June 18, 2011 | 4:11 pm

Kevah & Kavanah - Breaking up the routine

Posted by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

Follow me on

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.

June 10, 2011 | 5:23 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!

6 Comments — Leave your comment

June 1, 2011 | 3:04 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.

0 Comments — Leave your comment