12/13/2023 02:05:41 PM
A final word on Chanukah as we light the seventh and eighth lights. Chanukah has as many facets as there are ways to spell its name. I’ve touched on a few of them over the course of the holiday. In last week’s Dispatch, I wrote about lighting a light for each part of our identity and dispelling the darkness of misunderstanding. In South San Francisco, Mayor James Coleman and I spoke about Chanukah’s gestures of hope, lighting the Temple’s menorah against all odds of success, and in our practice today, progressively adding light despite the days getting shorter. On Shabbat, I taught how if candles are already burning, one must extinguish and relight them to fulfill the mitzvah of lighting the Chanukah candles; one cannot take credit for the beautiful flames without lighting and blessing them oneself (or with a group). What else do we take pride in or credit for, when we only enjoyed the result? The candles don’t light themselves. So, too, do we need to intentionally kindle the flames of community-building, justice and charity work, and being there for one another.
Today, we near the end of Chanukah, and its lovely, flickering spell is fading. But there is one more teaching to carry us forward through the darkness of December. Elana Stein Hain recently wrote in The Times of Israel, “We tell the story of Hanukkah, in our liturgy and in our songs and in the rituals we use to celebrate the holiday, as the decisive end of a frightening conflict: the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and the Temple is rededicated with Divine imprimatur. But that is not the full picture of how Hanukkah was experienced in its day: alongside the joy and triumph, there was loss, uncertainty, and ongoing strife.” The rededication of the Temple was not the end of the war, and the victory did not last the Jews forever. The Jews were not even a united people in that time. But rather than letting history ruin a good story, let it deepen the resonance of this holiday. As Hain writes, “As we continue to navigate the messy middle of today’s conflict, may the more complex aspects of Hanukkah and its aftermath inspire within us the hope and faith we need to persevere as a people.”
That hope and faith will be rekindled again this weekend, as we host Dr. Keren McGinity and Dr. Laura Yares for our Shabbat of Jewish Learning. Another contemporary teacher, Rabbi Dr. Joshua Kulp, reflects, “Part of the function of scholarship is to make people a little bit less certain about the truth of their own narratives.” Drs. McGinity and Yares will open us up to new narratives and learning on topics close to our hearts: interfaith families and youth education. Both speakers are engaging, insightful, and wonderful to spend time with, and I cannot wait to join together in learning from this Shabbat. Happy Chanukah, and soon, Shabbat shalom!
12/06/2023 06:30:20 PM
Tomorrow night we will light the first Chanukah candle, the little light that will grow each night, stubbornly dispelling the December darkness.
The kabbalistic tradition says that each holiday is a workshop for the soul. Let us take these eight nights of Chanukah to honor different parts of our soul. We honor our Jewishness, we honor our interfaith-ness, we honor our gender or sexuality, we honor the family we came from, and we honor the people we choose to become our family. Each night, let’s shed new light on a different part of ourselves.
Let us dispel the darkness with pride, putting our chanukiot in our windows, coming together for candlelighting in South San Francisco on Thursday and at Am Tikvah on Friday and Saturday. Our flickering flame, the very symbol of Am Tikvah, symbolizes our hope, our unity, and our beautiful Jewish joy. Happy Chanukah!
11/29/2023 03:01:39 PM
The reach of the Israel-Gaza War has returned to me repeatedly over the last few days. On Saturday, three Palestinian college students were shot while walking and chatting. Hisham Awartani, one of the students who attends Brown University, might not walk again. We have no tolerance for acts of violence inflicted upon people for simply being who they are. Then on Monday, the Oakland City Council held a six-hour hearing in which community members repeated such allegations as Israel staged the October 7 massacre and Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, a rabbi currently traveling in Israel told me, “The whole country has PTSD. I have no idea what can happen next.”
These dark times continue, but the temporary ceasefire that has brought hostages home and aid to Gazan IDPs (internally displaced persons) - has brought light amidst the darkness. That light is so important. The light that we kindle now, that we allow in and let it warm our spirits - that light will linger, brightening tomorrow too.
Midrash says that Hanukkah’s spiritual origins long precede the Maccabees: Adam and Eve were terrified by the slowly darkening days. But when finally the light started returning, they were so joyful that they celebrated for eight days straight.
Amidst the dark parts of the world, we will also celebrate. On Sunday, we’ll have our annual Chanukah Fair, with booths selling crafts and art, latkes and lentil stew, music, a raffle, and an activity center for kids! Thank you to the fair organizer Terry Levy and everyone who has helped by volunteering (and if you’d like to volunteer, you can still sign up). Chanukah starts on the evening of December 7, and we will gather for community candelighting, dinner, and Israeli dancing on Saturday, December 9.
The following weekend (December 15-16), we will follow Hanukkah with a Jewish Learning Shabbat. On Friday, December 15, we’ll bring back Friday Night Feast with Dr. Keren McGinity, the Conservative movement’s leader and champion of interfaith inclusion, who will study how interfaith relationships have been represented in pop culture with a particular focus on gender dynamics. Then on Saturday, December 16, Dr. Laura Yares will present the findings of her new book on the history of Jewish Sunday schools. They are both engaging, brilliant speakers and I am excited to bring them to Am Tikvah!
Last but not least, I need your input. I am planning to make Saturday Torah study hybrid (rather than Zoom-only), and opening a conversation on the timing: whether it should stay in the morning, before Shabbat services, or move to the afternoon following kiddush lunch. Please submit your thoughts and opinions here [link to survey]. Thank you in advance for your input, and see you on Sunday at the Chanukah Fair!
11/25/2023 03:28:40 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on November 22, 2023.
“I feel like now, when I look out at the congregation, I’ll feel more connected.”
These words make me so happy. They were spoken off-handedly, as we walked down the hotel hallway on Sunday morning of our Am Tikvah Retreat, but they were one of the most memorable things I heard all weekend. I have a privileged position in the community; I get to see and get to know many of you, but I realize that you might not always get to know each other beyond the set groups of friends or services-goers or religious school parents. The retreat brought fifty of us together across those gaps and the result was magical. [Note: If you weren’t able to go this year, keep it in mind next year, and if the barrier was financial, come talk to me and we’ll figure it out.]
On Shabbat morning, I spoke about how Jacob’s name forecasted his wiliness in stealing his brother’s birthright and blessing, but how our name, Am Tikvah, “People of Hope,” also predicted our optimism and commitment to hope and unity. I felt that hope and unity as we concluded our retreat, and my personal hope is that we will turn our learning into action. We learned what makes a ritual: it must be done with intentionality, have an indescribable factor, have symbolic value that goes beyond the practical, and must evolve over time to suit new people and contexts. Rituals get stronger through repetition, but if repetition leads to roteness then the ritual has become a habit or a tradition.
This weekend, we will participate in many rituals, both national and personal. All of our Thanksgiving rituals can be connected, in some way, to gratitude - if nothing else, we try to be grateful for some aspect of the moment. Alan Morinis, a leader in modern Mussar (the Jewish practice of self-improvement), writes that Judaism asks each person to be sameach b’chelko, happy with their portion, because, “If you are happy with your portion, you can live sanely within your means and according to your true and deepest priorities.” (With Heart in Mind, p. 146) Gratitude and appreciation for everything life has to offer - the blessings, the hidden blessings, the challenges and the growth - helps us live lives permeated by our values. May we, this Thanksgiving, find gratitude and contentment, and, as the Passover Haggadah says, may all who are hungry come eat.
11/25/2023 03:25:04 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on November 15, 2023.
Yesterday, on Rosh Chodesh Kislev (the beginning of the Hebrew month of Kislev), some Jews got together on the National Mall. Not just a few, in fact - the organizers say that they had expected 60,000 attendees, but the final count was approximately 290,000! If one assumed that all attendees were Jewish, then the March for Israel was attended by almost 4% of the U.S. Jewish population. As a friend commented, “Am Yisrael is very chai!” (The people of Israel very much alive!)
After weeks of grief and anxiety, it was such a mechayeh, such a life-giving thing, to see so much of the extended Jewish community come together. It reminded me of a Talmudic story about Rabbi Yochanan, who was so beautiful that he could heal people with the light that radiated from his skin. But even Rabbi Yochanan could not heal his own wounds, because, as the Talmud says, “a prisoner cannot free themselves from captivity.” We must lift each other’s spirits and bring light to our community wherever they may be, and yesterday I felt and saw that life-giving light of togetherness.
The month of Kislev is the darkest of the year, so we make an extra effort to bring light. We’re gathering this weekend for our retreat in Half Moon Bay, and if you’ve been on the fence, you can still come! Call the office at (415) 586-8833. We’re going to have great activities for kids around creating ritual items, trivia and a song session on Saturday night, and lots of great learning with Rabbis Hillary and Daniel Chorny, who are thoughtful teachers and each a gem in their own right. We have a great group going already, and even if you only come for one day, it will be worth it.
I want to highlight one other mechayeh coming up: as many of you know, my brother Gabriel is a cantorial student, and he’s local this fall. I am excited to share that he will join me on the bimah on Friday, November 24, and we’re going to make this all-in-the-family service one for our Am Tikvah family: we’re moving the services time up (just for that evening) to 5 pm to make it more accessible for young families, and we encourage you to bring some vegetarian Thanksgiving food to share together afterward.
Whether you come with your family or come on your own, I hope these next two weeks will bring light to your life. Chodesh tov and Am Yisrael Chai!
11/25/2023 03:24:13 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on November 8, 2023.
Last Shabbat, I shared the wisdom of one of our community members and teachers, Anna Bleviss Whitlatch, who taught the families at Mincha Family Shabbat how we see an increase in compassion from the story of Noah's flood to the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Noah's story, the world has become sinful and God wipes the slate clean. But by Abraham's time, Abraham successfully bargains God down: "If you can find 50 innocent people in the cities, will you still destroy them? How about 45? 40?" ... All the way down to 10. I challenged us to expand our compassion, to hold it and grow it. This can be especially difficult if we are feeling threatened or emotionally drained; it forces us to make space in our lives and to refill our cups enough to be our better selves.
This week, I'm thinking about the careful balance between justice and compassion. Sometimes, they seem like opposites. In a popular midrash (Genesis Rabbah 12), a king had a set of beautiful, carefully crafted glasses. "If I pour hot water into them, they will shatter," he thought to himself, "But if I pour very cold water into them, they will crack." So the king mixed the hot and cold water, and thus the glasses held. The story is an allegory for God's creation of the world: "If I create the world with only compassion," God thought, "it will be filled with sin. But if I create it with only justice, how could such a world endure?" So God created a world in which we hold both a sense of justice and a sense of compassion; the two seeming opposites are actually a complementary pair.
What we lack divine instruction for, though, is in what measures to hold both justice and compassion. There is no divine algorithm for every situation. It is upon each of us to divine the balance for ourselves, in each situation that we might face. I hope that this next week, as feel your sense of justice or your sense of compassion rising, you remember to do the holy work of uplifting both.
11/25/2023 03:21:55 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on November 1, 2023.
The war in Israel continues, and though I hope that soon my messages will be able to address lighter topics, the recent rise in antisemitism and conversations around it are heavy on my mind this week.
One of the hard things about antisemitism is that its very nature makes it hard to discuss. Antisemitism hinges upon the believe that Jews have power, even (and especially) when that power is not apparent. Thus, it becomes extremely hard to acknowledge points of power and privilege that Jews might have, because that acknowledgment seems to erase the other side of the coin; Jewish vulnerability is eliminated from the conversation.
Antisemitism touches the current discourse around the Israel-Hamas War on many levels, including debates over the validity and scope of Israel's response, the lack of media acknowledgment of rockets that continue to fall on Israel, and the rhetoric of colonialism. I want us to be able to be able to identify this hurtful and problematic language. (Here is a good resource from the JCRC that can help.) However, I do not want us to fall into a false binary, i.e., either Israel can respond to Hamas' attack or can have a ceasefire; either Jews have full ownership of the land or have none; either Jewish lives or Palestinian lives matter; etc.
Periods of such pain heighten threats, antisemitism, and extreme rhetoric. Let us not respond with similar absolutism, but with the thoughtful, moral voice of our people. To paraphrase Rabbi Sharon Brous, "We've lost so much. Let's not lose our minds too."
11/25/2023 03:19:10 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on October 25, 2023.
This week I’m thinking about the extensive reach of our community. I heard it in the stories that emerged during our Israel Havdalah and open community hour last weekend - how connected many of us are to the people and land of Israel. I’m also thinking about it as many of our members depart for Spain and Portugal to learn about the Jewish history there with Rabbi Emeritus Danny Gottlieb and Ricki Weintraub.
An old Jewish tradition says that if you travel to do a mitzvah, you will travel safely. I am so glad that you are going to do the mitzvah of preserving our people’s story. We can’t wait to hear from you and learn from you when you get back. Nesiya tova, have a good journey!
11/25/2023 03:16:40 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on October 18, 2023.
Many people are familiar with the Jewish stages of grief that start with the week of shiva, move on to the month of shloshim, the eleven months of saying kaddish, and then the ritual of observing the yahrzeit, the annual anniversary of passing. But before all these stages, there is a period called aninut, between death and burial. During aninut, the family of the deceased are released from all obligations except for preparing for the funeral and burial. All their physical needs are taken care of by their community. They are allowed to feel whatever they might feel, and one does not greet them with, "How are you doing?" Because how could they answer that?
Last week, the global Jewish community sat in a collective state of aninut. We were in shock, and the only thing we could do was express that shock and come together. Now we might still hold that sense of shock and grief, but it is complicated by the layers of anxiety, concern, and the dissonance with the continuation of our daily lives. Though our feelings might be less acute, we must continue to navigate this new stage together, in community. I look forward to coming together this weekend in community, and if you would like to speak with me one on one, my door is always open.
11/25/2023 02:10:10 PM
NOTE: Originally emailed on October 11, 2023.
On Yom Kippur morning, I spoke about Israel. I expressed my sense that we are part of one big, complicated family, with relationships that endure forever. I feel that sense of family more strongly than ever. Many of us are experiencing shock, pain, and grief over the daily heartbreaking stories from Israel.
As we face such horror this week and in the weeks to come, remember that we each hold this situation in different ways and react differently in different moments. We must lean into the solace of community, the opportunities to help, and our own methods of self-care. We will continue planning ways to come together to care for one another, and remember that you can reach out to me to talk (rabbi@amtikvah.org). I encourage you to donate to American Friends of Magen David Adom, SFJCF Emergency Fund, and the New Israel Fund Emergency Action Plan, and we will inform you of new ways to contribute as the situation evolves. And please, avoid the most horrific images and videos; some of these are tools of psychological terrorism, and as Jews we try to preserve the kavod, the honor, of those who have fallen victim to horrific atrocities. Finally, if you feel the dissonance between your daily life and the agony on your screen, remember that the living must go on living, and the war will be long. Let us cultivate the care and strength that we will need.
You are invited to join a day of communal fasting with congregations around the world in response to the war in Israel. Fasting together connects our physical and spiritual experiences of this moment and creates space for prayer and action. For more information, click here.
With prayers for peace and safety,
Rabbi Chayva
