Since I’ve arrived, not only have the Raptors won the NBA Championship, but Bianca Andreescu won the US Open and Beth Tzedec celebrated its most well-attended Selihot ever! Maybe we can build on this momentum and this will also be the year my classmate and good friend Rabbi David Wise changes his email from “lastcup67” to “lastcup20” as the Leafs win the Stanley Cup!
Rosh Hashanah sometimes feels like the championship game of Judaism. For a rabbi, this time of year in and of itself is filled with anxiety. We wonder, will we be able to craft a meaningful sermon? Will we find the right balance between kavanot, prayer intentions, and prayer itself to create a spiritually uplifting experience for all? Will we end on time?
One meaning of the word yira is anxiety. No wonder the rabbis called these days the Yamim Noraim. It’s a double entendre — Days of Awe and Days of Anxiety. In fact, for modern secular Hebrew speakers, that’s how they understand the meaning of the word.
Last week, when Neta Riskin and Ayelet Zurer, two of the cast members of the Israeli hit TV show Shtisel, were waiting for their Uber they wanted to know why I kept referring to Rosh Hashanah as the Yamim Noraim or the “Awe-ful or Anxiety” Days? It was a teachable moment that our Director of Education Daniel Silverman seized upon to explain the broad use of Hebrew and Hebrew grammar; to two Israelis!
Rosh Hashanah is a time of awe as it is also the time to mark the cycle of completion and a beginning. One year goes out as another comes in. As the Talmud says, “kol hatkhalot kashot — all beginnings are difficult.” New beginnings always produce both abundant excitement and, with it, some anxiety.
The liturgy of the New Year compounds these feelings. The mahzor, in addition to its poetic beauty, is literally a collection of Jewish anxiety. The imagery of Unetaneh Tokef is that we pass before God as sheep, wondering who will live and who will die. “V’timneh v’tifkod nefesh kol hai — God reviews and counts, judging each living being, determining the fate of everything.”
Then, “the great shofar is sounded. A still small voice is heard. This day, even the angels are alarmed, seized with fear and trembling as they declare: ‘The day of judgment is here!'” It doesn’t get more anxiety-producing than that!
Actually, it does. Unetaneh Tokef asks the really big questions: Mi yihyeh u’mi yamut — who will live and who will die? Who is at their end and who not at their end? Who by fire and who by water?... Who by earthquake and who by plague?... Who will rest and who will wander, who will be tranquil and who will be troubled?”
“I sat in shul for years reading these words before I realized the answer,” writes my colleague and friend Rabbi Ed Feinstein, who is the Senior Rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA. “The answer to each of these questions is ‘Me.’”
You see, Eddie is a survivor of colon cancer. In 1994, during the Northridge Earthquake, he was nearly crushed by debris. And living in Southern California he has also experienced fires and flooding as well. For him, as it is for too many of us, Unetaneh Tokef is not some abstract philosophical expression. This is our life’s journey.
“It is,” he continues, “a frightfully succinct summary of my existence. So now I read it again, but in the first person, and it makes me shiver: I will live and I will die, at the right time, and before my time, I will wander, but I might yet find rest, I will be troubled, but I may achieve tranquility.”
This is the central truth of the High Holy Days. This is what makes them Yamim Noraim — Days of Anxiety. (Un’taneh Tokef and the Limits of the Human Condition, page 146). Sickness, wandering, natural disasters, financial issues — it’s all there in the text of the mahzor. What’s coming? We all worry; about our family, about our community, about our country, about Israel and about our world.
Now the truth is, we live in an age of increased anxiety and not just because of our personal struggles, but as a result of our communal challenges as well.
Some observers have noted that we are anxious because we are living through the biggest, most disruptive paradigm shift in all of human history. Tom Friedman, in his book Thank You for Being Late identifies three powerful global forces: climate change, globalization and technology that are converging and accelerating; disrupting our world.
Geopolitically, one sees the impact of these forces everywhere — increased polarization, increased instability — politically, socially and environmentally, and increased vitriol. And because we are in the middle of it, as Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, says, “no one knows where the brakes are.” So we are afraid.
“Fear,” to quote one of my favorite philosophers, Yoda, of Star Wars fame, “leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to... suffering” (Yoda).
Living in an Age of Anxiety, we are.
Nowhere is there more anxiety than in the lives of our youth. Some are even calling it an epidemic. “Serious psychological distress, which includes feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, jumped 71% among 18-25 year-olds from 2008 to 2017 (Dr. Jean Twenge). A recent New York Times article reported that 60% of today’s university students suffer from anxiety disorders and psychological distress (Wolverton, 2019). And according to the Canadian Mental Health Association, by age 40, 50% of Canadians will experience a form of mental illness; anxiety and depression being the most prevalent.
How do we cope with all these anxieties?
Sarah Hurwitz, Michelle Obama’s chief speechwriter, in her new book Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life — In Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There), responds to the question.
She shares that like so many of us she didn’t feel that Judaism, or religion for that matter, had much to offer. She read self-help books. Saw therapists. “Tried yoga and meditation. All in a quest for peace of mind, spirituality, to understand herself more deeply and to lead a more meaningful and impactful life.”
What she discovered is that “all of this happens to be precisely what religion, [Judaism in particular] when done well can provide. The problem is,” she explains, “that it is often not done well, and it comes with a lot of baggage — both current and historic” (page xxi).
And she’s right. In my previous role as the CEO of USCJ, the network of Conservative communities in North America, I had the opportunity to travel the continent and engage with synagogues all over. The synagogues that are doing it well are thriving because they focus not on membership, but meaning. Not on programming, but purpose.
In other words, when their leadership meets they ask the big questions that Sarah, really, all of us ask today: “What’s the deal with God? What is our purpose here on earth? What happens when we die? What does it mean to be a good person? To be true to yourself? To treat others well?” (Hurwitz, page xviii).
The last words of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer provide us with a prescription: “tshuvah tefillah u’tzedakah maavirin et ro’ah hag’ezerah – return, prayer and tzedakah remove the severity of the decree.” This is not a formula for miracles to change destiny, or to solve the unsolvable. The world and God don’t work that way.
Rather, it is a challenge to find meaning through action, to help defeat anxiety, banish disconnection and aloneness, raise despairing sprits, reduce stress and remove a little of the impact of life’s challenges. Tshuvah tefilla u’tzedakah – how can we actualize these values as a framework for living a life infused with meaning?
Ultimately, this is what our new Centre for Spiritual Well-Being is all about. It’s not a room. It’s not a program. It’s not crunchy granola shtick. It is a vision, a framework, for the future, our future here at Beth Tzedec, and I believe, the future of the Jewish people.
Beth Tzedec’s Centre for Spiritual Well-Being is our basis for meeting the needs of our souls and the circumstances of our lives, in this age of anxiety. We cannot cancel anxiety, sure, but we can make teshuvah tefillah u’tzedakah concrete and relevant.
That vision can be expressed in one word, shlaymoot, from the Hebrew root shalem, meaning wholeness, peace and well-being. Shalymoot is the peace and contentment born from our mental, emotional and physical health and strengthened by the values and beliefs that give our lives purpose and meaning. The Centre for Spiritual Well-Being is the prism through which we will examine all aspects of what we plan and what we do, how we measure if this institution succeeds or fails, so that we can continuously recreate Beth Tzedec as a force in the community to create shlaymoot.
This is why we are happy to welcome Rabbi Robyn Fryer Bodzin to Beth Tzedec. As you may have read, she is from Toronto, grew up at Beth Tikvah and studied at York University before going to Yeshiva University for her MSW and then to the Zeigler School of Rabbinic Studies in LA for the rabbinate. She brings the right combination of skills and experience to lead the Centre’s work. You will hear more about it from her tomorrow here in the sanctuary, or if you hurry upstairs, you can hear her today too!
Emily Esfahani Smith, originally from Toronto and a professor of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, in her book The Power of Meaning, identifies four pillars of meaning that make life worth living and contribute to one’s shlaymoot, well-being. They are: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence.
“The way we satisfy our need to belong,” she writes, transforms over the course of our lives. “In our early years, the love of a caregiver is essential; as we grow older, we find belonging in our relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners. What remains the same, though, is the vital importance of these bonds” (page 55).
Jewish life is tied to belonging, but we call it kehillah — community. Most of our most meaningful moments take place not in the synagogue, but in the home — Shabbat dinner, Pesah, holiday meals, brit milah and shiva to name a few. A minyan, a quorum of ten people representing community, is required for each life-cycle ceremony and to pray our most meaningful prayers. So powerful is belonging in our tradition that we mark the passing of those who are no longer physically with us, but always belong to us, through Yizkor and Yarhtzeit in a minyan.
Yet, we are living at a time in which, sadly, many of us lack close ties. The rates of social isolation and loneliness are rising, especially among teens and young adults and seniors.
Dr. Jean Twenge is a leading researcher from the San Diego State University and an expert on young adults born 1995 – 2012, a group she calls iGen. In her book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, she points to “one societal shift over the past decade that influenced the lives of today’s teens and young adults more than any other generation: the spread of smartphones and digital media like social media, texting and gaming. While older people use these technologies as well, younger people adopted them more quickly and completely and the impact on their social lives was more pronounced. In fact, it has drastically restructured their daily lives.”
Thanks to the smartphone, never before have we been more connected and at the same time more lonely and isolated. Young people today spend less time interacting with their peers face-to-face than any previous generation and more time on their electronic devices. With fewer in-person interactions and more self-worth measured by the number of likes one gets on Instagram or Facebook, it isn’t surprising, then, that “nearly 30% of girls and 20% of boys have an anxiety disorder that impedes their daily function” (Twenge).
If we want to help iGen find shlaymoot in this age of anxiety, then we have to help them put down their phones and increase their face-to-face peer-to-peer social time. And you know, that’s not a bad thing for all of us every once in a while. Though it certainly is hard.
Even here, now, on Rosh Hashanah, so many of us find it difficult to be disconnected. But you know, it’s almost as if God anticipated this moment in time. The Torah says that on our holy days “kol melakhah lo taasu — one should put down your devices of work” and be present. That’s what Shabbat is for. A day, once a week, to be fully present with family, friends and community. (Back to belonging!) I know so many of us here make Shabbat dinner together. Shabbat is the quintessential observance for turning away from the mundane and reconnecting with our deepest values, especially belonging.
Way before smartphones existed, and before the “unplug movement” became a meme, we had Shabbat telling us to slow down, “stop working, stop buying, stop trying to bend the world to our desires — and simply appreciate and enjoy what we have” (Hurwitz, page xx).
On the other end of the generational spectrum are seniors. We have, for example, more than 100 people who come to Beth Tzedec every Thursday to play Canasta and Mah Jong. Two weeks ago I sat with some of them and learned Canasta. It was fun! You can learn too! The games are nice, but ultimately they come for the company. And we know there are many more people out there who long for that company, to belong.
Did you know we have a monthly list of more than 80 seniors or people in recovery from an illness or accident that would benefit from regular visits? We are certain that that number is low. As a community, we do a really good job of responding to crisis, but the ongoing work of bikkur holim, pastoral visits at the scale required for our members in need, exceeds the human capacity of our Spiritual Leadership team. We can only connect with many of them about twice a year. We have a small group of people who are helping us, but to really make a difference, we need a whole lot more.
Inspiring and engaging you, our community to meet this need begins now. If you want to volunteer to be the “be” in “belong,” to help someone who is isolated and feeling lonely, contact Yacov Fruchter, our Director of Community Building and Spiritual Engagement. We will train you. We will support you. We will connect you. And we will thank you. But more importantly, you will add meaning to someone else’s life and will infuse your own with meaning as well.
And while we are talking about belonging, let’s have a conversation about those who are here, yet are often overlooked, ignored, misunderstood or disrespected. It’s time to pay more than token attention to those who identify as LGBTQ+, Jews of colour, people with disabilities and those who live with mental health challenges. We are arranging for inclusivity training for our senior staff with Keshet, the organization for LGBTQ equality in Jewish life. And thanks to a generous member and a committed group of lay leaders and staff, we will be undertaking an audit of our inclusivity and welcoming practices. We can expect the outcomes of that audit to lead to important and substantive discussions and purposeful change.
“Purpose sounds big,” writes Esfahani Smith, “ending world hunger big or eliminating nuclear weapons big [or climate change big]… According to William Damon, a developmental psychologist at Stanford, purpose has two important dimensions. First, purpose is a “stable and far-reaching” goal... It is the forward pointing arrow that motivates our behaviour and serves as the organizing principle of our lives... Second, purpose involves a contribution to the world. It is a part of one’s personal search for meaning, but it also has an external component, the desire to make a difference in the world” (Page 78).
These two pillars intersect and support each other. If we are working to ensure everyone belongs, then inclusion — of all kinds — is a purpose. As Jews, that purpose is anchored in our tradition: We are all created in the Divine image and, therefore, we are all of infinite worth, we are fundamentally equal yet each of us is unique. Everyone has a place at our table, and everyone must be, and feel, safe in our community, especially the vulnerable.
There are many complex problems in the world today that require complex solutions. We are not going to be able to fix all of them, but like the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot says, “Lo alekha hamlakha ligmore v’lo l’hibatel mimena — It is not our task to complete the work, nor are we free to refrain from it.” Climate change, homelessness, food insecurity, poverty — our tradition has something to say about these problems, and it has established mitzvot, Jewish actions and commitments, to engage in their remediation. Jews act. Beth Tzedec—as an institution, and through groups of individual members, rescues refugees and feeds and houses the homeless during the winter. Our members are charitable with their resources and their time. And yet, as a community, we can do even more.
Through the Centre for Spiritual Well-Being, we are going to enrich our work with Out of the Cold, expand our social justice offerings to teens looking to fulfill and exceed their community service requirements, engage families in B’nai Mitzvah projects and encourage you to help us visit the sick, the home-bound, the lonely and more. The Centre will work with groups of similar interest and needs. We know that those who connect with others, who help others, who can identify and participate in a purpose greater than themselves, live lives of shlaymoot.
Storytelling. It’s the most obvious connection for us to make. Open any Jewish text and you find a story dealing with the same issues that positive psychology has been exploring for a few decades; they have been a focus for Jewish scholarship, worldview and teaching for millennia! And yes, our bible has its share of ancient fanciful events, but underneath it all, our tradition is the story of flawed human beings trying to do better. And we can relate.
That’s what good storytelling does; that’s why we come together to tell our Jewish stories again and again. Each telling adds to our understanding and creates an opportunity for us to add new chapters to the unfolding story of our people. “This is what Judaism is” says Sarah Hurwitz, “it’s not just a religion; it is the story of a large, diverse family” (page xxv).
Transcendence. We call it kedushah. Let me tell you about Sam. Sam is 74. He describes himself as a young 74, even though he has heart failure and has been told there is nothing left medically to do for him.
Sam is dying.
But when you talk to him, you hear what shlaymoot sounds like. You hear what peace and contentment are when they stem from a person’s mental, emotional and physical health and his relationship with the values and beliefs that provide purpose in his life.
Sam doesn’t want people to feel sorry for him. “I have a great deal to be grateful for,” he told me. “There are many suffering more than me at a younger age.” I asked him how he got to this understanding and he replied, “If I want to be philosophical about it, I have had many layers of gratitude in a lifetime — just to have been born, to witness the world, to have had people who have enriched my life and whatever good fortune may have come my way.”
I asked him about God. “I have an uncertain relationship with God,” he said. “I’m a product of my age and background.” Yet, he refers back to a meaningful conversation he had with Rav Baruch who told him to “leave a little room for God.” Sam interpreted it in his own way as the search for comfort and meaning. He concluded that God is “a source [of meaning about which] I don’t have to have certainty, but nevertheless need.”
“I always liked the idea of God,” he said, “but never have been disciplined enough to believe.” Today, Sam says it’s not about leaving a little room for God, it’s about making room for God. “If I’m being truly honest with myself about my needs and motives at this stage of my life,” he says, “I need to make room for God.” And in so doing, he achieves kedushah, transcendence. Listen to Sam’s meditation found in the High Holy Day Reader:
As I pray for a year of life and blessing, may G-d grant me the humility to know that I am only one among many;
the strength to make a difference for good,
the tenderness of spirit to care for the needy,
the wisdom to embrace differences,
the courage to confront evil,
the insight to know that what I do affects others,
the understanding to treasure the beauty and bounty of this world,
the trust to have faith in the future,
and the inspiration to give life meaning.
“This,” writes Hurwitz, “is what spirituality in Judaism looks like: It’s less a pursuit of once-in-a-lifetime highs, and more a series of routine practices, whose effects build slowly over time.” (Page 91). The effects of kehillah, purpose, storytelling and transcendence in the cumulative context of Jewish experience are what build shlaymoot. This is the work ahead of us.
Well, now that I’ve gotten that off my mind, I’m feeling better. Thanks for letting me tell you about my anxieties. And our plans for the future. And by the way, if you want, you can always stop by and share yours.
We are, after all, here for each other.
