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.

Somewhere in the space between reluctance to commit and the sense of being too busy, I have found a million other things to do besides write to you.

But when I articulate for myself what this work is all about, I know: it is about being a conduit for God’s love. Which is unconditional, a form of grace, and has nothing to do with reluctance to commit, or being too busy, or the million ways in which we hide from one another and from Him. Her. It. Whichever pronouns suffice to point to that sense of Greater Than All Of This, Always. That’s what I mean when I say God. But theology is for another time. After all, this is my way of initiating (resurrecting?) “On My Mind,” which has lived on the website as the Rabbi’s Blog, and until now has been the landing spot for my sermons and teachings.

At first, it was a sense of priority: get to know several hundred families. That was the most important thing when I began two and a half years ago. I gave myself eighteen months. (If you’ve never taken me up on my open office hours, it’s still a thing. Click here to schedule time together.) As I prepared for the High Holidays last summer, I had a plan: beginning with the new Torah cycle, I would share Torah weekly—maybe a video, maybe written, maybe both. (Would that the sermon was still that forum; I do hope that one day we will get to that place, where coming together weekly on Shabbat mornings will feel compelling and holy to more of you. It does to some of us already, and those I get to see each week—and even each morning, some of us, at daily minyan online—get what I mean. But I’ve come to realize—not without sadness—that for the rest of you I’m going to have to reach out beyond that medium.) So yes, I thought, I’ll do what many of my rabbinic colleagues do, and not only write a weekly d’var torah for services, but also create something that goes out to everyone and anyone who wants to read and/or watch it.

So, B’reshit. In the beginning. Those opening words of Torah, the first parasha, that first weekly reading of the Torah cycle. That’s where I thought I  would start, when this idea germinated last summer. Get through the High Holy Days, Sukkot, and then as we begin the Torah over again I’d be off and running. 

We read it on the morning of October 8.

War. At that point, a terrorist attack and hostages taken and the Jewish people shattered to its core. Israel not yet striking back, not yet mobilized to retrieve those taken, still counting the missing and the dead and unsure who was which. Those first weeks-turned-into-months tipping us over the edge from the comfort zone we’d been in to a discomfort zone of anxiety, fear, sadness, uncertainty, worry, grief, despair. The writing I’ve managed to send out since then has centered around all of this. Too much else to do, holding so many people with hurting hearts. Good thing we spent those eighteen months getting to know each other. 

But now it’s time to expand out. To go ahead and nourish us with Torah of all sorts. I’m not sure exactly what it will look like. Sometimes, it will be the weekly Torah reading; other times, it will be movies, or what’s on my mind with the kids or life in general. I don’t know yet. What I do know is that we need more Torah, more teaching, more wisdom, more spiritual succor. We crave it, now that the shock has taken root in our bones, the shock of this war and the resurgence of anti-Semitism; the shock of the culture of this country in this election cycle and culture-shift—but also the shocks and aftershocks to this congregation of a generational shift in leadership. 

Two and a half years into my tenure as your rabbi, there are still a million things that keep me from reaching out in this way. But if I push myself to articulate why I want to write to you at all, it is this:. Because I want to be in relationship with you. And in order to do that, we have to show up for one another.

So this is me trying a new way of showing up. In return, I hope you’ll try new ways, too. Because I love you, and God loves you, whatever that might mean to you. And if you don’t know, or are surprised to hear a rabbi saying those words which have come to sound Christian or just empty—well, good. That gives us something to talk about over our next cup of coffee, our next email exchange, the next time you push yourself to show up in this relationship with me, with Oheb, and with the Jewish people.

As many of you know, I served at a congregation in Ohio as an interim rabbi the year prior to joining Oheb Shalom. There I met Diana and Romi and their 12-year-old daughter. This was during the height of COVID, and I only met them once in person. Not because they were COVID-cautious, but because they did not believe it was real. In their objection to their sense of government interference with personal liberty, they also therefore refused to attend zoom programming and had pulled their daughter from school. Romi hung out in QAnon circles. You get the picture. Despite their political differences from the rest of the congregation, they were beloved and had many close friendships in the generally blue-leaning, progressive community.

Halfway through my time there, Diana was diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer. They did not trust the medical establishment and so treated her at home with herbal remedies. In the days and weeks that followed, one thing became super clear: no matter what, Romi and their daughter needed a community and they needed a rabbi. They needed me to show up and not care about their politics or ideas about medicine. The only thing that mattered was that Diana was dying. Romi and I spoke daily after Diana passed. As he worked through his grief, much of our conversations involved QAnon and other political ideas I did not share. It didn’t matter; Romi needed to talk, and my role was not his political advisor but his rabbi. Just a few months later, Romi died of a sudden heart attack. Because I’d stuck around, this suddenly orphaned 12-year-old had a rabbi, too. Her first zoom was the congregational shiva visit we organized for her to dial into, from her uncle’s home in another state. Her new life began surrounded by the community that loved her no matter what her parents’ politics had been.

Over the past weeks, since war broke out on October 7, my job has completely shifted. The pastoral care that had been focused entirely on people’s personal needs has become infused with anguish over what is going on now at the peoplehood level. For some, the anguish is about the hostages, the terror attack by Hamas, the IDF soldiers risking their lives to defend Israel. For others, the anguish is about the suffering in Gaza, the war being waged there, and a sense of rage and betrayal that Israel would cause such suffering. The overlay of the 400% rise in antisemitic attacks here in the US over the past five weeks – including a friend being shoved last night in a nearby town and called “f-ing Jew” – has many on edge, or over the edge. Our hearts hurt, our heads spin, many are anxious and afraid, and many don’t know what to do or think.

My job is not to judge anyone as right or wrong in our ideas about Israel or anything else. My job is to hold all of us in community and love. My sense of responsibility as a leader of the Jewish community does mean I stand publicly with Israel, where half of the world’s Jewish population lives, and a spot on earth that has been part of the Jewish story since the first chapters of Genesis. It does not mean, though, that my heart is closed. The images of the suffering and destruction in Gaza touch the deepest parts of our humanity and it is hard to know how to hold both – caring for Israel and caring for Palestinian life – in a way that has intellectual cogency. I’ve sat with many of you who are confused how to hold it all, how to care for Jews and Palestinians, how to get through the day without this taking over, how to feel and function.

For me, the work feels like it is about learning to hold multiple truths. Truths that are complete opposites, truths that don’t work together and logically can’t all be true. That is a feature of deep truth, that something and its opposite can both be true. For me, the work right now feels like it is about stretching my heart as big as it will go. I leave the political solution-izing to others.

We are a diverse group with lots of different ideas and feelings about Israel, as with everything else in Jewish life (and life life). We seem to love our pluralism in other areas – some of us keep kosher, some don’t; some pray every day, some don’t. We treasure our diversity in gender expression and sexuality, in the colors of our skin, in our marital statuses and neurotypes and in so many other ways. I hope we can treasure our political differences, too. I hope we are able to hold pluralism here with as much love as we do in other areas of our communal life. I hope that our sense of commitment to Jewish life and community trumps our need to feel right and to be with only people who agree with us. I hope we can create safe space for all of us to show up and feel that we all belong here at Oheb and in Jewish community. Because we do.

On Sunday morning, December 3, at 9:30 am, I will host a Listening Circle on Israel. This program, which will take the place of my regularly scheduled Sunday morning class,  will be a highly structured, facilitated gathering, designed to support participants in sharing from the heart, and will be appropriate for teens and adults. The goal is not to work towards common ground or any particular outcome, but rather to share, honor and listen to the authentic multiplicity of views that make up our community.

With a big heart, prayers for peace, and much love for all of us whose hearts are hurting and heads are spinning,