TROPES!

Recently, I did a zoom class about the power of taamim -- the accents that we use to read Torah and prophets and other texts according to our traditions. 

Facebook brought across my bow this posting from 4 years ago.

Also this weekend, I came across a YouTube video that I hadn't been aware of where I was interviewed by BREAD about its history and my history with the organization.

That one was about 5 years old. In both these cases, I find myself making the same points with passion and joy, which means either that I am a tiresome and unchanging person, or that I am deeply connected to values that inspire me.

As I approach my retirement at the end of October, it makes me feel good and settled and satisfied, but still inspired to move forward with the things I hold dear.

Here's what I said 4 years ago today:

So today provided one of those great validations in the work I do:

Like most cantors, an important part of my work is training young people for bar/bat mitzvah. This afternoon, I had 3 delightful lessons. I want to talk about one in particular. . . 

This girl's bat mitzvah is next spring. We're just getting rolling. . . First, she told me that I made a mistake in my recording of her haftarah.  (This was a confirmation of something she THOUGHT might be the case at the preceding lesson.  Once upon a time, I recorded those on cassette tapes. Over the years, I converted those to CDs and now some form of MP3 files that I can edit pretty freely.  So I made the correction in the file, and then copied it into a couple of other places where I make the haftarah available to myself or the world.  She was impressed by this small feat of legerdemain—and how often can grown-ups like me impress teenagers or adolescents in the tech realm?!)  She learned 4+ sentences of her haftarah -- PERFECTLY -- so well (and this is a funny thing I experience from time to time) that it seemed incongruous when she got past what she knew and just looked up at me. That's all there was. What makes that fun or funny is that she SOUNDED like she could have sung ANY haftarah perfectly from start to finish perfectly – but so far she has just learned what she’s learned.

We did some work on the tropes – the building blocks that make it possible for her to learn independently of my recording of her portion.  

What was so satisfying in this meeting?  Delightful that she chose to carefully correct me at the outset.  Very pleasing to hear her chant the haftarah so on target – and to know that she will add to it and add to it.  Particularly nice that she did this before she has connected with the teenager who will be tutoring her in addition to the work that I’ll be doing with her.  In other words, she did it herself.  

But more than that – just what IS it we’re doing when we teach a child a haftarah – and what are they doing when they learn it?  We are transmitting MUSICAL information that might be 400 years old – more or less.  By Jewish standards, that’s pretty new.  By any other standards, pretty preciously old.  I say 400 years because I’m considering the western musical style in which we interpret Torah and Haftarah cantillation.  It might be younger than that – but very likely not OLDER than that.  

But the written notation – the tropes themselves – upon which we base the music we later derived?  That’s about 1000 or 1100 years old.  Which is pretty fabulous.  Yet in order for some cheeky Masorete to write those tropes onto scrolls, it had to be an oral/visual custom dating back considerably farther.  My guess is an additional thousand years.  And the texts themselves are older than that – with great variation in just how long.

No matter how “recent” all that turns out to be, though, it’s pretty thrilling to be able to transmit what has come down to me piece by piece – a few hundred years and/or a couple of thousand years – and to be able to do it exactly.  In a way that I know that this student and others like her can continue to transmit it in the future.  

I don’t explain how cool this is to my students often enough.  Or do I explain it TOO often?! Well, TOO often when a kid just stares blankly at me.  But today, I felt that Audrey really understood that she had done something significant.  Which made her happy, too.  

So, Thank You, Audrey, for “making my day.”  And thanks to all my students – including the two Ethans I really enjoyed earlier today – for listening to me and trying to connect to the ways that I explain the value and importance of these traditions you’re learning.

Thank you to the congregation and community that give me the privilege of doing this for my profession.  Obviously I could take the thanks higher – but I don’t really like to go there in Facebook.  Maybe I’ll need to transfer this conversation to my blog. . . and take it to a higher level.

But for now. . . thanks for listening!

A Tisha B'Av Message from Me to Seth Rogen, Prime Minister Netanyahu -- and You

A Tisha B'Av Message from Me to Seth Rogen, Prime Minister Netanyahu -- and You

It's Tisha B'Av -- and though we wonder each year whether we are going to destroy ourselves yet again through sinat chinam -- senseless hatred -- I'd like to ask an even more basic question: Can we consider being responsible for the things we say?

In many synagogues throughout the world, the words Da Lifnei Mi Atah Omed appear over the ark -- KNOW BEFORE WHOM YOU STAND.

Some of you are aware of my ongoing PRAY AND MEAN IT activities -- unpacking the words of our prayers paragraph by paragraph. I've been at it one way or another for over 10 years -- and it's likely to occupy some of my time and energy after my retirement. In an expansion of a corner of that activity, I have started recording myself praying the daily service -- not all the time -- just making some basic recordings. I am always conscious of whether or not I'm really thinking about the words I'm praying as they "go by" -- but "when the little light is on" -- kal vachomer -- all the more so.

I take pride in being mindful of these composed words -- and I believe it helps me to be more mindful of the words I actually SAY to people.

I'm nowhere near perfect. I still have to apologize and re-word things too much of the time.

But when I see and hear some of the voices in the public square today, I am growing increasingly aware that many people have no sense that they have responsibility for their words at all. This isn't so surprising when words appear on screens and news feeds and might not even get printed out and here comes the next news cycle.

But as your mother used to tell you -- words and actions have consequences.

A couple of people I'd like to call attention to -- in very different contexts and with pretty different implications -- this Tisha B'Av -- Seth Rogen and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Rogen is the Hollywood mogul who used to be just a joker A master of writing and portraying silliness that was really inappropriate and off-color and very irritating but somehow made you sympathetic more than not, he's had enough successes that he's now a full-on big shot -- so that what he says or does matters to thousands of people. His .interview with Marc Maron, another free-speaking I-can-say-any-shit-I-want-to-middle-aged Jewish amuser, has sparked lots of reaction.

On one level -- HEY GREAT! That's just what Rogen would want. He's got a new movie coming out. Way easier for you to hear about it if people are arguing about stuff he says.

But on another level, those words that he can flippantly offer up along with Maron and hide behind the shield of "I'm just expressing myself -- I'm a comedian, writer, producer, actor -- I don't need to defend myself" are heavier than he's willing to admit.

In the interview, he says that "as a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life.” “You know, they never tell you that, 'Oh, by the way, there were people there. They make it seem like it was just sitting there – oh the f***ing door’s open!”

This relates to one of the brilliant slogans coined about the magnetism of Jews and the Land of Israel for each other -- A Land With a People for A People Without A Land.

The phrase pre-dates much Zionist thought but was promoted by early Zionist Israel Zangwill -- and you'll still hear it in use today occasionally -- most often in right-wing descriptions of why "Judea and Samaria" should be part of the "eternal homeland of the Jewish people."

For my part (getting back to daily prayers), I say every day that God has promised to us the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizites, Jebusites and Girgashites. I'm quite certain that many others who recite this prayer (just before we recount the liberation from Egypt, something we do multiple times each day) read it as telling us that the land belongs to us -- God said it -- that settles it -- etc. For me, it's way more complicated. I know that the Torah and Prophets spare no words in telling us that we need to wipe out all evidence of those folks -- and that when we fail to do so, we will ensnare ourselves and suffer grievously. So it's a daily reminder that, although I DO believe that there's an amazing tie between my people and this land (and it's WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW!!!) I recognize that my people have never had an exclusive claim to that land.  Nor has anyone else.  So we’re GOING TO NEED TO WORK ON THAT.  So when I recite this passage every day, it’s a reminder that I need to support negotiations with other people who think the land belongs to them.

Which brings us back to Seth Rogen.  Seth – you had a pretty intense Zionist education.  Your parents were radical social Zionists.  You went to Young Judaea programs – which are among the best.  Are you saying that at no time in your adolescence someone brought into discussion the complicating facts of other people who are here?  This is the claim of groups like If Not Now, the young adults who have decamped to the left of the circles in which I run – who claim that they were lied to about the truth of Israel and Palestine.

As someone who was an occasional part-time staffer at Ramah Wisconsin, I understand pretty deeply the challenge of how and when to present messages to campers and staff about Israel.  You probably don’t have a complicated political history discussion with an 11-year-old – although I have always told the story of how many then-6 year-old daughter, when she beheld the Palestinian neighborhood outside the Old City when we first visited there, DID understand things in ways that too few adults do – “They think it belongs to them.  They’re not going anywhere.  We think it belongs to us.  We’re not going anywhere.” BOOM! 

So how do you shape that message to a 14-year-old? A 16-year-old?  Your 18-21 year old staffers?  These are challenging questions that I saw the Camp wrestling with. 

And, though I appreciate that these young people are no longer accepting tired old answers to questions, I mostly see and hear them stomping their feet and blaming the State of Israel and Jews around the world and preparing to destroy what has been built without a clear picture or path to what needs to be built instead. 

“Tear it all down” isn’t helpful.  “Tear some things down” and “BUILD SOME OTHER THINGS UP” is what is desperately needed.

And back to Rogen:  You gotta figure that as a kid he never took anything that anyone said to him seriously.  And he’s made quite a good living at that.  But some things are important – and you can’t just make jokes about them.  Seth, you’re old enough to say “I feel like I was told that it belonged to us – and I don’t think they did enough to help me see a larger picture – and I hope that we can do better in the next generation.”  I don’t want to play the Holocaust card here – but the shit he says (you have to read it to come to your own conclusion, and here's a PDF of Allison Kaplan Sommer’s trenchant analysis in Haaretz) -- Sommer on Rogen is just irresponsible.

There are certain truisms that become repeatable and repeated:  “Young people are just fed up with Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.”  I’ve been working for years to try and have deeper conversations that enable young people to ask and explore hard questions – against a background in which some more right-wing Jewish groups categorize such people as self-hating or ignorant – when what they are really showing is a real interest in deep questions.  When they are denied the opportunity for a grown-up and respectful conversation, they will turn their back on “the whole Israel thing” – which becomes everyone’s loss.  And dangerous.

Speaking of irresponsible – we have the Prime Minister of Israel and his Designated Screamer Public Security Minister Amir Ohana – and their minions – yes, minions – not minyans.  As dozens of demonstrating middle-aged leftist Israelis have grown into thousands of younger (and older) diverse citizens, Ohana has wondered aloud why the people aren’t treating the demonstrators as badly as they would if they were Chasidim or Ethiopians.  And he has said today that the fomenting of violence by the demonstrators is worse than that which preceded the assassination of Itzhak Rabin in 1994 – despite the fact that the only violence occurring (and there is way too much of it) has come from right-wing soccer hooligans who are beating up the demonstrators.  And the Prime Minister for his part declares himself and his family under threat of murder – thus stirring the right-wing thuggery into higher gear.

It's really heartbreaking.  But part of heartbreak, we understand, is opening our hearts to feel the pain – so I’m going to challenge you – and myself – to be more careful with the things we say.  If we are, we’ll be in a better position to hold others accountable.

One of these years on Tisha B’Av, maybe we’ll be able to look back from better times on worse times.  L’shanah Haba-ah Birushalayim V’Tel Aviv – v’Hollywood – v’Washington DC – u-wherever-you-are.  A time of INCREASING health and DECREASING fear.