Episodes
Monday Dec 23, 2019
Monday Dec 23, 2019
One year after the massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Torah was rolled to the story of Cain and Abel. A year earlier, I had spoken forcefully about our need to combat Anti-Semitism without mercy in our country, and I was criticized by many for not responding to Hate with "words of Love." Again at the one year anniversary much of the blogosphere was filled with slogans and platitudes that we can combat hate with love, and yet I could not find specifics anywhere about how we do that. In this 11 minute reflection, I try to answer what this really could mean, using the Cain and Abel text, and drawing on the research that says that many who become racist or anti-Semites have had an experience at one time in their earlier lives of feeling that what they deserve was robbed from them by a member or members of the group they come to hate. I also consider social media conglomerates accomplices to the spread of hate. A key part of this teaching is the role desensitizing young white men to hate through videos and memes that mock political correctness. After I recorded this, the following article came out about the billions of downloads of Dennis Prager's conservative funded organization whose mission is to do this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/josephbernstein/prager-university
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
I present new difficulties facing progressive rabbis from the Left, including a paucity of resources to even discuss the rise in anti-Semitic attacks because racism "cannot be perpetrated against people of privilege," by new progressive definitions. This, combined with other progressive tropes, has created a situation whereby anti-Semitism can only be mentioned by white Jews of privilege (like rabbis like me) once we have "fixed ourselves" according to purity tests on the left, and which mainly mean leaving our Judaism and our Zionism behind. In that sense, it's a "gaslighting" situation whereby every time we cry out for the injustice against ourselves, we are told first we must "get well" before anything will be addressed.
My reading of Jacob's Wrestling with the "Angel" is that it speaks to issues we are struggling with today around the prevalence and reality of depression and anxiety. We want to say that Jacob overcame his fears in order to face his brother, when something closer to the truth is that Jacob only temporarily overcame his fears, but quickly returns to them (since he flees from his brother immediately after facing him and lying to him, and then he suffers great fear and depression ongoing in his life). Similarly, we wish those who suffer depression and anxiety could overcome them in a way that we can celebrate, like the end of a Hallmark movie. I argue that this is a tendency to blame the victim, a tendency to say the problem is "in them" and must be "fixed" and "treated" in them, rather than consider that they, and many of us, live in a CRAZY-MAKING world, and the whole system needs to be fixed and addressed. (In psychology, this is called the mistake of identifying "a target patient" rather than targetting the system. Without acknowledging the system, we are "gaslighting" the victim when we tell them: "Just get a better therapist, coach, self-help book... Learn to prioritize, do self-care, etc." We do that to Yaakov/Jacob.
I never got to give a great sermon on this because there was a violent act of Anti-Semitism two days before. And what I realized is that Jews are being told the problem is in many ways with themselves when it comes to Anti-Semitism. We say, "We're anxious! There is rising anti-Semitism! The press isn't even covering the attacks! I want to be able to be a public Jew!" and the reply from some progressive quarters is, "Well, maybe it's Israel's fault, or your own failing to reckon with your own racism or privilege, and maybe you could be cured by dropping your Judaism and by just voicing a fully secularized progressivism" which is another form of gaslighting, of telling Jews THEY NEED TO CHANGE rather than that THEY LIVE IN A CRAZY MAKING SITUATION. I try to explore this comparison in this 16 minute teaching.
Wednesday Dec 11, 2019
Change or Die: The Meaning of Lekh L'khah
Wednesday Dec 11, 2019
Wednesday Dec 11, 2019
In this 14 minute teaching, I use Alan Deutschman's book "Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life" as the best explanation of the meaning of the famous command to Avrah and Sarai to "Lekh L'kha," to go for your own sake, or, in Deutschman's terms, to spiritually "Change or Die." The thesis of the sermon is that the totality of Genesis/Bereishit is intended to tell God's story that change cannot be effected by an individual without a community of norms, positivity, and reinforcing habits. The Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Tower of Babel, and the Flood and Noah all teach us the futility that the world can change based on an individual transforming their own society. Therefore the covenant with Avraham is that he must create a brand new society or tribe within which God's intended changes are possible. This mirrors the precision with which Deutschman spells out change within our own lives: what's holding us back from changing, and what might, if we are willing to have the faith to embrace a new community, make possible the leap forward to change.