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Jewish Journal

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September 24, 2021

Gratitude and Happiness Within – Chol Ha-Mo’ed Sukkot

Leave a Comment / Seeking the Good /

Preface For Friday September 24th
I have spoken to many people who had really incredible Yom Kippur experiences. Their Sukkot has becoe dwellings of transformation. People look at how they have been living and place special focus on the people in their lives. Too often we allow our relationships with others to be shallow and negative and then we strive for something more. A few people have shared with me that when they come out of the time of the Sukkah, they intend to change the nature of their relationships – more honesty, vulnerability, more authenticity – or maybe having to find new relationships that will reflect the person they want to become.
In the tradition of the holy guests that we invite into our Sukkah, one of the holy guests is the self on the horizon. We have to ask ourselves what prevents that particular guest from arriving. For most of us, as we look back at these Days of Awe and the year before them, we realize it has been our own thoughts, feelings and emotions that have made us strangers in this world and strangers to other people. During the past week, the truth mind has become sovereign. In the coolness of the transitional space of the Sukkah, we can see our lives clearly and make the decisions needed to create inner well-being and well-being with other people.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Finley
Chol Ha-Mo’ed Sukkot

Shabbat Chol Ha-Mo’ed Sukkot 2021/5782

Gratitude and Happiness Within

(adapted from previous versions)

 

We entered the final act of the High Holy Days period on Monday night and Tuesday, as the seven-day holiday of Sukkot began. The first days are a festival, and then we have the intermediate days (chol ha-mo’ed). Right after Sukkot, we have the holiday of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.

 

Two of the most important spiritual themes of Sukkot are gratitude and joy/happiness – Hodayah and Simchah in Hebrew. In the dimension of the ego-self, we are grateful when we receive something we want or need and are grateful to whomever has provided it. At the ego-self level, we are grateful when we are gratified. We have all experienced the down side of this – we can become resentful when we don’t receive what we need, want or demand, and then we can become unhappy when our needs are not gratified.

 

At the dimension of spiritual psychology, however, gratitude and happiness are not just responses to what we receive, but rather states of mind and soul that we cultivate as spiritual disciplines. In other words, cultivating gratitude and joy within begins as an act of will and forms into a spiritual discipline. I am not recommending that we try to become grateful and happy with whatever comes our way. Bad things happen to us. I am recommending that we cultivate an inner life discipline of gratitude and happiness in spite of what happens to us. We don’t mortgage our inner lives to vagaries of other people and events out of our control.

 

This idea, that gratitude and joy begin in the will, is an extension of my teaching on the High Holy Days about the ego-self. The unconscious ego-self and the various ego-states found there can be hypnotized by what happens outside of us and to us – we are mesmerized by the world and all the inhabitants thereof. This fixation on the outside world is the job of the ego-self; it must be vigilant for threat. The pleasure at having needs met is entirely natural. Anger and frustration at not having our needs met is also entirely natural.

 

Natural to the ego-self does not mean good. The higher self, and the soul, however, have their own nature, and it is not the same nature as that of the ego-self. Natural to the higher self is the experience of Love, Justice, Truth and Beauty, of the Good and the Holy, and of the Divine.

 

I believe that one way to define the soul is that the soul is the non-linguistic, experiential dimension in which life takes on meaning and purpose, where the Divine can be experienced.

 

The realms of Higher Self and Soul are, for most of us, mostly unconscious, until we work on bringing them to consciousness. We often have fleeting moments of depth and clarity, but we should try to make them more stable and accessible parts of our day to day lives.

 

The goal of wisdom work and spiritual psychology, and the spiritual practices connected with them, is the rooting of our consciousness in those realms of Higher Self and Soul as often as we can, and shaping those realms, as well. Gratitude and Happiness/Joy should become basic attitudes, not just responses to the outside world.

 

How does one hold gratitude and joy/happiness within? Let’s imagine you have received a gift, something that you think is both especially beautiful and an expression of loving care. Or imagine that joy we feel when justice has been done; imagine the need to celebrate when some wrong has been righted. With a bit of contemplation, we can see that, at the core, joy and gratitude are often connected with the spiritual values of love, justice, truth and beauty.

I often meet people for whom life is not giving them joy and they have little for which to be grateful. They are often lonely, either alone, or lonely in a relationship. Their marriages are sometimes rocky, their kids distant and their jobs (if they have one) give them little gratification. In the realm of the ego-self, they are starving.

In the realm of soul, however, happiness does not come from what we get, but from an inner character – the joy of being on this journey in a conscious way, the gratitude to the Nameless One for our lives and our souls. Once one taps into the source of joy and gratitude that flows into the soul, the decision can be made: do I shape my consciousness around what happens to me, or do I shape my consciousness around the decision to be a certain kind of person, a person who is characterized by joy and gratitude?

As you can imagine, certain problems in life start to clear up when we go from being joyless and ungrateful to being people who exude, from an inner wellspring, happiness and gratitude. In tough lives, the will to be joyful and happy may only be aspirational – but even the aspiration can be transformative.

Shabbat Shalom, and Chag Sam’each!

Rabbi Mordecai Finley

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NYT Removes Line Saying AOC Changed Iron Dome Vote Because of “Influential Lobbyists and Rabbis”

Leave a Comment / News, United States /

The New York Times appeared to remove a line from a September 23 article stating that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had changed her vote from “no” to “present” on the Iron Dome funding bill because of “influential lobbyists and rabbis.”

The article stated that Ocasio-Cortez “tearfully” decided to change her vote after a meeting with her fellow Squad members, which the article initially said “underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.” It was subsequently changed to say that the matter “underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party.” As of this writing, the article does not provide an editor’s note explaining the change.

The “rabbis” line was met with criticism, and the stealth edit did not quell the criticism.

“Yes it’s commendable that @nytimes removed this antisemitic trope, but the paper seems to have a serial problem of indulging in stereotypes and elevating strident voices,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted. “There’s a pattern of bias that merits investigation. Submitting to a 3rd party review would be a good start.”

“As a proud Zionist and Rabbi, I was surprised to learn that we Rabbis have powers far beyond those of mortal men that could somehow cajole AOC to change her anti-Israel vote to ‘present,’” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement to the Journal. “Another explanation is that The Squad’s anti-Israel tropes had exceeded their weekly quota.”

Stop Antisemitism Executive Director Liora Rez also said in a statement to the Journal, “We’re not sure if we’re reading Richard Spencer’s the ‘Daily Stormer’ or a vintage piece from 1939 Die Wehrmacht! Every time we think the [New York Times] can’t go any lower with their disdain for the Jewish people, they shock us with more antisemitism.”

Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) tweeted, “Embedded in the story is the assumption that support for Iron Dome, which defends civilians from relentless rocket fire, can only be explained by power (‘influential lobbyists and rabbis’) rather than principle. The causal Antisemitism never ceases to shock me.”

Newsweek Deputy Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon tweeted that the Times article was “disgusting.” “The [New York Times] remains incapable of writing about Jews without stumbling into the most obvious antisemitic tropes. Who knew Washington was overrun with ‘powerful’ and ‘influential’ rabbis forcing outspoken progressives of virtue to undermine their principles.”

 Writer Melissa Braunstein tweeted that even the stealth edit, the Times article “is still pumping antisemitic stereotypes into the cultural bloodstream.” “The only thing missing from this NYT article is the Internet-famous caricature of the Jewish man with the exaggerated nose rubbing his hands together, as he schemes,” she wrote in a subsequent tweet.

Gilead Ini, Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, noted in a September 24 piece that the stealth edit did not translate to the print edition of the article, which still has the “rabbis” line intact.

“With no published “correction” to be found on the website, it’s unclear whether the paper will inform print readers that it doesn’t stand by the problematic language,” Ini wrote. “Will editors admit to echoing antisemitic tropes about Jewish power used against good, and apologize? Or will they pretend the edit, made as news of the language was spreading on Twitter, was just an inconsequential change made to save a bit of space?”

The Times did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.

The bill, which allocates $1 billion in funding to the Iron Dome, passed the House of Representatives with 420 votes in favor, nine against and two abstentions on September 23. The vote came after progressive Democrats refused to vote on a government stopgap funding bill if it included the Iron Dome funding.

 

NYT Removes Line Saying AOC Changed Iron Dome Vote Because of “Influential Lobbyists and Rabbis” Read More »

Unscrolled V’Zot Ha’Berachah: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Leave a Comment / Commentary, Judaism /

It is surely one of the most fascinating endings of a story ever conceived.

After all we have gone through—the revelations and the rebellions, the miracles and the massacres, the divinity and danger—the text refuses to bring us over the finish line.

Like Moses, we are left stranded in the Sinai wilderness, looking over the boundary line but unable to cross. For Moses, this makes sense. Because of his sin—arrogantly striking the rock to bring forth water for the Israelites instead of speaking to it—he has been condemned to die without ever taking possession of the promised land. But what was our sin as readers? Why can’t we cross over? Why does the text, which has taken us this far, refuse to take us just a little bit farther?

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, AKA Ramban, offers a clue in the introduction to his commentary on the book of Exodus. “When they left Egypt, even though they came forth from the house of bondage, they were still considered exiles because they were in a land that is not theirs … When they came to Mount Sinai and made the Tabernacle, and the Holy One, blessed be He, caused His Divine Presence to dwell again amongst them … then they were considered redeemed.”

What a marvelous paradox. Despite leaving Egypt, they are not redeemed because they are in a land that is not theirs. But when they build the Tabernacle, despite being in a land not theirs, they are redeemed.

I can’t help but be reminded of the ending of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Having journeyed all the way to the Emerald City in search of someone who can help her return home to Kansas, Dorothy is told by Glinda the Good Witch that she was in possession of the power she sought the whole time. When asked why Glinda didn’t inform Dorothy of this in the first place, Glinda responds, “Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”

As a child, I found this answer unsatisfying. After all, Glinda could have at least tried to tell Dorothy that this long, dangerous journey down the yellow brick road was unnecessary. As an adult, however, I feel I now understand this teaching. We are all in the position of Dorothy. We have heard, at one point or another, that the things we seek are not somewhere over the horizon, but are right here with us. All spiritual lessons eventually come to rest on this: be here, live in the now, appreciate what is.

All spiritual lessons eventually come to rest on this: be here, live in the now, appreciate what is.

And yet, despite how many times we are told this, we don’t believe it. Not really. Not in our bones.

Dorothy’s journey, then, was not unnecessary. It was, however, necessary in a different way than she had supposed. The Emerald City was never the true goal, but the path there was instrumental to her waking up to the true source of her redemption.

As seen in Ramban’s above teaching, land does not equal redemption, but it is somehow connected. Perhaps we can venture to say that the land makes redemption realizable. Just as the Emerald City is the place where Dorothy finally understands what she has had all along, the promised land is the place where the children of Israel truly realize that they have been redeemed.

We might also say that the land is the place where redemption can be turned from a state of being into a way of life. The land is the theater upon which the Israelites’ spiritual lives will play out. It is the source of their sustenance and the fertile soil of their culture and language. It is a repository for cultural memory and experience.

But the real redemption—that came earlier, when we built a space for God in our midst. God might have mentioned that to us way back in the book of Exodus, but of course we wouldn’t have believed it.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.

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The Parvenu and the Jew—Objects of Scorn in Bolesław Prus’s Classic Polish Novel, “The Doll”

Leave a Comment / Books /

“The Doll,” published in 1890 (republished with NYRB, trans. David J. Welsh, 1996), is Polish master writer Bolesław Prus’s long, sweeping, fin-de-siècle work that collects all the shiny literary objects of the 19th century, in good magpie style, and displays them between its pages. We have the Dickensian court cases, full of humorous asides, and slapstick pranks. There is the ill-used lover lying down, in despair, on the train tracks, along with the battles of the Napoleonic wars, both in the tradition of Tolstoy. We encounter the “Woman Question” as debated in the oeuvres of Eliot and the Brontës, Turgenev, and Tolstoy again; the imagining of a future world, full of flying machines, as in Verne’s science fiction; and the class system and attendant figure of the upstart, or as it was called, the parvenu (a topic still popular decades later—think of Gatsby!). But for our purposes, I want to highlight one of Prus’s strongest preoccupations—not only his, but so many of his generation: the Jewish problem.

On the surface, Jews have no meaningful role in “The Doll,” which recounts, primarily, the story of Stanisław Wokulski, a generous and ambitious man who, from his early days as a server in a restaurant, makes his way up the ranks to become a great entrepreneur, a millionaire who entertains duchesses and countesses but can never convince the love of his life that he is worthy of her. The titular “doll” is the love interest of Wokulski; Izabela is beautiful, shallow, impoverished, and haughty, a picture of the dying aristocracy. Although Izabela is not in any way stupid—in fact, the back-cover blurbs are misleading, with Phillip Lopate’s description of Izabela as an “airhead” saying more about Lopate’s gender politics than Prus’s—she, like the class she represents, would rather disappear into oubliettes of history than wed with the humble working man. Below a tradesman like Wokulski there is only one creature more base, more feared, more reviled: the Jew.

Below a tradesman like Wokulski there is only one creature more base, more feared, more reviled: the Jew.

We must then ask the question: Is “The Doll” a work of antisemitism? Surprisingly, the answer is no, not really, despite the ungenerous portrayal of Jews throughout. After all, there is a distinction between antisemitic writing and writing about antisemitism. From the second page of “The Doll” on, we hear Warsaw residents grumbling that “only the Germans and the Jews get rich from Army trade.” The working class wonder “which is worse—the Jews or the nobility?” A new employee at Wokulski’s store is instantly liked when his colleagues see how fervent an antisemite he is. Repeatedly, we read complaints about the pungent, garlicky odor of Jews, their greasiness, their ability to attract fleas. They are accused of being money-hungry, which is a great irony in a novel full of money-obsessed characters (only the Jews are disdained for their materialism).

Rzecki—Wokulski’s employee and friend, whose diary entries are interspersed in the narrative—does his best to be fair-minded. He observes that the “dislike of the Hebrews is increasing; even people who, a few years ago, called them Poles of the Mosaic persuasion, now call them Jews. And those who recently admired their hard work, their persistence, and their talents, today only see their exploitation and deceit.” Rzecki writes about Warsaw’s blood libels; a one-time fighter in the Napoleonic wars for liberté, egalité, fraternité, Rzecki, hearing these rumors, stops to wonder “whether my youth was a dream.”

Of his colleague Szlangbaum, Rzecki has sympathy, admitting Szlangbaum is a “decent citizen in the fullest sense, yet no one likes him since he has the misfortune to be a Hebrew.” Ultimately, however, Rzecki also turns against Szlangbaum, who buys the store from Wokulski and hires fellow Jews to run it. The ending of the novel (spoiler alert), in which the aristocracy, failing to give Wokulski his due, realizes they have traded the devil they know (the Christian parvenu) for the devil they don’t (the Jew), suggests that at heart “The Doll” is a cautionary tale. Watch out, or the Jews will rule the world. And yet.

Of his colleague Szlangbaum, Rzecki has sympathy, admitting Szlangbaum is a “decent citizen in the fullest sense, yet no one likes him since he has the misfortune to be a Hebrew.”

Still, Wokulski, the hero, appears to be devoid of antisemitism. His retorts to anti-Jewish sentiment are sharp and consistent. And importantly, so too, it seems, is the omniscient narrator—which tells us that Prus’s novel is more engaged with chronicling rising antisemitism than (re)producing it (indeed the narrative ends just before the wave of pogroms that swept through Poland in the early 1880s, instigating large-scale immigration to the U.S.). Moreover, if Jews “worm” (to use a verb favored by Rzecki) their way into every plotline and nearly every page of the novel, it is mainly because they offer such a good metaphor for the primary focus of the novel—the parvenu. This is perhaps not surprising. The figure of the parvenu was, in the nineteenth century, tinged with Jewishness; one might even say Jews were the parvenus of parvenus.

Over a hundred and thirty years after its initial publication, “The Doll” remains an interesting artefact of life in the late-nineteenth century. Ironically, the “self-made millionaire” is now almost entirely without controversy (if anything, more people admire Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk than, say, the British royals). The figure of the Jew, however, remains an ideological battlefield.

Karen E. H. Skinazi, PhD, is a senior lecturer and the director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol (UK) and the author of  Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture.

 

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LA Teachers Union Won’t Vote on Pro-BDS Motion

Los Angeles, News /

The United Teachers Los Angeles union decided against putting a motion supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to a vote.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter Ben Sales tweeted that the union had said the vote was “indefinitely postponed” during UTLA’s September 23 meeting. According to Louis Keene, reporter for The Forward, the final vote was 94 in favor of the indefinite suspension of the vote and 35 against.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles issued a subsequent statement expressing “our appreciation to the Board of Directors of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) and the House of Representatives of UTLA for rejecting BDS and antisemitism to end the one-sided and derogatory anti-Israel motion introduced by some of its members this past May. We are grateful that UTLA’s leadership has heard our community’s voices and the voices of hundreds of UTLA members who spoke out against the motion and stood strong against antisemitism. We look forward to continuing to work with UTLA leadership to ensure zero tolerance toward antisemitism, as well as understanding the problematic nature of the BDS movement.” The Federation had partnered with the American Jewish Committee Los Angeles, ADL [Anti-Defamation League] Los Angeles, the Board of Rabbis Southern California, the Holocaust Museum LA, the Israeli-American Council, and StandWithUs on the matter.

ADL Los Angeles Regional Director Jeffrey I. Abrams said in a statement, “The original motion made very problematic claims and biased assumptions, including blaming this Spring’s outbreak of violence solely on Israel, while ignoring the violence and provocation from Hamas, a terrorist organization.

“In light of the spike of the recent spike in antisemitic incidents across the world, including here in Los Angeles, we are glad that the leadership of a body tasked with educating all children in our public school community. We want to thank all those stakeholders who successfully raised their collective voices and spoke out against this biased proposal including LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] parents and teachers, as well as other community members.”

Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper called the vote “a great victory for the children of Los Angeles and defeat for haters of Israel!”

The Israel-American Civic Action Network, UTLA Caucus for Israel and California Students United also issued a press release featuring a quote from LAUSD teacher Jennifer Grunfeld stating, “Being the granddaughter highlighting their advocacy on the matter and featured a quote of an Auschwitz survivor, hearing the outpouring of support for a motion that segregates us has been quite disappointing. Following tonight’s vote, I’m grateful that there are still good people in the world that see a place for all teachers and all students to learn in a safe environment.”

American Jewish Committee Los Angeles Regional Director Richard S. Hirschhaut said in a statement to the Journal, “We are gratified that common sense and fairness have prevailed within the ranks of UTLA leadership. The original resolution was a divisive measure that would have created a toxic and incendiary learning environment throughout LAUSD. Through the principled and courageous leadership of teachers, parents, and countless community members, a positive example has been set for our students and the principle of educational integrity. Going forward, it will be incumbent upon us all to make the most of this ‘teachable moment.’”

UTLA is the largest teachers union in Los Angeles and is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers union.

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