From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

A Message From Our President

Dr. Lance Strate

We Were Nomads

Passover is coming, and with it comes our annual celebration of the exodus from Egypt. We tend to think of it as a liberation from slavery, the first step on a journey to the promised land, with a very significant stopover at Mount Sinai. But we also tend to discount the journey itself, the forty years of wandering in the desert. We may think of it as a punishment for losing faith. Or we may even joke about it, saying that we got lost in the desert because the men refused to ask for directions.

We tend to think of wandering in negative terms, often as "wandering aimlessly," losing our way, being rootless or fickle. Maybe that's because, in the modern world, we tend to be so very goal driven, so fixated on getting from point A to point B, on making progress, proceeding towards a predetermined end.

We lose sight of the fact that wandering can also mean meandering, taking our time for the pure pleasure of it. It can also mean exploring, delighting in the joy of discovery. And it can also mean roaming, traveling from place to place in a deliberate fashion. This last form of wandering is characteristic of the nomadic way of life, the way of life that we associate with the origins of our people, and our faith.

The story of the Jewish people begins with Abraham in the city of Ur, who is commanded by God to leave the city and journey to the land of Canaan to become a nomad. He becomes a shepherd, roaming the land in search of green pastures and the water that sustains them. In other words, Abraham cannot become holy by remaining in the city. He is sanctified through an exodus of his own, and later witnesses how two other cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, have become the sites of sin and corruption, and are destroyed by God.

When periodic drought strikes the land, Jacob and his sons travel down to Egypt, and as we tell the story, they went down to Egypt to sojourn and not to settle. In other words, as nomads, that move was meant to be temporary. But their descendants are enslaved and forced to build cities for Pharaoh, specifically the cities of Pithom and Rameses, according to the Torah.

The exodus then was an escape from Egyptian cities and slave settlements, and a return to nomadic life. And as nomads, the Israelites would not have been wandering aimlessly in the desert, but rather following a circuit in conjunction with the changing seasons. Not a straight line from departure to destination, but making the rounds repeatedly, in harmony with their environment. It is during this period that the words of the Ma Tovu are uttered, classically rendered as, "How goodly are thy tents."

And the story of the return to the promised land begins with Joshua bringing down the walls of the city of Jericho. Jerusalem itself was not built by the Israelites, but rather conquered by King David to serve as the capital of his kingdom, and the site of the Temple built by Solomon. And without discounting the singular importance of Jerusalem, I want to suggest that we recall the lessons we learned from our experience as nomads:

As nomads, we learned that God, or if you prefer, the holy, the divine, or the spiritual dimension of existence, is not confined to any one place. There are no geographical limits to the encounter with the sacred. Transcendence can happen anywhere.

As nomads, we learned that the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. That travelling in circles is not a bad thing. That the real world has curves, just as we later discovered that the planet is round, just as Albert Einstein later discovered that all of space is curved.

As nomads, we learned that lines and boundaries are creations of frail and fallible human minds, not commandments from God. That walls are meant to be torn down, to be shattered by the rippling resonances of sound waves. That houses and buildings, settlements and cities, and even nations, are not as permanent as they may seem. That what really matters are people, family, community, and beyond, to teach our children diligently, to honor our parents, to love our neighbors, and to love the stranger, for we too once were strangers.

As nomads, we learned that any given place is not all that important, that it is temporary, transitory. That our religion is not so much about space, but rather about time. We can pray anywhere, we can observe Shabbat, the festivals, and the High Holy Days anywhere, what matters is that we observe them according to the calendar, not the map. We learned that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

As nomads, we learned that flexibility is better than fixity and rigidity. That being a seeker and a searcher is better than becoming too settled in our opinions.

As nomads, we learned to live in harmony with our world, and not be overly proud of our own inventions and constructions.

As nomads, we learned to be cautious about our circumstances, not to take things for granted, to know that situations can change suddenly, precipitously, catastrophically. To always keep one bag packed.

As nomads, we learned what it means to be free, what it means to be a people, and what it means to have faith.

This is the legacy we share, together, as a congregation. Wishing you a very wanderful Passover holiday!

The Language of Truth

Fresh from yesterday's Jewish Standard, here is an article featuring Marc Salem, who will be performing tomorrow at Congregation Adas Emuno—see our previous post, Marc Salem's Mind Games This Sunday.

The article, entitled The Language of Truth, and written by Jewish Standard editor Joanne Palmer, is subtitled, "Mentalist Marc Salem of New Milford talks about nonverbal speech," and concludes with the following information:

Who: The mentalist Marc Salem

What: Will present “Mind Game”

When: On Sunday, March 11, from 4 to 6 p.m.

Where: At Congregation Adas Emuno, 254 Broad Ave. in Leonia

For more information: Call (201) 592-1712

How much: $10

And here is what the article had to say:

Mentalism.

That’s a scam, right?

That’s when somebody’s on stage pretending to read your mind, tell your secrets, maybe embarrass you, all while he’s busy diverting your attention or his assistants are rummaging through your bag, next to you on the floor, or the person whose mind he’s reading is a plant, right? Right?

Well, I don’t know. And I’m not here to tell you one way or another. But I do want to present the case for Marc Salem, mentalist by night, for about 20 years a professor of psychology at such schools as NYU and Mount Saint Vincent (and the holder of a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania) by day. (Oh, and also, on other days, for nine years, the director of research at Sesame Street, and directly responsible for Rechov Sumsum, Sesame Street’s Israeli version.)

We’re focusing on Mr. Salem, who lives in New Milford and is the son of a rabbi (and whose given name, Moshe Botwanick, would fit less easily on a theater marquee than his taken name), because he will perform at a benefit for Adas Emuno on Sunday.

According to Mr. Salem (who could be called Dr. but prefers not to be, he said), he has always been interested in nonverbal communication, “because people have a much more difficult time lying nonverbally than verbally. We are not really trained to read nonverbal language, but it is much harder to hide emotion because it literally is written on people’s faces.”

He chose developmental psychology because, he said, “I was always sensitive to other people’s nonverbal cues.” From the time he was a small child, Mr. Salem added, he was able to know things about other people that he thought were entirely obvious, until he realized that no one else could see them. “I wanted to go into psychology because the mind fascinated me,” he said. “It was my playground. I thought that everyone could read it, that it was part of everybody’s makeup.”

What began as intuition he later honed and trained, so now he works with a combination of instinct and decades of experience, he said. It’s not magic; it’s observation and knowledge. It’s also fast talking and fancy but obfuscatory theory, of course, but that’s all part of the show.

And so is the idea of leaving audiences feeling puzzled, but happy, never uncomfortable, never pried into.

Mr. Salem’s shows included a stint off Broadway—to rave if disconcerted reviews—and a still-viewable (Google for it) and honestly jaw-dropping segment with Mike Wallace onstage for 60 Minutes

It’s all a balance.

There is no real conflict between his work as a teacher and as an entertainer, Mr. Salem continued. “Marshall McLuhan,” the mid-20th-century North American philosopher who pioneered media studies, said “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either,” Mr. Salem said.

Although he’s a writer, as well as a teacher and performer, one thing that he never has done and never will do is counseling, although his credentials would allow him to. Because he can see so deeply into people “I would be too close to people’s pain, and it would hurt me to try to deal with it,” he said. He uses his father as an example; as a pulpit rabbi, at Tel Or in Havertown, suburban Philadelphia, his father, Rabbi Israel Botwinick, counseled congregants, and he worried and grieved with them. As a result, his son said, “My father died too young, because he didn’t know how to build calluses against other people’s pain.” So, he said, he steers clear of avoidable pain. Instead, “I bring joy.”

His shows include tricks like guessing which numbers people are thinking about, or what words; they’re based on an understanding of the sorts of words or numbers people are most likely to guess. Although much of his work is based on visual cues, some of it is purely verbal. For example, on the phone, he said, “Pick a number from one to four.” Almost everyone picks three, he explained, because the sentence that offers the range of numbers — from 1 to (2) 4—omits three. He offers other, similar tricks, which steer the listener clearly but unconsciously in specific directions. It’s not foolproof, but it’s smart.

His work, Mr. Salem said, “is a matter of being sensitive to other people. If everybody learned to be better at nonverbal communication, they’d be better parents, better siblings, better lovers. It’s the one language that we don’t learn, and it’s the one language that carries the most truth.”

And yes, there is a great deal that is Jewish in his work, Mr. Salem added. “A great deal of what I do involves thinking things through. I think I use a talmudic logic.

“The rabbis of old had incredible memories—and so do I. They could memorize page after page of Talmud. It is the written word versus the oral tradition. I focus on both of them very strongly, and I see how they differ from each other.

“I think—and McLuhan taught—that the written word is very different from the oral word. I think that our oral tradition allows laws to be changed in certain ways, and it also creates powerful memories.

“I worry about things like iPads and other electronics, because of the way we rely on them instead of our memories,” he continued. “The Talmud says that each generation will get weaker and weaker,” and he fears that the devices’ external memories make us dependent on them, and let our own internal facilities degenerate. “I am no Luddite, but I do think we must not let that happen,” he said. “The more technology memorizes stuff for us, the less we use our own muscles for memory.

“We are the people of the book, and I think that the written word is the most powerful. I do think that the power of the linear written work goes into your cerebral cortex. What you hear to some extent goes in one ear and out the other. To retain things, you must be skilled in reading.

“I talk about the difference—not to my secular audiences, of course—between the Torah she’be’ketav—the written Torah—and the Torah she’baal peh—the oral Torah. They are both important, but the 10 Commandments are written in stone—they are unchanging—and the Talmud is an oral tradition.

“I am of the belief that the future hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “Therefore we make our own future. The smarter you are, the easier it is to create your own future—but there is also the random element.

“There is a tribe that used to let its cattle wander based on the cracks that developed in the bones they would throw in the fire. The cracks were random—so they never went back to a place they’d already been. So what they thought was predicting the future really was randomness, giving them a map to travel where they’d never been before. Following randomness has certain advantages. It prevents the bias of thought in doing things.

“It’s like a stream. If a rock goes into a stream, it will be diverted. We have to realize that the rocks will be there.”

Confused yet? Marc Salem says many things; some of them are entirely clear, and others are not so clear. But he can read a great deal about you from the way you express your confusion.

So, if you are in mind for a little confusion, and a lot of entertainment, join us tomorrow at 4 PM for a mindblowing performance!

Marc Salem's Mind Games This Sunday

Marc Salem - 60 Minutes from JLI on Vimeo.

Social Action Spring

From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:


 

A Report from Annette DeMarco
Social Action Committee Chairperson




 


Hello All!

The number of the moment is 183! That is how many items of soup we collected and donated to the Center for Food Action… and during one very, very cold winter! Thank you to all who took part in our "Souper Bowl"!

We are now working with the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey as this organization sponsors its March Mega Food Drive. Please bring non-perishable foods to the vestry room between now and March 19, and place in our Community Purim Baskets. Donations will be brought to the JFNNJ office and from there distributed to local food pantries.

Another chance to help: On Sunday, March 25th, families are being asked to help sort the food collected as well as pack week-end snack packs for children in need. Please go to www.jfnnj.org/fooddrive to register and to find a list of most needed food items. There are no age limitations to participate!

Save the Date: Sunday, May 6

For the third year, our congregation will be part of Family Promise Hike or Bike in Ridgewood. This event raises money for homeless, working families with children. Participants can choose to hike (walk through town) or bike for three miles, or bike for 15 miles. There are lots of family activities plus refreshments. Stay tuned for more information!

Social Action Committee Meeting: Thursday March 15 from 6:30-7:30 PM. New Members Welcome! I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to those who answered our call to support March for Our Lives by making a donation or purchasing merchandise. Marchforourlives.com

L’Shalom,
Annette 
acheryl21 at gmail.com

Youth Group News Spring 2018

From the pages of Kadima, the Newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

Youth Group News from
Youth Group Advisor
Samantha Rosenbloom:

Our next Youth Group event will take place on Sunday March 11 with pottery painting!

April's event will be an “escape room” excursion. As a group, we will be locked into a room, where we will need to solve clues to escape before the time runs out.

samantharosenbloom at gmail.com

Spring 2018 Religious School News

From the pages of Kadima, the Newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

Religious School News 

     from


Cantor Sandy Horowitz

Religious School Director

The joy and silliness of Purim having just ended, we now look ahead to Passover at the end of this month. As in previous years we will be putting together a school Passover Seder program with student contributions of music, skits and presentations. We need help from parents with food, setup and cleanup—please check out the Parent Volunteer link and sign up if you can help:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0845a9 aa2caafe3-class

The next Family Service on March 23 will be led by our youngest students from Grade 1-2- 3. Come on out and support them as they lead us in songs and prayers, and provide us with their take on the 10 Plagues!

The April 27 Family Service in celebration of Israel’s 70th birthday will include contributions from each class, as they share sets of 7 facts (one for each decade!) on different aspects of Israel’s life and history. This promises to be an inspiring and enjoyable celebration.

But wait, there’s more! Jordana Marcus is celebrating becoming Bat Mitzvah on Saturday, March 10th. B’nei mitzvah services at Adas Emuno are open to everyone. Our students work hard and we are so proud of them—go Jordana!

Please make a note of these upcoming dates in March and April for our students & families!

Saturday, March 10 
10:00 AM–Bat Mitzvah of Jordana Marcus

Sunday, March 11
Confirmation Class followed by Youth Group activity

Friday, March 23 
7:30 PM—Shabbat Family Service featuring Grades 1-2-3

Sunday, March 25— Religious School Passover Seder

Sunday, April 1 No School

Friday, April 27 
7:30 PM—Shabbat Family Service in celebration of Israel’s 70th Birthday

Sunday, April 8
10:30-12 Confirmation Class with Guest Author Joan Arnay Halperin who will discuss her book, My Sister’s Eyes: A Family Chronicle of Rescue and Loss During World War II. Open to the Congregation.


 School Sundays at 9:15 AM Mommy/Daddy ‘n Me!

Character Matters, The Prophets Say

Our friend Joanne Palmer, editor of the Jewish Standard, published an article on this year's Sweet Tastes of Torah that is worth noting here on the congregational blog of Adas Emuno. 

The title of the article is Character Matters, The Prophets Say. The subtitle of the article, which was published in the January 19th issue, is "This year’s Sweet Tastes of Torah includes a talk on prophetic literature; also havdalah, dessert, and dancing," and here's how it begins:

In some ways, everything is different this year.

In other ways, things are the same; we build on successes and learn from missteps. The Sweet Tastes of Torah, the annual program that offers the community workshops with local rabbis, all of them members of the North Jersey Board of Rabbis, has been going strong for almost a decade now. About 18 Conservative and Reform rabbis will teach two sessions of classes on February 3 at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center.

But this year, in response to the increased urgency that many people feel to do something, to understand more about what they can do and to know more about the Jewish context that can nourish their instincts and actions, Sweet Tastes of Torah is reshaping the evening.

It will begin with the usual spirited Havdalah, and it will end with the usual and much-anticipated dessert, as well as Israeli folk dancing (to even out the dessert), but it will include a keynote address, which will provide the focus for all of the first session’s workshops and some of the second.

So far, so good, you may say, but what really makes this year's event different from all other years, you may ask. Well, then, read on!

The keynote speaker is Rabbi Barry Schwartz, who heads Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia and is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. In what must have been his abundant spare time (assuming that either he never sleeps and has figured out a 36-hour day), he has written Path of the Prophets. The latest of his books—he wrote a children’s book, Adam’s Animals, that came out in October—looks at some of the prophets—both the obvious ones, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—and biblical figures who were not called prophets but who functioned in that way, characters including Judah, the midwife Shifrah, and Ruth.

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Although Rabbi Schwartz worked on his book for five years, he said, and therefore he began the work well before today’s political situation evolved, “it just so happens that it’s coming out at a time when we are so conscious of the ethical issues that are swirling around the presidency and also the #MeToo movement. This invitation to deliver the keynote came smack at the time when the Harvey Weinstein story was just breaking, and it seemed that every day there was a new story.

Because his book is about prophecy—and about ethical living, which prophecy demands—it seemed absolutely timely, he said, and that is a great sadness. “I thought that I was writing it in order to make my contribution to the conversation about the prophets,” he said. “They inspired me when I was younger, and I wanted to do that for the new generation.

“So many people try to read the prophets, and their eyes glaze over. So much of it is written in high rhetorical style, in a poetical prose that is very hard to digest. I wanted to write a book that makes the prophet’s works, and even their lives, accessible and relevant and compelling.”

He talked about his book’s structure, and how the workshops at Sweet Tastes will mirror that structure.

“The book is divided into three sections—justice, compassion, and faith—reflecting Micah’s admonition to ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God,’” Rabbi Schwartz said.

“Certainly we are seeing ethical crises of leadership, particularly political and sexual in nature; these crises are happening so fast that we can hardly keep up with them. My thesis is that the prophets of ancient Israel brought forth an ethical revolution, and we need to retrieve their often overlooked or forgotten messages today. It will help inform us, perhaps it will help steady the ship.

“Part of what I will raise in the keynote is that it is not enough for us to lament what is going on. It is not enough for us to raise our concerns and then move on. In some ways, that is putting our heads in the sand, and the prophets would say no, that is not enough.

“We very much need to hear the prophetic message that every person has a responsibility to do their part. The prophets didn’t turn their ire just on the leaders, but on the people as well, and in some ways that is even more daring. If the leaders are making a mistake, we need to speak truth to power, but we also need to speak truth to the people, and to understand, as Rabbi Heschel put it, that especially in a democratic society, not all are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Rabbi Heschel, of course, is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the 20th century Jewish theologian and political advocate whom Rabbi Schwartz counts as among his inspirations. So, he said, was the rabbi of the shul to which his family belonged when he was growing up, in Croton-on-Hudson in New York. “Rabbi Michael Robinson, of blessed memory, was a disciple of Heschel’s, and one of the dozen Reform rabbis who were arrested with Martin Luther King in St. Augustine,” he said. “He was a true advocate for social justice, and I grew up with him, listening to him quote King and Heschel and the Hebrew prophets.

“It was JPS that published Heschel’s book The Prophets in 1963, and I feel a great kinship as the head of the JPS with Heschel’s work.”

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Rabbi Schwartz begins each of his chapters—each dedicated to one official or unofficial prophet—with a biographical sketch based on the information available in the Bible and fleshed out by his imagination. “I combine biography and theology by taking an episode from their lives that illustrates what their lives were about,” he said. “Sometimes the biographical bits in the text are sparse, but I elaborate on it by what I call creative first-person midrash. I have the prophets themselves speaking in the first person, and I take some poetic license to do it.”

Among the prophets Rabbi Schwartz writes about are Judah, who walks the “path of repentance,” he said. “Judah is the first character in the Bible who undergoes what we think of as repentance, and he changes.” And then there is Caleb the spy, “who had the audacity and the courage to stand up to his fellow spies, and he countered their terribly pessimistic report about the land they were about to enter with a more optimistic report. He was an example of someone whose spirit gave him the ability to stand forward.

“And the prophets are not all doom and gloom,” Rabbi Schwartz continued. “Some of it is about compassion, forgiveness, kindness, and hope. All of this is very much part of the prophetic message. That’s the second group, compassion. And then there’s the third one, walking humbly with your God. That’s the path of joy and faith and humility and wisdom; it’s more about internal characteristics.”

So, will his keynote address at Sweet Tastes of Torah be overtly political? It probably depends on how you define political, and for that matter how you define overt.

“I definitely will reference what is going on today,” Rabbi Schwartz said. “I am going to recall the names of so many people caught up in scandal today, without dwelling on any of the particular individuals or the details of their stories. But I do want to begin by painting a picture of the sordid state of affairs. I certainly will mention political figures and the figures in the worlds of entertainment and the like who have been caught up in political and sexual scandals, without going into detail.

“And then I will move directly to the message of the prophets, which is about not making ethics peripheral. They should be central to our lives.

“Character truly counts. To all those who say that our leaders’ character does not matter, the prophets would say that you can never separate character from the office. It’s reaffirming an old-fashioned message, that leadership is not just about a person’s ability, but about that person’s character. It’s not just about their ability but also their integrity.”

And then, of course, after all the discussion and soul-searching, there always is dessert.

The article also includes a nice picture of Rabbi Schwartz:

And it concludes with the following information: 

Who: The North Jersey Board of Rabbis sponsors

What: Sweet Tastes of Torah

Where: At the Fair Lawn Jewish Center, 10-10 Norma Avenue

When: On Saturday evening, February 3; doors open at 6:30 and Havdalah is at 7.

How much: $15 per person until January 31; $20 at the door

For more information, including a list of breakout sessions and teachers, and to register: Go to sweettastesoftorah.weebly.com or Google “sweet tastes of torah 2018”

We hope to see you there!