Extraordinary
Posted by RabbiB in B's BLOG, Warrior Jew - Character & Courage on May 16, 2012
Extraordinary
When children are at play, their play acting almost always involves being the hero on the battlefield saving lives, the all-star at the free throw line making the game winning shot or the fair princess exalted and loved by all. I simply have never heard my girls play acting, pretending to be the hand maiden or the meager servant girl who quietly skulks behind the scenes. Even when I listen to them playing teacher and student, the teacher is always all-powerful, all-knowing far closer to God and the student is always “the star pupil;” everyone one wants to be a star.
Hardly anyone sets out in life to be ordinary. We long to go beyond the ordinary, to be extraordinary – to which my son asked, “does ‘extraordinary’ mean really, really ordinary?” A good question, but no, extraordinary means to go beyond the ordinary. We want to be famous, to be an all-star to be king or queen – but rarely the princess’s right hand woman and never the guy who bats .200 or a mediocre pitching arm.
Of course we want our children to dream of becoming kings and queens, putting up that buzzer beater game winning shot. But extraordinary is not about the crown we wear, the game we play or whether or not we even excel. Rather, extra-ordinary is the quality of the work we provide, the attitude we bring to bear in anything and everything that we do. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr: “If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well”.
Star athletes, powerful politicians and famous celebrities constantly disappoint us turning out to be ordinary all along. That is because our ordinariness or our extra-ordinariness is not just determined in what we do, but in how we do it. There are all kinds of extraordinary people all around us doing seemingly ordinary jobs living seemingly ordinary lives. But they do their jobs and live their lives extraordinarily well and that is extraordinary indeed.
Shalom,
Rabbi B
Revolution of Jewish Spirit #3 We Want To Change But….
Posted by RabbiB in B's BLOG, Re-Membering The Tribe - Community, Ruakh - The Human Spirit, Warrior Jew - Character & Courage on May 9, 2012
Quite often a rabbi, cantor, synagogue lay leader or entire ritual committee will visit me at my shul, CSH, on any given Shabbat. They will witness and participate in something truly unique, revolutionary and inspirational. Invariably our team at CSH will hear the same thing from these visitors – “wow, wow, wow, – I wish I could do this at my shul.” Time and again this is the mantra we hear and time and again I’ll respond the same way:
“You can, you should, you must do this, or something like this, if you want to transform your dying shul into a living shul.”
They know where the status quo is leading them. They know that they are heading towards a dead end. They know it’s time to change. But still, invariably they will respond with a long list of “buts.”
“But rabbi, you don’t understand,” a cantor will say, “my rabbi will never go for this.”
“But rabbi, you don’t understand,” a rabbi will say, “my cantor would never play along.
“But rabbi, you don’t understand,” the ritual committee will say, “neither the rabbi nor the cantor would sign off on this.”
“But rabbi, you don’t understand,” the cantor and rabbi will say, “our ritual committee would kill this even before it is begun.”
Fear of failure, fear of trying, fear of what “they” might say is stifling too many of our organizations and leaders. No, you can be assured of success. However, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
So if your shul or JCC or Federation or Day School is dying – be honest – make up your mind to try something new, anything new. No, you can’t be certain it will succeed, however, you can be certain that to do nothing and continue down the path you are headed will just bring you more of the same.
Shalom
Rabbi B
Rabbi B is co-author, with Ellen Frankel, of their forthcoming book, “Revolution of Jewish Spirit,” due to be published with Jewish Lights Publication Fall, 2012
Revolution of Jewish Spirit #1: Faster Horses
Posted by RabbiB in B's BLOG, Re-Membering The Tribe - Community, Ruakh - The Human Spirit on April 30, 2012
Once, when Henry Ford was asked about his vision he responded:
“If I had asked people what they wanted,” he said, “they would have said a faster horse.”
Ford didn’t ask people what they wanted. He understood that often times we don’t know what we want, certainly don’t always know what we need. We may think we know. We may be committed to a particular idea, model or approach but when it begins to fail us and we continue to cling tight to it, we need visionaries and leaders to step in and enlighten us to what we don’t know.
“I’ll never need anything more than a vinyl record” we once said, and along comes the eight track tape – in this case we were right, we didn’t need the eight-track tape. But soon we did did need cassette tapes and vinyl records all but disappeared.
“I’ll never need anything more than the cassette tape,” and along comes the c.d., then MP3′s and who knows what’s next. But this much we can be assured – there is something next and usually we don’t even know we need it until some visionary has delivered it from her mind into our hand. Yahoo, Google, Groupon, Facebook, the iPod, iPad, iPhone (all things Apple of course) the Snuggie (oh, c’mon you made the impulsive buy too)….we don’t know what we don’t know which is why we need leaders and visionaries to fill in the blanks.
And this is why so much of the American Jewish community, our Movements, our synagogues, Federations, JCC’s, Day Schools…..are all falling apart. We spin our wheels trying to make the horse faster, find a faster version of what we have always had and then wonder why no one wants what we have to offer. If Judaism and our Jewish communities are going to survive and thrive we are going to have to stop talking about our horses, about our current models, configurations, structures, organizations and offerings and rethink the vehicle, the model, the paradigm from head to tail.
It takes vision to look beyond what we currently know; it takes courage to challenge the assumptions, popular sentiment and the status quo. But that’s what leaders do, that’s why we need them, and need them in the Jewish community now more than ever before. With them we’ll reinvent our communities and thrive once again. Without them we’ll continue to spend our time cleaning up a lot of manure as we continue to search in vain for a faster horse which never has, never will exist.
Shalom
Rabbi B
Rabbi B is co-author, with Ellen Frankel, of their forthcoming book, “Revolution of Jewish Spirit,” due to be published with Jewish Lights Publication Summer, 2012
Weeds In Our Yard – Imperfection & All
Posted by RabbiB in B's BLOG, Carry The Fire - Mourning, Ruakh - The Human Spirit, Warrior Jew - Character & Courage on April 24, 2012
Only modern, western, suburbanites could create such a neurotic, bizarre and frankly perverted relationship with their yards.
Spring is here – let the lawn lunacy begin.
It begins by cleaning up all of the “junk” which accumulated from the previous year – dead leaves, dead branches, dead grass, as if they don’t serve a purpose to decay and replenish the soil. Still its yucky, its messy and we don’t like a mess. So we put down poison to kill the weeds. And when the yard is perfectly poisoned green we still aren’t happy because now its messy as it is overgrown. So we cut it, cutting it once a month at first, once a week pretty soon and then twice a week, complaining about it all the way. We pay to have it hauled away, far, far away (cut grass begins to stink) then we’ll complain when it stops growing mid-summer as we water it (more money, more wasted resources) just so we can complain about cutting it once again.
We plant and water and poison and weed and cut and dump just to repeat the cycle again and again and again. And why do we do this? Because we want neat, tidy, perfect little square plots of land. If our yards are perfect, after all, what does that communicate about the owners of those yards? It communicates that we have a perfect, neat and weed free life.
But green little square plots of earth say nothing about us other than we work really hard to have neat little green plots of earth. Nor does it say anything about our weeds. They’re still there, below the surface, now just out of site but probably not out of mind. In the words of Arnold, “they’ll be back” again and again and again. (Ironically we are more of an illusion than the weeds as they’ll be back long after we are gone).
But the truth of the matter is weeds are only ugly depending upon how you look upon them. Living should not be about spending our days hunting down the imperfections in the lawn or covering over every blemish, flaw, mistake or imperfection in our life. As the Kotzker Rebbe once said, “the only whole heart is a broken heart.” That is to say, if something is going to attain perfection, it must contain imperfections. Those little imperfections that dot our yards are part of the yard, often bringing color to what otherwise is a pretty boring shade of green. Perhaps its time to stop trying to perfect upon God’s creation through the elimination of weeds. Perhaps its time to rethink those weeds, their role in our yard and in our life. Maybe just maybe its the imperfections which make you, you, which make me, me, which make each of us perfect – weeds and all.
Shalom,
Rabbi B
Bag of Bugs
Posted by RabbiB in B's BLOG, Revolution of Jewish Spirit, Ruakh - The Human Spirit on April 17, 2012
We live in a perfection obsessed society. In every area we want perfection, strive towards perfection and believe that this is what the noble, worthy, even godly, life is all about.
It’s not and it’s not possible. Even if it was, it certainly isn’t the Jewish ideal.
The rabbis debated this issue thousands of years ago. Amidst a discussion in the Talmud about the “perfect leader,” Rabbi Yehuda felt that imperfections of character or past actions disqualified a person from community leadership positions. However, two Jews three opinions as the saying goes, and Rabbi Yohanan had a different take.
Rabbi Yohanan had said in the name of Rabbi Simeon son of Yehozadak: “One should not appoint any one leader of a community, unless he carries a BAG OF BUGS (skeletons, indiscretions, imperfections) on his back, so that if he became arrogant, one could tell him: Turn around .”
A bag of bugs. A sack of indiscretions. A closet filled of skeletons, call it what you will. Whereas some might feel that leadership is about perfection others, like Rabbi Yohanan, feel that it is the imperfections, not perfections, which can make a person great. It isn’t ongoing engagment in those perfections but it isn’t about shamefully locking them away in the closet either. Imperfection, not perfection, is the way of the world.Politics aside, leadership positions left to debate another day, this is an important teaching for each and everyone of us in politics or not, in leadership roles or just living our average, ordinary lives.
We live in a world obsessed with perfection. If you have weeds in your garden nuke them with Roundup. If you have a blemish on your face mask it with Coverup. If you have a blemish in your past then tuck it away, hide it in the closet and just pray no one finds out about your imperfect past.
Life, however, is complicated and human beings are messy creatures. No matter how hard we try weeds eventually pop up. No matter how much we scrub our face, pimples, from time to time, rise to the surface. And no matter what kind of front we might present to the world, each of us lives in a home with closets, many closets filled with all kinds of creepy crawlies regardless of how much we deny them, hide them off or lock them away.
This doesn’t mean we have to be proud of our indiscretions, failures and hurtful misdeeds. We must do all that we can to right our wrongs and not commit the same sin twice. However, shame does not further us down our path and if we have the courage to take those skeletons out of the closet, put them in a bag and carry them with us to remember what we have done, who we are, who we are not and who we are committed to be becoming – we will be better for it, stronger, honest and real.
Perfection in this life is never achievable and sometimes its the imperfections that make us better, make us trustworthy, ready to lead or certainly ready to serve. It’s what we do with those imperfections that make us worthy of leadership positions, help us live good, meaningful and perfectly imperfect lives. Perfection by definition contains within it imperfection so lets stop putting pesticides on our lawns, coverup on our flaws or botoxing out the beautiful truth in our faces or in our lives. It’s time to come out from the closet. It’s time to be honest about our skeletons, its time to move forward down the path of our truth, bag of bugs and all.
Shalom,
Rabbi B
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