Matt Rosing

“For my house shall be a house of prayer for all people.”(Isaiah 56:5)

Every congregation wants to be seen as welcoming, and some of us put a lot of energy and attention into making sure that all who walk through our synagogue doors are greeted warmly and find their needs met. Nevertheless, it is terribly easy to overlook the diversity of human experience, to forget that everyone’s needs are not the same.

February is Jewish Disability Awareness Month, which comes to remind us of just this truth. Jewish Disability Awareness Month challenges us to adjust our thinking not only about how we welcome others, not only about the importance of accessible architecture in our meeting places and facilities. It also prompts us to consider how we carry ourselves through the world, how we relate to others, and how our assumptions can sometimes make the world a more difficult place for those among our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and loved ones, our friends and the strangers who travel through or settle down in our midst, who live with disability.  

Every congregation wishes to be seen as welcoming, and yet it has been, over the years, the complaint that I hear most often when talking with folks who have visited or are searching for a congregation. Under the best of circumstances, it can be intimidating to walk into a new place, to find a seat among strangers, to navigate a new culture. Will anyone greet me? Do I have the right book? Am I sitting in the right place?

Now, add a physical or cognitive disability into the mix.  What else contributes toward feeling welcome and included, a part of the community, or not? How easy is it to get in and out of the building? Can I navigate the sanctuary in my wheelchair or walker? What if I can’t hear well enough to follow the service? Or see well enough to read from the siddur (prayerbook)?  Are there appropriate restrooms in the building? Will I get funny looks if I need to pace the aisles during silent prayers? Or if I must remain seated when everyone else is standing?

One of the many reasons I feel so proud of this congregation is the way in which Temple Or Hadash makes serious business of welcoming every person who comes through our doors. We can, of course, do more, whether we sit on the board or are ourselves a new member.

Most of us will encounter some form of disability in our lifetime. Either we are born with it, we pass through it after an acute injury or illness, or we age into it. Our tradition commands us to advocate for one another, to “speak up for those who cannot speak” (Proverbs 31). We honor the divine spark in every soul: “Do not look at the container,” we read in Pirkei Avot, “but see what is in it.” And we remember that we are all one community, all bound up with each other’s fate: “Hinei ma tov u’ma na’im shevet achim gam yachad.  Behold how good and pleasant it is when all people live together as one”(Psalm 133). What can we do to make this vision come true, to make our congregation, and ultimately our world, a truly welcoming, inclusive place, a house of prayer for all people?

To learn more about Jewish Disability Awareness Month, about what we can do as individuals and in community, please visit https://rac.org/advocacy/issues/issuedr/.

gam zeh ya’avor,

Debra

On the Birthday of the Trees, the Trees Bring the Gifts

For one thing, tonight is Rosh Hodesh Shevat, the start of the month when we celebrate, exactly two weeks from tonight, Tu Bishevat, the new year of trees. As a rabbi, and especially as a rabbi who is blessed to hang out with Jews of all ages, Tu Bishevat is hard to miss. There are herb seeds and planting mix to order, stories to read, songs to learn, a Tu Bishevat seder to plan, tables to fill with the fruits of trees, the fruits of the trees of Israel in particular.

But how is it, by what spirit of genius does our sacred calendar know that this is exactly what we need at this time? How subtle our sages to recognize that—coming out of the festively-lit darkness of Hanukkah, out of the extended party that every culture manages to throw during the darkest time of the year, emerging into the cold, only dimly-growing light of these lengthening winter days (how subtly attentive of our forebears, to see that)—what our souls crave in the midst of this great freeze, with much of the natural world in suspended animation, is the promise of new life, reminders of the smell and feel and taste of a world still some weeks or months off, a world bursting with warmth and color, where all the land shimmers with the soft green of infant vegetation? How nimbly our tradition seems to know just how to provide it, transforming this moment of provoking dormancy in nature into a threshold barely containing the possibilities brimming at its verge: everything born after this day is new fruit of a new year.

And, after all, in the beginning, that’s all Tu Bishevat was. A day for accounting, for re-setting the annual calculation and collection of tithes, the 10 percent due from each Israelite to the priests in the Temple in Jerusalem. A day for accounting the age of trees, too, and for calculating when a tree is mature enough to be harvested. With the destruction of the Temple and the beginning of exile and diaspora, these practices were largely lost. But slowly, over the course of time, a fuller meaning emerged for Tu Bishevat. Now it encompasses everything from the Kabbalists’ mystical model of trees as agents of unification for the divine presence, which shattered into countless shards at the moment of the world’s creation; to the 2000-year longing of the Jewish people in exile for Israel and its flowers, its fruits; to the reclamation and resettlement of Israel by the early Zionist chalutzim, the pioneers, much of which manifested itself as re-forestation projects that continue to this day.

For me, the true wisdom of Tu Bishevat lies back on that threshold I mentioned a few minutes ago. Its liminal, neither-here-nor-there quality, combined with the clear expectation that the natural world, and we with it, will soon step over, move forward, grants us both an opportunity for reflection and a challenge to action. This is our time to coolly assess where we are without despairing over what we have lost.

And we have lost a lot, as we always do, every year, and perhaps this year, more: to the fires and the floods, and the ineluctable tides of time. Sentimental objects and sidelined opportunities and souls, oh, the souls! Lost to our own families, to the families of service-men and –women who continue to die in decade-old wars; souls lost to gun violence, and vehicular accidents, and the list could go on and on. We, as a society, tolerate these losses, because it seems impossible to make the changes that would be necessary to prevent many of these losses.

As a society, we wreak this carnage with our own hands—as if the impersonal progress of virus, bacteria, cancer cells, or natural disaster weren’t already killing enough of us for our liking—and most of the time we manage not to think about it.

But then it is January. It is Tevet, and the Hanukkah candles have become a flickering memory, or it is Shevat, and the cold, scattered glare of mid-winter days falls mercilessly on us all, like daggers, and we are forced to see who we are and what we have done. And, lest we go mad, or despair, neither of which Jewish tradition encourages, we crave the shelter, the grace, the embrace, the return of trees in full flower. Trees return to us what we have lost.

As I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about trees.

One of my family’s cats died on Sunday, quite suddenly, though he was very old. The children had questions, of course, unanswerable questions, and as we planned to bury poor old Shep in the backyard, I thought, we need to plant a tree. Sheppie’s body will make fertile the ground to nourish a tree, and so the tree gives Sheppie back to us, in a different and wonderful form. We haven’t picked out our tree yet, but we will soon, and the girls are comforted.

Why do we so love to plant trees? Memorial trees, celebratory trees, honorary trees. Trees for shelter, trees for shade, trees for fruit. Trees, as Robert Frost has taught us, for swinging. Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin writes, rhetorically: “Try to imagine paradise without trees.” Why do we love trees so?

There are practical reasons. Trees take one of the primary waste products of human life and activity, carbon dioxide, and return it to us as oxygen, one of the necessary requirements for human life.  Trees drain swamps, control mosquitoes and flooding, stabilize soil, filter and maintain groundwater. Organizations such as Sustainable Harvest and Trees for the Future have planted millions of trees around the world, providing work and wealth, food and other resources in deforested, impoverished communities around the world that had neither.  (These organizations, by the way—working for economic justice, dignity, and freedom for people around the globe—are linked in their efforts with those who fight modern slavery by working toward fair trade practices in the chocolate or tomato industries.)

But there’s more. According to the website for Million Trees LA, Research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference (AAAS) in Chicago has showed that the presence of trees could cut crime by as much as 7%. And researchers from the University of Illinois concluded that trees have the potential to reduce social service budgets, decrease police calls for domestic violence, strengthen urban communities, and decrease the incidence of child abuse. Their research showed an 85% drop in the incidents of parents threatening their children with guns or knives in publicly subsidized housing projects when trees were part of the landscape, compared against projects surrounded by a landscape barren of trees. It makes me think we all need to start planting many more trees.

We have spiritual and figurative motivations for our love of trees, as well. Rooted securely in the ground, with branches brushing the very heavens, we envy trees their obvious place in the world and, simultaneously, their transcendence of the world. From branches to roots they span the distance between heaven and earth, forming a living bridge that we may climb to another realm of being. “It is a tree of life, to those who hold it fast,” we say of our Torah, our source of wisdom, “and all who cling to it will find happiness.”

One of the nicest (if not necessarily the truest) compliments I have ever received was to be compared, spiritually, to an overflowing cup, always giving, always full. How do I do it? My flatterer asked. Setting aside for a moment how my husband or children might answer this question, the first thing that came to mind in response to the image of the overflowing cup was the way in which a tree generates its own energy from the environment around it: sunlight, available water, air.  How do I do it? How do any of us do it? How do we go on every day, still working, still giving, still loving, in a challenging, painful world?

This time of year, when troubles both domestic and international, both physical and metaphysical, threaten to drain us with their stark, unavoidable persistence—like an ugly building you only notice after all the leaves fall from the surrounding trees, and then you see nothing else—we must plant, or make plans to plant, trees. We must celebrate our trees, as this jewel of a holiday, Tu Bishevat commands us to. And we must be like the trees, still living, still growing inside our diminished winter form, always refueling itself, finding nourishment and grace and freely bestowing our gifts, even in harsh conditions.

“If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone says to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah.” So taught Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, in Avot d’Rebbe Natan 31b.

Perhaps it is the planting of trees, in the earth, and in ourselves, that will bring redemption.

I have been thinking a lot about trees.

Rabbi Debra Kassoff
Temple Or Hadash
Fort Collins, Colorado
Rosh Hodesh Shevat: January 11, 2013

Sunday late afternoon, the gathering dusk taking into its arms the it the last moments of the eighth day of Hanukkah, I found myself sitting in a spacious room in Denver’s Mizel Museum, surrounded by a riot of Jewish artifacts, old photographs, the light of a ner tamid winking at me from above an enormous, colorful ark. It was the end of Hanukkah, the end of a full weekend. And all of us, you may recall, were still reeling from the unspeakable news out of Newtown, Connecticut.

I was fortunate that afternoon to have found my way to a Jewish meditation group practice, 90 minutes of a little learning and a healthy helping of silence. It was just what I needed. What can we say in the face of such tragedy? God wept with us that weekend.

Our teacher, Rabbi Stephen Booth-Nadav, set up his Hanukkiah (Hanukkah menorah), filled it with candles, and without blessing—we had already blessed the eighth night lights the previous evening—lit them all. “For eight days we have received the gift of this miraculous light,” he began. “But now the Hanukkah lights are going out, and we must consider how we will carry that light forward, out into the world.” He instructed us to meditate, as we watched the candles burn down, fading with the day itself, upon how we might now become sources of light ourselves, living Hanukkiyot, walking through the world spreading light to those who need it, particularly the grieving parents, schoolchildren, and citizens of Newtown.

Rabbi Booth-Nadav spoke about the single small jar of pure oil the Maccabees found in the defiled temple, how it looked like it would only burn for a single day, but instead it kept the Temple lamps burning for eight days, long enough for more oil to be made. “What if each one of us had eight times as much potential, eight times as much energy and light, than we realize?”

In the aftermath of tragedy, there is sometimes little to say, but much to do. We must work to ensure that the hurting, lonely, and scared among us get the attention and care they need before it’s too late. We should take a serious look at the cost to our society of allowing free access to automatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

The problems are immense, and our light seems so small. But we know the miracle of Hanukkah: the victory of the weak over the strong and the few over the many. We are eight times more powerful than we realize. “Not by might and not by power but by spirit,” the prophet proclaimed, shall we realize our dreams of a just and peaceful society.

As the memory of the candles’ warm glow recedes in the cold glare of January, a new secular year, let us recall our strength, put the light of Hanukkah dedication to work in our own world.

I will keep you all apprised of my own efforts to be the Hanukkah lights in 2013, and I hope you will do the same. Perhaps soon there will be congregational actions to report. Try one, or more, of the following actions, and be the light in our world:

• Buy only fair trade and/or organic chocolate and coffee to minimize the chance that you are consuming the fruits of slave labor.

• Purchase as much food as possible locally, and find out as much as you can about the production chain of the meat, eggs, milk, and produce you buy.

• Pay a visit to your grocery store manager to share your concerns about slave labor in your food. Click here for a sample letter to leave behind.

• Learn more about the problem of slavery and human trafficking here.

• Join one of the many organizations working toward, or sign on to a petition like this one advocating for, sensible gun control laws. Call or write to President Obama and your federal and state representatives to tell them how you feel.

• Join with the National Alliance for Mental Illness (nami.org) to advocate for better funding for public mental health care, and for access to care for all who are suffering mental illness.

At the start of 2013, as we emerge from the stunned silence of tragedy and injustice, may our actions speak louder than any words, and may our dedication to healing and justice in our world carry our efforts farther than we could.

gam zeh ya’avor,

Debra