January 20, 2012 | 6:55 am

Lew The Jew

Posted by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

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Jack Lew, new White House Chief of Staff and President Obama

There was a time, not so long ago where the thought of a Jewish Chief of Staff to the President of the United States would have been a distant pipe dream for our community, or have confronted the ‘no room at the inn’ reality of The Gentlemen’s Agreement era.  But not anymore, its cool to be Jewish today (or at least cooler).  As has been widely reported Jack Lew becomes the fourth MOT (Member of the Tribe) to serve in this high post.  Ken Duberstein was the first MOT to serve at Chief of Staff under President Reagan.  Followed by Josh Bolton under President George W. Bush and of course Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s first Chief of Staff. 

Much has been made about the fact that Lew is a modern orthodox observant Jew and the question has come up, how will he observe the sabbath while performing the 24/7/365 duties of Chief of Staff to the President of the United States?  While the question is interesting in a Sandy Koufax not pitching on Yom Kippur kinda of way, what is more telling is the bright light it shines on shabbat observance in our modern world.

The issue is not what Jack Lew will do from 18 minutes Before Sunset Friday to Three Starts in the Sky on Saturday, but what do we do during that time?  Ok so maybe the Chief of Staff will have to make some accommodations, but what’s our excuse?  As Judith Shulevitz’ New York Times best selling book The Sabbath World made clear last year, we need a sabbath in our modern lives perhaps now more than ever.  As a progressive Jew I embrace the sanctity of shabbat, even if it does not quite fit halachic distinctions.  For me shabbat is zman kodesh (sacred time) and that is defined by time that is separated and elevated from everything else I do during the rest of the week.  So on shabbat I don’t do email - because I do it all week.  I try to be active and outside in nature to appreciate God’s blessing of a body and natural world.  I try to spend time with my family and be fully present when I do.  I call my parents, and as a Jew who finds spiritual renewal and growth in prayer I go to shul.

Like Mr Lew I too sometimes work on shabbat, as a Rabbi often the spiritual needs of my community supersede my own, where I may want a shabbas nap, others have an afternoon Bar Mitzvah, or shabbat dinner is sometimes rushed as I head off to shul to lead services instead of lingering with my family (or guests).  But I imagine like Mr Lew, I accept that trade off on two conditions.  (1) What I am doing is important and valuable to others and would find favor in G-d’s eyes, and (2) it truly is a trade off.  I am aware when my shabbas is not as I intended it and accept that as the exception not the rule.  The point being that you have to have a rule, boundaries to know when you have gone beyond them.  Tonight as Jack Lew celebrates Shabbat as Chief of Staff at home or in the Situation Room, my sense is that whatever he is doing will be important and valuable, worthy of G-d blessing - my suggestion is that we make sure we are always be able to say the same about our own sabbath observance.

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July 1, 2011 | 4:10 pm

Jewish Summer Camp - Not Just for Kids

Posted by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

Shabbat at Camp

There is a company in Texas that for a fee of $500 will allow you to go back to kindergarten for a day.  For $500 you can wear mismatched socks, finger paint, play with blocks, drink apple juice, eat graham crackers and have nap time.  They have a waiting list 3 months long.

Every summer I do the Jewish equivalent of this act of regression, I spend a week at a Jewish summer camp as the rabbi in residence.  Over the last three years that camp has been here in LA at Camp Alonim in Simi Valley.  Where this year hundreds of Jewish kids are spending the summer swimming, riding horses, playing gaga, having song sessions after lunch, Israeli dance late into the night, wearing white on Shabbat and acting out the weekly torah portion in skits and conversations that can only happen in a sanctuary made of trees and windows open to the sky.

If you can’t tell I love camp.  I am a rabbi because of my Jewish summer camp experiences as a teenager.  Just look at a Jewish summer camper, they are tan, they are filled with energy, most days they are covered in paint or dirt, or both and most of all they are experiencing Judaism in a way that is making a lasting and profound impact on their lives – they are experiencing it through a joy filled community of peers.

But the lessons of camp, its transformative impact and value is not just for kids, its for grownup too.  Through the eyes of Jewish summer campers we can see that they are loving Judaism right now, they are connected to each other and to a power in their life, be it God, community, Jewish history, practice or culture that is greater than they knew before.

So what’s the secret, what is it about camp that is so helpful and inspiring for the Jewish experience?  What can we learn from these kids that can teach us as adult how better to appreciate the gift of our Jewish identity? (Please share your answer in the comments field below)

There are some many things I want to highlight just three lessons that we can take from camp and apply in our own homes and Jewish lives.

Shabbat is different time, its special time.  At camp on Shabbat the food is better, we clean ourselves up, we dress in white, we sit with our friends (old and new), we take our time at the meal, we sing songs and dance afterwards.  We sleep in on Saturday morning, we connect with nature, we have a long period of time to relax or take advantage of the things we didn’t get to do during the week, and we end Shabbat with a ritual that truly marks the time as different from the week that lies ahead.  We can do this in our homes as well, we can make Shabbat, we can make time for Shabbat, we can tell the world it has to wait, this time, our family comes first.

Prayer at camp is a collaborative experience; it doesn’t exist unless you help create it.  As a rabbi at camp on Shabbat I tell a story, some kid or kids with a guitar plays music but the campers own the service, they chose the prayers, the melodies, the readings, the setting.  We need to do more of this in our congregations.  Yes gone are the days where to sit in shul meant to sit on your hands stark still. Indeed now in synagogue we sing along, we clap, but we cannot stop there we need to help create, to the shape the experience, to own it.  Because prayer is not the sole responsibility of the rabbi or the cantor.  In Judaism it takes a community to truly pray, so we all have to contribute and not just our voices, but our yearnings and our desires, we must make plain what we need from this service and then together let us capture it.

Camp runs on Jewish time.  No I don’t mean everything is 15 minutes late.  What I mean is that you don’t have to go to a certain place to feel Jewish, its in the air, its in the food, its in the names of buildings, the types of activities.  Judaism is a consistent thread that runs throughout your day.  From blessings in the morning and over meals, to the art projects and stories shared around the camp fire.  Of course it is hard to do in the real world with so many things competing for our attention and energy.  But if we continue to treat Jewish faith and practice as something kept under glass, break only in case of emergency or family crisis or lifecycle event we’ll never truly learn how to use it, let alone own it for ourselves.

There is much more that camp can teach us about the joys of Judaism, but lets start there, with purposeful Shabbat, with collaborative prayer and with an embrace of Jewish ritual every day not just now and then.

You can’t spend the rest of your life in kindergarten (though my mother tells me I did spend two years – apparently I failed scissors) and camp is only for a few months of the summer.  But we can each of us, kids and grownups bring a little bit of camp into our daily lives, sprinkle it around your family and throughout your Jewish identity, and see what grows there – your kids will thank you and you’ll thank yourself too.

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June 18, 2011 | 2:11 pm

Kevah & Kavanah - Breaking up the routine

Posted by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

This Shabbat marks my first full week back in my congregation since the end of my three month sabbatical.  I am grateful for the time that I had to study, reflect, rest and rejuvenate.  I took the three months to travel around the country visiting other congregations and communities, meeting with clergy, lay people and professional staff.  I observed some of the most innovative and forward thinking congregations not only in the Jewish community but amongst Mormon and Evangelical Christian congregations as well.  For those interested the lessons and observations from my sabbatical studies can be found at www.rabbidanmoskovitz.com (I may repost some of them here at a later date as I begin to formulate meta observations and suggestions).

As I return to the day to day life of serving my congregation I am struggling against the muscle memory of not wanting to just do things the way I have done them for the past 12 years in the rabbinate.  The text that keeps coming to mind is from Pirkei Avot Chapter 2, “Rabbi Shimon says: c’she’atah mitpalel, al ta’as tefilat’cha keva – Rabbi Shimon says, when you pray, don’t make your prayer keva, fixed (routine).  The alternative being Kavanah to perform your actions with a purposeful, considered intention.  I have tried throughout my spiritual life to be guided by this principle, and find it even more important now after sabbatical.

It is so easy for each of us (not just rabbis and not just with prayer) to slip in to the comfort zone of ‘that’s how I have always done it’.  The challenge of course is to continue to learn, grow and reinvent ourselves.  We are encouraged to do this by our tradition because to just rely on our old tired but true ways is to deny that thing makes us uniquely human and not machines.  A machine can perform the same repetitive task time and again, never tire, and never make a mistake.  In fact if you ask a machine to do something that is is not constructed or trained to do, that is often when the machine breaks down.  With people it is of course just the opposite - we are most alive when we push ourselves to try and do the unfamiliar.

In my brief week back at the congregation I have tried to make a conscious effort to do things differently and it has been both fun and a bit unsettling.  Its fun because I am trying out some of the new insights and techniques I discovered during my studies.  My conversations with b’nai mitzvah students are different, the format of my weekly Torah study is evolving, I’m trying some new things in worship, and trying very hard to use the phone and technology in a way that I don’t feel enslaved to it.  I’m even using some new jokes on the bimah - you must know its not easy for a rabbi to give up a tried and true good one liner.  Its only been seven days, but so far the intentionality of trying to be unpredictable to myself has been invigorating. 

So lesson one, on my first week back is don’t go back to how it was, even if the old ways were pretty good.  Honor the change, the growth we experience as human beings when we make a routine out of not doing things routinely.

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June 10, 2011 | 3:23 pm

Weiner’s Problem is Our Problem Too

Posted by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

Rep Anthony Weiner

Weiner’s Problem is Our Problem Too
Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

There is much to say about the exploits of Congressman Anthony Weiner, none of it very kind and much of it inappropriate for synagogue let alone polite conversation.  But a question needs to be asked; why would a successful, 40 something married man, albeit a Jewish man, with a baby on the way flirt with younger women online? 

That is fundamentally the question that has been asked about this sad incident since the congressman took the podium and so publicly confessed his sin of sexting.  The answer I have found tends to fall into two camps. 

One group, made up largely of married women of his generation and older men and women respond with three words, “What an idiot”.  When asked to explain what they mean, they offer that he is a sad, impish man-boy who never grew up and accepted the obligations and responsibilities that come with adulthood.  He’s not a man – one married mother of three wrote on her Facebook page.

The second group which is largely younger single adult men & women and married men of Weiner’s generation respond with the same three words, “What an idiot” but when asked what they mean is, “What an idiot he is for getting caught.” As Time, Newsweek and any afternoon Dr. Phil like TV conversation on a couch have shown us, sexting, flirting, internet chats, online porn, facebook friending and far more traditional and egregious intimate encounters are the worst kept secret of the internet age. 

There are entire websites dedicated to this very activity, of facilitating married adults (overwhelmingly men, but not exclusively) in the act of stepping outside their marriage for experiences along a whole spectrum of adulterous activity.  No not everyone is doing it, but a lot of 30-40-50 something guys are, enough to support a whole industry and to cover the airwaves and internet with weekly examples of some married guy getting caught doing something salacious with another woman.

So a second question compels, “What is wrong with middle aged men in the 21st century?”  Why are they not satisfied in their relationships, why do they seek validation from other women?  To be sure it is a complex and uncomfortable topic. 

It is complex because we don’t really know what is going on in another person’s marriage – but we know enough to know that marriages are always a work in progress and because they involve other people there are seldom simple.

Its uncomfortable because we know a lot of 30-50 something married men, they sure look happy and responsible, and with the exception of fascinations with Fantasy Baseball and Video games they appear to be grownup and mature individuals.  But beneath that accomplished, easy going exterior there is a crisis brewing with the American Male – he is broken, defeated and unhappy.

I don’t make a statement like that out of thin air.  I have spent the past 8 years of my rabbinate working with men of this certain age in a monthly men’s group in my home, on retreats, in counseling and writing about the challenges men face.  I can tell you that I hear a lot of pain out there.  I hear men pulled in a hundred directions at once, with immense expectations placed upon them to succeed and provide since the beginnings of adulthood. 

The modern man, like the modern working mom is expected to bring home the bacon, and fry it up in the pan, and change the diapers, fix the gutters, coach the soccer team, help with home work and drive carpool.  The problem is two fold, one women sought this equality of gender roles, for large part men never did.  They wanted to be more involved than their own fathers but they didn’t want to become their mothers.  The second problem is where women largely have social networks where they can discuss the complex and competing emotions of being a bread winner and a sandwich maker, men don’t talk about those things with other men.  We talk about our jobs, we talk about sports – we don’t talk about balancing the work family divide – not easily and not with other guys anyway.

Physiologist Warren Farrell points out that this brokenness comes because men are not allowed to be human beings anymore and instead are conditioned to be human doings.  Conditioned by society toward the endless pursuit of wealth and success – the modern middle age man is under so much pressure to success, produce and provide that he is looking for escape at every turn. 

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes in his book, ‘The Broken American Male’.  “We have created a hyper-competitive society where the worth of a man is judged by one thing and one thing only: his professional success, measured in how much money he has, how much power he wields, and how famous he’s become.”  And so as Rabbi Shmuley explains men escape:
• They escape these pressures by rooting for other men, more successful men in bright colored uniforms as they compete against each other in sports. 
• They escape into their work, under the misguided assumption that if they can accumulate enough wealth, power or success they can escape the burdensome expectations that society has placed upon them. 
• They escape to the Internet and the anonymity that extramarital affairs, real or imagined provides them.

Which brings us then to a Jewish response and this week’s Torah portion.  In it the Israelites complain to Moses that they are tried of the daily servings of manna that is falling from heaven, they remember longingly, if inaccurately the varied and delicious menu of slavery in Egypt.  Moses hearing this complaint petitions God for meat for the Children of Israel and then adds.  “[God], I cannot carry this people by myself, for it is too much for me.  If you would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg of you, and let me not hear their complaining anymore.” (Numbers 11:14-15)  God hearing Moses’ plea does two things.  First he provides quail to satiate the people’s physical hunger, and then he tells Moses to gather 70 other men in the tent of meeting so that, “I will come down and speak with you there and I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them, they shall share the burden of the people with you and you shall not bear it alone.”  (Numbers 11:17).  God heals Moses’ emotional burden by giving him a group of guys to share the load.  So that he is not alone, so that rather than escape in isolation he can experience a camaraderie of sprit and purpose.

I don’t know the specifics of Congressman Weiner’s problem, but I am confident that at its core this man like so many men his age lacked good male friends and role models that he could confide safely confide in and open up to.  That is the work our men’s group, our brotherhood and our congregation have been trying to do over these many years and it is the work we must encourage the men in our life to do going forward.  If Moses can ask for help and form a support group of 70 other men, so can we!

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June 1, 2011 | 1:04 pm

There’s a blog for that

Posted by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

I thought of calling this blog ‘iRabbi: there’s NO App for that” but decided to go with the more positive tag line.  The idea, other than a play on a certain computer company that shall remain nameless, is that being a rabbi is not something any one app could do.  Maybe its not something any one person can do well.  The role of a rabbi is so varied and eclectic that it demands the richness of human capacity and creativity, and even then we so often fail and fall short.  In these posting together we will explore what a modern rabbi is called upon to do on a daily basis, the issues and challenges facing our community and the stories that connect each of us to each other and to our shared human experience.  I think you will discover that being a rabbi is at once both the greatest job in the world (well being a professional baseball player would be pretty cool) and also one of the most isolating and thankless. 

What is so great about being a rabbi?
What could be isolating about leading a community of hundreds (thousands of people)?
What does a Rabbi do?

Those questions and many more are what this blog is about, it is about breadth and depth of the role of the modern rabbi and by extension the modern Jew.  The varied experiences and interactions I have in serving my own congregation and working in partnership with colleagues and leaders in the larger Jewish community.  It is my hope that through these postings a dialogue will develop not only between me (the author) and you (the reader), but also across readers and sources; a conversation about the nature of the modern Jewish experience.  What are we doing now as Jews and where are we headed in the near future as institutions and individuals.

iRabbi and this is what I do.

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