Rabbi’s Grater’s Sermons

Examining Peace, Remembering Rabin — J-Street Reflections

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 20:00:25 -0800

November 4, 1995, was a Saturday. We were living in Jerusalem at the time during my rabbinical school year in Israel. After making Havdalah, we were sitting around our apartment, talking, reading and relaxing. Around 10pm, our phone rang, which was odd because nobody ever called us. It was the days before cell phones and the internet was spotty in our apartment. I answered the phone and found my buddy from California on the other end. “Did you hear? Is your TV on?” To begin with, this particular friend was known in our circle as the one who always had information first, and he prided himself on that fact. This one took the cake! From 10,000 miles away, he was the first to tell me that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been shot at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, which was just an hour away. We quickly turned on our small, portable television and began to try to decipher the fast-talking, emotion-laden Hebrew of the newscaster, as we watched live video of the tragedy. I will never forget that night, beginning with the shaken newscaster announcing that Rabin was dead, and the next three days, where Israel came to a halt, silence falling over the normally frenetic energy pulsing through the country. Those three days, which included waiting in silence with millions of others to walk past Rabin’s casket lying in state, and watching the world leaders, including Arab leaders who had never been in Israel, land at Ben Gurion airport for the funeral, changed my life. The pain, the tears, the silence, the fear and the hope: all were swirling around me. President Clinton and King Hussein gave historic and emotionally searing eulogies for Rabin. This past Wednesday was fourteen years since that fateful night when a Jewish extremist gunned down one of Israel’s founding fathers. My experience with working for Middle East peace didn’t begin with that fateful night. It began a few months earlier, during the first week we were in Israel.

Wandering around the Old City, Franci and I saw a flier for a free tour of Hebron. Not having any real experience in Israel, not having grown up in a Zionist household or synagogue, I was pretty unaware of the biblical, historical and political history of Israel. This tour was my first lesson, and it was a hard one. We showed up for the tour early the next morning and found ourselves on a small bus with about twenty other folks. It was not until we got to Hebron, and were met by our tour guide, that the education began. Our leader was a rabbi and he was armed with an M16 rifle and a pistol, for our protection. It quickly became clear, even without much prior knowledge, that we were being led on an extremist tour, for our guide began the day by standing in the middle of the Arab marketplace in Hebron and yelling, at the top of his lungs, about how filthy the Arabs were, that they were animals and then, raising his gun and pointing it at the back of a merchant who had just passed by, said we need to shoot them before they shoot us. Then he laughed, and so did many in the group. The day didn’t get much better. We were trapped with this group, which included about ten baby-faced boys, probably 18-19 years old, who had just arrived from the States and were studying with this rabbi. The day came to an apex when, after visiting a settler family and hearing how God commanded us to be in all of this land, we were brought before the statue of Baruch Goldstein, a hero in this community. If you remember, Goldstein was the Jewish doctor from Brooklyn who had made aliyah and entered a mosque in Hebron on Purim a few years earlier and shot twenty-nine Palestinians to death while they prayed. It was here that I lost it and began to argue with one of these young men. He proceeded to remind me that in the Torah that week we read about Pinchas, the Biblical hero who, in his zeal and passion for God, had killed two people engaged in public sexual immorality. Goldstein was Pinchas and I was not a true Jew if I didn’t believe that, he screamed. We had to be separated and the guide tried to calm us all down for the rest of the trip. Finally, after twlelve hours, this nightmare ended and we returned to Jerusalem. I was shaken and angry. What had just happened? I never saw those people or that rabbi again, but their message has driven me every day since to work for peace.

I tell you these stories because they are the indelible shards of life that propelled me onto a path dedicated in large part to making peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That summer saw the ramp-up to Rabin’s assassination, with Jerusalem covered in posters showing Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform, dressed as an Arab, with hateful rhetoric and rallies taking place every Friday. Sadly, fourteen years later, without another leader to fill his enormous shoes, and after coming painfully close in 2000, we continue to find peace eluding us. The tenacity of Yitzhak Rabin, his ability to transform himself from general to diplomat, inspires those of us working to keep his dream alive.

While my experiences in Israel during 1995 and subsequent trips have propelled my work for peace, my grounding and sustainability come from the Torah and our tradition. From the prophets of Israel, who call for justice, peace, equity and compassion, to this week’s parsha, Va’era, where Abraham argues with God for the plight of innocents in Sodom and Gomorrah, our people know what it means to stand up to authority, even God. We know what it means to seriously analyze situations and question outcomes; we know what it means to ask questions and challenges assumptions. We do this, not out of spite or revenge, but out of our genuine love of God, Torah and Israel. From this place, I went to the J-Street conference, a gathering of pro-Israel, pro-peace activists, and I sought to learn, listen, speak and engage. For those that have not heard of J-Street, I urge you to read my bulletin article this month, as I wrote about my feelings before going to the conference and gave the history of its founding just eighteen months ago. By all measures, the conference was a wild success. One thousand registered and fifteen hundred attended. The media was well-represented. All the sessions I attended, and the ones I heard about, were all at a high-level intellectually, and provided a diverse range of opinions. There were heated conversations in the hallways and corridors in between sessions. There were over 250 college students representing 78 campuses, which was the most exciting for me, as the campus is where we need to have knowledgeable, articulate, pro-Israel, pro-peace voices to counter both the right, who say that Israel is under siege without any recognition of its actions in the conflict, and the left, who say that Israel is the pariah and shouldn’t exist. Both of these extremes are counterproductive and unhealthy, whether on campus, in our synagogues, in our press or in our conversations. J-Street sought to present a middle path, a moderate path, one that supports, loves and stands with Israel, while also asking hard questions about some of the policies of the government, primarily maintaining the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Jews have the right and responsibility to speak out, from a place of respect and concern, and the conference sought to give us a place to do this in a safe, pro-Israel environment.

We heard from major voices in Israel, Palestine and in America, including a highlight for me, General James Jones, current National Security Advisor to President Obama. One hundred and eighty members of Congress cosponsored our Gala Dinner and over 40 came in person, including Representatives and Senators. The keynote speaker of the dinner was former Senator Chuck Hagel, who articulated a message of strong support of Israel, financially and militarily, while also saying that making peace with the Palestinians is crucial for Israel’s future and the peace prospects of the region. Both General Jones and Senator Hagel said that ending the occupation and reaching final status agreements with the Palestinians would be the most effective tool in dealing with Iran. That was a huge statement, in my mind, for how diplomacy and engagement for peace will be more effective than any military action. This was coming from a general and a decorated Marine, not two peaceniks with flowers in their hair. There was a feeling of authenticity for the position of peace, a feeling that has long been absent in the discourse of our community. To me, that was the greatest success of the J-Street conference.

While there was a great feeling of energy and strength, there were some areas for improvement. I was not alone in feeling that a stronger sense of Jewishness was needed throughout the conference. While I know that J-Street is trying to reach out to a broad swath of the American Jewish community, and to a lesser extent, the non-Jewish community, the secular nature of the three days left me feeling a bit alienated as a rabbi and Jewish leader. There were over 50 rabbis in attendance, and while we had two small panel sessions and two private lunches, which were very moving, we didn’t play a major role in any of the plenaries or significantly attended sessions. One of the reasons that J-Street has recently merged with Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, effective January 1, is for the incredible Rabbinic Cabinet that we have formed, enlisting over one thousand rabbis around the country. I hope we are better utilized next year. In addition, there were no blessings, invocations, benedictions or words of Torah as part of the flow of the conference, let alone any organized minyans (that I knew of) or other distinctly Jewish rituals. The one rabbi who spoke as part of the Gala dinner, under the heading of “kavannah,” just gave another speech. It was a good speech, but not what I would call a kavannah. As one of my colleagues noted, there was not the denominational diversity that you might hope to see in a pro-Israel conference, namely that the Jews in attendance were mostly progressive, liberal or secular. We need to do a better job reaching out to the moderates in the Conservative and Orthodox movements. Of the fifty rabbis, I believe that there were only six Conservative rabbis, and only two of us were in pulpits. Lastly, and perhaps most disturbing, the group in attendance seemed hesitant to applaud and stand up for strong pro-Israel lines in the speeches we heard. This will need to change as we go forward. We can empathize and call for justice in Gaza and for Palestinians, but we must also stand loudly and proudly for Israel and her safety and security. I was disturbed by some of the silences I heard and know that they play into the misperceptions that J-Street followers are not truly pro-Israel.

Despite the drawbacks, which can be overcome and improved upon, J-Street launched onto the Washington scene with a bang. My hope is that our message, that Jews have a wide range of opinions on how to support and love Israel, and that there is not one, monolithic voice speaking for all of us, will spread from the halls of Congress, where I was one of six hundred people lobbying on the last day of the conference, to the streets, synagogues, JCCs and communities of our country, offering another voice to this important discussion. I spoke on a panel of rabbis and shared my experience of growing into this conversation, making mistakes over the years, and learning from those mistakes to bring me to PJTC ready to lead by both speaking my mind and listening to others, by sharing my perspective and allowing other views to be heard. The legacy of our Torah portion this week, both that of Abraham standing for justice and the relationship between Sarah, Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, need to inform our path as we go forward. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and executive director of J-Street, reminded us repeatedly at the conference: being pro-Israel doesn’t require us being anti-something. To water the seeds of peace, we need to recognize the humanity on all sides of this conflict and work to create a framework of peace that acknowledges the truths of two distinct narratives without disregarding the pains of the other. This needs to happen on both sides, to be sure, but as Jews, we are responsible for each other and our voice. I was extremely proud to be at the conference and hope that many more folks from PJTC join me next year.

I close in honor of Yitzhak Rabin, and share some of his final words, delivered at the peace rally, November 4, 1995.

Permit me to say that I am deeply moved. I wish to thank each and every one of you, who have come here today to take a stand against violence and for peace.
I was a military man for 27 years. I fought so long as there was no chance for peace. I believe that there is now a chance for peace, a great chance. We must take advantage of it for the sake of those standing here, and for those who are not here -- and they are many.
I have always believed that the majority of the people want peace and are ready to take risks for peace. In coming here today, you demonstrate, together with many others who did not come, that the people truly desire peace and oppose violence. Violence erodes the basis of Israeli democracy. It must be condemned and isolated. This is not the way of the State of Israel.
But, more than anything, in the more than three years of this Government's existence, the Israeli people has proven that it is possible to make peace, that peace opens the door to a better economy and society; that peace is not just a prayer. Peace is first of all in our prayers, but it is also the aspiration of the Jewish people, a genuine aspiration for peace.
This is a course which is fraught with difficulties and pain. For Israel, there is no path that is without pain. But the path of peace is preferable to the path of war.
This rally must send a message to the Israeli people, to the Jewish people around the world, to the many people in the Arab world, and indeed to the entire world, that the Israeli people want peace, support peace. For this, I thank you.

May the memory of Prime Minister Rabin be for a blessing and may our work for peace reflect the tireless spirit of his legacy.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom, aleinu v’al kol yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tavel, v’imru amen.

Noah and Climate Change

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:00:27 -0700

I have been wondering lately, “If the earth could talk to us, in our language, what would it be saying? If animals could talk to us in our language, what would they be saying?” As humans, we take pride in our ability to communicate, dialogue and assess issues that face us. I wonder if animals get together, out in the depths of the forests and say, “Man, what are we going to do about these humans? How are we supposed to live with all of this mess that they are creating? Maybe we should revolt? Send the elephants and horses into cities, swarm them with bees? Maybe get the pigeons to hover over large areas until we get some change?” They probably don’t do this, I know, but I kind of wish they could and would. Concerning our earth, and the challenges we face, our human voices often are not heard and I feel that we need a more radical and aggressive approach to the urgency of global climate change and all that comes with it. So, if I am not going to get herds of wild beasts holding a sit-in at coal refineries, then I guess we will need to go with something else!

In synagogues around the world this week, we read Parshat Noach, the story of Noah and the flood, and in congregations around the country, many rabbis are choosing to speak on the issue of climate change and human responsibility, relating this modern devastation to the primordial devastation we read about in the Torah. The story of the flood is a well-known epic, teaching us about the destruction and recreation of the Earth by God, with the help of Noah and his family. We read in the Torah that the reason for the flood was the fact that “the earth was filled with violence.” (Gen. 6:11) Many of us, I imagine, understand this to mean that people were killing each other in rampant fashion, and indeed, many of the midrashim on these verses indicate the belief that the earth was filled with murder, theft, sexual immoralities and other depravities. However, one intriguing d’var torah I read this week, from the American Jewish World Service, introduced me to other midrashim, commentaries and stories, that speak more potently to us today as we face the possibility of a human induced “flood.”

In the Jerusalem Talmud, it states that, “If a countryman brought a basket of vegetables to market, they would edge up to it, one after the other, and abstract a bit, each in itself of petty value.” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Bava Metzia 4:2) In discussing this midrash, the author of the d’var torah, Daniel Bloom, raises the point that one might assume if people were taking small amounts of food from each other, this must have been a time of great scarcity and lack. However, in a stunning piece from Louis Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews, we learn the exact opposite. This period, according to the rabbis’ imagination, was one of great plenty and abundance. The abundance made people contemptuous and rude, and they showed no respect for one another. They stole the little bits others had, even though their harvest would yield enough food for forty years. Finally, we learn from Rashi, the great 11th century French commentator, that Noah took 120 years to build the ark, potentially hoping that people would hear his message of impending doom and repent. The coming of the flood was a slow moving process by God. Bloom’s conclusion, one that I share, is threefold: the cumulative effect of small, individual acts was causing crisis; there was an abundance of resources preceding the coming of the flood; and this was a slow-moving destruction.

When I look at my kids, who just turned eight, I pray that they will have a world to grow into that is habitable and sustainable. One of the great challenges we face today, in our modern, uber-technological world, is that of instant gratification versus the long view of history. Many of us want what we want right now, and if it is possible, then why shouldn’t we be able to have it? With this mindset, we often are not present to the idea that what we do today can and does affect what will be ten, twenty, a hundred years from now. The generation of “whatever” is doing great harm to the future of our existence. Think about littering, as an example. It was often said, “Oh, it is just one gum wrapper on the ground, whatever.” The answer we parents give is often, “Imagine if everyone in the world threw their gum wrappers on the ground, then what?” This mentality must apply to the bigger issues facing us, besides applying to the everyday issues of litter, recycling, turning off lights, inflating our tires, changing our bulbs, adjusting our thermostats, and all the other ways we, as individuals, can make a difference in our world. We need to apply this mentality to oil, food, construction, transportation and energy development. Along with grand visioning, we need some “small mind approach” to the big challenges we face. Otherwise, we can get overwhelmed and think nothing can be done. I know that I have given this sermon, in some form or another, at least three times in the past 6 years, but we need to hear it again. I need to hear it, you need to hear it, our world needs to hear it. Those who choose to say that we are not affecting the planet by our actions are shirking their responsibility as humans created in the image of God. If we believe that we are created b’tzelem elohim, in God’s image, then why don’t we think that we have the power to create and destroy? In this Torah portion, God promises Noah and the animals that God will never again destroy the planet because of us. We didn’t make the same promise. If we are to survive, it is time we make it.

I am grateful that the Jewish community is taking a leading role in addressing the issues of climate change and pushing us to talk about this, especially before the upcoming world meeting in Copenhagen. Hazon and other major Jewish institutions put out the call for this Shabbat, and they have organized a campaign called “The Jewish Climate Change Campaign.” I urge you to visit their website and sign the pledge. Together, with our small actions, we can make a difference for the good, inverting the small, greedy acts of our ancestors who brought on the flood. Together, by recognizing the abundance of resources we have and working to redistribute them in a fair and equitable way, urging our leaders to work on the global level as we organize on the individual and local level, we can make a difference for the good, not mimicking the generation of the flood and their petty, selfish ways. By listening to the voices of Noah today, those of Hazon, American Jewish World Service, The Shalom Center and the myriad other groups and leaders calling us to teshuvah and a change of behavior, we may just be able to avert another great disaster. God brought the destruction in the story of Noah; we are bringing the destruction in the story of today. May we heed the call of the wise, save ourselves, our planet, our future and give our children an inhabitable world. If that doesn’t start working, maybe someone should round up the elephants and pigeons and send them in!

Shabbat shalom.

Yom Kippur, 5770 — Positive Epidemics

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:00:02 -0700

Chances are if I say the word “yawn” to you now, many of you will yawn, including me. Yawn. Now, yawning is not exactly the best way to start a Yom Kippur sermon, but this little experiment is only one of the many examples given by Malcolm Gladwell, the brilliant thinker and author of The Tipping Point, one of his best selling books. In it, Gladwell chronicles events, episodes and trends that he describes as contagious or viral or in the most extreme language, epidemics. In writing about yawning, he says, “Yawning is incredibly contagious. I made some of you reading this yawn simply by writing the word ‘yawn.’ The people who yawned when they saw you yawn, meanwhile, were infected by the sight of you yawning — which is a second kind of contagion…And finally, if you yawned as you read this, did the thought cross your mind, however unconsciously and fleetingly, that you might be tired? Simply by writing or saying a word, I can plant a feeling in your head. Contagiousness, in other words, is an unexpected property in all kinds of things, and we have to remember that, if we are to recognize and diagnose epidemic change.” (Tipping Point, p. 10) When we think about epidemics, we often think of something negative, for that is what the word means. However the power of word, with its definition of “sudden, widespread occurrence of a particular phenomenon,” is inspiring me. You don’t often hear of an epidemic of happiness, or an epidemic of love going around. However, and this is Gladwell’s genius, the very same way that viruses and flues spread, and can turn quickly and massively into epidemics, so too can positive change in our society spread. I would like to posit this morning that we need some of these epidemics right now in our great nation, and there are three I am focusing on: an epidemic of compassion and gratitude, and epidemic of healthy food and an epidemic of civility. We are partners with God to create our world, and on Yom Kippur, we say over and over, “ki anu amecha, v’atah eloheinu, For we are Your people and You are our God.” God is waiting for us to act and so we must. Spiritual growth, working on our souls, should lead us to changed behavior in the world.

More than any other idea in the Torah, we read about treating the stranger with compassion and kindness, “ki gayreetem b’eretz mitzrayim,” for we know what it was like to be strangers in the land of Egypt. Thirty-nine times we read about this idea. Compassion, chesed, and gratitude, ho’da’ah, are cornerstones of our people and are the principles that God gave us to set up our societies here on earth. The famous midrash teaches us, “Just as God is gracious and compassionate, you too must be gracious and compassionate. Just as the Holy One is Faithful, you too must be faithful. Just as God is loving you too must be loving.” (Sifre, Ekev) So, in seeking an epidemic of compassion and gratitude, I am thinking about the birth of my children, born 8 weeks early and in the NICU for most of that time. Thank God we had health insurance because it cost over $300,000. What if we hadn’t? What if we were like the 40+ million Americans who live daily without access to healthcare? Is that compassionate? Does that exemplify a society of gratitude? This is clearly the American issue of our time, and this morning, while not wanting to wade into the details of policy, I want to say clearly that reforming our powerful but broken healthcare system in America is a moral issue and a very Jewish one at that. In a recent cover story in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, my teacher and friend, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, makes a cogent argument, based on Jewish legal sources, for why universal healthcare needs to be supported. He says, “The Jewish demand that everyone have access to health care does not necessarily mandate a particular form of delivery, such as socialized medicine or government-sponsored health insurance for those who cannot afford private plans. Any delivery system that provides basic needs will meet these Jewish standards.” Maimonides, the 12th century physician and greatest legal mind in all Jewish history, lists healthcare first on his list of the ten most important communal services that a city has to offer its residents. (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De’ot 4:23) Is it compassionate that we allow so many of our fellow citizens, including, I imagine, some sitting in this congregation, to live in fear of getting sick because they have no coverage? To be clear, we had health insurance for our birth, but we struggled mightily to pay the $800 a month premium. Many people are not so fortunate. Are we a grateful nation when we permit children to die of curable illness because their parents are out of work, or have been told they have been dropped from coverage? Are we compassionate when the number one cause of bankruptcy in America is health-related costs? Rabbi Dorff reminds us of some of the facts that we know, but for some reasons choose to ignore: “We Americans spend about 15 percent of the gross national product on health care; our Canadian, Western European and Israeli friends spend about half that — 8 percent. Yet their morbidity and mortality rates are much lower than ours. Yes, they give up some of their autonomy in their health care, but the vast majority of Americans have very little choice now. We get what our employer provides — no more, no less.” There is an epidemic of fear that is spreading around the country, fear that we will somehow ruin our nation’s healthcare if we finally figure out how to join every other wealthy and industrialized nation and insure all of our citizens. Healthcare is a right, not a privilege and that is what the Torah is here to remind us. Almost all self-governing Jewish communities throughout history set up systems to ensure all their citizens had access to healthcare. Rabbi Dorff sums it up when he says, “The fact, however, that more than 40 million Americans have no health insurance is, from a Jewish point of view, an intolerable dereliction of society’s moral duty.” I urge us all to let our representatives know if we support reforming our healthcare system to provide affordable coverage for all, and I invite all of us to an interfaith vigil I am spearheading on October 19 here in Pasadena. We have been praying these holy days, “Who shall live and who shall die?” It is high time, after decades of blockade, for reasons of fear and sadly, greed, that we answer this call and not let our citizens, especially our children, suffer or die unnecessarily. Ki anu amecha, v’atah eloheinu, We are Your People and You are our God.

So, if talking about healthcare didn’t agitate you, I might imagine that talking about food, healthy or not, on Yom Kippur will! We hear a great deal about epidemics of hunger, often taking place in Africa, but also closer to home, and we collect food, volunteer at soup kitchens and give tzedakkah to organizations like MAZON, American Jewish World Service and ONE. In this country, we have a pandemic of unhealthy, processed and deadly food production that we have come to accept as normal, and are spreading around the globe. My kids came home from a friend’s house recently and they had a gleam in their eyes. I asked what was so exciting. “Daddy,” they said, “we just had the most incredible thing and we want it at home.” “What is it?” I asked. “White bread!” they exclaimed. “Can we get that? It was delicious. Why is our bread always brown? We want white!” It is an uphill battle, to be sure. I am not only talking about McDonalds and all the fast food chains that are making too many of our children, especially the poorer ones, obese, as chronicled in books like Fast Food Nation, but also about the very way all of our food is produced. Not coincidentally, this is directly related to our healthcare issue. Our system is broken, in part, because we are not a healthy nation. We are not a healthy nation, in part, because we have allowed our food to become a multibillion dollar industry and we just eat whatever is in the store. On this holy day, when we refrain from eating, we need to not only think about the over one billion people who are hungry each day in the world, but we should be thinking about the kinds of food we put into our bodies on a daily basis. In Deuteronomy, we read the line “v’achalta, v’savatah, u’verachta, you shall eat, be satiated and you shall bless.” These three words are the basis of saying birkat hamazon, the prayers after we eat, and they are instructive. Eating is at the heart of what we do, except for today, and how we are satiated, and how we give thanks are moral issues in our tradition. I have been reading a great deal about food production and it has really made me think. We need an epidemic of concerned citizens regarding what we eat, how it is produced and what it is doing to our health. Ki anu amecha, v’atah eloheinu, We are Your people and You are our God.

From grocery stores to school cafeterias to fast food to 7-Eleven stores to everywhere we get our food, our disconnect from the land itself, from how and where the food comes from, is evident. In all fairness, I grew up on Apple Jacks, Ding Dongs, Tang and Carls Jr., so I am no purist! Yet, thankfully, after years of people in the so-called “food movement,” there is now a small but advancing group bringing better food to the table. Farmers markets are exploding all over the nation, home gardening is on the rise, including at the White House, and people like Michael Pollan, the author of most recently, In Defense of Food, are getting attention. We have a small garden in our home, and I can’t tell you the joy on our kids faces when a tomato ripens and they can pick it. Almost as big a smile as eating white bread! In a recent article I read, Pollan taught me about the works of authors Wendell Berry and Frances Moore Lappe, who since the late sixties and early seventies, have been writing and teaching about food sustainability and heath. These thinkers, says Pollan, are serious “dot connectors.” It was Lappe, in 1971, who published Diet for a Small Planet, which “linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment.” (The Nation, Sept. 21, 2009, p. 29) And clearly we didn’t listen! What would it take to have an epidemic of healthy food sweep our country? What would it take for us to care about and be informed about what we are eating? This is kashrut at the highest level! We must not only be concerned with separating milk and meat, buying food that is kosher, but we must go further, to what Rabbi Arthur Waskow has been calling “eco-kashrut,” for decades. It is why Jewish groups like Hazon, run by my friend Nigel Savage, have embarked on teaching food sustainability from a Torah perspective, holding their second annual food conference this winter in the Bay Area. Its why Sinai Temple in LA and other shuls now run a CSA. Pollan taught me Wendell Berry’s famous formulation, “eating is an agricultural act.” From our perspective, eating is a holy act, one preceded and followed by blessing God for the gift of the food. Today, it is not enough to bless whatever it is we are eating. Since Genesis, where we are commanded to be guardians and keepers of the earth, we have been getting further and further away from that link. This morning, I invite us to think about how we can return. I am no food expert, no super-organic, food growing farmer either, so I am speaking as much to myself as to all of you. It is an uphill battle, but one we must win. Awareness is key to progress. Ki anu amecha, v’atah eloheinu, For we are Your people, and You are our God.

Finally, I believe we need an epidemic of civility and respect in our country. Pirke Avot teaches, “Aizeh hu chacham? Halomed m’kol adam. Who is wise? The one who learns from all people.” Our tradition has a long history of debate, disagreement, known in Hebrew as machloket. We learn that a machloket l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven, is upheld. We are allowed to disagree — just ask anyone whose matzoh balls are better, my grandma’s or yours? However, recently in our nation, we have seen an outbreak of nastiness and ugliness that, sadly, is what makes for news these days. Why have we allowed rudeness and extreme behavior to not only be tolerated, but spread like a disease? From our athletes to our performers to our elected officials, at town halls and rallies, Americans are spouting hate and derision in the name of disagreement. We have witnessed temper tantrums at a national level. That is what they are, be it Serena Williams, Kanye West or Congressman Wilson — they are temper tantrums, and these folks should be sent to their rooms! They should not get book deals, be stars on cable and talk radio shows, and certainly not be lauded as any sort of heroes. We can disagree, we can get upset, we can feel mad, but as I am trying to teach my own children, how we feel doesn’t permit us to act in any manner we choose. Remember the book Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? These national and international figures need a few minutes with Mrs. Dinerman, my kids’ kindergarten teacher at WDS, to remind them how to behave!

We need an epidemic of civility, we need to redouble our efforts to teach our children respect, honor, kindness and goodness; we need to redouble our efforts to stand up for civil disagreement, without diminishing the other to being a racist, a moron or worse, a Nazi. Be it on healthcare, Israel, climate change or any other major issue. Our nation has given carte blanche to the bombastic voices of our media to dominate what we hear as news — we need to take that back, shut them off until we can return to an era of serious reporting. Do you think Walter Cronkite, of blessed memory, would even get a job today? Aizeh hu chacham? Halomed mi’kol adam. Let us reclaim the wisdom of our ancestors, who understood that to disagree is also to learn. An opportunity for holiness. Ki anu amecha, v’atah Eloheinu, For we are Your people and You are our God.

To those who ask, “How is this possible? How can we recapture a sense of compassion, kindness, health and civil discourse?” I close with the following proposal, thanks to my creative and dear friend Craig Taubman. On a walk we took a few weeks ago, he said something interesting. We were discussing the fact that Lance Armstrong, the famous cyclist, could send a message on Twitter and have 1,000 people show up the next morning to ride a few laps around Griffith Park with him. Craig proposed that we create something called Twittzes, which is a combination of Twitter, the social networking site, where people sign up and follow other people’s lives if they choose, and the tzizit, the holy fringes on our tallit. Normal people have their friends and a few others follow them on Twitter, mostly about nonsense, but some of the famous folks, like Armstrong and Oprah and Shaq and Al Gore, have over one million followers. So, Craig asked, what if those people decided to Tweet (that is verb for Twitter, as well as the sound a bird makes), that they were engaging in some serious tikkun olam, or following one of the many mitzvot to better our society? If they tweeted, “I am doing something kind for my neighbor today, and you should do the same.” “I am eating locally and you should do the same.” If one million people were doing that, some energy would be shifted in our cosmos. An epidemic of love might just spread, as quickly and hopefully as strongly, as H1N1. Not only that, we need a culture shift, and change in behavior, a tipping point. Will you join me in a commitment to talk in the carpool line about healthcare and what we can do? Will join me in a commitment to talk at the dinner table, starting tonight, about how we might eat in a more healthy and sustainable way? Will you join me in planting bigger gardens, at your house, in your neighborhood, maybe even here at the synagogue? Will you join me in saying blessings before and after we eat? Will you join me in not supporting news and media that is poisoning our culture and distracting our children from the values we cherish and believe in? As a community, we need to organize for the betterment of our future. Only twenty years ago, barely anyone used the internet and nobody had a cell phone. We can change. I hope twenty years from now, if not sooner, everyone in America has healthcare coverage, everyone in America is eating locally grown, healthy and sustainable food, and Americans are talking with civility and respect to one another. We can spread these epidemics of hope, Ken yehi ratzon! Ki anu amecha, v’atah eloheinu! God is waiting for us to act, and so we must. Our inner, personal teshuvah must lead to greater, more global teshuvah. Please wait till after break-the-fast to Tweet that! G’mar chatimah tovah, May we all be sealed for life and health.

Rosh Hashanah, First Day, 5770 — Agudah Achat

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:45:55 -0700

A recent exhibit at a Native American museum in Arizona featured works of mothers and daughters of the large Naranjo family, who, like their foremothers, tell family stories and pass on folklore through their pottery. “Pottery runs in our DNA,” says on of the potters. “Many pots of all types pass throughout our lives. Some made by ourselves, some by … other family members, neighbors or at times from another Pueblo. At the end of our lives, after death we have another pot. We begin and end with pottery.” And, as I read about this remarkable art work, I was reminded of a quote from Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who said that God created human beings in order to listen to their stories. These Native American women tell their stories on pieces clay. We Jews tell our stories too, on parchment, in books, in music, art, liturgy and dance. Yet, the clay metaphor resonates with me at this time of year as I think about our community.

Shaping and growing a community is holy and remarkable work, comparable, I believe, to the way clay is molded by a potter. Working together, sometimes kneading hard, sometimes gently caressing the edges to form delicate shapes, the artist and the clay are a team, similar to the piyyut “Ki Hiney Kachomer” that we will say on Kol Nidre, which uses the metaphor of God as the sculptor and humans as the clay. In our community, both you and I have the chance to be the artist and the clay. At different times, in various circumstances, you mold me or I mold you. As we gather now to begin 5770, I want to talk about the current form of the PJTC clay, as well as what I hope will be a stimulating vision for the clay of the San Gabriel Valley Jewish community as a whole. And here is my goal: I don’t want to be a leader as described in the Talmud, “When a leader lords over a community, the Holy One weeps everyday because of him.” (B.T. Hagiggah 5b) Rather, I will seek to be a leader in the spirit of another Talmudic passage, in the name of Rabbi Eleazar, who said, “Any leader who guides a community gently will merit guiding them in the world to come.” (B.T. Sanhedrin 92a) Wish me luck!

So…I think you all know the old joke. Man trapped on a desert island is finally rescued, his rescuers discover he’s built two buildings—one is the synagogue where he belongs and the other is the synagogue he wouldn’t step foot in. Our people has a colorful history of synagogue mishegas, and the San Gabriel Valley is no different. So, with the merger of PJTC and Congregation Shaarei Torah, we are starting a new and exciting chapter in our Jewish communal lives. We welcome all the members of CST who are now part of the PJTC family. This joining together is a huge change for all of us, yet I believe it is a blessing with many opportunities. We will need to get to know one another, listen to one another, learn from one another and mold our clays into one. We have physically grown, both in membership and facilities, and we will spiritual grow too, as we were awarded a small grant to have some unique prayer experiences this year because of the added space. Now we are not two communities, but one community with two campuses. There will be no “us” and “them,” but rather all of us together—we need to work hard to integrate the new folks, as we did with the Tujunga merger several years back. How we do this now, in the opening year, is crucial to our success. Let’s widen our vision so that we can attend events, services and programs at both sites without feeling that we are abandoning what we know and love. Of course, there is pain and sadness with the closing of CST, which I acknowledge and honor. There is also fear of the unknown. It is much easier to be pessimistic than optimistic. We must fight to overcome those feelings, for there is remarkable potential and exciting opportunity. I say Shecheyanu v’keeyamu for this holy moment.

With this merger, I believe now is the right time to talk about the wider community. PJTC has been uniquely fortunate to have both steady leadership and generous supporters, thereby enabling us to be strong and stable in a location where the Jewish community is relatively small. Despite the fact that the community is small, we have many facets—families with small children, families with teenagers, couples with no children, interfaith families, single people, retired people, religious people, secular people, gay and lesbian people, hawks, doves, liberals, conservatives, and people from all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum. As a Jewish community, we need to meet the needs of all these people, despite our small overall size and limited resources. So here is the crux of my message: One healthy synagogue does not a healthy community make; PJTC cannot exist in a Jewish vacuum. It is no secret that some of the San Gabriel Valley’s Jewish institutions are challenged to achieve their missions in a stable environment, and we already lost one of our day schools in recent years. A healthy, vibrant and stable Jewish community must have a plethora of Jewish institutions in order to be a true success. This morning, with the spirit of holiness that surrounds us, I ask this question: How can we be working together better with the other institutions in our valley? How can we be pooling our resources? This question extends from the macro—how can all our institutions, the synagogues, religious schools, Weizmann Day School, Federation, all be recruiting and fundraising effectively from a limited pool of local Jews?—to the micro—can we all be purchasing office supplies or health insurance collectively to save costs? There are many possibilities for collaboration, and we should not be threatened by this. Territorialism in a small Jewish community is deadly. We need to be able to work together toward our common end—a vibrant Jewish community in the San Gabriel Valley. The recent merger of PJTC and CST is an opportunity to explore not further mergers, but collaboration between our institutions so that we can all flourish.

Too often we are afraid to admit that all of our local institutions are vital to the community because we mistakenly believe that we are in competition with one another for recruits or dollars. There are enough students, congregants and dollars to go around. Whether we personally attend every Jewish institution in the San Gabriel Valley or not, if we do not as a community support them all, then doors will continue to close. In thinking about how to articulate this message, I have come to realize that we have more in common with Kingston, NY, the small town that I served for three years before coming to Pasadena, than we do with our neighbors in west LA or the San Fernando Valley—this is an isolated Jewish community that needs to be united and collaborative to move successfully into the future. Let’s open our doors to collaboration and cooperation, and let’s be the leaders in this effort. We are stronger when others are strong.

Just last Shabbat at our New Member weekend, we had an incredible Friday night service with many new young families, most moving here in the last two years from other parts of LA. Here is what they ask me: are there synagogues? Is there a day school? Is there a Jewish Federation? Are there kosher bakeries and butchers? Is there a JCC? Are there young families coming to shul? Are there people who are keeping Shabbat and holidays? I can answer, yes, we have synagogues, great religious schools, a fantastic day school, and an energized Jewish Federation. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a butcher, a JCC or a bakery—although I would like to propose to the business leaders in our community I think a high-quality kosher bakery could be profitable and attractive to the general community as well. As for the make-up of our religious community, and who comes to services on Shabbat and holidays, I have a story.

Once there was a king who had a magnificent aviary full of birds. Every beautiful bird in the world lived in his palace—except one. One day a traveler came to the king and told him of the most remarkable bird in the world. But, nobody could catch this bird, for not only was he beautiful, but he was extremely clever. “I will catch him!” said the king. “I know more about catching birds than anyone.” So, the king set off to try to catch this bird.

With all of his bird catching equipment in tow, he found the tree and scanned up to the top with his binoculars. Sure enough, there was the bird. “I am coming to get you birdie,” the king vowed. The bird looked down at the king and snickered. First, the king tried a huge lasso to catch the bird. But, the bird just hopped to the side and the rope came crashing down on the king’s head. The bird laughed. Next, the king tried his never-fail, trusty bird catching net. But, the bird just hopped to the side and the net came crashing down on the king’s head. Now the bird laughed even louder. So, the king took out his folding ladder and opened it and opened it and opened it until it reached to the very top of the tree. The king climbed up until he reached the top, and was standing face-to-face with the bird. “I’ve come to take you home with me!” The bird just shook his head and laughed. Then, something unexpected happened. The king started to sniffle and itch, and from deep within him came one huge sneeze. “Aaaachooooooooo!” He lost his balance and went tumbling down. The situation was so ridiculous that the king started to laugh in spite of himself. In fact, he was laughing so hard that he didn’t notice at first that the bird landed right next to him and started laughing too. “Hey,” the king said to the bird. “You are here, laughing with me.” “Of course I am,” said the bird. “This was too funny to let you laugh alone.” “But I tried to catch you.” the king said. “You can’t catch me!” said the bird. “I won’t let you catch me. But, if you ask me, I will be your friend.” “You will?” said the astonished king. “Will you live in my palace?” “Sure,” said the bird. “If you invite me, it would be my pleasure.” So the king invited the bird, the bird gladly moved in, and to this very day, the king and the bird laugh together. (adapted from Capturing the Moon, Rabbi Edward Feinstein, p. 121)

On this Rosh Hashanah, I want to try and learn from the bird and his message of invitation and laughter. After six years, you know I love and believe in the daily practice of Judaism, including Shabbat, saying blessings each day, studying Torah, supporting Israel, and working for justice here in Pasadena, in our nation and our world. Many of you participate in some or all of these Jewish components of our community. As your rabbi, I want more of you, but I am not the king, I am the bird! I don’t want to catch you, capture you, force you or bribe you. I invite you, with all my heart and soul, and I hope you will accept the invitation.

As for laughter, nothing makes me laugh more than children, both my own and all of your kids whom I have the privilege to teach and know, because their sense of joy and wonder at the world is infectious. When there is Torah learning infused with laughter, magic can happen. To me, there is no better place to laugh, and learn Judaism, than at Jewish summer camp. To the end of infusing our children’s clay with Torah-filled laughter, I am announcing this morning the establishment of a new special scholarship fund for kids to go to Jewish summer camp. Thanks to a generous anonymous donor, we now can help families with the cost of Jewish camps. I just spent a week at Camp Ramah in August, as rabbi in residence, with my whole family, and we had an amazing time. I grew up at Camp Ramah here in Ojai, spending almost a decade there as a camper and staff. It watered my roots as a Jew, giving me the tools to know my tradition and its rituals. After our community’s kids go to Gan Shalom, our local Jewish Federation day camp, and when they are ready for sleep-away camp, I want more of them to go to Ramah. Or Alonim. Or JCA Malibu. Or Tawanga in Yosemite. Or other Jewish sleep-away camps. With more PJTC kids in Jewish camps, learning, living and loving Judaism in a safe and transformative community for the summer, I believe the culture of our synagogue’s spiritual life may shift. Our USY youth groups will be stronger, maybe we could have a regular Family service or kids services on Shabbat morning, like many other synagogues our size, in addition to our great Tot Shabbat. We can’t know what it’s like until we try. I know I have said that a few…hundred times in the last six years. I hope to have some kids with me at Ramah next summer when I am there for my week or two as rabbi.

We enter this new year with great hopes, and what I hope are also great dreams. Let’s try to realize some dreams together. These are my dreams. What are your dreams? We just read in the Torah last week, “Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei adonai eloheichem, You stand today, all of you before Adonai your God.” I spoke last week of the need for all of us, from the youngest to the oldest, from the most knowledgeable to the beginner, from longtime members to brand new members, all of us need to stand up, to grasp a hold of our community and engage. The key is “hayom, today,” a clarion call of the Torah that each day, each moment is a chance for renewal and connection. Never mind yesterday, don’t wait for tomorrow. Hayom is about now. Make a mark this year on our Jewish pottery, step in a bit closer, stay a bit longer, come a bit more often, try something new, renew something old, take a risk, take a chance. Let’s unify our valley and continue strengthening and molding the clay of our Jewish community for the future. On his tribute album after 9/11, Bruce Springsteen sings about the brave men and women who went, “Into the Fire.” Fitting for us in this moment. I think these words can also apply to each of us, and to God. “May your strength give us strength, may your faith give us faith, may your hope give us hope, may your love give us love.” Our community is blessed, so blessed, in this time, and may God tread swiftly, humbly, boldly and lovingly along with us, glazing our clay with the fire of peace, as we journey together, one community, Agudah Achat.

Shana tovah!

Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5770 — Living a Life of Choice

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:00:24 -0700

Sometime during the past year, reading a remarkable little book, I subconsciously knew what this first sermon needed to be about. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how I would say it, or what would be result, but I was certain of the topic. If you have read the short memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you will know what I am talking about, to a certain extent, for each of us reads and interprets words in our own unique way. The book is remarkable not only for the content: short, witty and immensely deep chapters, but what is more important, it is remarkable because of how it came about. In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the forty-three year old editor of the French edition of Elle magazine, suffered a massive stroke that left him completely and permanently paralyzed, a rare victim of “locked-in syndrome.” This gregarious and talented man now found himself, after waking from a month-long coma, only able to communicate by blinking his left eye. The title describes the polarities he faced: a diving bell is the old helmet worn underwater, a helmet that is incredibly heavy and totally cuts a person off from the outside world, save for the small eye window. That became Bauby’s physical existence. His soul, his inner life, however, is described as a butterfly: free, soaring, alive and hopeful. Not without pain and sadness, to be sure, but alive nonetheless. Yet, in a world that values worth based on productivity, he was relegated useless as a human being. Bauby, who died two days after the memoir was published, became my teacher for this moment, inspiring me in a way that I didn’t expect. So, as I read the book, I knew that I needed to talk about what I learned from this memoir, and what I think is one of the more profound truths of being human, which is a central theme we are meant to explore during these holy days. Life is about choice; life is about moments of decision; life is about creating possibilities; life is about what we do with what we have been given; life is about how we react to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us this when he wrote, “…that what makes a human being human is not just the mechanical, biological, and psychological functioning, but the ability to make decisions constantly.” (Who Is Man? p. 9) Tonight, with thankfully more than just my left eye blinking, I hope to channel some of Bauby’s spirit and invite us to see life as a series of choices.

In a chapter called “Guardian Angel,” Bauby, writing about his speech therapist, says:

She is the one who set up the communication code without which I would be cut off from the world. But alas! While most of my friends have adopted the system, here at the hospital only Sandrine, the therapist, and another female psychologist, use it. So I usually have the skimpiest arsenal of facial expressions, winks and nods to ask people to shut the door, loosen the faucet, lower the volume on the TV or fluff up a pillow. I do not succeed every time. Like the [time] the heartless oaf switched off the Bordeaux-Munich soccer match at half-time, saying, “Good-night!” with a finality that left no hope of appeal. Quite apart from the practical drawbacks, this inability to communicate is somewhat wearing. Which explains the gratification I feel twice daily when my Sandrine knocks…The invisible and eternally imprisoning diving bell seems less oppressive. (p. 39-40)

In our wildest dreams, we can’t imagine what this condition, living in the world without means to communicate or participate, must be like. Yet, it is from the mind of this man, and the patience of those who sat and took the dictation of his memoir letter by letter as he blinked it out with only his left eye, that I learned the incredible lesson of choice in our lives. As human beings, we are the animals in God’s creation that can live with knowledge of our death, have the capacity to assess and refine our lives, and have the power of choice, the unique human trait of deciding what we will or won’t do in any given moment.

A funny aside that illustrates this point: My dog, a lovable 8-year-old standard poodle named Zuma, has Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland condition that also afflicted John F. Kennedy; it affects his entire system and is aggravated by stress. One of the side-effects of Addison’s is that my dog can only eat his prescription food and nothing else. If he does eat other stuff, it can really make him very sick, perhaps even cause death. Yet, to this day, and even still as an 8-year-old dog, if he can get into food when we are not home, he does. Just recently, after what I thought was a good job putting everything away, he found some energy bars in an unpacked shopping bag and ate four of them! In my frustration, I always ask myself, “Doesn’t he know that this will make him sick? Can’t he just take care of himself that way?” Of course, he can’t. He is a dog, and when a dog finds food, a dog will eat the food. There is no choice, no decision, no calculation of consequence. Home alone equals search for food and eat any food found. The movie Ratatouille illustrates this point—its a favorite in our house. A rat with a sense of taste and concern. Interesting midrash or silly kids movie?

Humans, on the other hand, lead much different lives, and yet we often act like my dog Zuma, not thinking that we have any choice, reacting purely out of our animal instinct rather than our rational human side. We often think that either we don’t have any choice (and the phrase, “Sorry, I have no choice but to…” reflects this misnomer), or the choice is not in our hands to make. To be fair, sometimes it isn’t. But, oftentimes, it is and this is the time of year to take stock of how we made choices this year, where we got stuck and where we went astray.

In a recent column, Rabbi David Wolpe addresses this very issue when he talks about the Garden of Eden and the creation of human beings. Rabbi Wolpe asks, “If God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree, why create the tree in the first place?” He answers, “One among many possible answers is: all real life is deciding. Wanting, weighing and choosing are the essence of being human.” Among the many theological issues that people raise with me in moments of crisis, the major one is often, “If God could stop evil from happening, why doesn’t God do it? If God could stop a person from committing a crime, why doesn’t God do it?” Be it the Holocaust, 9/11, a drunk driver or any other horrible human-caused evil, our greatest angst as humans is often how we can believe in a God who allows these things to happen. Yet, and this is the point of Rabbi Wolpe’s column, if God intervened in every moment to stop evil, we would not be human, we would be robots. He says, “God could have fashioned a garden without a tree. Eve and Adam would never have eaten and never have left. Eden would be their permanent, perfect address. It would have been a beautiful place to exist. But it would have been no place to live.” I love that line—it would have been a beautiful place to exist, but it would have been no place to live. Living in paradise but without freewill and choice would rob us of the true essence of being human. Making decisions, from the minutia of where to eat lunch to the grand choices of life, enables us to fulfill one of the richest calls in the Torah, in parshat Re’eh, “I place before you today a blessing and curse…” God gives us the opportunity to participate in creation by providing us the power of choice, the gift of decision making, the awesome responsibility of being a part of the master schema of our lives. We are not robots, we are not dogs, we are humans. At the end of our days, according to the Talmud, God will not ask us how much money did we make, how many sales did we complete, but rather, did we make good choices, wise choices in how we spent our time, conducted our business, loved our children, contributed to the betterment of our world. There are times when we want others to decide for us, or when we want an easy answer.

The literary critic Gilbert Highet quotes “…‘a wise man’ who said the Greeks’ greatest legacy to the world’s welfare was ‘on the one hand and on the other hand.’” The constant weighing of options can be maddening; after listening to his advisors offer him conflicting economic advice Harry Truman burst out in frustration, “Can someone get me a one handed economist!” Of course not. If there were one choice, one path, vitality would be drained from the world. The gift of possibility entails arguing, failing, reevaluating, feeling the constant frustrating yearning to do better. (Rabbi Wolpe, Off the Pulpit)

What moved me most about Bauby in the Diving Bell was his choice to keep living, even after being struck down to almost nothing. Like Victor Frankel before him, and Franz Rosenzweig before him, Bauby reminds us that no matter what the circumstances, no matter how horrible a turn our life takes, the greatest attribute of humanity is our ability to choose how we respond. We try to teach this to our children, even as we try to manage it ourselves. In this economic climate, in this time when our nation is facing some of the biggest questions about the kind of country we want to be, in this time when fragility and fear can be overwhelming, I invite us to come closer together as a community, as a human family, and to work together to make choices that benefit the greater good within us. Finding ways to not blame one another, which was one of the tragic responses in the Garden of Eden story, can lead us to making choices which will lift us up, raise our spirits, get us back on track. In this time when so much seems to be going sour, from money, to the climate to war to poverty to hunger to discrimination to obesity to depression, this season, with its primary text of Psalm 27, reminds us that hope can always spring eternal, that each rising sun, each shimmering moon, each passing breath, each moment, is a spark of divine holiness, a gift for us to choose wisely for ourselves. They can be cliches, or they can be inspirations to truly aspire toward. We choose whether to dull our senses to the wonder around us, or be open to the endless possibilities that are before us. Us, not God. We do it. Kaveh el adonai, hope in God, Who is hope. Remember, this hopeful God gave us the power to be partners in the creation of our lives, the sustainment of world. Before we can follow the timeless adage to choose wisely, we must remember that we can choose at all. In that choice, may we all find the butterflies to lift us out of whatever moment we find ourselves facing. Jean Bauby did it by blinking his left eye. How will you do it?