I watched “The Bachelor” finale with my daughter this week. How emotionally intense it wanted to be! Daisy was brought to tears in one scene; after the commercial break, it was her rival Kelsey’s turn. We watched as Joey struggled with fierce emotion. How could he possibly decide between the two, knowing that he’d hurt one? Cue the violins. The clip of his tears on the beach was in every commercial and lead-up promo. I won’t spoil it beyond telling you that he chose one of them. And they all cried.

The other reality television phenomenon that happened this week was the opening of the Major League Baseball season. Which teams will shine, which players will rise to the top, who will win the pennant? (As I write, it’s Yankees 1, Astros 0, just saying.) The MLB changed the rules last year to give the game more action and a shorter run time; fandom was down in an era of ADD and penchant for speed. It worked; attendance rose by 10% last season and TV viewership was up, as well. Last weekend, though, as I was chatting with friends, they admitted they haven’t registered their kids for baseball because they don’t want to commit to a game that takes so long. “It’s so boring,” they said.

“This world is forever calling us to the surface of things with its drama, seduction, humor, and entertaining dilemmas,” Rabbi Shefa Gold has written. “Constantly bombarded with stimulation, we begin to rely on that stimulation to keep us from boredom and dreaded emptiness.” 

When I think about my own inner life – the life of the spirit – I wonder: is there a connection?

Is it possible that our aversion to boredom is somehow related to our yearning for more meaning in our daily lives? That our manic craving for emotional intensity (as in “The Bachelor”) keeps us “on the surface,” far from the hidden recesses of the soul?

Is avoiding boredom keeping us from achieving spiritual depth?

Speaking of things boring and emotionally flat, there’s this week’s parasha, Tzav (Leviticus chapters 6-8). For context: the concern of Leviticus is the sacrificial system of the Temple, the mainstay of Jewish worship for the 1,000 years in which the Temple cult operated in Jerusalem, as well as at other shrines for a thousand or so years prior. Within this system, there are lots of animals and foodstuffs offered on the altar at various times, for various reasons. But here’s the thing to notice, as we think about boredom and stimulation and all: the parasha opens with an all-night, every-night offering. This is the korban olah, or burnt offering. This means that the fire of the altar would be going all night. It would need tending. And in the morning, every morning, a mess of scorched ashes would need to be cleaned up. (Sort of like my kitchen. Didn’t we just clean up this mess??!!)

The daily clean-up, we read, was the job of the kohen (priest). First thing in the morning, every single day, the priest would move the ashes to the side of the altar. They were to stay there, next to the altar, where all the action of the sacrifices took place. Only once the pile became too large would the priest move it outside.

So wait. You mean to tell me that the priest, the one whose life is spent in devotion to God, is the one who does the boring drudge work?

Yes. Because our boring, daily acts of devotion are the key to our spiritual lives.

Brushing your teeth? Absolutely. Shlepping the kids to school? Yep. Laundry, errands, the dishes… What Tzav is telling us is this: don’t discount that stuff. Yes, it’s boring, but it, too, can be an offering.

Rabbi Dr. Erin Lieb Smokler writes:

“Every night, throughout the entire night, an animal would burn down to ashes on the altar, keeping the mishkan aglow continuously. Even during the depths of nighttime darkness, there was always a little devotional light flickering, ensuring that that hallowed space never ceased to be a place of active worship. “אֵשׁ תָּמִיד תּוּקַד עַל־הַמִּזְבֵּחַ לֹא תִכְבֶּה”– a fire burned incessantly on the altar, never extinguishing.

“The pious act of terumat ha-deshen, of shoveling the detritus of fiery consumption from the center of the altar to its side… moves the light [excitement, stimulation, satisfaction] from center stage to a more peripheral place, and then honors it there. The altar juxtaposes fire and ashes… Not to ignore, throw away, or deny those parts of ourselves that threaten passion, but to give them their place. If we can cultivate an excitement that acknowledges boredom; a commitment that allows for alienation; an enthusiasm that makes space for malaise, we just might find a more sustainable, more integrated way to keep our fires burning tamid, continuously…”

How might we each cultivate our offerings of drudgery and boredom? Daily life cannot consist of constant emotional fixation. We can’t always shorten the game or make it more exciting. We have to go to work, mow the lawn, and stand in line. We have chores that are dreary and obligations we resent. What blessing is hidden in each of these activities? What offering of gratitude, patience, or aspiration might we offer as we begin each one? Can we stand at the kitchen sink and offer up thanks for the food eaten, the running water, the use of our hands? Can we suffer through the super long meeting by composing silent blessings for each person in the room? What if we whisper a little prayer for patience when we feel boredom creep in?

When I pray in the mornings, or meditate, or exercise, or choose foods that conform to my Jewish eating practice – all mainstays of my spiritual life – I assure you that much of the time, it is mundane, routine… in other words, boring. But the effort of keeping the fire of a steady practice is itself a spiritual practice. We miss that when we rely on things to keep moving, entertain, keep us from feeling that boredom.

The Maggid of Mezerich was once asked how a person can sustain a passionate spiritual practice or connection to God. He responded, “He who needs fire should look in the ashes.” It might not make for riveting entertainment, but that boredom might contain the very sparks we seek.

My intention this week had been to keep it light. After all, we brought in the month of Adar this week, the month designated for mirth. How I wish that my phone had exploded with “Purim Torah” on Monday – jokes and silliness – instead of what crashed it: the news of an unfortunate antisemitic memo sent to the faculty of a local high school by an administrator. While Dr. Gilbert, the acting superintendent, quickly issued an appropriate response reiterating that there is no room for hate of any kind in this district or town, NBC covered the story and it is making the rounds in the broader community.

So much for telling a few jokes or wondering what’s up with Princess Kate.

I am deeply grateful to Dr. Gilbert for issuing his statement, and for taking the time to meet regularly these past months with me and a group of local Jewish parents and rabbis. So instead of focusing on the particulars of this school district or this incident, I’d like us to use it as an opportunity to go internal.

How does it feel to you right now to be Jewish, or part of the Jewish community? And how much of that response is shaped by what the non-Jewish world says about us?

Let me back up a bit. There are 15.9 million (with an m) Jews in the entire world. To contextualize, there are 2.3 billion (with a b) Christians, 1.9 billion (with a b) Muslims, and 1.2 billion (with a b) Hindus. Even the “unaffiliated” category listed in the World Population Review, from which I took these numbers, totals 1.2 billion (with a b).

My point: we are a teeny tiny minority. The entire Jewish community constitutes less than 0.2% of the world population. In the US, we are (at most) 2.4%.

This is confusing, because in the NYC metropolitan area it doesn’t feel that way.

And it is confusing, because when the majority culture has a story about a minority culture, the minority culture absorbs it as part of its own self-identity. The doll experiment is one classic example (YouTube video here if you don’t know what I’m talking about. It makes me cry every time.) So right now, with the war in Israel and Gaza bringing to the forefront classic antisemitic tropes in new clothing (genocide the new blood libel; oppressors the updated myth of Jewish power), in what ways have we internalized anti-semitism?

I want to be clear: we are a beautifully diverse community. Plenty of us are critical of Israel’s government and policies now and/or have been for years. That is not what I’m interested in here. Right now I’m curious about something else: how do the ways in which the majority culture speaks about the war affect how we feel about ourselves as a minority culture?

Ben M. Freeman has a few lenses for us to try on as we grapple with these questions. I heard him last week at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Never is Now Conference, and I’d like to share them with you now. I offer them as springboards for our inner work. He calls them the 3D Test of Internalized Anti-Semitism:

Diminishment: sometimes we make ourselves smaller, Jewishly. We change our names, or our noses. We say “I’m Jewish, but… I’m not religious” or “I’m Jewish, but not really Jewish.” In what ways do we distance ourselves from the stereotypes handed to us by the majority culture by diminishing our own Jewishness?

Denial: in past generations, this has meant conversion to other religions. In our day, you don’t need to convert out… you just opt out. “I’m Jewish, but it doesn’t really mean anything to me.” Or: “I love being Jewish, and I don’t need to join any organization to prove it. I do my own thing.” How do we hold our multiple commitments and identities, and in what ways does our independence stand at odds with proud belonging to a people?

Deployment: using our Jewish identities against the Jewish community. “I’m Jewish, and I stand against [insert here whatever part of the Jewish community makes you nuts].” Deployment is about using our Jewish identities as a weapon against other Jews, in order to make ourselves feel better, cooler, more accepted by the majority culture. In what ways do we subconsciously align with a majority culture which may have unwittingly abetted an internalized self-hate? 

These 3 lenses and the questions they raise are food for thought as we figure out how we hold our Jewish identities in this moment. I pose them in my continued insistence that our main job as humans on the planet right now is stretching our hearts as big as they will go. I pose them in my continued insistence that pluralism and diversity of opinions – including around Israel and how we hold the various aspects of our Jewish identities – is holy.

Part of our inner work as a minority community is to encourage in ourselves and our children a sense of pride in who we are. No matter what the government of Israel says or does, no matter how we relate to Zionism, and no matter what people here in the US convey to us about ourselves. Even as a tiny minority, the Jewish contribution to world civilization has been, and continues to be, tremendous. May we each be blessed with the courage to grapple with our own sense of self, our multiple identities and commitments, and emerge with a self-love and self-image that enables us to go into the world with our heads held high and our hearts ready to give, to love, and to shine.