Jewels 2018

Dear Steve 2025, Has the way we care for one another improved? Are you still devastated to see mentally ill people, psychotic and disheveled, lining our streets like discarded byproducts of a polarized society? Do we still abdicate higher ground by hiding behind ill-conceived mental-health laws that value autonomy over dignity and individualism over compassion? I’m reminded of Francis Peabody’s 1925 proclamation, “The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.” Those words remain most urgent in the care of those who cannot care for themselves. Yet, I’m disgusted by how we’ve lost our guiding

Dear Friends, Thank you for being a part of this year’s of Jewels of Elul. I hope that you found the introspections from the past 29 days to be mind and heart opening. This year’s open ended theme “What If”, led to some wonderfully creative pieces that were read by people all around the world. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please send your comments to info@picounionproject.org – We’d love to hear from you. For those who purchased Jewels of Elul your gift helped support our work at the Pico Union Project, a multi-faith cultural space located in the oldest Synagogue

What if we weren’t afraid to ask the hard questions? You know, the ones that compel those of us with privilege to reflect honestly about our own status. To ask the kind of questions that might force us to get uncomfortable and acknowledge when we may have made people feel like outsiders, even inside our own Jewish community. Within Klal Yisrael, where diverse races, ethnicities, sexualities, genders, and socio-economic statuses always have thrived, what if we all dedicated ourselves to making those most marginalized among us feel elevated? To building a community where those with non-Ashkenazi heritage never have to

As I write this, news just broke about the Trump Administration’s policy separating children from their parents who are seeking haven in the United States. Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA, got a permit for a similar rally in Washington D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary of that hate-fest; and Antwon Rose, a 17-year-old black unarmed teen was shot dead by a white police officer in Pittsburgh. How did we get here, and how do we embrace the words of George Bush, who in accepting his party’s nomination for the Presidency

One day in fourth grade, the rabbi visited our classroom to teach us the V’ahavta in Hebrew. The V’ahavta is a prayer which commands us to love God with everything we are, in everything we do. We sat filled with fear and excitement that the rabbi himself was teaching us that day. He assigned each of us a line of Hebrew to learn for the following week. At the end of class, I stashed my Siddur, prayerbook, under my desk, raced to carpool and didn’t give the assignment another thought. When the rabbi returned the following week, he listened intently

Sarah: What if. This is the start of stories we tell ourselves, ingraining our fear of the yet unknown. What if I never fall in love again? Or write another joke? Susan: Yes, to hold not-knowing with grace is a gift to ourselves — and to the world. To embrace possibility. Sarah: My therapist says we are looking through a pinhole. And we distort that speck of reality into a big ghost story. Susan: Or into a Big Truth everyone must share. Your struggle to embrace not-knowing is an important model. Too many people, factions, nations, look through that pinhole

What if my father was an optimist, a romantic, one who insisted that man is innately good? What if he saw only what he wanted to see, made excuses for himself as well as for other people? What if my father had not himself experienced the voracious appetite that Jew haters had for hating Jews. While others thought that a cultured, civilized nation, the birthplace of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, could never be seduced by the likes of Hitler and the Nazi movement, my father knew better. Often as a boy he had been the scapegoat of bullies who taunted

Throughout Jewish history, we’ve been called the People of the Book, a people dedicated to understanding the manifold elements of Torah and applying it to our daily lives. Yet, a cursory survey of the Jewish landscape—in Israel and the Diaspora—reveals something dark and disturbing: Judaism, either as an assimilated people or as an extreme fundamentalist religion, with little in between. Consequently, Judaism lived globally and lived fervently with an ethos of compassion may be withering before our eyes. How do we stave off this creeping sickness within our midst? What if we ensured the mitzvot, sacred commandments, radically transformed us?

“Arise shine for your light has dawned” -Isaiah 60:1 For each of the seven weeks leading to Rosh Hashana, we read special Haftarah’s that are collectively called the Haftarot of consolation. Our ancestors had lived through destruction and devastation, but these passages from the Prophets promised that this reality was not the end of the story. They promised a better future if only we are willing to work for it. In each of these readings we are told that our actions in the world matter. And through these actions we can redeem ourselves and the entire world. Our tradition has

If we were able to see our pasts with total clarity, we would remember a time we weren’t carrying the emotional burdens of regret, recriminations, self-hatred and hatred of others. Through years of painful experiences, we came to believe in the idea of holding onto this oppressive, senseless cargo. It is sad (and all too human) how easily we came to embrace, and even to cherish such harmful thoughts —as if losing them would feel like losing a limb. In Elul we are looking for a particular blessing, one that creates circumstances through which we learn some momentous lesson about

What if in our teshuvah we focused on being ‘translators’ of God’s tradition? Eliyahu HaNavi revealed in the Gemara: When we say the words יהא שמיה רבא מבורך, ‘May God’s great name be blessed’ in Kaddish, God hangs His head and laments, ‘Woe to the Father Who exiled His sons, and woe to the children who are in exile from their Father’s table’. Why? Tosafot explain: אין העולם מתקיים אלא אסדרא דקדושתא איהא שמיה רבה מבורך, “The world stands on the holiness of these words…” ושם היו עמי הארצות ולא היו מבינים כולם לשון הקודש לכך תקנוהו בלשון תרגום שהיו

In 1994 I wrote a song that asked “what if god was one of us”. Twenty four years later I have no answers, only questions. What if the worst was true? What if the best was true? What if neither, what if both? What if some random electron decides to inhabit that remote section of its Quantum Probability Curve resulting in total collapse of the universe we know? What if The Big Bang was really a Slow Burn? What if Lee Harvey Oswald shot JR? What if Coke really is The Real Thing? What if Tide really does get your

What if? Two little words that inspire children to dream and scientists to ponder. For my family, we could ask “what if” when we think about what might have averted the January 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein; our 19-year-old first born son.  What if we had all stayed home for a family game night, taken a family vacation over his winter break from UPENN or eaten dinner out that fateful night? Would he still be alive? We learned that “what ifs” can be the road to misery for people that have lost loved ones. We choose not to consider what

I was raised in a toxic environment. I spent 20 years of my adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol. I lived on the streets as a thief and with a cardboard sign to support my heroin habit. All of it led to a lot of pain and suffering for myself and others. My life has been filled with a lot of highs, and an equal number of lows, and all of it has prepared me to be what I am now. I have spent the last four years clean and sober, deeply rooted in a challenging personal spiritual journey

A decade after the genocide, Rev. Cecil Murray was in Rwanda with researchers from the center I direct at USC. He visited a Christian organization serving women survivors of the genocide – most lost their whole families and endured horrific sexual violence. Many were dying of AIDS. Some were mothers whose only living children were born of rape. During a healing service there, the president hears that Rev. Murray is a pastor and professor. He asks him to address the group. Rev. Murray obliges and walks to the front of the room. He takes out a newish, pink Rwandan Franc.

What if we only ever listened to leaders in positions of formal authority? When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, what if we asked “Who are you to dream?” When Dolores Huerta said Si Se Puede, what if we said no we can’t? When Abraham Joshua Heschel called on us to pray with our feet, what if we stayed seated? When Sarge Shriver demanded we lift up the poor, what if we demanded he run for office first? When Emma Gonzales cried out in grief and demanded action, what if we demanded silence? When Tarana Burke said me too, what if

What if we believed that, one day, we were going to die? What if we could imagine our final moments? Most of us don’t really believe our lives are finite. But on Yom Kippur we are forced to admit the essential fact of this life: that it will end. Yom Kippur challenges our comfortable pieties about Judaism as a this-worldly religion. It is our annual summons to abandon name/ face/personality/achievements and inhabit our death-bed. An out-of-body experience that urges us to relinquish what will someday be taken from us, so that we can live the time allotted us with greater

Being the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have often appreciated how incredibly optimistic my mother always was, despite everything she lost — her father, her home, 80 relatives, and so much more. As I think about my parents’ survival, and how they clung to Judaism and picked up the pieces after the war, my mind goes to the Jewish people as a whole, and how miraculously durable we have been. But what if we weren’t? What if we allowed others to destroy our dreams, our identity, or our connection to Israel, starting with the Greeks and Romans? What if we

What if the boys of Pointe du Hoc did not climb? What if the The Flag was never raised above Mount Suribachi? Near my iMac, I have two glass vials filled with dirty sand from two old forgotten shores, half a world apart. Inconspicuously they hide behind loud and shiny technological miracles of man’s modern innovations, of man’s progress, of man’s hubris. Unassumingly, these tiny bottles go unnoticed from day to day, from dawn to dusk, from dust to dust. But today I see them… What if my eyes could be a microscope for a moment? What if I could

What if you grew up in the small suburb of Parkland, Florida, as a normal kid, Hebrew teacher, lifeguard and youth group president with aspirations of being a filmmaker? What if one-day, loss and risk turned your life upside down? Mine did. What if we did not have to bury our heroes? Heroes should be able to teach the next generation of heroes, not leave us learning from loss. What if political parties never divided us? What if we came together to confront the problems of today? What if our elected officials stood up for the most vulnerable people? No one

We are all aware of things about ourselves that we want to improve, but what about the things we’re not aware of? How can we change that which we do not even know exists, yet unwittingly guides our behavior? And how can we come to terms with the fact that even the best of intentions can be derailed by unconscious biases? I adopted my African American son at birth. He is 21 years old now, and I am no closer to a complete understanding of his experience as an African American boy—and now man—in America today than I was 21

On a recent trip to Israel I rented a car. Driving in Israel is harrowing. Driving in the Holy Land can be anything but holy. One busy Friday afternoon, as I rushed to finish buying food for Shabbat, I turned a familiar corner and was cut off by another car, who narrowly missed plowing into the passenger side of my car. My heart raced. My blood began to boil. I felt my body begin to scream “you meshuganeh/crazy Israeli driver,” when all of a sudden, the face of the culprit came into view. It was my friend Dan. Foe to

As a public educator and activist, who is also: a formerly Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic rabbinic student, who formerly lived as a man, and now lives her true self as a woman – one of the questions I get way too often, is: What If? What If you would have been born into another Jewish community? What If you would have been raised with a different religion? What If you could’ve been born in a female assigned body at birth? What If you weren’t LGBTQ, white, rich, poor, or skeptical of religion? It’s a question I often ask myself. A question that

What if each nation devoted itself to building a unique civilization, an experiment in what it could be like to be human? What if the nations could compete honorably and decently among themselves to see which of these experiments would best advance knowledge, creativity, prosperity, righteousness and godliness? What if each nation could be independent of the others, sometimes admired and sometimes opposed, but always treated with respect? What if the nations resolved disputes through voluntary arbitration, rather than being forced to submit to foreign laws dictated by world bodies dominated by others? What if we could be deeply impressed

Every day I ask myself: What if Matthew stayed home from school that day? What if he had skipped baseball practice? What if I had waited for him on the field? What if I had run faster to the field after his panicked and tearful phone call? What if his friends had been able to stop him before he reached the hotel? What if the security at the hotel had stopped the sweaty distraught 14 year old? What if the door to the 10th floor banquet hall had been locked? What if the windows had been unbreakable? What if the

I recently challenged members of a Florida synagogue who were polarized politically: “Take someone to lunch who voted the wrong way in 2016,” I said, “and speak to that person.” After the sermon, a psychologist gave me the greatest correction: “Next time,” he advised, “say: ‘and listen to that person.’” What if we started listening generously to one another, engaging deeply with loved ones and strangers, giving each other the benefit of the doubt, not the back of our hands, if they dare disagree with us? What if we remembered Mayor Ed Koch’s principled flexibility in telling voters: “If you

Elul 5: I Have a Few Questions ~ Rick Lupert

I speak to each of my parents every week, on occasion maybe twice a week if there is something particularly unusual happening in one of our lives or in the world. This means that for the last 30+ years I’ve had at least 1,563 conversations with each of my folks. I also see them once or twice a year in person which adds to my total conversations. I don’t recall having a conversation or visit with my dad in this 30-year period when we didn’t spend some portion of our time together talking about death. These aren’t somber conversations. Some

Sometimes, a Broadway show is not just a performance. It is a dream set to music. That was my experience when I saw “The Band’s Visit”, the multi-Tony Award-winning musical version of the Israeli film of the same name. “The Band’s Visit” is the story of an Egyptian police band, booked to sing in the Israeli city of Petach Tikvah (“with a p”). Through a simple linguistic error, the band winds up in a small desert town — Beit Hatikva (“with a b”). There, a café owner, Dina, invites them to stay the night, as an unresolved romantic tension between

What if the planet wasn’t round What if the silence had a sound What if we took our paradigms and flipped them upside down What if we made room for us all What if we didn’t let you fall What if we wore our bodies like the splendor that they are What if we synthesize? What if we integrate? What if we energize? What if we liberate? Oh gracious spirit of the universe Rise up like the sun We have these questions and we need divine direction Help us to believe It’s still to come A better world is still

I like to play around with gematria, a kind of playful reflection on Jewish letter/number coincidences. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value – aleph is 1, bet is 2, etc. Therefore, every word in Hebrew has a numerical value often shared with another word. So, when I am asked, “What if?”, I am wont to translate to Hebrew and then check the gematria. “What if” comes out to “Mah im?” “Mah” (what) comes out to 45. Forty-five is the also the numerical values “adam” – “human being.” And if you turn “im” around (another kind of

Life is composed of finite facts and infinite possibilities. Part of the art of living is to take the possibilities and elevate those which enhance our lives, improve our world and grow our souls. What follows are meditations on what might be. In the Talmud, one Rabbi has a dream about an upside down world. By stretching our minds, by what-iffing— we can broaden our vision and jumpstart our imaginations. On the Yamim Noraim we wonder what the world would be if… suddenly the gleam brightens, the blur sharpens, the vision beckons and we recognize that maybe, just maybe, this

A few months ago, I went out to lunch with Bruce, an old friend, who asked me “what it would take to bring back Jewels of Elul?” I answered, “Time and money.” He said, “What if I gave you the money?” With this brief, generous response, Bruce gave me two gifts – the funding for this year’s Jewels and the theme: What if? “What if” is the ultimate dare, the permission to think out of the box and reach for what might, could, or ought to be. It is the spice of life and for me, the fuel that drives me through