Mitt Romney is up more than two percentage points in the polls from where he was before the first presidential debate in Denver. Some analysts say that the election is now a virtual tie, giving Romney the momentum that will be hard for Obama to break through. Romney has the Big Mo.

On the other hand, Detroit Tiger's manager Jim Leyland says, "I'm a guy who doesn't believe in momentum in baseball. Momentum is your next day's pitcher." The New York Time's polling analyst, Nate Silver, makes a similar point about elections. "Momentum…ought to imply that a candidate is gaining ground in the race—and, furthermore, that he is likely to continue to gain ground," says Silver. "As a thesis or prediction about how polls behave, this notion is a bit dubious… a candidate who gains ground in the the polls in one month…is no more likely to do so during the next one."

Yesterday's pitching fiasco means nothing about your chances the next day. Yesterday's bad poll numbers do not predict whether you will be up or down today. The human mind is conditioned to search for clues that will help us predict what will happen next in our world, so we seek trends and directions, even when past performance tells us nothing about the future. Here is where the manager and the political commentator agree: The past does not determine the present. 

What is true in baseball and elections is also true in our lives. We often look at the things we have done in the past and draw conclusions about what that must mean for our future. This is the thinking both of the addict and the megalomaniac. We have the ability to turn everything that has gone badly in our lives into a reason to believe that we are worthless and incapable of being any different. We also have the ability to turn everything that has gone well into evidence that we are invulnerable and infallible. Neither is true.

Jewish tradition stands for the idea that change is always possible. We can never rest on our laurels and we can never give up the hope to become better. The rabbis teach, "Do not be sure of yourself until the day of your death" (Pirke Avot 2:5). Your future has not been written. You never reach the point at which you cannot change for the better and you never reach the day when you can stop trying to do better.

There is no Big Mo. Where you have been says nothing about where you can go, who you can be, or what you can make of your life.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Pesach and Opening Day
Why Torah is Like Baseball
Shoftim: Pursuing Justice Justly

Avram (who soon will be renamed Abraham) went with his wife, Sarai (Sarah), into Egypt to escape a famine (Genesis 12:10-20). It is impossible for us to read the word "Egypt" in the Torah without thinking of it as the symbol of slavery, confinement and constriction. To enter Egypt willingly in the Bible is an act of self-enslavement. The prospect of deprivation—the hunger of the famine—frightened Avram into giving up some measure of his freedom in exchange for security.

The text tells us, "It was when … caused him to come close to enter Egypt, [Avram] said to Sarai his wife, 'Behold, now I know that you are a beautiful woman'" (Genesis 12:11). The verse is difficult to understand on a few critical points. 

First, it is unclear what the subject of the verb "caused to come close" might be. Was it Egypt that enticed Avram into approaching its borders, or was it Avram himself who was the cause? Perhaps it was both. Avram's fear of deprivation may have caused him to feel the attraction of Egypt, which lured him into giving up his freedom for false security. 

Second, Avram speaks as though he did not know before that Sarai was beautiful. He said, "Behold, now I know that you are a beautiful woman." How could that be? Had he never looked at her before? Obviously not. Rather, this was the first time that Avram had ever seen Sarai's beauty as a threat. He sees her beauty and responds, again, with fear. He tells her, "When the Egyptians see you and say, 'this is his wife,' they will kill me and keep you alive. Please say that you are my sister so that it will go well for me, so that my life will be spared because of you" (Genesis 12:12-13)

In this story, Avram is afraid of everything. He feared the famine, and that led him to enter the land of confinement. As soon as he began to feel the pinch of Egypt's grip on him, he began to fear that others would desire Sarai. It was at that point that he failed to see her as a full person. He began, for the first time, to see her instead as an object—a y'fat mareh--a thing that has a lovely appearance that others would want to take from him. He is so afraid that he disavows his wife and allows other men to take her.

The hidden lesson in this story is about what happens to us when we begin to give in to our fears. We give up little pieces of ourselves to buy some safety or security, but we do not realize how much we are giving up. We do not realize that one devil's bargain inevitably leads to others. Avram entered Egypt rather than face hardship in the land that God promised to him. Once out of his element, he began to see himself as vulnerable in more ways and his fear overwhelmed him. He betrayed his loyalty to his wife and he lost sight of the mission that God had set for him. 

It happens to us, too, and it can start early. Perhaps you know someone who has turned away from his or her interests and passions in order to play it safe in life. Perhaps you yourself have sometimes taken a comfortable path at the expense of following your dreams. What happens next? People can become trapped by the choices they make, leading to worse choices. In time, people can discover that they don't even know themselves anymore. They feel as if they are living somebody else's life, all because of choices made in fear.

At the beginning of this week's Torah portion, God told Avram, Lech l'cha, "Go to yourself." God wants us to be our most authentic self, to discover the identity that is formed by our hopes and aspirations, not the path we are scared into following. Early in the story, Avram gets derailed. He drifts away from the promise of the Land of Israel and goes down into Egypt. He gets trapped by material comforts of Egypt. The Torah even tells us that Avram "acquired sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels" (Genesis 12:16) in Egypt. But he was not being true to himself. He had to leave.

The lesson of this week's Torah portion is that in order to be our most authentic selves, we must face up to our fears, not avoid them. In order to heed the call of Lech l'cha, "go to yourself," you must be willing to take the difficult road and stay true to the people who are close to you and to your own passions. That is the path of true reward and true happiness.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Devarim: Bringing Your Questions to God
Fearing God

Howard Moskowitz is the food science expert who had the insight that there is no one ideal flavor, aroma, texture or appearance of any food. People have a variety of different tastes and only a variety of different options will satisfy the largest number of people. 

That may not seem like a huge discovery, but it was enough to revolutionize the food business in the early 1990s. Today, the industry no longer assumes that there is one perfect version of any product. Instead, adept food makers try to produce as many different versions of their products as there are tastes and preferences.

This is the world that Howard Moskowitz gave us. Where there used to be only one flavor of tomato sauce from each manufacturer, we now have Prego Roasted Garlic & Herb sauce, Prego Veggie Smart Pizza sauce, Prego Chunky Garden Combo sauce, Prego Mushroom Supreme Portabello sauce, and  no fewer than eighteen other varieties.

And this revolution has done even more than that. Not only are supermarket aisles filled with dozens of varieties of the same food, we consumers have come to expect the multitude of choices. 

We have been trained to seek the flavor experience that exactly matches our preferences. We no longer go to the store looking just for any orange juice. We now scan the refrigerator section for orange juice with no pulp, some pulp, or lots of pulp. We can find added calcium, vitamin fortification, added antioxidants, low acid, or any number of combinations of all the above. We have been convinced that we want these choices—whether we want them or not.

What does this have to do with joyful Judaism? Plenty. 

During the same time period that Howard Moskowitz revolutionized the food business, there has been a proliferation of flavors of Judaism. I don't think it's a coincidence. 

In many American cities today you can find a "classical" Reform congregation where most of the prayers are in English and the cantor performs for an attentive, quiet audience. There is also a "new" Reform congregation where the congregants are encouraged to clap their hands while the cantor leads on guitar. 

There is a Conservative congregation featuring prayers sung in hundred-year-old melodies, mostly in Hebrew, with men and women sitting together. A few blocks away, there is a Modern Orthodox synagogue where the women and men sit separately and chant similar staid and steady tunes. There also is the Chabad House with its curious mixture of traditionally observant Jews and those who appreciate the sense of "authenticity" with a dash of Chasidic fervor. 

There might also be a Reconstructionist or a Renewal congregation for those who seek Judaism that features tambourines, chanting, meditation and left-wing politics. Some cities might also have a Humanistic congregation or a Workman's Circle that offers Jewish culture and ethics, but without belief in God. 

The fact that we have different movements of Judaism is not new. What is new, though, is the way we treat the potpourri as a shopping experience. People no longer connect to a movement out of ideology or family history. We pick and choose the synagogue that fits best into our lifestyles and preferences. Instead of looking to belong to something that is larger than ourselves, we look for something that conforms to our own personal tastes. 

Now, before I get too huffy about all this, let me first say that there are some very good things about Judaism in an age of many choices. The fact that there is lots of competition has forced congregations to reach for excellence. Synagogues can no longer afford to be boring; if they do, they will lose support faster than a supermarket that does not offer products people want. 

Variety also means that Judaism is no longer one-size-fits-all. There are different kinds of Jews with different tastes. Choice means that a person who does not feel moved by the style of worship in one congregation can generally find another that suits him or her better. If that keeps more people connected to Judaism, it's a good thing.

But there is also a downside to all the choices. The focus on giving each individual exactly what he or she wants is so common today that even within a single congregation there is division. On a typical Friday night or Saturday morning, some congregations might have a "traditional" service in the main sanctuary, a "musical service" in the chapel, and a meditation service in another room. Such segmentation can be good and useful if it helps make more people feel included, but it can also make a synagogue feel like we've turned it into a supermarket aisle.

When the focus of the congregation is no longer on the kahal—the collective community—but only on the separate individuals within, it is no longer a single congregation. It is no longer a unified community. Our focus on the individual and meeting the needs of the individual can make us blind to the reality that genuine community requires people to put aside some of their individual preferences for the greater good of the whole.

That sense of genuine community, I believe, is what makes Judaism Judaism. As Jews, we can only find real joy, real fulfillment, through the experience of being a part of the Jewish people. If, instead, we drive people apart with the unintentional message that individual tastes and preferences trump community, then we will miss the truly authentic flavor of Jewish living, Jewish culture, Jewish values and Jewish tradition.

Our society does not really need to have twenty different flavors of Doritos to make people happy. It seems to me that the food industry has gone overboard in trying to please everyone, but a Dorito is just a cheesy corn chip. It doesn't really matter. Judaism, though, should be about much more. 

Through our tradition and our people, we are meant to experience life meaningfully. When we make ourselves part of something larger than ourselves, we find greater comfort in our sorrows and fuller joy in our celebrations. Happiness, we discover, is not the realization of our personal desires. Rather, happiness comes from making the community's desire a part of our own desire. It makes us matter beyond our own small selves.


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Do Not Separate Yourself from the Community
I Got My Family Back
Bringing the People Together

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is a time for us to pay special attention to the continuing crisis in women’s healthcare, the need for screening, and the need for more research to combat this deadly illness. It is also a time to acknowledge the women who have fought breast cancer, who experienced the shock and terror of a breast cancer diagnosis, who were strong for themselves and for their families, who undertook surgery to remove their cancers, who found the resolve to endure months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, who found comfort and hope in the support of their friends and family members. Tonight, we recognize and remember women who survived breast cancer, and also those who did not. They are our mothers, our wives, our sisters, grandmothers, aunts, friends, and neighbors. We stand with them.

In the book of Psalms we read this verse:
“Adonai, my God, I cried out to You, and You healed me.” (Psalms 30:3)

Adonai, we ask you tonight to put your loving arms around women who have endured and who are currently enduring breast cancer. Ease their pain and suffering. Strengthen them to experience their own peace, strength and love of life. From the brokenness they experienced in body, spirit and mind, may they find a wholeness that reminds us all of the ways that we can find wholeness in our lives, even when we feel most shattered. 

יהי רצון מלפניך יי אלהינו ואלוהי אמותינו ואבותינו

May it be Your will, Adonai our God and God of our mothers and fathers, that these women who have survived breast cancer live lives of wholeness, courage, integrity and peace. May they inspire us all to do the same. May the day come soon when we find treatment and cure to end this disease and the resolve to make it available to every woman, everywhere. And we say together: Amen.

While this kind of arithmetic is an important way to make choices about how we spend limited healthcare resources, there is something disturbing about it. We don't like to say—as the calculation suggests—that a life is worth $50,000. It makes us wonder about our commitment to the idea that human life is invaluable.

In this week's Torah portion, Noach, we read the story of the building of the Tower of Babel. After the Flood, the people decided to build a tower out of bricks that would extend up to heaven. God, seeing the people build the tower, frustrated their plans by confusing their speech, causing each person to speak a different language. Unable to understand each other, the people abandoned the tower and scattered (Genesis 11:1-9).

The ancient rabbis asked an inevitable question about the story: What was wrong with building a tower to the sky? Isn't it good for people to aspire toward heaven? The rabbis read between the lines of the story to show how the problem with the Tower of Babel was that it made people devalue human life.

According to a classical midrash, the Tower was of such great height that it took a person a year to climb from the base up to the top. Every brick that was baked on the ground and brought to the top of the Tower was, therefore, considered extremely valuable—it represented a huge investment in energy and time. As the Tower grew taller, according to the midrash, its builders began to see bricks as more precious than people. "If a person fell and died they paid no attention, but if a brick fell they sat and wept, saying, 'Woe upon us! Where will we get another to replace it?'" (Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer 24:7).

The sin of the builders of the Tower of Babel was not that they wanted to climb up to heaven. They may have begun their project with good intentions, but, in doing so, they turned human beings into mere commodities of limited value. That was their sin. They lost touch with the truth that human life is invaluable, that we are each created in the image of God.

Our society today wants to do great things, too. We want to build great cities. We want to explore the universe. We want to build devices that give us amazing powers of calculation, communication and creativity. We want to amass wealth, luxuries and military security. But at what price? What objects of our own devising do we value more than the lives of human beings?

In the realm of medicine, health insurance and public health policy, we legitimately weigh how we spend money to save lives. We want to make wise choices to maximize our resources to do the most good. Using a formula based on costs and benefits is how we say that in numbers. But, even there, we recognize the dangers of putting  a price tag on life. Human beings are not numbers.

How much more, though, do we need to be careful when our appetites for power, prestige, comfort and security blind us to the value of human life? Which bricks do we mourn as the bodies fall from today's towers? We must avoid the error of Babel by not ignoring the price we pay when the pleasures we seek lead to the exploitation of works, the poisoning of our environment, and the death of innocents.

Each life is of infinite value, including our own. When we ignore the value of the lives of others, we cheapen our own life, and we degrade our relationship with the one in whose image we are formed.


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Letting Go

Cain and Abel were the first brothers. Cain grew crops and Abel kept flocks. Each offered God the fruit of his labors as an offering. Cain brought the grain he grew and Abel brought the prize of his herd. For some reason, though, God liked Abel's offering better. Cain was devastated. 

The story immediately forces us to deal with an undisguised bitter truth—life is unfair. Sometimes God shines on one person and not on another for no apparent reason. The first crime comes about as a result of Cain's inability to deal with that truth.

God saw Cain's distress and pondered some moral philosophy with him. God asked Cain (I'm paraphrasing Genesis 4:6-7), "Isn't it true that there is uplift for doing good? And isn't it true that if you don't do what is good, you invite disaster upon yourself? Buck up, Cain. If you don't master your feelings, your feelings will be masters over you!"

Cain did not take the hint. In what we can only imagine to have been a fit of jealousy, Cain murdered his brother Abel. God saw and told Cain the consequences. He would no longer be able to raise food from the ground. He would be cursed for spilling his brother's blood on the earth. 

At this point in the story, we can wonder what the meaning behind all this might be. The story seems to say that when we deal with disappointment, frustration, injustice and deprivation in life, we have a choice. We can either make the best of it and strive to do what is right, despite life's capricious hardships, or we can let our emotions get the better of us and follow the impulse toward spite, revenge, jealousy, brooding, self-isolation, and doing harm to others. If we follow that course, the story says, we will just end up hurting ourselves. We will remove ourselves from the things that ought to sustain us. We will be cursed.

The best thing to do, then, is to be on guard for those self-destructive impulses. We all experience such feelings at some point in our lives—whether in response to bad luck or to other people's bad behavior—but what separates the good from the wicked is the ability to recognize and reign in those tendencies. The failure to do so, the story suggests, is the essence of sin. Sin is the weakness of the soul in dealing with not getting what we want.

After receiving his punishment, Cain cried out to God, and his words are mysterious and revealing. In Hebrew, he says, "Gadol avoni minso" (Genesis 4:13). Many translations render this as, "My punishment is too great to bear," and that makes sense. Cain felt self-pity for being driven from the land that had been his life's work. He complained that he would be a wanderer over the earth and that, as a murderer, anyone who met him would be justified in killing him. He couldn't bear to live that way.

But the Hebrew word, avoni, is ambiguous. It can mean "my punishment," but it can also mean "my sin." Cain could have meant, "My sin is too great to bear"—as in, "I can't stand to even think about what I have done." Cain, the first murderer, could also have been the first person to be tormented by guilt.

There is yet another possibility. The word minso literally means "from bearing"—but whose "bearing" are we talking about? Cain's or God's? Cain might have confessed that his sin was too great for God to bear—that is, too great for God to forgive. Cain might have believed that murdering his brother was beyond the possibility of atonement. He even says to God in the next verse, "From Your face I must hide" (Genesis 4:14). Cain might have believed that, through his actions, he had lost God. 

All of these multiple meanings can be seen as forming a complex picture of the nature of sin. When we are weak and give in to our impulse to strike out at others, or to shut down within, we can experience a range of emotions that drag us even further down. We might indulge in self-pity and feel sorry for ourselves and our miserable plight. We might anguish in self-loathing for the ugly way we have behaved. We might despair and believe that we have cut ourselves off from forgiveness and give up on being good. The whole range of responses is suggested by the ambiguity of three words, "Gadol avoni minso."

Or, we can accept a different response. We can say, as God suggested to Cain before the murder, that we can be the master of our feelings, they need not master us. We can take the warning that negative thoughts of self-pity, self-accusation and despair only drive us deeper down the hole. We can, instead, do what is right and find uplift.

The story of Cain and Abel is part of the Hebrew Bible's introduction to the whole topic of sin and punishment. It teaches us that the real reward of doing good is the affirmation of all that is meaningful in life. Doing good is mastery of the self and it is the fulfillment of what ultimately gives pleasure and success in life. Conversely, the story teaches that the real punishment for sin is not thunderbolts from heaven—it is the loss of self. When we do what is wrong, we punish ourselves with self-recrimination, self-loathing, self-pity and fear. 

We've had our warning. We can be mastered, or we can be the masters of our lives.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Bereshit: In the Beginning of What?
Devarim: Bringing Your Questions to God

Simchat Torah is the only day on which we read the very last portion of the Torah, Vezot Haberachah. It is the only Torah portion that is not read on a Shabbat. It lies outside the usual cycle of weekly Torah readings so that it can be read just on this one day of the year. 

Vezot Haberachah tells the story of the very last hours of Moses' life and it tells the story of his death. Moses offers a final blessing to each of the tribes of Israel, then he climbs to the top of Mount Nebo, where God shows him the full extent of the land that he has spent a lifetime trying to reach. In the end, though, God tells him that he will not be permitted to enter the land himself. Instead, he dies on the mountaintop and is buried there by God. 

The text makes a point to say that "to this very day, no one knows where his grave is" (Deuteronomy 34:6). Moses leaves no shrine where his descendants can go to worship at the site of his bones. His legacy, instead, is only in this profound declaration: "Never again in Israel did there arise a prophet like Moses who knew Adonai face to face." The death of Moses marks the final curtain. The End.

Until the next beginning.

The reason why we read these words only on Simchat Torah is that they can never be the final words. As soon as we finish the story of Moses' death and burial, we immediately start anew by reading a single aliyah from the very beginning of the Torah. Tradition teaches that it should never be said, "the Jews have finished studying the Torah," and so we don't. We go straight from the end to the beginning. 

This is a lesson beyond the simple idea of devotion to our studies. The Torah imitates the true shape of our lives. Nothing is ever finished. Every challenge we face in life is merely the prelude to the next. Every closing introduces us to new vistas to be discovered—just as Moses, in his final moments, looked out from Mount Nebo to see the place where the next chapter in the life of the Israelites would be played out.

Even death is not an ending. The Jewish ideal of a meaningful life is one that continues to matter. For such a life, death is no obstacle or barrier. The significance of our life continues into the next chapter of our families, our communities, the Jewish people and the world. There is no end.

This is who we are. We Jews are the people of "end, beginning, end, beginning." Throughout history, we have known many endings. The First Temple ended. The Second Temple ended. Prophecy ended with Malachi and the Mishnah was completed by Rabbi Judah HaNasi. The Golden Age of Spain ended with the expulsion of 1492, and the great Jewish communities of Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Germany ended with the Holocaust.

Except that they didn't. Just like the life of one individual persists, so does our people. We keep reinventing ourselves, rediscovering ourselves, redefining ourselves to be reborn in a new age. Just as they say about Torah, so it is true of the Jewish people—"Turn it over, turn it over, because everything is inside of it" (Pirkei Avot 5:26).


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The Light that Defies Death

The day also marks the end of the Days of Judgment. Yom Kippur was the day on which God's judgment was sealed, but Hoshanah Rabbah is said to be the day on which the judgment is delivered. In the book of Isaiah, God says that Israel "will seek Me day [after] day" (Isaiah 58:2). The repetition of the word, "yom" in this verse, meaning "day," is taken as a hint that Hoshanah Rabbah is a second Yom Kippur. It is another final opportunity to appeal to God and find redemption. 

It is clear, though, that Hoshanah Rabbah is a very different day of judgment. It could not be more different in tone and expression than Yom Kippur. Hoshanah Rabbah is not a day of somber self-probing. It is not a day of fasting and self-denial. It is, rather, a day of joy. Hoshanah Rabbah is the greatest day of celebration of zman simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing.

We have, it seems, two distinctly different routes toward redemption. First, we must pass through the day in which we seek forgiveness by confronting our wrongdoing and asking for forgiveness. It is only after that day that we can experience the redemption of joy. We acknowledge today that 
we complete our t'shuvah by giving ourselves over to joy.

Life is not just about acknowledging our faults and feeling remorse, and neither is our relationship with God. There is a second path toward atonement, a second day for discovering our scarlet sins turned to the whiteness of the Torah scroll mantles. Before the final judgment is delivered, we are given a chance to experience transformation, healing and wholeness through the path of joy. We march around the synagogue, waving our lulav and etrog, and affirm that deep and fulfilling happiness puts us on the path of return.

Pitka tava. May Hoshanah Rabbah conclude your season of judgment on a good note.


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Repairing Everything in an Instant

Sukkot is the  holiday that celebrates the culmination of the yearly cycle. For people who are more likely to get their meat and vegetables wrapped in plastic from the supermarket than straight from the farm, it is an occasion to reconnect to our relationship with the natural world. For people who have come to expect strawberries in winter and apples in the spring, Sukkot should remind us that we are part of a natural cycle that we can only bend so far before it breaks. We have become so removed from the way our food is produced that we sometimes fail to notice the connections that link our increasingly artificial diet  to disease, infertility and diminished health. I certainly count myself among the offenders.

My recommendation for a joyful Sukkot is simple. Don't just sit in your sukkah eating processed foods and diet soda. This Sukkot, make a point to eat real foods made from real ingredients. (Here's a hint: If you can't pronounce it, it's not real.) This is, after all, a harvest holiday. Make it an opportunity for you and your family to know where your food comes from. Go to a farmer's market, join a CSA, give up the packaged food aisle for a week and, instead, eat foods that you can actually trace back to the earth that we celebrate at this season.

Use this holiday as a time to remember that there really is nothing convenient about "convenience foods" once you take the consequences into account. Rampant obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, infertility and God-knows-what-else are too high a price to pay. To make matters worse, forgetting where real food comes from is just another way of forgetting where we come from and the source of our plenty. 

I wish you a chag sameach, a festival of joy that is also a festival of health, mindful eating, connection to what is real, and gratitude toward its source. 


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