Dear Friends:
In Psalm 90, we ask Adonai to teach us how to make each of our days matter. I write these quarterly messages documenting my rabbi-ing in part to challenge myself to make each day matter. Life indeed is a precious gift, and from the moment we awaken to our last conscious thought before falling asleep, we have the opportunity to do something meaningful and positive in the world.
Much of my rabbinic work this last three months was at HaMakom (hamakomtheplace.org) in Santa Fe where I spent some of my Shabbat mornings on the “rabbi” side of the bench, some on the “cantor” side of the bench, and some as an enthusiastic congregant. At the end of our post-service oneg, I instituted a practice of sharing a brief, often Hasidic, teaching based on the weekly Torah portion. I spoke about Jewish foods as an installment in the monthly HaMakom Adult Education series only a few days after our two sumptuous Passover feasts at home, courtesy of chef Beverly and her sister, Deborah. Beginning the second night of Pesach, we started counting the Omer, and I should have started counting calories as well. Deborah and her two youngest daughters, Daphna and Dalia, ensured that we wouldn’t go hungry during their ten-day stay in New Mexico by transporting nearly 100 pounds of kosher-for-Passover food from Brooklyn.
At the Los Alamos Jewish Center, I officiated at a joyous ceremony for a Bat Mitzvah who made all of us proud with her expert chanting and words of wisdom. Also on “the Hill,” the churches in Los Alamos invited Jewish participation in their Lenten series, and I spoke about the Jewish view of afterlife in a talk entitled “With Feathers: Why Woody Allen was Wrong About Hope.” Further from home, I got to spend a Shabbat with my Mom, and I shared a D’var Torah at the synagogue down the street from her new place in San Diego. Providing parents with opportunities to kvell is also a way of making one’s days count.
Frequent flying in conjunction with my day job as a physicist has contributed to ample book reading time, and I can recommend for the scholarly-inclined Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select documents, 1772-1914 by ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Jay M. Harris; Who By Fire, Who By Water – Un’taneh Tokef – edited by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman; and Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages by Ephraim Kanarfogel. For those interested in biography, I enjoyed Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedlander and The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman, a book about a truly eccentric Jewish mathematician named Paul Erdos. In the fiction genre, Motti by Asaf Schurr, Between Friends by Amos Oz, and Lily La Tigresse by Alona Kimhi were all translations from Hebrew, while That Is How It Is by Moshe Nadir was translated from Yiddish.
The sudden, unexpected death of my friend and former Los Alamosan, Ginny Melvin, was yet another reminder for us to make each day matter. May her memory serve as a blessing, and may the immeasurable good that she accomplished in the world be an inspiration for us all.
Keep counting down to Sinai, and have a joyous Shavuot (but watch the calories on those blintzes!!).
B’shalom,
Rabbi Jack