Thanksgiving Notes from Myrna

Dear Families,

May you and your extended friendship and family circles have wonderful gatherings over this long week-end.

Have you ever thought of starting your get-togethers with HaMotzi to give a Jewish flavor to Thanksgiving?   This week’s holiday, derived from Sukkot, the biblical harvest festival cherished by the American colonists who had escaped from religious oppression, reminds us of our own ancestors who left their native countries to reach America—for us, their descendants!!  We all have so much to be thankful for.  Let’s encourage our children to develop an attitude of gratitude in a historical context on Thanksgiving. The blessings after meals, Birchat HaMazon, would also be appropriate.

Coming up early next month will be, of course, Hanukkah.  The staff is working diligently to develop an interactive program on December 7^th where significant subject matter will be covered and the inspiration of celebrating as a Jewish learning community will be experienced.  Rabbi Josh Breindel, Esther Benari Altmann, Myrna Hammerling, Susan Federspiel, Darlene Weeks and Nancy Shulman will welcome the different age groups at a variety of stations during the afternoon. 

We hope to conclude the afternoon with candle-lighting and songs.  Although we won’t light your personal hanukiyyah (leaving the ritual lighting of the seventh candle to be enjoyed at home), could you please send your child with a hanukkiyah for the display table we will set up for all to share?  Thank you.

Reminder:  Please bring in, starting December, items to help our homeless brothers and sisters.  See attached list of items they need the most.

B’Shalom u’vracha (in peace and blessing),

Myrna Hammerling

Thoughts on KI's Jewish Solidarity Mission to Cuba

         R. is a fifty-nine year-old man who lives with his family in Santa Clara de Cuba, a city most known as the site of the last battle in the Cuban Revolution and as the final resting place of Che Guevara. The streets of R’s hometown are lined with fading buildings that are crumbling back into the earth. The roads, traveled by bicycles, cars new and antique and horses pulling buggies, are rutted and potholed, though traffic, for want of fuel and spare parts, is light. Lacking jobs, men play dominos while their families live off a dole that allows them just enough to survive.

          Santa Clara is neither the most primitive nor the most developed city in Cuba. It lacks Havana’s tourist infrastructure, with its hot running water, burgeoning private restaurants and few functioning flush toilets. At the same time, it does not suffer from the isolation of former sugar center, Trinidad, which today is a UNESCO heritage site lacking any sort of industry to employ the people who remain there. Like many Cuban cities, Santa Clara has a hospital with plenty of doctors and little medicine; stores with plenty of shelves but few products; a surfeit of arable land but no farming – after a fifty-year ban, personal gardening was only legalized a few months ago; and plenty of people but little motivation - if not great disincentive - for them to take responsibility for their own lives.

There are about 25 Jews in Santa Clara, with about another 60-70 living within an hour drive of the city center, and R is the president of the community. And R is a maker of miracles. R dreams up projects – after constituting the community, his first project was the placement of a holocaust memorial in Santa Clara’s postage stamp of a Jewish cemetery. R’s passion lit a spark in American Jews on solidarity missions, who, with the help of an inspired young non-Jewish tour guide, brought funds for the memorial. Visitors carried stones from the market street of the Warsaw Ghetto into Cuba, one by one, to pave the path in front of the modest monument. Even as teens from Atlanta were putting the finishing touches on the memorial, R was already hatching a plan to refurbish the cemetery, repairing the graves and the walls and planting a grove of trees modeled after the grove at Yad Vashem. And as the cemetery project was nearing completion, R was already, in his magnetic, charming way, campaigning for a synagogue and community center building, inspiring donations with his passion and vision for a peaceful, harmonious future. A testament to a vibrant Jewish present is now rising in what is, to all appearances, the epitome of exile at the end of the earth.

There aren’t many people like R in this world, who use their gifts for the benefit of the Jewish community with such skill and panache. And yet as we traveled around the island of Cuba, we met with many leaders of the Jewish community who are curious about their Judaism, passionate about learning and making meaning and devoted to rebuilding connections among Cuban Jews and with the world at large. It’s no small task – though anti-Semitism is not really in issue in Cuba, religious expression has only been legal since 1992. And yet, with change in the air, resourcefulness, creativity and hope prevail.

The self-taught, excitable guide we met at the botanical garden of Cienfuegos, a city in south-central Cuba, unintentionally provided a metaphor for the Cuban experience when he enthusiastically described his favorite plant, bamboo, which was introduced to Cuba decades ago. Bamboo can grow three feet in one day; you can actually watch it grow and flourish.

It doesn’t take much for people to thrive like bamboo. Given the slightest of opportunities, we push our way into the light. Visiting a place like Cuba underscores the drive for survival, prosperity and fulfillment. Yes, decades of a misguided, large-scale socioeconomic experiment have turned the economy upside-down. It is more lucrative in Cuba to be a restroom attendant – a human toilet flusher – than a physician. Yes, laws were written and a secret police established to discourage private enterprise. Yes, the buildings are literally falling apart for want of materials for repair, and fertile fields lie fallow even as capable workers sit on street corners. Certainly many people are entirely dependent on the regime for their subsistence allowance of bread, milk, rice, beans, pork, butter and eggs. (That’s four eggs a month per person.) Still, human beings are incredibly resilient. Creativity is innate, and art flourishes even when things get worse than could ever be imagined. Ambition is instinctual and transcends even the most counterintuitive limitations placed upon it. In the face of exorbitant licensing fees, usurious income taxes and the ever-present threat of imprisonment or execution, the most enterprising Cubans have still begun to open private craft stalls and restaurants. Defying all odds, David’s tiny Jewish community yearns for a better world and a better lot for themselves. Like bamboo shoots, given a little bit of land, a little bit of space and even an unfair shot at a better life, they grow, and grow and grow. Watching hope spring up in the least hospitable of climates makes t’hiyyat hameitim – resurrection of the dead – seem real. Death and despair not the end; they are the necessary precondition for hope and rebirth.

Knesset Israel’s trip to Cuba coincided with the parshiyot that describe Jacob’s sojourn in the household of Lavan. I was volunteered to read Torah last shabbat, and chanting Jacob’s response to his dream – “God was in this place, though I was not aware… How awe-inspiring is this place; this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gateway to heaven.” – was both jarring and inspiring. And furthermore the juxtaposition of Jacob’s journey and travel in Cuba, invited comparison between the journey of our ancestor and the experience of the Cuban people.

Jacob’s journey is framed by dreams: first, having left the house of his father, Jacob dreams of finding comfort in the midst of his anxiety. Angels are ascending and descending a ladder. God is standing at its top, sharing a message of safety and hope with Jacob. Jacob’s initial dream is one of lofty ideals and abstract promises and it accompanies him as he goes into exile from the comforts of home and the habits of ordinary life. He travels with anxiety but also a sense of purpose and hope into the ‘experiment’ of a different sort of life. He expects prosperity and protection, and his dreams are of God. This is the same ethereal, idealistic sort of dream that ostensibly motivated the revolution of 1959.

But Jacob’s experiment works out poorly, to say the least. His trusted uncle turns out to be a shyster of the first order, tricking Jacob into years of hard labor, a disingenuous marriage and menacing indenture. As the years go by, despite all the promises, Jacob is still virtually enslaved to his uncle and father-in-law. He asserts that he has been a good boy throughout, doing everything for the benefit of his employer and holding himself to a higher standard than would an ordinary shepherd. Yet his dreams are changing. No longer does Jacob dream of God; Jacob dreams of sheep, envisioning how to manipulate the rules to increase his personal herds at the expense of his scheming uncle.

Our sages and even the Torah itself are pretty hard on Jacob for that second dream, suggesting that it is this dream that signals to God that it is time for Jacob to go. Materialism has absorbed our otherwise holy, focused ancestor. Yet, after traveling in Cuba, I am no longer eager to condemn Jacob’s dream of a few sheep to call his own or his sudden obsession with gaming the twisted system established by his uncle. When an individual lives a life of privation and compulsory sacrifice, when the path to sustenance is so labored as to be nearly impossible, when enormous energy must be expended in order to put a few extra eggs in the family’s pot or to search out an antibiotic, who can judge that person’s dream of becoming master of his own future? Economic muscle and political power are intimately related. When an individual frees himself of servitude and poverty, he assumes control of his destiny; a people may do the same. Perhaps Jacob’s materialistic dream of sheep is actually a message not of reprimand but of growth: only now that Jacob is ready to take care of himself and his family is he ready to move on. He has grown from dependence into responsibility. It is time for Jacob to use his ingenuity to set the stage for present and future, accepting the risk and welcoming the reward.

Yet Jacob’s journey and Jacob’s dreams are far from complete. There is one long, terrible, frightening night still ahead of him, a night during which, alone, he will struggle with a demon, perhaps sent by others or by his own conscience. He wrestles all night with this being, rolling in the dust, never sure of whether or how he will emerge. Jacob will not be the same as he was before the journey, but no one ever is. I fear that Cuba is heading in the direction of a long, dark night. Disorganized liberalizations of the economy remove some of its safety net. The secret police seem to have fewer eyes and ears than ever before. And the reemergence of a class society (instead of all have-nots, Cuba now has have-nots and have-a-little-bit-mores) inspires petty crime. I doubt Cuba will long remain as ‘safe’ as it is today, and I am sure that whatever transitions are coming will involve painful moments for its citizens. Perhaps there is no other way.

By traveling to Cuba and by supporting its people – through personal connection with our fellow Jews and their institutions - we provide a taste of that hope. Our presence is as welcome as our presents. Though Knesset Israel will not be leading another solidarity mission for at least two or three years, I would encourage participation in other trips that take American Jews to see not only Havana but also other parts of Cuba. Knesset Israel is now a part of the Jewish network that sends aid to Cuba; though direct mail is prohibitively expensive, we are able to send packages of toiletries, medication, school supplies, books and the like with other groups planning missions. And finally, I believe that we have a moral obligation to lobby in the United States against the embargo on financial transactions with Cuba. That policy is only providing a convenient excuse for the Castro regime to oppress the Cuban people. To take action that necessarily loosens Castro’s economic stranglehold on the people of the island is to give the Cubans more freedom and control over their destiny.

We must remember throughout whatever happens in Cuba over the next few years that Jacob’s nighttime struggle is not permanent. The Torah tells us, as day broke, as it eventually does, the sun shone for him for the first time since he first left his parents’ house. Jacob’s unquenchable spirit and his remarkable passion set him up for a new destiny. No longer Jacob the Trickster, he is also Israel, the one who fights with God and with men and prevails. Though his trials are far from over, he once again experiences light and hope. And in bringing light and hope to our brothers and sisters in Cuba, we find ourselves inspired. 

Teaching to the Test - Some Thoughts on Jewish Education and the MCAS

            Both of my parents are teachers by training, and I grew up participating in conversations around the dinner table that revolved around matters of educational policy, theory and practice. Before his decision to focus his career around preparing teenagers for bar and bat mitzvah, my father taught junior high school science in an urban public school system. For the last fifteen years, my mother has taught English literature and writing at a rigorous, college-preparatory school in the Midwest. I couldn’t help but absorb some of their passion for the exchange between teacher and student and their dedication to teaching not only the facts but also the practices of curiosity, inquiry, analysis and critical thought. I learned those habits and, at the same time, got a sense of how important it is to communicate them to the next generation. To this day, when I speak about the reader finding or making meaning through study a text, secular or religious, I draw on all those skills and strengths that were inculcated in me at home and at school – in secular and in Jewish studies.

            Yet I remain al l too aware that our national standards of education don’t really address curiosity, inquiry, etc…, even though those are the leanings that enable me to gather and process the information I use every day. So I count myself fortunate that I am an adept test-taker. I learn easily through reading, lecture and discussion and can memorize facts and formulae to transcribe them quickly or to fill in the correct oval with a number-two pencil. I honed “life-skills” like psyching out a multiple choice exam based on the scoring rubric because I had to in order to advance through my education. Although mandatory standardized testing (as opposed to college exams, which have been ubiquitous for several decades) was just taking off as I was graduating high school, I understood what it took to get scores that were high enough to not interfere with my prospects. The irony was particularly apparent the day in eleventh grade that I was compelled to miss most of a class on bond angles in advanced placement chemistry in order to take a multiple-choice state freshman proficiency exam in science. Perhaps the tests motivate some students to learn, but that was not true for me. I learned to learn, despite the tests, and have brought that thirst for knowledge and understanding to bear on every aspect of my life – academic, interpersonal, Jewish, spiritual.

            I can’t help but notice that our conversations about education in the congregation have started to adopt the language of the national discussion about testing. “Communicate the information.” “Read and drill.” And I wonder whether we’re selling ourselves short by using those terms to think about Jewish education. Is it desirable, or even possible, to teach to the test in this context? Has bar mitzvah become the Jewish MCAS? Is there a Jewish MCAS? How do we know when we’ve experienced success in our lifelong Jewish and journeys?

            If we look at this week’s Torah reading, Toldot, we see that the main characters Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Esau are constantly testing each other. Who passes? Who fails? Who overcomes disadvantage? Who loses everything? And why?

Rosh Hodesh Ideas from Myrna Hammerling

Here’s another occasion to add to your family’s portfolio of ways to celebrate being Jewish!  This one doesn’t come every week like Shabbat, but it does come every month.

In ancient times people sat on mountaintops near Jerusalem and watched the sky at the end of each month.  Upon seeing the first sliver of the new moon, they would race down the mountain to inform the rabbis of their sighting (two witnesses were required).  Torches would be lit on mountain top after mountain top to spread the word; trumpets or shofarim would be sounded.  In a pre-written calendar world, this is how the new month began in Israel.  To this day Jewish calendars note Rosh Chodesh (literally head of the month). 

When the new moon was confirmed, people would carefully count the days from that first night to identify important benchmarks, holidays and observances for the rest of that month.  The Jewish rhythm was established in this communal way.  As Jews moved away from Jerusalem over the centuries, and the identification of the new moon was not as accurately observed, we began to celebrate two-day holidays in the diaspora.  Even in Eastern Europe Rosh Chodesh was still a half-holiday from school for Jewish children and a holiday from work for women.

So how can we make this a celebratory opportunity for our families?  One way to celebrate is to have a special family dinner—either on erev Rosh Chodesh or during the next day’s lunch.  Festive meals, decorations appropriate for the month ahead, candles of special colors or scents, singing songs of the upcoming festival, and inviting friends are a few suggestions.  Eat a new fruit of the season and say the shehechiyanu; make crescent shaped rolls or cookies to resemble the moon; determine what to do with last month’s tzedakah collection.  Some families schedule their monthly family meetings at this time or give out monthly allowances.  Use your imaginations—there’s neither a fixed nor an incorrect way to celebrate!

In shul on the Shabbat before the new month called Shabbat Mevorchim, there are some specific variations.  The Ya-aleh v’yavo paragraph is added to the morning Amidah, the maftir (8^th) Torah reading comes from Numbers 28:9-15, Parashat Pinchas, the Haftarah for Rosh Chodesh is from Isaiah 66:1-24, and the Birchat HaChodesh is recited while holding the Torah before marching it back to the ark.  Next Shabbat, 11/6/10, you may even hear this last-mentioned prayer sung to the tune of Maoz Tsur as a foreshadowing of the arrival of Channukah later in the month.

Enjoy!

- Myrna

Parashat Hayye Sarah

Read
This week's Torah reading begins with the death of Sarah and Abraham's quest to find a burial place for her, which he ultimately purchases at substantial expense from Ephron the Hittite. The bargaining process, recorded in great detail in the Torah (Genesis Chapter 23) shows us the extent of Abraham's single-minded devotion to his beloved wife, and to the task at hand.

Discuss
Abraham, through his behavior, shares his values with us. Revisiting this story provides a great opportunity for families to talk explicitly about what is most important to each individual, and to the family as a whole.

• Name some of Abraham's core values. Do you share some of them?
• What are your core values? What makes you the person you are?
• What do you do to communicate what is most important to you? 
• Have you ever felt challenged regarding your core values or commitments? How far have you gone for them?

Share your ideas with the KI community by posting here.  

Exciting Meeting Last Night

It was so energizing to hear from a large number of parents who are so committed to their children's Jewish education last night. The diversity in the room was tremendous, yet people felt comfortable speaking from the heart about a number of challenges they face on their journeys and the different kinds of pressures they face even as they seek to make Judaism a priority.
Many major themes arose: among them, that we have established little connection between Hebrew School and home. This blog is intended to help address that concern and, perhaps over time, to reach beyond that. Families were interested in hearing about themes, stories and issues to discuss with their children at dinner that will further their Jewish, religious, spiritual and moral development as a family.
We'll see what we can do, and how you are interested in responding.