Dear Friends:
We just passed the halfway point in the Omer, our annual countdown to Shavuot and the anniversary of receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai, and I feel grateful as I count all the wonderful and diverse rabbinic opportunities I’ve had of late. In February I enjoyed leading the Tu B’shvat seder at the Los Alamos Jewish Center (LAJC) while eating an abundance of fruits appropriate for this New Year’s Celebration of the Trees.
Also Los Alamos-related, a young woman from our community who is now in college contacted me for some assistance on her National History Day project exploring Reform Judaism during its formative years in America, and I had a vicarious thrill when the project received high honors. And an independent film maker from Santa Fe dropped by my place one Friday to record my advice on his multi-year passion and laudable goal– a film about how halacha and Muslim religious tradition can be used to help address the conflict in the Middle East.
In the more conventional worship arena, I utilized some Saturday morning services in Los Alamos as teaching moments to examine the closing prayers, including Alenu, and to review the intricacies of
Passover. These discussions led to the Pesach holiday itself, and Beverly and I had the privilege of conducting the first seder with my Mom, brother Ted, and Beverly’s Dad in attendance with a dozen dear friends. I thought it particularly shrewd to “allow” my boss’s wife to find the Afikomen, thereby assuring myself of a healthy raise this year. We recuperated the next day and were ready once again to eat matzah at the Los Alamos Community seder where my role as leader included providing the text to the Four Questions in multiple languages, my favorite being “Valley Girl.”
Teaching, as always, has kept me busy. My friend, Zoe, who serves as Religious Director and teacher of the teenagers at the LAJC, parked me in the hot seat for nearly an hour while her students grilled me on topics ranging from G_d to nuclear weapons to why we don’t eat pork, with dozens of challenges in between. In my weekly early Shabbat morning Torah study at HaMakom in Santa Fe, we finished the weekly portions in Exodus where our focus was on the medieval commentator, Rashi, and have been immersed in an examination of Leviticus through the eyes of Ramban. Soon we’ll segue to Numbers, and I think we’ll become acquainted with Ibn Ezra; the intent is to gain a new perspective book by book for an entire year.
My annual presentation at A Taste of Honey, the Albuquerque-based Jewish adult education event held each February, provided a controversial approach to conversion in Judaism through an exploration of rabbinic texts. I also tried to generate some debate with my talk for the Los Alamos Lenten series entitled Birth Control: In the News and the Views of the Jews. By contrast, I felt like the blind leading the blind when I spoke recently at the Los Alamos Methodist Church on the Apocrypha using a translation of these extra-canonical books given to me nearly thirty years ago by my parents who sensed that my library wasn’t yet extensive enough.
I do manage to keep finding interesting items when I browse my shelves. Over the past few months I worked my way through a trilogy of studies on the Talmud, absorbing some modest fraction of the wisdom from “Charting the Sea of Talmud” by Yisrael Ury, “New Talmudic Readings” by Emmanuel Levinas, and “The Talmud as Law or Literature” by Irwin Haut. I also was totally engrossed in two books by Mitchell Chefitz, “The Seventh Telling” and “The Thirty-Third Hour,” both of which I recommend highly.
One of these days I hope to tackle “The Tree of Life” by Chava Rosenfarb for which I will need a big block of time. Thanks to the incredible generosity of my dear friends at Or Chadasch in Vienna, Austria, that block of time could well be the plane flight Beverly and I will take this September when I have a most amazing privilege of leading that congregation in High Holiday services. That Omer seems like it’s going by too quickly, and I’d best start thinking about appropriate High Holiday sermon material!
B’shalom, Rabbi Jack