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Jewish Journal

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October 6, 2005

Where India Meets Neil Simon

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Theater /

Michael Schlitt sees a definite connection between his type of Jewishness and his reasons for directing a Neil Simon play in India. Being drawn to India and all things Eastern is Jewish, he says. And so is asking a million questions about everything.

“Basically, my work is very Jewish, even if it’s not about something Jewish,” declares the 44-year-old actor, writer, director and founding member of the Actors’ Gang theater company, now based in Culver City. “I’ve always been a searcher, the wheels in my head always spinning. A rabbi once told me that’s as Jewish as it gets.”

Schlitt spent the past five years transforming a midlife crisis, a professionally disastrous trip to India, and his burning and failed ambition to make a movie about that disaster into a one-man show called, “Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure.” A play about a film about a play, Schiltt’s work premieres Friday at EdgeFest, the annual Los Angeles festival dedicated to new and experimental theater. His play’s script reads like a page of Talmud, with the central event of the India adventure framed by commentary about the trip itself, the filming of the trip and the questions that inevitably arise from the failure “to create a masterpiece.”

“If someone told me to see some one-man show about a guy’s attempt to make a movie about his trip to India, I’d probably say ‘No thanks,'” says Schlitt over coffee at a Culver City Starbucks. “But on the other hand, there’s a real hook to the show. Neil Simon in India is bound to pique curiosity.”

Directed by Nancy Keystone, who’s also married to Schlitt, the play, at its core, addresses the painful realization that certain youthful dreams will never materialize, “that moment you understand you’re never going to make ‘Citizen Kane,'” Schlitt says. “Rarely is the journey what you think it’s going to be.”

In 1999, a producer of questionable repute invited Schlitt to direct a production in India of Simon’s “They’re Playing Our Song.” In the throes of a midlife crisis, Schlitt, who detests this play, ignored his intuition and accepted the offer to put together a production ASAP and tour it in three Indian cities. His rationale: He’d make a movie about whatever happened because that’s been his dream, even though he despises the movie business.

“All my life there had been this strange tension between working in the theater and working in film. I mean I live in Los Angeles, the film capital of the world,” he writes in the script.

“The whole prospect was so shady,” Schlitt recalls. “I thought I would just bring the cameras and I would have this great film, some kind of cross between ‘Waiting for Guffman’ and ‘Salaam Bombay.’ Instead, I wound up butting my head against the wall for years.”

Unable to complete his film, Schlitt finally listened to the advice of a filmmaker friend and returned to the theater.

“You could say it was the path of least resistance, but it’s where I needed to be,” he says. “I know the theater and that feels great.”

“What I love about Mike’s play is that it’s blazingly honest,” says Keystone, whose directing credits led her to be named as one of 2005’s “Faces to Watch” in the L.A. Times. “He exposes everything, including some unpleasant aspects of himself, and I have a lot of admiration for him.”

Describing himself as “a laid-back neurotic,” which he attributes to growing up first in New York and later in Berkeley, Schlitt says his Jewish education ended after nursery school and until recently, “never thought of myself as Jewish.” Raised by his mother, who once aspired to be an actress, Schlitt also credits his father, who wrote for the 1960s TV show, “The Monkees,” as a considerable artistic influence.

“He was the kind of Jewish father who got me reading Kierkegaard at age 4,” he says.

As a theater major at UCLA, Schlitt met the future famous actor Tim Robbins. And they and other fellow students formed the Actors’ Gang in 1981, a company that rose to prominence in the L.A. theater scene for its often provocative, avant-garde productions.

“We were this group of guys who all hung out together,” he says of the Gang’s origins. “There was a lot of testosterone but we all had this great passion for the theater.”

Standing in as leader of the Gang when Robbins left for a life in New York with actress Susan Sarandon, Schlitt worked on some 40 productions. This included directing the American premiere of George Tabori’s “Mein Kampf,” an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Inspector General” and performing his critically acclaimed solo show, “Drive, He Said.” In 2000, Schlitt essentially parted from the Gang, a move he’d rather not discuss in great detail. It did, however, have something to do with the midlife crisis that led to his current show. “For 16 years, I was the company’s resident Solomon,” he says. “It was time to step away.”

Though Schlitt says he hasn’t completely given up on finally making his movie, the play he wound up with instead “has definitely gotten the monkey off my back. I have fed myself artistically,” he says. “And if it’s between the artistic or the commercial path, I know which one I’d choose.”

“Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure” runs Oct. 7-23, 9:15 p.m. at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles. Tickets are $15 or $8 with EdgeFest Passport. For more information, call (866) 811-4111 or visit www.edgeoftheworld.org.

 

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A Critical Question

Leave a Comment / Personals /

One of the most important questions we need to ask ourselves, particularly as we approach Yom Kippur, is: How will we be remembered?

An incident in the life of Alfred Nobel illustrates how he was unexpectedly forced to face that important question. It is reported that when Nobel’s brother died, the obituary column had a terrible error. Instead of eulogizing Alfred’s brother, the paper eulogized him.

The eulogy indicated the following: Alfred Nobel, the creator of dynamite, one of the most destructive forces known to humanity, died yesterday a wealthy man.

Upon reading his own obituary and seeing how he was to be remembered, he decided to make a change in his life. He took some of the profits from his creation of dynamite and used it for an altruistic purpose.

Today we remember him for the good he achieved in his life.

Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prize.

The important question we should each ask ourselves during the High Holidays is: How will I be remembered if, God forbid, my life ended today?

If you are not happy with the answer, take the gift of transformation that Yom Kippur offers. Modify the way you speak, the use of your spare time, your charitable habits or the way you vent anger. If you are not treating those in your household or those with whom you work with dignity, pledge to change that.

But begin the work soon for life is fleeting.

Rabbi Harold Kushner writes of a psychiatrist who suggests that we could probably put the same inscription on 90 percent of all tombstones in the cemetery, “I should have loved them more while I could.”

We all make the mistake. Our priorities become confused and we often let the immediate desires drive away the important ones.

Yom Kippur is our spiritual wake-up call. It reminds us that not only our lives, but the lives of those dearest to us will some day end. If we take that seriously, then we should more frequently say, “I love you” to our wife or husband, to our father or mother, to our children, and to our friends.

We should also seek forgiveness … a difficult task for most of us. Many see apologizing as a sign of weakness. We cannot quite bring ourselves to admit fault to a co-worker, a friend, a parent, a spouse or our children.

Yet, apologizing is a courageous act. Which takes greater strength of character, ignoring a wrong or confronting it? Ask yourself, if someone came to ask your forgiveness, would you not gain respect for such a person?

When a bone is broken in our body one would think that the point of fracture would, after healing, be the weakest part of that bone. Yet the place where the bone healed, in fact, becomes its strongest part.

Confronting those fractured parts of our lives and ourselves makes us stronger as well.

Here, too, however, there is a price for waiting too long.

The Torah recounts the lives of twin brothers, Jacob and Esau, who have a terrible argument and become alienated from one another. When the day comes that the brothers must face each other for the first time in many years, the Torah says that Esau falls on Jacob’s neck and they both cry. But the Torah does not say why they cry.

One explanation that I find particularly moving is that the twin brothers looked into one another’s face and each saw how the other had aged. This moment was a reflection of the many years that had passed. Further, as twins, they realized that in each other’s eyes they saw a mirror image of themselves. They recognized the wasted years, born of the anger, which consumed them, and they cried for the loss of time.

We can, of course, change our lives and ask forgiveness any day of the year. If, however, you are reading this in the hours before Yom Kippur, think of this sacred day as an opportunity to look into your soul and affirm that life is beautiful, inherently optimistic, yet sometimes fragile. And though our lives seem to pass swiftly, it does not preclude each of us to be forgiven and to forgive while we are here.

What an empty feeling to realize too late that there were words that needed to be said that were never spoken. If you have someone in your life with whom you are estranged — and would like to reconcile — take the step.

Then, when the shofar sounds at the end of Yom Kippur, you will leave your synagogue with a full heart, with a soul that has been refreshed and with a renewed vigor to begin the New Year, grateful to God for one of the greatest of all gifts … the gift of life.

David Woznica is rabbi of Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles. He can be reached at dwoznica@sswt.org

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Boy Do We Need Teshuvah Now!

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

When I was a small boy — 6 or 7 — I became acutely aware that being a Jew made me a member of a tiny minority. I asked my mother why there were so few of us, and her answer was quick: “Judaism’s a hard religion, with lots of rules. When you’re Jewish, it’s not enough to believe, you have to actually do the right thing. Most people don’t want to work that hard.”

As I grew older, I discovered another reason for a scant Jewish presence in the world: persecution. Demographers have estimated that without the carnage inflicted by the Crusades and the Holocaust and centuries of pogroms, there’d be about 100 million of us.

But when it comes to one major cause of a diminished Jewish presence, assimilation, I do believe my mother was right. Being authentically Jewish is tough. It’s also part of what makes Judaism vibrant and meaningful.

I was reminded of this several years ago, when my youngest daughter brought home a study packet from school centered around the month of Elul and the concept of teshuvah — repentance, or literally, return. This fourth-grade material listed the elements of self-improvement elegantly and succinctly:

1 — Feel bad about what you did.

2 — Stop doing it.

3 — Admit you did it out loud.

4 — Decide not to do it again.

The quartet pertains only to sins committed against God. When one transgresses against another human being, a fifth stage is added: Beg forgiveness from your victim and, if not met with immediate assent, persist at least three times.

Repentance the Jewish way is tough love at its finest, a perfect road map for self-improvement grounded in a profound understanding of psychology. Yes, it involves guilt and much has been made of “Jewish guilt.” But that’s just one more bad rap against our religion perpetrated by self-hating individuals who’ve tried to reduce 3,000 years of proud, Jewish legacy to a loathsome whine.

“I’ve been crippled by Jewish guilt,” goes the chant, “therefore I can’t move forward.”

But the old joke — “How many shrinks does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the bulb has to want to change” — is true. And healthy guilt — honest, heartfelt regret over doing the wrong thing coupled with the courage to effect behavioral change — can be a wonderful, empowering emotion.

Back when I worked as a child psychologist, I was clear about distinguishing my role from that of other doctors when I met new patients. “They do stuff to you,” I explained. “I work with you.”

My patients appreciated that, none more than the seriously ill kids I treated at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. These were youngsters with cancer and diabetes and birth defects and cystic fibrosis who’d been poked and probed and cut open and irradiated for much of their young lives, and craved a sense of control over their destinies.

Years later, as a cancer patient myself, I appreciated this on a whole new level. But even my physically well patients grasped the notion of being respected as volitional beings, and they reveled in confronting their maladaptive habits and learning new ways to cope. One of the many joys of my years as a psychologist was establishing partnerships with thousands of kids, guiding them toward insight and helping them help themselves.

Yes, the bulb has to want to change, but when it does, it shines brighter than ever.

Teshuvah is tough, but boy, do we need it now. Because repentance in the short attention-span, sound-bite-driven zeitgeist of the 21st century has devolved to smarmy, self-serving, spin.

And pseudorepentance — talk show repentance, public relations repentance, politician’s repentance — is worse than no repentance at all, because it consoles the wrongdoer, teaches him he’s gotten away with it and fuels further bad behavior.

Teshuvah raises the probability of improvement. Spin-doctored recitations virtually guarantee the repetition of sin.

In a teshuvah-driven world, Austria would stop trying to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German, and France would shudder at offering moral lessons to anyone.

In a teshuvah-driven world, countries like Switzerland and Sweden who maintained a noxious neutrality during World War II, and profited from it to the tune of billions of dollars, would be scrambling among themselves to return the filthy lucre to its rightful owners and would cast aside their postures of staggering self-righteousness.

A healthy dose of teshuvah would cause self-styled “progressives” to remember the transgressions of their philosophical forbears, when the left refused to condemn Hitler as long as the Nazi leader aligned himself with Stalin, only to relent when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. The same goes for the spawn of those religious leaders who turned a blind eye to the extermination of millions, while inveighing against the establishment of the State of Israel.

Today, the philosophical spawn of both groups have chosen to forsake the only democracy in the Middle East and to align themselves with corrupt, thuggish Arab dictators, obsessing upon Israeli misdeeds, while maintaining a good German silence when Jewish babies are shredded to death in Jerusalem pizza parlors.

The failure to do teshuvah leads to the horrible confirmation of Santayana’s warning, quoted so often that it’s become a cliche, but no less valid for that: Forget the past and you’re condemned to repeat it.

Teshuvah is hard. Being Jewish is hard. But what holds true for muscle, applies to the human spirit: no gain without pain.

So perhaps there’ll never be a lot of us, and maybe that’s good — quality over quantity.

We Jews must adopt a dual approach: Never forget what has been done to us, never allow the world to forget and never cease to defend ourselves with power and vigilance. At the same time, we need to look deep within our own souls, taking a no-excuses approach to our own shortcomings, and working harder at self-improvement.

Teshuvah’s good stuff. We Jews need more of it.

So does the world.

Jonathan Kellerman is the author of 24 novels, five nonfiction books and numerous essays and scientific articles. He is clinical professor of pediatrics and psychology at USC School of Medicine. His current novel is “Twisted” (Ballantine.) His novel, “Gone”, will be published in April.

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Balancing Tikkun Olam and Self-Interest

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

I’m reluctant to draw lessons from the hurricane, even if the High Holidays are a time of stock taking, and even if Jewish tradition suggests that calamities are “heavenly alarms” meant to arouse repentance. If God is speaking to us through Katrina, he might want to brush up on His communication skills.

Besides, there is a fine line between taking personal and communal lessons from calamity, and exploiting a tragedy to score political and theological points.

That being said, the hurricane and its aftermath afford a moment to consider Jewish communal priorities, and especially a moment to ask where our commitments to our own communities end and where our responsibilities to a wider world begin.

In Ian McEwan’s riveting new novel, “Saturday” (Nan A. Talese) a London brain surgeon is pondering how human beings give themselves license to kill and eat other animals, even as evidence mounts that they too feel pain.

“The key to human success and domination is to be selective in your mercies,” the surgeon concludes.

I don’t know about the success and domination part, but if it weren’t for our abilities to be selective in our mercies, I think we’d all go mad. The panorama of human suffering that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is almost too great to absorb.

We’ve all probably played out in our minds the dark fantasy of what we’d do if we had to start from scratch — no home, little money, plunked down in a far-off city. For most American Jews, the immigration era ended around 1925. For 12,000 New Orleans Jews, it began two weeks ago.

But there I go, being selective in my mercies. There’s no doubt that the human toll of the disaster fell most heavily on the poor, the black, the indigent elderly. The mostly middle-class Jews of the Gulf states fell back on friends and communities in Houston and Atlanta and Dallas, or made it to hotels where they could sit out the worst of the storm before returning to reclaim or rebuild their flooded homes.

To pity Chabad or the Jewish federations and synagogues seems almost indulgent when viewed this way, a real-life twist on the famous joke about the Jewish newspaper announcing the apocalypse: “World to end tomorrow; Jews to suffer the most.”

Tribalism does become obscene when carried to extremes. Take a recent decision by Israel’s Defense Ministry. After a Jewish gunman shot up a bus in the Galilee town of Shfaram, the Defense Ministry declared that the Israeli-Arab families of those killed were not considered terrorism victims under Israeli law. Why? Because their killer was Jewish.

Apparently, Israeli law defines terrorist acts as those carried out by “enemies of Israel.” That didn’t go down well with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who earlier had denounced the shootings in Shfaram as “a sinful act by a bloodthirsty terrorist.”

Sharon directed the Justice Ministry to amend the law so that the families could receive the same government aid accorded to victims of Palestinian violence. Call him a bleeding heart, but Sharon understands that to define terrorism as an attack by Arabs on Jews is to take tribalism to its extreme.

And yet, we need the tribal impulse if we are to cope with tragedies like Katrina, because it reduces a vast, impossible-to-grasp event to a human scale. As Primo Levi famously put it, a “single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriad who suffered as she did, but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”

So we focus on the pain of those most like us, and trust that other communities of faith and feeling are doing the same for their own.

But if “we could not live” without a focus for our pain, we could not live with ourselves if we addressed only our own people’s suffering. So nearly all of the Jewish organizations accepting donations for hurricane relief — B’nai B’rith, United Jewish Communities, the Union for Reform Judaism, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, American Jewish Committee, Mazon — are also pledging to aid non-Jewish victims of the deluge, even as they help restore synagogues and other Jewish institutions lost under the waters.

A cynic will say we do this out of self-interest — that if gentiles see us supporting them in their time of need, they’ll also support us in ours. And community relations is a time-honored Jewish practice. But self-interest doesn’t account for an equally strong tradition of Jewish universalism, a strain that transformed the highly esoteric kabalistic concept of tikkun olam (heal the world) into a synonym for global action.

That impulse — particularizing the universal, universalizing the particular — is another gift of the Jews to the wider world. From our place as a tiny minority, we understand well what it means to be at the mercy of tragedies natural and man made. In lean times, we turn inward, emphasizing our tribal concerns over those of others. In times of plenty, we allow ourselves to reach out.

In times like these, the key to human success is remembering that we are all created in God’s image, and compelled to do the good and right thing.

Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor in chief of the New Jersey Jewish News.

 

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Lessons From Abramoff’s Case

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s recent indictment and arrest on charges of wire fraud involve an already notorious individual. The U.S.

Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and federal grand jury have already investigated him about his unscrupulous dealings with Indian tribes.

Because Abramoff’s public persona trades on a glossy presentation of himself as an exemplar of Jewish values, his case calls for careful attention — not only from the general public but specifically the Jewish community. As Jews who have worked with Native American communities, we feel that the Abramoff case can open a long-overdue conversation among American Jews about Native Americans today and some areas of common interest.

To start with, there are Abramoff’s dealings with tribal governments that were his clients. Marketing his influence with key members of Congress, Abramoff allegedly secured fees from one tribe to help it obtain legal rights to conduct gaming, then took fees from another tribe to help it squelch the other client’s tribal gaming prospects. If true, this stunning disregard of basic fiduciary responsibility would be but one example of his business practices with Native Americans. According to the New York Times, Abramoff wrote e-mails to his business partner, Michael Scanlon, referring to his Native American clients as “idiots,” “troglodytes” and “monkeys.”

According to a June 23, 2005 report in the Los Angeles Times, Abramoff used funds gained by allegedly defrauding Indian tribes to finance “a Jewish religious school that he founded” and “paramilitary operations mounted by Jewish settlers in the West Bank.” Because of the public association of Abramoff’s activities with support for Jewish causes, an affirmation is needed that he does not represent Jewish religious values regarding the ethical treatment of non-Jews and respect for the divine image of all human beings. Abramoff’s actions and words also depart from the important American Jewish traditions of respect for democracy and activism to achieve social justice.

Then there is Abramoff’s alleged conduct toward his Native American clients from a perspective grounded in Jewish sources. According to the Torah, cheating, lying, expropriation of other people’s property, misuse of funds and condescending attitudes toward non-Jews are not Jewish values, and are expressly forbidden. The idea of establishing a school to teach Torah using misappropriated funds would be total nonsense from a Jewish point of view — the worst example of faulty ethical and moral thinking.

If they prove authentic, Abramoff’s racist and demeaning references to his Native American clients would suggest that he has not been thinking and behaving according to the Jewish teachings that, as the founder of a Jewish school, he claims to espouse. The Jewish tradition teaches us that all human beings — not just Jews — are made in the image of God. Abramoff’s proffered excuse, that he was just indulging in “locker-room talk,” runs aground on the most basic Jewish teachings that you must “Love your fellow as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and “You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people” (Leviticus 19:16).

Abramoff’s conduct should prompt more from American Jews than a repudiation. It should serve as an occasion for forging better relations and understanding between Native and Jewish communities. If anything, Abramoff’s experience as a Jew should have made him more, not less, sensitive to the humanity and concerns of Indian people. Like Jews, American Indians know what it means to be historically dispossessed. They are struggling to assert sovereignty over what remains. Like Jews, American Indians wrestle with the meaning of their remembered past and how to accommodate to the powerful society that surrounds them.

Because of reservation poverty and forced relocation programs mounted by the federal government in the 1950s to move tribal members off reservations and into cities, Indian nations also share with Jews the experience of Diaspora. Like Jews, they have been subjected to coercive programs of conversion and assimilation, their cultures and sacred practices outlawed, their numbers diminished by genocide and their identity made more complex by intermarriage. Desecration of cemeteries and burial sites, long a problem for European Jews, remains a current horror for Indian people.

Jews should seek a higher level of understanding and better relations with Indian peoples. We are egregiously misrepresented by the likes of Abramoff. We feel pride and a sense of affinity with distinguished legal scholar Felix S. Cohen, whose “Handbook of Federal Indian Law” (1942) and other writings have been crucial to restoring federal recognition of tribal sovereignty. A secular Jew committed to democratic principles, Cohen wrote passionately about Native American self-government from a perspective informed by Jewish history:

“Our interest in Native American self-government today is not the interest of sentimentalists or antiquarians,” Cohen wrote in 1949. “We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany. For us, the Indian tribe is the miner’s canary, and when it flutters and droops we know that the poison gasses of intolerance threaten all other minorities in our land.”

Haim Dov Beliak is rabbi at Temple Beth Shalom of Whittier and is co-director of Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens and Jerusalem. Gelya Frank is a USC professor and director of Tule River Tribal History Project. UCLA law school professor Carole Goldberg directs the Joint Degree Program in Law and American Indian Studies.

 

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The Painful Holidays

Leave a Comment / Singles /

A feeling of trepidation takes hold of my heart. The Jewish holidays are upon us again, and as a 30-something single in a family of all married siblings, I’m feeling anxiety and pain.should be excited, as I get to spend two days with my parents, brothers, sisters-in-law and their kids. However, for weeks before a holiday arrives, I experience apprehension that grows exponentially as each holiday draws closer.

Please don’t get me wrong. I love my family very much. I’ve always gotten along with my siblings and their spouses; I love my nieces and nephews like crazy, and I’ve always considered my family to be closer than most. The idea of being with them should ease the pain of being single and alone, and should ease the sense of loneliness I feel being single among married couples.

Hence, my feelings of guilt, because I do not look forward to being with my family during the holidays. I don’t look forward to having to put on a happy face, when cheerful is the last thing I feel. I don’t look forward to the questions my nieces invariably ask, when wanting to know why I am not yet married.

It is as if an important part of me is missing. I watch the loving eye contact between my siblings and their spouses, the hand holding under the table as we eat the holiday meals and the cheerful chattering of my nieces and nephews. I listen to talk of the kids’ baseball leagues, dance lessons and where the next family get-together should be held.

Someone tries to pull me into the conversation every once in a while, but I don’t really have anything to add. I feel separated from what is going on.

What I really want to say aloud is, “What about me? I want someone to talk to, to love, who will understand me, and really listen to me, and have things in common with me. I want to enjoy my own little boy and girl.”

Sitting in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, I have tears in my eyes, because another year has past, and I’m still alone. And being with my family only makes it worse. Seeing the happiness among my family members and knowing it’s due to the one thing I don’t have — a loving spouse and children — makes my heart ache.

Jewish holidays are times when families come together. But I don’t have my own family yet. And this point is driven home to me very clearly every time I’m with my siblings for the holidays.

I sit at the meals wishing there was someone who could understand what I’m going through, and I’ve come up with what I think is a really good idea: If there were one or more singles sitting at the meals with me, this would surely ease the loneliness I feel. They would probably be feeling some of the same emotions as I am, and we could support each other, just by sharing these times together.

I would have someone to laugh with when my nieces asked their probing questions, someone to roll my eyes at when my siblings were acting mushy and I was feeling vulnerable, and someone who would be going through what I was going through and could relate.

There are always some singles who have nowhere to go for the holidays, because their families aren’t observant or perhaps they live too far away. If these singles were invited for the Jewish holidays by families like mine, where there is one single among many married couples, this could have multiple benefits.

First and foremost, it would be a tremendous mitzvah on the part of the families doing the inviting. It would also alleviate some of the pain that the singles feel at being the only one who is single. Personally, having another single around for the holidays would make me feel less alone and more open to enjoying my family’s company, without the added burden of loneliness.

Before the holidays wrap up for the year, I wish to call out to families who have singles in their midst. I wish to tell them that we, the singles, are lonely and need help this time of year, help that could come from having other singles around.

So please, this year when we are all trying to make changes, do something new, something good, and invite singles to your tables and to your homes on Yom Tov. You will warm others’ hearts, and maybe even your own.

Michele Herenstein is a freelance journalist working in New York. She can be reached at michelesherenstein@yahoo.com.

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Tightrope of Life

Leave a Comment / Torah /

In the days of communism’s fierce grip on the Soviet Union, there lived a Chasidic Jew named Reb Mendel Futerfas. Reb Mendel repeatedly put his life at risk with his efforts to promote Jewish education behind the Iron Curtain and for some 14 years was incarcerated in prisons and labor camps for his “crime” of teaching Torah. While in the Siberian gulags, he spent most of his free time studying and praying, but he also interacted and conversed with other prisoners — some Jewish, some not. Among these prisoners was a circus performer whose claim to fame was his incredible skill as a tightrope walker.

Reb Mendel would often engage this man in conversation. Having never been to a circus, Reb Mendel was totally baffled by the man’s profession. How could a person risk his life walking on a rope several stories above ground? (This was in the days before safety nets were standard practice.)

“To just go out there and walk on a rope?” Reb Mendel challenged incredulously.

The performer explained that due to his training and skill, he did not need to be held up by any cables and that, for him, it was no longer all that dangerous. Reb Mendel remained skeptical and intrigued.

After Stalin died, the prison authorities relaxed their rules somewhat and the guards told the prisoners that they would be allowed to stage a makeshift circus on May-Day. The tightrope walker coordinated with other acrobats in the camp, but there was no doubt that his famous tightrope act would be the highlight of the show. The tightrope walker made sure that his friend, Reb Mendel, was in the audience.

After all the other acts finished, the lights came down; everybody waited with baited breath. The tightrope walker climbed the tall pole to the suspended rope. His first steps were timid and tentative (after all, it had been several years) but within a few seconds, it all came back to him. With his hands twirling about, he virtually glided across the rope to the pole at the other end, and then, in a flash, made a fast turn, reversed his direction and proceeded back to the other side. Along the way, he performed several stunts. The crowd went wild.

When he was done, he slid down off the pole, took a bow and went running straight to Reb Mendel.

“So?” he said. “Did you see that I was not held up by any cables?”

A very impressed Reb Mendel replied, “Yes. You’re right. No cables.”

“OK. You’re a smart man. Tell me, how did I do it? Was it my hands? Was it my feet?” the man asked.

Reb Mendel paused for a moment, closed his eyes and replayed the entire act back on his mind. Finally, Reb Mendel opened his eyes and said, “It’s the eyes. It’s all in your eyes. During the entire time, your eyes were completely focused and riveted on the opposite pole.”

“Exactly!” said the performer. “When you see your destination in front of you and you don’t take your eyes off of it, then your feet go where they need to go and you don’t fall. OK, now one more question. What would you say is the most difficult part of the act?”

Again Reb Mendel thought for a moment. “Most difficult was the turn; when you had to change direction.”

“Correct again!” he said. “During that split second, when you lose sight of that first pole, and the other pole has not yet come into view, there is some real danger there. But… if you don’t allow yourself to get confused and distracted during that transition, your eyes will find that pole and your balance will be there.”

This special Shabbat — the bridge between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — is referred to as “Shabbat Shuva.” In this week’s Haftorah, we hear the words of the prophets — exhorting us, pleading with us, beckoning us to improve the quality of our lives; to even change direction if need be.

It is also noteworthy that this week’s Torah portion — in which we learn about the events that transpired on the last day of Moses’ life on earth — is called “Vayeilech Moshe” (And Moses went). The commentaries point out that even on the last day of his life, Moses was on the move — walking forward, achieving, growing — making the most of every precious moment of life. Moses’ message to us being that so long as we have a breath of life, there ought to be “Vayeilech” — explorations of new horizons, journeys to new frontiers.

How do we walk this tightrope called “life” without stumbling? The answer is: by establishing clear and proper goals and remaining focused on those goals like a laser beam.

The Torah provides us with a road map to a meaningful and fulfilling way of life. It sets down goals and defines purpose.

When you know what your purpose and destination is, and you do not take your eyes off that pole, then you know where to put your feet. Even when things turn, and we momentarily lose sight of the pole, we need not despair. Shabbos Shuva teaches us that a change of direction ought not to send us plummeting. On the contrary, we can and should shift gracefully with changes of circumstances, catch our balance and let the next pole come into view.

Rabbi Moshe D. Bryski serves as the executive director of Chabad of the Conejo and dean of the Conejo Jewish Day School.

 

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What to Ask a Jew

Leave a Comment / Judaism, Opinion, Rob Eshman /

If you’re Jewish, this is not for you to read. Please clip this editorial and hand it off to a close non-Jewish friend. I’m certain some of your best friends aren’t Jews. And thanks for sharing.

Dear Non-Jewish Friend:

Every year around this time your friend disappears from work or school for a couple of days to mark the High Holidays. There are many Jews for whom this is a deeply spiritual, life-changing time that reconnects them to their faith, their people and their soul’s purpose here on earth.

Then there are most Jews.

Let’s assume your friend belongs to the larger group. You assume when he’s away from work on one of those holidays that local newscasters pronounce a different way each year, he’s living la vida Hebrew, cloaked in mystical garments, eyes drifting upward to heaven. You watched “A Price Above Rubies.” You channel-surfed the Chabad Telethon. You assume when we’re among our own, it’s all circle dancing and full-throated chanting.

It is not.

Too many sanctuaries have all the excitement of a physician’s waiting room, minus the excitement. Think of one of those interminable assemblies back in elementary school. After an hour of the fourth-grade orchestra, followed by mumbled student council skits, even the thrill of not having to go to class that day evaporated.

For too many of us, this is the situation come Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Does your friend return to work after the holidays and — when you ask how they were — just shrug? Or does he roll his eyes and emit an “Ugh.” Or is it just an all purpose, “Oh, fine.”

In that case, I’m going to ask you to perform an intervention, a spiritual crisis intervention to stave off insanity.

Insanity is not too strong a word — because entering dumbly into the same soul-deflating, boredom-inducing behavior every year as though this year will somehow automatically be different is the definition of insanity.

Fellow Jews have tried to help by doing what we do best: We’ve formed committees. The committees investigate declining synagogue attendance and lack of enthusiasm among younger Jews, and very often their recommendations are spot-on and well meaning.

And we have innovated: rock ‘n’ roll services, meditation minyans, yoga amidahs (don’t ask), free services, elite services, singles services.

I keep waiting for the press release about the bullock sacrifice on mid-Wilshire. (Maybe at the site of the old Bullock’s department store.)

That ought to juice things up.

There are engaging services out there, innovative or not. If your friend’s rabbi presides over one of them, no need for he or she to take offense here. But the basic trope I hear from too many Jews year after year is that attending their service is more duty than delight.

Your job is to change things. With one High Holiday down and one more to go, you can help your Jewish friend. These interventions typically work around a series of questions. Because you care, but may not know what to ask, here are my suggestions:

Ask them if High Holiday services inspired them.

Be sure to register their immediate reaction. If they squint and screw up one side of their face, take this as a “no.” The truth is, most Jews sit through these services looking either intermittently bored or catatonic. Listen and you’ll hear the stampede of so many minds wandering so far so fast. At some services I’ve attended, the snoring is louder than the cantor.

Ask them, then, why they go.

Why accept the status quo? What do they wish they got out of going? What kind of experience are they looking for?

Ask them how they would improve it?

Is it the liturgy? The melodies? The sermons? Do they feel like a stranger to the Hebrew, words, the ideas?

Ask them if they’ve ever mentioned their boredom to their rabbi?

They might be surprised to find out that their rabbi senses it, can see it in a sea of faces — might even be bored, too. There, perhaps, is the beginning of a solution.

Ask them how involved they are in Jewish life, learning and prayer the other 360 days of the year.

Making Yom Kippur your only synagogue holiday is like making “Koyaanisqatsi” your only cinema-going experience. You need some background, some study, context and preparation. Otherwise you leave scratching your head.

Ask them if they think their ancestors would be happy knowing they are still going to shul, even though it makes them bored and miserable.

Never mind, skip that question.

Ask them why, if these days are so holy, we treat them so lightly.

Are they something we get through or, as we say in Los Angeles, get into?

Ask them what they will do to make next year’s High Holiday services a meaningful and profound experience.

These are questions for you, the non-Jewish friend, to ask. Don’t worry about imposing. Your friends will have plenty of time to ponder them in shul.

 

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Burning Bush Meets Burning Man

Leave a Comment / Wandering Jew /

In a tent on an ashen desert plain, seven Jews take refuge against the beating sun. One, a middle-age man with a thick Israeli accent, chants Haftorah as the wind kicks up white dust devils around the group. Next to him, a sun-kissed, raven-haired miss in bikini bottoms and halter follows along, her lips forming the syllables in silence. It’s Saturday morning at Black Rock City, in a tent they call the Jewish Community Center, and this happens only once a year.

Black Rock City, Nev., is a temporary community that springs from the ground in the desert each August as tens of thousands make pilgrimage to the weeklong Burning Man festival. You may have heard of Burning Man as a celebration of countercultural art and community. Or you may know it as an orgy of sex and drugs in the desert. What bubbe probably never told you is that in Black Rock City, the temptation to connect spiritually is as strong as the more publicized pull to indulge physically. In this arid terrain, Jews can connect to an underlying sense of yearning and can undergo spiritual cleansing.

Hence the presence of the Black Rock JCC on this bleached prehistoric lake bed of a desert called the “playa.” The “Black Rock JCC” is a nylon roof held up by four poles. No permanent walls keep out the wind — or the curious. And both are welcome. The structure itself defies the odds, withstanding forceful bursts of wind, sandstorms and penetrating heat. A JCC here, where no stalk can grow, is a monument to the strong roots of tradition. Among the 40,000 attendees or “burners” at Burning Man, a few Jews shy of a dozen are the heartbeat of this Jewish community.

For a week the tent stands along with thousands of others arranged in concentric circles, weblike about a central camp. At week’s end, a wooden man burns in the center of the playa. Revelers cast into the flames objects they wish taken from the earth.

“I see burning the man as analogous to burning off spiritual sin,” says Rabbi Menachem Cohen of Oak Park, Ill., after conducting the Saturday morning services for his small band of congregants.

Like a secular Yom Kippur, burners throw off a year’s worth of evil. Instead of casting out invisible sin, it’s photos, letters, mementos, bottles and even furniture they hurl into the bonfire. But then, a photo can capture a sin; a sofa can hold a mistake. This rite celebrates freedom, cleansing people of “negative energies” from their possessions and acts — even as the fire and parties rage far past dawn.

There’s something tribal, in an ancient Jewish way, in the vista of 1,000 tents surrounding that central, blazing light. Cohen connects the moral dimension of Burning Man to tikkun olam — that is, to why Jews must continue to explore wherever a light burns.

“When God made the universe he created vessels to hold the light,” Cohen said. “But the vessels were too weak and when he filled them with light they burst. The sparks flew to all parts of the universe. When we do tikkun olam we are searching for the sparks, to gather them together, to repair the world. Sometimes the brightest sparks are hidden in the darkest places.”

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Kabbalah and the Modern Shrink

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Judaism /

“Connecting to God, Ancient Kabbalah and Modern Psychology” by Rabbi Abner Weiss (Bell Tower Books, $24).

It was Rabbi Abner Weiss, in psychologist mode, who “Jerry” went to see after his wife, “Sandy,” found him in bed with another woman. Although Jerry and Sandy seemed like the perfect couple, they lacked intimacy, and Jerry had developed a nasty habit of risky promiscuity. Sandy wanted a divorce.

Weiss’ diagnosis?

“Jerry suffered from grossly distorted chesed/gevurah [lovingkindness/power] balance…. Like his gevurah, his chesed had also been transformed by the … kelipot of the nefesh [evil shards of the animal soul].”

Although it is an atypical psychological assessment, Weiss insists that it is a curative one.

Since the early 1990s, Weiss, former rabbi at Beth Jacob Congregation and current rabbi at the Westwood Village Synagogue, has been using kabbalistic tools in his psychology practice. Recently, he published “Connecting to God, Ancient Kabbalah and Modern Psychology,” a book that asserts the congruity of the two disciplines.

“The American Psychological Association started publishing serious books on the spiritual experience in the early 1990s, and part of this trend was to look at the mystical experience that psychologists called ‘transpersonal,'” Weiss said. “But all the new transpersonal psychologists used Buddhist or Hindu systems. I began to wonder why nobody had looked at Kabbalah. In Kabbalah, I found this full-fledged, psychological system, fully developed, but buried in Aramaic texts.”

Weiss found that by using the 10 Kabbalistic Sefirot (divine filters/vessels for divine energy) as behavioral tools, he was able to help many patients have breakthroughs, and find their way out of paralyzing and dysfunctional behaviors.

These sefirot are arranged in four groups in what is known as the etz ha chayim (tree of life), and they form a paradigm that encompasses not only the divine but human behavior and experience. Above all, there is keter (crown), which is the repository of Divine will, and below all, as a foundation, there is malchut, sovereignty or the Divine presence. Then comes chochmah (wisdom), binah (understanding) and data (knowledge) — the cognitive component of sefirot. The next three — chesed, gevurah, and tiferet (splendor), are the emotive sefirot. Netzach (victory), hod (empathy) and yesod (foundation) are the interpersonal sefirot.

In his professional practice, Weiss “started with the thesis that you are born with your energy system in balance, but your influences growing up throw them out of balance,” he said. “I would use kabbalistic meditations, self forgiveness and forgiveness of others [to help people] become unstuck. It is only when you become unblocked, and when you can let go and reclaim your authenticity, that you can begin to grow personally and spiritually.”

In “Connecting to God,” Weiss delineates his interest in Kabbalah, explaining its evolution, and some central tenets of kabbalistic belief, such as the makeup of the soul, and how Kabbalah understands God as “being.” In his exegesis, he does not name or credit the Kabbalah Centre on Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles, but he does give de-facto kudos to those who have helped to popularize Kabbalah.

In his elucidation of the sefirot, he explains how different energy imbalances can produce destructive behavioral patterns. As exemplars, he uses real-life examples of the patients he has treated and their [kabbalistic] diagnoses and corrective therapies. He also clarifies how, once a person’s issues are resolved, Judaism and its mitzvot can be a tool for spiritual growth. The book is peppered with lengthy guided meditations. And for added assistance, an accompanying CD is available.

In several ways, the book is a personal one. Not only does Weiss give an account of the development of his interest in the subject, he also explains how these Kabbalistic tools helped him through a personal crisis — the discovery of long-buried family secrets about his father’s chicanery.

“As a prominent spiritual leader … [I] was terrified of being unmasked as an insecure, self-doubting individual, from a less than perfect family,” he writes.

In his own therapy, Weiss wrote a letter to his father, detailing his terrible failures as a parent. Since he did not know where his father was buried (he had disappeared before Weiss was born), Weiss read the letter to a picture he had of his father.

“The experience was cathartic. I wept as I read,” he writes. Weiss also “reparented his inner child,” by cuddling a pillow that he imagined was himself as a little boy.

“My tears began to flow as I acknowledged the boy’s pain, loneliness, and fears, and reassured him that I loved him,” he writes.

“It’s the idea of the wounded healer,” Weiss said. “I use my own recovery as a model for other people’s recovery.”

While the book is an exposition of ancient Jewish concepts, Weiss is careful to use current scientific literature and studies to bolster what he presents. The book does not shy from controversial ideas. In several places, Weiss promotes past-life regressions — that is, going under hypnosis to discover who you were in a previous life, as a tool for self-understanding.

On Oct. 9, at 5:45 p.m., Rabbi Abner Weiss will be speaking at the Academy for Jewish Religion/California, 11827 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles. For more information, call (310) 398-0820.

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