton, New Jersey, NOM President Brian Brown made an attempt to link his discriminatory cause to the civil rights movement and to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“What if Martin Luther King, Jr. would have listened to those who tried to silence and tell him that his faith has no place in the public square — that he should be silent?,” Brown told The Star-Ledger. “You are a part of a new civil rights group — a civil rights group dedicated to protecting the most fundamental and basic institution known to mankind: marriage.”

Fortunately, Outfront Minnesota, Minnesota's pro-LGBT equality group is responding here in Minnesota and has organized events around each of NOM's stops in the North Star State. Join Outfront for 3 Days of Action for Equality and stand up for LGBT equality in Minnesota. Join Outfront and other pro-equality groups in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday, July 28 at 12:00 noon to stand up for love.

This week's Torah portion, Va-et'chanan, includes the words of the Shema (Deut. 6:4):

Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

Hear O Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal Alone.

In the image above, just as in the text of the Torah, the last letter of the word 'shema' and the last letter of the word 'echad' are written larger than the other letters. These two letters, ayin and dalet, spell the word eid, meaning witness. The text of the Shema teaches us to bear witness to God's unity and to the fact that we are all creating the the image of God.

Stand up for love. Stand up for equality. Bear witness to God's image in each and every person. Show up and lend your pro-equality and pro-love voice of faith to the debate. Let's show NOM whose side God is really on.

A Taste of Torah - Parashat D'varim - Shabbat Hazon

This Shabbat is Shabbat Hazon, the Sabbath of vision, given its name because of the Haftarah portion, Isaiah 1:1-27 and Isaiah's vision of the people's transgression and their hope for redemption. This Shabbat is the one that immediate precedes Tisha b'Av. But the designation of hazon, meaning 'vision', can also be tied to one of the Biblical characters briefly mentioned in the Torah portion this week. "Not one of the men [counted in the census], this evil generation, shall see the good land that I swore to your fathers - none except Caleb son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him and to his descendants will I give the land on which he set foot, because he remained loyal to the Eternal" (Deut. 1:35-36). Of the generation of the Exodus, only Caleb and Joshua make it to the Promised Land because of the hopeful report they brought back when they and ten other scouts checked out the Land of Israel. Joshua gets a book named after him in the Hebrew Bible, but Caleb does not.

Rabbi Zoë Klein gives Caleb a voice in her text, The Scroll of Caleb. According to Klein, Caleb represents the highest potential of every person. He is not capable of miracles and wonders, like Joshua's making the sun stand still, but he was able to see things that the other scouts couldn't. He helps us see that we, as ordinary people, possess extraordinary potential without being something we are not. On this Shabbat before Tisha b'Av, Tisha b'Av being the date on which numerous calamaties are said to have befallen the Jewish people (including among them the day on which the people chose not to listen to Joshua and Caleb, but rather to the ten other scouts), we are called to have vision like Caleb, seeing the potential of our future and our ability to fulfill the potential that God has placed within us, even when we seem overwhelmed by what seems impossible.

Disconnecting to Better Connect

When I was a camper at Camp Canadensis, I was a camp director’s nightmare. I refused to participate in cabin activities, constantly found reasons to go to the infirmary, and on multiple occasions threatened to run away. One time, I even wrote my parents and told them if they didn’t come and get me right away, I’d run away. They still remind me of this any time I get too full of myself. Oh, the grief I caused them. Camp Canadensis is a camp for Jewish kids in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. It’s an eight-week program, no matter your age, and my four summers there were probably the worst summers of my life, or so I thought then.

Because of the duration of the session, there was a visiting day halfway through the summer. During the rest of the summer, campers were allowed to make periodic collect phone calls home. Maybe once a week, though it might have only been once every two weeks. Those collect calls never came soon enough for me. One day, probably on my way back to the cabin from arts and crafts, I found the phone room, a pad-locked room near the main office building, miraculously unlocked. Looking around to see that no one was watching, I snuck into the dark phone room, picked up a phone, and dialed ‘zero’ to get an operator to connect me with my parents. I pleaded with them to come and pick me up. If I were a camper now, and that had been my experience, I would have loved to have had a cell phone at camp.

Fortunately, I did not have a cell phone at camp. And fortunately, my parents did not come and pick me up, no matter how much it pained them to see me suffering so much at camp. Earlier this week, Mitch Albom wrote a piece titled ‘Cell phones at summer camp? Just say click.’ In it, Albom details the highlights of his summer camp experience. He was, I imagine, a better camper than I was.

Summer camp, he writes, “meant disappearing into another world. It was a world of woods and fields and bunks, a world without Mom and Dad, without friends from the neighborhood, without TV, without movies, a world where you wrote letters to communicate with your ‘other’ life.” Unfortunately, this is not always the reality at summer camps today. Camps are struggling with cell phone policies. They know how disruptive a cell phone can be to creating community, but they also know that the kids who want them are the reason the camps exist. Some kids, Mitch Albom accurately notes, even opt out of summer camp if it means being without their cell phones and other technology. But it isn’t only the kids’ fault.

Many parents, perhaps more than the kids, want there to be cell phones at camp. They want to be able to be in constant contact with their children. They cannot bear the thought of not having their children at their fingertips. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand where the parents are coming from, even though I am not yet a parent. Parents want the best for their children. Parents worry about safety. They worry about loneliness. Mitch Albom points out that “we can’t live in constant fear.”

But more importantly, he gets what really makes technology at summer camp so problematic: We can’t enjoy life while filming it. Mitch Albom expresses his desire for a ban on all electronic devices at summer camps. He says this out of fear, too, but out of a different kind of fear. He fears that kids are losing the ability to exist. Albom writes, “When we went to camp, we were in the moment. We jumped in the pool; we didn’t film ourselves jumping in the pool … Kids who have to give up their smartphones or computers for summer camp – thereby losing touch with Facebook – worry about becoming invisible. But they are erasing themselves from the real world every minute they spend in the virtual one. Kids need to learn that memories are not the same as storage devices and feelings are not the same as postings … You can’t absorb the experience if you’re constantly sharing it.”

For us, as Jews, this shouldn’t be a foreign concept. From the beginning, Judaism has taught us the value of disconnecting with our every day experiences in order to have a richer existence. In his book The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches about the unique quality of Shabbat. Other religions, he teaches, speak of holiness in space and in nature – sacred spaces. But Judaism introduced the concept of holiness in time. Heschel writes, “The sense of holiness in time is expressed in the manner in which the Sabbath is celebrated. No ritual object is required for keeping the seventh day, unlike most festivals on which such objects are essential to their observance, as, for example, unleavened bread, Shofar, Lulab and Etrog or the Tabernacle. On that day the symbol of the Covenant, the phylacteries, displayed on all days of the week, is dispensed with. Symbols are superfluous: the Sabbath is itself the symbol” (Heschel, The Sabbath, p. 82).

Though I may not have known it then, my disconnecting from the world around me taught me to focus on the world in which I was living, the world of summer camp, with all of its activities and all its anxieties. I learned more about who I was as a person, even if some of that understanding took years to develop. It meant that when I was a staff member at a summer camp, I was more keenly aware of kids like me who need to be encouraged not to withdraw from the summer camp experience to survive it, but rather understand that disconnecting from the outside world would help me to connect better with the world of summer camp.Just as Shabbat needs no ritual objects to be a holy experience, summer camp needs none of the sacred objects of our everyday lives to create meaningful moments and memories. Shabbat teaches us to disconnect with the ordinary world so that we may better appreciate it. Summer camp provides our children with the opportunity and the incentive to disconnect with ordinary existence so that we can relish the world in which we live and the people with whom we interact during the rest of the year.


P.S. If you made it this far and you are reading this at summer camp, you've missed the whole point. Put away the technology and go enjoy the summer.

A Taste of Torah - Parashat Pinchas

A fair amount of this week's Torah portion details a census of the Israelites. One of the details of the census is the division of land among the tribes of Israel. According to the Torah (Numbers 26:54), the larger tribes would be given more land while the smaller tribes would be given less land. But the next verse says that the land would be given out by lottery. Rashi looks at these two verses that seem to contradict one another and sees a nuanced lesson. He writes, citing a midrash from Sifre, that since some areas were superior to others, the land was not divided solely according to measurements, but it was assessed; an smaller piece of land sufficient to grow crops well was equivalent to a larger piece sufficient to grow fewer crops. It all depended on the value of the soil. These two verses, when read together, teach us that while the Israelite's land was divided up by size based upon the size of the tribe, the real value of the land was in its quality, not its quantity, a lesson that we could well apply to our daily lives, as well. It's not about how much we have, but about how good it is.