Midway Jewish Center
Going Strong Since 1953
THE CYBERSHUL

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This CyberShul has been dedicated by:

No One This Week, But Just Think…
A Bar/t Mitzvah, Baby Naming, Brit, Wedding, Anniversary, Promotion—
Honor a Loved One with a CyberShul Shalom! They’ll Love It!!

The Six Extra Restrictions of Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur is a day much like Shabbat, though in place of Shabbat joy, the mood is more reserved. All the Shabbat restrictions apply to Yom Kippur—no lighting fires, no writing, no arts & crafts, no transferring objects from one domain to the next (except within one’s own home), no cooking and so forth.

But in addition, there are six other prohibitions. They are:
—no eating
—no drinking
—no leather shoes
—no bathing
—no sexual relations
—no anointing (go light on cosmetics)

There are also some things that we ought to do:
—be confident that God will forgive you
—pray with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might
—utter no negative comments about another person all day long
—memorize one verse from the Mahzor (prayer book)
—wish everyone a very warm Gemar Tov [= Finish the Holiday Well]
—say something kind to each member of your family

This Week’s Torah Reading

Vayelekh

At the age of 120, Moses admits that his time is running out. Though he will not cross the Jordan with the people, Joshua will lead them as directed by God. The Jews will encounter resistance by the indigenous peoples there, but the Lord will deliver them into the Israelite hands. Moses addresses Joshua with words of encouragement, writes down some teachings and gives them to the kohaNIM (priests). He instructs all of Israel to hear the words in full once every seven years during Sukkot, the Festival of Booths. God speaks to Moses and Joshua and predicts the infidelity of the Israelites. But God teaches them a poem, which will explain the meaning of suffering. Why do they suffer? Because they have betrayed God. The poem will appear in the next paraSHAT hashaVU’ah, Ha’aZInu. Moses wrote down the appropriate teachings and charged the Levites to keep it next to the Ark of the Covenant (which contained the Ten Commandments).

A Shabbat Thought

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

~~ George Bernard Shaw ~~

WEB OF THE WEEK

http://www.whoshalllive.com/video.html

B’rosh Hashanah Yikateivun,
On Rosh Hashanah it is Written, and on Yom Kippur it is Sealed… 

FEDERATIONS CAN STILL HELP HURRICANE-HIT COMMUNITIES

Since Hurricane Ike ravaged the Gulf Coast of Texas and beyond, staff and volunteer members of UJC’s Emergency Committee have remained in daily contact with the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston to monitor emerging and continued needs.

UJC’s Emergency Committee has been assessing the storm’s impact with Lee Wunsch, president and chief executive officer of the Houston federation, and the federation’s emergency response team, as well as with Network community leaders. UJC and federation officials have been coordinating the disaster relief with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, national, state and local relief agencies, and national Jewish groups and religious movements.

Though UJC and the federations have helped a great deal, through storm preparation and response planning and through initial fundraising across the system, much work remains to be done in the Jewish community and beyond. Synagogues and entire neighborhoods suffered physical damage to buildings and more than 30 percent of the Houston area remains without power. Many people need aid for basic needs such as food and housing, and kosher food is needed for Shabbat and upcoming holidays.

UJC urges North America's 157 Jewish federations and 400 Network communities to participate in the UJC Hurricane Relief fund or to open their own relief efforts for the disaster and forward those funds to the continental relief effort. As with the UJC/Federation response to Hurricane Katrina, which raised nearly $30 million, 100 percent of the new funds will help support both the Jewish and general communities. To donate to the UJC Hurricane Relief Fund, please click here. 

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THIS WEEK’S CYBERSHUL OFFERS TO YOU RABBI BURTON VISOTZKY’S ROSH HASHANAH SERMON

Rabbi Visotzky is the Nathan and Janet Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and leader of our Parallel Minyan over the Yamim Nora’im 

I have a Christian friend who is married to a Jew. This particular friend is active in her Church and is a writer about psychology and religion. She has written books about Seeking God and about spiritual leadership. Because of those books, she knows an assortment of religious figures – from Buddhist monks, to Rabbi Adin Steinsalz, the modern Talmud commentator. She’s been to schul with me and sung Had Gadya at my Seder. We’ve studied Torah together. My point is simple – my Christian friend knows and understands Jews and Judaism.

And yet – every now and again she pulls me up short by saying something which marks the difference between us. Mostly this happens when she kvetches to me about her aging mother. She says things like: My mom called me today and told me she was talking with Jesus this morning and he told her….Or she’d say, My mom was talking with Jesus about my children and he told her to tell me…..

Now I want to be clear: my friend was always complaining about the CONTENT of Jesus’ message, never, never ever the mere fact that her mom seemed to commune with Jesus on a daily basis – right there at home!! Every time I heard these reports I would think the same thing: Jesus? Jesus! The experience of such an intimate relationship with God was so alien to me that it bordered on the strange, very strange. But my friend didn’t think it weird at all. She knew plenty of people who experienced God every day. Indeed, this friend is not the only one among my Christian colleagues who experiences God in this way.

I come from Litvak stock – my blood-lines are pure Misnaged – which means I am inclined to intellectualize my Jewish practice. I am trained as a Jewish academic, which means I have a lot of experience THINKING about God. I am thoroughly comfortable with the IDEA of God and I confess that I am somewhat envious of my Christian colleagues’ easy ability to experience God. Maybe this is a difference between Christianity and Judaism – after all, Christians see God as human; while Jews (at least since Maimonides almost 900 years ago) imagine God as Wholly Other, transcendent, disembodied, ineffable. But maybe it’s not just a divide between Judaism and Christianity – maybe it’s the difference between Litvak, academic Jewish approaches to thinking about God, and Chassidic emotionalist approaches to experiencing God. What the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (himself an Apter Chassid) called "Radical Amazement.

I know that there are many among us who are, in fact, skeptical even about the existence of God. So why might you want a God experience if you’re not even sure there IS a God? I would address this as an existential question – we ALL want our lives to have meaning – and to feel there is something larger than ourselves that offers us that meaning.

The issue of experiencing God as I’ve just characterized it is one which I care about, which I struggle with, which I find myself putting front and center more and more often. So it is all the more astonishing for me to tell you that this past Spring, after a long, long period of wandering in the wilderness, parched for even a drop of God experience, I had three moments that I think are worth sharing with you today – for they offer possibilities for standing in God’s Presence.

I start with an experience that happened last May 17^th – and it will come as no surprise to those of you who have heard me speak here during the last seven years, that this experience took place while I was on vacation. My wife and I were in Berlin for Shabbat and I had been invited by Rabbi Gesa Ederberg to give the Dvar Torah at the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue. That schul was built in 1866 and was the largest synagogue in Germany. It was damaged by the Nazis on Kristalnacht in 1938 and then destroyed by allied bombs in 1943. In 1958, it was totally leveled by the East German communist government. Only in 1995 was it partially restored, and then as a museum and community center. Near the top of the building there is a chapel for services each Shabbat for the 100 or so Berlin Jews who pray there.

I was in Berlin that Shabbat courtesy of my wife, Sandy, who had a lawyers’ convention there. Due to the influx of lawyers in Berlin, there were a large number of visitors in the Berlin synagogue. Rabbi Ederberg led the service in German and in English, and I was prepared to give my Dvar Torah in English. But neither I nor any of the other visitors were prepared for what happened in that German synagogue in Berlin when it came time to read Torah. As we all sang Ki Mitzion and the Rabbi opened the ark, suddenly there were a dozen or so children under the age of six standing on the Bimah. They had come in from the hallway, where they had been quietly playing. For the German membership, it was simply another mundane ark opening. But for those of us who were visitors, it was like witnessing a miracle. There before our eyes were German Jewish children in a historic Berlin schul, engaged in the sacred activity of taking the Torah from the ark. Who ever thought that we would witness the resurrection of that once great congregation? For us it was like watching Isaac, bound on the altar – an Isaac bound and slaughtered 6 million times – and now young Isaac stood before us sweetly singing along with the Torah service. As we read in today’s/tomorrow’s Torah reading, "On the mount of the Lord there is a vision."

My second experience of the divine took place the very next day. On Sunday my wife and I "rose up early in the morning," went to the Hauptbahnhof, and took the Inter-City Express to Leipzig. That city has been around for 1,000 years, and notably was the home to the East German Secret police (Stasi) during the cold war. There is a Stasi museum in Leipzig which recounts those horrible days when neighbor turned in neighbor to the repressive government. But it was Sunday, and Sandy and I were visiting Leipzig to go to Church. The church has been there since the 12^th century. Martin Luther preached in the Thomaskirche in 1539. It continues to be a Lutheran church to this day. But we went because from 1723 to 1750 the cantor, or music director, of the Thomaskirche was Johann Sebastian Bach. We wanted to sit in the pews of Bach’s church and hear his divine music.

That Sunday the church was celebrating the "confirmation" of those who had been members of the congregation for 50 years or more. We were surprised to see over a hundred seniors file up to be recognized. But we, along with hundreds of other tourists were utterly transported when the service began at 9:30 sharp with a Bach prelude played on the church organ. It was followed a bit later by a Bach cantata, sung by the visiting Monteverdi Choir from Munich. Sandy and I left after the cantata, before they offered the Eucharist – we came to listen to Bach – whose face, by the way, was right up there in the stained glass window just above the organ in the church.

We are blessed here at Midway with Cantor Bensimhon and Cantor Rhodes. We are blessed with a long Jewish liturgical tradition. As a Layvi, I am proud that my lineage dates back to the Levites who sang Psalms on the steps of the Jerusalem Temple. But it is no insult to any of that music to pay tribute to the sublime magnificence of Bach. To explain the profound effect of listening to Bach in his own Church, I turn again to our teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel,

"Music is more than just expressiveness. It is rather a reaching out toward a realm that lies beyond the reach of verbal propositions… Listening to great music is a shattering experience, throwing the soul into an encounter … which the mind can never relate itself adequately … Music leads us to the threshold of repentance, of unbearable realization of our own vanity and of the terrible relevance of God." (Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom, "The Vocation of the Cantor, pp. 245-246)

My third experience of God took place in New York City last April – a month before my Berlin vacation. Yet even here I had to travel away from home to have this God-filled moment – in fact, I had to travel all the way across Central Park to the East Side! Once again, I had been invited to offer words of Torah in a sanctuary – but this was a new experience for me – for the sanctuary where I was to preach was the 96^th Street Mosque. I am friendly with the Imam of that Mosque and I had invited him to speak to JTS students at a Minchah service. So my colleague reciprocated and invited me to preach in his magnificent Mosque. The building is one of the most striking buildings in Manhattan, an architectural gem erected between 1989-1996. I went to the Mosque for the Friday service accompanied by a minyan of Jews. Men and women sat separately (the women sat in the balcony behind a Mehitzah, as it were). The other men were asked to sit at the back of the sanctuary. The Imam asked me to join him in the prayer line, where he whispered to me, "You don’t have to bow." And so, I stood erect as the assembled Muslims prayed to Allah and the Imam offered one of the warmest sermons on the value of brotherhood I have ever heard. When he called on me, I stood before the 900-1000 Muslims present, people ranging from lily white to dark chocolate, people from the U.S., from Arab countries, from Indonesia (where the Imam comes from), and from everywhere in between. People who were CEO’s, cab-drivers, school teachers, professors, shop keepers, you name it.

I preached on Jewish Muslim relations, which for the vast majority of our history have been good -- far, far better than they are now. I spoke about a social action project that my JTS colleagues are doing with members of the Mosque – joining together to work side by side to feed the hungry at a soup kitchen at the local Church! When I finished I was mobbed by delighted Muslims who wished to pay their respects, to voice their appreciation for my coming, to say Amen to my words. One Muslim asked me point blank, "Why did you come here?" My answer to him was simple, "Because we are neighbors."

For all that I was deeply moved by the brotherhood displayed and the incredibly warm reception they gave me, it was another moment that gave me a glimpse of the divine. Many of you know that when Muslims pray they drop to their knees and then bow by leaning forward until their forehead touches the ground. This posture reenacts their ancestor Ishmael’s prostration before Allah when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son to Him. According to the Islamic understanding, the submission of Abraham and Ishmael to God was the founding moment of Islam – the word itself means submission. Seeing almost 1,000 people drop to their knees and bow until their heads touched the ground was a supremely powerful moment. To be so humble before God, to submit one’s self to something greater – this was a truly religious experience.

During the summer, after I had reflected on my three experiences: the young German Jewish children at the ark in Berlin, the Muslims submitting during Friday prayer, and the intricate sublimity of Bach’s devotion, I spoke with a group of rabbis about my desire for divine encounter. When I confessed my envy of the apparent immediacy of the Christian encounter with God, my colleague Rabbi Marty Pasternak pointed to a difference: the Christian experience that my friend’s mother seems to have daily is a private devotional moment. We Jews, on the other hand, encounter God in community, much as we have been doing since we stood together at Sinai. Of course Rabbi Pasternak is right – our liturgy is regularly in the plural, even when we pray privately! For Jews, encountering God is most often a communal endeavor.

Yet to feel the encounter in our hearts, this must happen one person at a time.

Shabbat Shalom & Gemar hatimah Tovah—
May we all be sealed into the Book of Life for a New Year! 

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