Parashat Behar
May 12, 2012 / 20 Iyyar 5772

Parashat: Leviticus 25:39 – 26:46
Haftarah: Jeremiah 16:19-17:14

Posted: 05/15/2012 4:52 pm

I am a convert to Judaism under the Reform umbrella, then the Orthodox one. It is well-known as I wrote a book about it.

And while I am neither a rabbi nor an expert in halacha (Jewish law), I am obviously a very proud Jew, deeply involved in the Canadian Jewish community. I live and breathe Judaism in my daily life. I am fully committed to the religion and peoplehood of Judaism, for I chose to become a member of this covenant and nation — just as did Ruth thousands of years before.

I can’t help but say that I now find myself disheartened by the direction that the conversion debate is unfolding in Israel and the Diaspora.

This comes at a time when church pews and Buddhist temples are filling with names like Goldberg, Cohen, or Azoulay. Here in Canada, Jews-by-birth gush in mainstream newspapers of their pride in abandoning all Jewish holidays, replaced delightfully with a Christmas tree.

Scores more who haven’t assimilated by decision are doing so by drift. Jews-by-birth increasingly see Judaism as the antiquated, narrow religion of their uneducated forefathers, with no relevance for today’s world of post-religious, universal values.

This is not to say that conversion is the solution to assimilation and without its own challenges, or that all converts are genuine. But multitudes of converts bring passion, knowledge, talent and steadfast commitment to a people that need more of these traits, not less.

We need an approach to conversion that isn’t devoted to more barriers, the invention of ever more stringent conditions, and the division of the Jewish people into streams. We need to end the emphasis on the adjective (Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox) and return it to the noun (Jew). And we need a consensus among k’lal Yisrael that stems from, rather than negates, halacha. In fact, we would argue that the halachic requirements of the Shulchan Arukh (the most authoritative legal code of Judaism), as well as the convert’s sincerity, should be decisive factors in the process. But the focus needs to be on Jewish law, rather than streams of Judaism.

Without question, this will require every denomination to set aside its own narrow interest in an effort to find a common solution — if for no other reason than the dire consequences of a dysfunctional and fragmented approach to conversion has an impact upon all of us. Intermarriage, assimilation, and the closing of doors to committed Jews-by-choice — who are said to have been at Sinai with the entire Jewish people — should concern every Jew and every stream.

via Richard Marceau: Who Says You’re a Jew?.

May 17, 2012

Jewish Journal Staff

Is there another way to finance synagogues?

That was the question asked by a group of friends and members of Swampscott’s Congregation Shirat Hayam at the end of 2010. “A few people realized that changes had been made to so many other aspects of synagogue life, but not to the funding formula, so they started talking about ways to fund a synagogue whichmight not have been thought of,” said Hal Schwartz, Zuzzim president.

The answer they came up with was Zuzzim, a program where businesses and consumers would band together to create a flow of income that, if successful, could offset and possibly replace synagogue dues.

The name, “Zuzzim,” refers to the Hebrew for coins and also means “moving through,” meaning that money will move through the community. Many people recognize “zuzzim” from the Passover song, “Chad Gad Ya.”

Through Zuzzim, local businesses offer to donate a percentage of their own choosing to Shirat Hayam when customers from the synagogue use their services. However, it became apparent that the program would need greater economies of scale, so it was expanded beyond Shirat Hayam to other local synagogues and nonprofits.

Today, the business and the consumer split the donation between the nonprofits chosen by the business and the consumer.

Deborah Vozella, executive director of Temple B’nai Abraham, has been working with Zuzzim to join the network. Her synagogue recently received its first check from the Zuzzim program.

via Zuzzim Looks at New Ways to Fund Nonprofits.

It’s the mother who has to keep constant vigil over her diet while pregnant to ward off suboptimal fetal intelligence. She’s the one who is encouraged to suffer authentically during natural childbirth. Dads can buy birthing balls and give back rubs and coach moms on deep breathing, but those are just grains of sand thrown into an ocean of labor pain. Once at home, a father can be the most valiant promoter of mother’s milk, waking up for all the 3 a.m. feedings, stripping to the waist to encourage skin touching while giving the infant a bottle (of lovingly pumped milk, of course) in the breastiest way possible, but he will still never know the horrors of mastitis. Mom is on her own on that one.

There is one valuable role for the father when it comes to attachment parenting, however: he can argue against the whole thing.

This is a natural argument for fathers to make. If a mother’s instinct often pushes toward more protection, a father’s instinct tends to tell us that the kid is going to be just fine. Fathers already have a slight–and I would argue, healthy–sense of distance from parenting.

In my marriage, for example, I was the one who always wanted to have kids. For as long as I can remember, I knew I wanted children–two of them, to be exact. My wife wasn’t nearly as sure about having children at all until much later than I was. And yet when they arrived, they were hers, in a deep, unspoken, irrevocable way.

via The Detached Dad’s Manifesto – TIME.

In the Office, They Strangle Ideas, Poison Progress; How to Fight Back

By SUE SHELLENBARGER

When it comes time for a meeting, co-workers can be deadly. Discussions get hijacked. Bad ideas fall like blunt objects. Long-winded colleagues consume all available oxygen, killing good ideas by asphyxiation.

When it comes time for a meeting, the office can be deadly. Long-winded colleagues consume all available oxygen and good ideas get killed by asphyxiation. Sue Shellenbarger explains on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

Co-workers wander off topic, send texts, disrupt decision-making or behave in other dysfunctional ways. Even the best leaders can resort to desperate measures to keep the discussion on track: chocolate rewards, Elmo dolls and ice-cold rooms.

Multitasking at meetings is such a given that unless a leader sets a “no devices” rule or schedules “tech breaks,” nearly everyone texts or sneaks a peek at email during meetings. And yet, that is nothing compared with real sabotage.

Naysayers are the ones who “whatever you bring up, it will never work,” says Dana Brownlee, founder of Professionalism Matters, a corporate-training company in Atlanta. One of her strategies is to take serial naysayers to lunch before meetings to let them vent and try to reach agreement. Once the meeting begins, she sets ground rules, requiring anyone who complains also to offer a solution.

Another problem personality is the silent plotter, Ms. Brownlee says. “They may be the quiet person sitting in back, but as soon as the meeting is over, they’re over there by the Coke machine, planning your demise,” she says. She makes a point of calling on plotters during meetings to try to draw out their feedback.

And for the toughest offenders, ramblers, Ms. Brownlee sometimes puts an Elmo doll in the center of the meeting table and tells participants, “Anytime anybody in the session thinks we’re getting off track, pick up the Elmo doll.” This allows co-workers to express frustration without interrupting, she says.

Brenna Smith still talks about her big meeting victory. She was making a slide presentation to her new boss and 10 colleagues several years ago when, mid-sentence, a co-worker stood up and walked toward the front of the room, arguing that her ideas wouldn’t work.

To show that she could hold her ground, Ms. Smith says, she returned fire. “I think you’re making a really good point,” she told the interrupter, “but I want to finish what I’m saying first so we can talk about my ideas, and then we can talk about yours if we have time.”

via Deadly Meetings in the Workplace – WSJ.com.

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

www.RabbiB.com

]]> http://rabbib.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=3973 0 http://rabbib.com/blog/?p=3971 http://rabbib.com/blog/?p=3971#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 12:32:04 +0000 RabbiB http://rabbib.com/blog/?p=3971 Tracing the Path of Jewish Medical Pioneers

By RONI CARYN RABIN

The young man who applied to medical school in the spring of 1933 had graduated from Dartmouth College with good grades, a keen interest in medicine and, according to the university official who interviewed him, a nice sense of humor.

The application did not ask about religion, but the interviewer surmised it. “Probably Jewish,” he wrote in a scribbled evaluation, “but no unpleasant evidence of it.”

The handwritten note was found in the admissions files of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. After the implementation of quotas, the proportion of Jews in the student body fell to less than 5 percent in 1938 from nearly half in 1920.

The note is displayed in an exhibition called “Trail of the Magic Bullet: The Jewish Encounter With Modern Medicine, 1860-1960,” on view at Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan. The exhibition offers a rare look at a topic few patients ever stop to consider: the emergence of European and American Jews as innovators in medicine, despite their status as outsiders frequently scorned by the medical establishment.

While some religions place ultimate responsibility for healing in divine hands, “Jews don’t see a conflict between faith and medicine,” said Alan M. Kraut, a professor of history at American University who helped put together the exhibition and has written extensively about immigration and health.

“The healer is seen as one of God’s instruments, not a competing force,” he said. “The physician is someone held in the highest esteem, doing God’s work — preserving life.”

During the Middle Ages, European Jews were instrumental in the spread of medical knowledge, translating many important early medical treatises from Arabic into Hebrew and other languages. One of the books in the exhibition is said to be the first medical textbook printed in Hebrew, a translation of a treatise written by the Persian physician-philosopher Avicenna in the 11th century.

But Jews were not admitted into most medical schools in Europe; they learned medicine through apprenticeships or were self-taught, said Dr. Edward I. Reichman, a physician and rabbi who practices at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and teaches medical ethics. One university in Padua, Italy, admitted Jews in the 1500s, but charged them higher fees than other students.

via Exhibition Traces the Emergence of Jews as Medical Innovators – NYTimes.com.

What’s odd about such self-restraint is that I was terrible at holding back my childish desires in almost every other way. Even as I skipped the pepperoni, I would often gorge myself on cake. I could deny myself lobster, but I would throw massive tantrums if I didn’t get my box of Milk Duds at the movies.

Though I no longer keep kosher, I’m still puzzled by why I found it easy as a child to follow these faith-based rules. Because it’s not just me: People consistently find ways to obey all sorts of onerous religious dictates. During Ramadan or Lent, for example, the observant manage to be self-denying even as they struggle to stay on a diet or hold back their temper. “The world is full of people who are fastidious about Biblical rules but can’t say no to fast food,” says Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. “There’s something about rules from God that make them easier to follow.”

According to research led by Kevin Rounding at Queen’s University in Ontario and recently published in Psychological Science, Rabbi Wolpe is right: People are better able to resist their desires when thinking about God. In a series of clever experiments, the Canadian scientists demonstrated that triggering subconscious thoughts of faith increased self-control.

First, the experiment’s subjects had to unscramble a series of short sentences, some containing words with religious connotations, such as “divine” or “Bible.” The scientists argue that encountering such expressions leads people to think of God, even if they aren’t consciously aware of such thoughts.

After completing the unscrambling task, the students took several tests of self-control. In one, they were paid a nickel for every sip of a foul drink of orange juice and vinegar. Interestingly, those students primed to think of God could endure much more discomfort and swilled twice as much sour juice.

In a second study, the scientists tested students’ ability to delay gratification, asking them if they wanted $5 tomorrow or $6 in a week. Those on a religious wavelength were far more likely to opt for the more prudent option. Finally, the scientists showed that God-minded subjects persisted for a longer time in trying to solve a frustrating puzzle.

If God is always watching, we better not misbehave—he knows about the pepperoni.

The effect, it turns out, does not require religious belief. More than a third of the students in the studies were atheists or agnostics, yet the scientists found that they were still influenced by subconscious thoughts of God.

Needless to say, we still don’t know why inklings of religion increase self-control. The scientists describe thoughts of God as providing the mind with “important psychological nutrients” that “refuel” our inner resources, much like Gatorade replenishes the body after a long run.

But how does religion do this? The scientists think that faith-based thoughts may increase “self-monitoring” by evoking the idea of an all-knowing, omnipresent God. Previous research, which showed that priming people to think of a vengeful, angry God reduces the likelihood of dishonesty, supports this view. If God is always watching, we better not misbehave—he knows about the pepperoni.

For Rabbi Wolpe, these results are an important reminder that human nature is deeply shaped by external structures. “People need a system of rules to live by,” he says, adding: “People drive slower when they see a police car. God is a bit like that police car: Thinking about Him makes it easier to do the right thing.”

A version of this article appeared May 12, 2012, on page C12 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Divine Way to Resist Temptation.

via Jonah Lehrer on Religious Thoughts and Self-Control | Head Case – WSJ.com.

Parashat Emor

May 5, 2012 / 13 Iyyar 5772
Parashat: Leviticus 22:17 – 23:22
Haftarah: Ezekiel 44:15 – 31

via A Man. A Woman. Just Friends? – NYTimes.com.