The Yom Kippur Flood of 2013: Are You OK?

It's Yom Kippur, and on my laptop I have two windows open. On one, I am streaming the final service of the day, Nei'lah from Lab/Shul, a project of Storahtelling's Amichai Lau Lavie. It's passionate, musical, innovative, and moving.

In the other window is live video from 9News.com from the Boulder Airport, where National Guard helicopters are taking off and landing in a constant stream. They are looking for and looking after victims of the devastating Colorado floods.

When the bay doors of one of the helicopters opened, it revealed a large cardboard sign with this handwritten message:

ARE
YOU
OK?

I can picture the helicopters hovering above the floodwaters, a Guardsman or woman spotting a person and holing up the sign, then waiting for a sign.

Yes, we're fine.
No, we're not fine. We need help!

At its best, Yom Kippur asks the same question.

My daughter loves to tell the story of the man who was caught in a shipwreck. A rescuer in a small row boat came and offered assistance. The man refused, saying confidently, "No thanks. God will save me." The woman in the row boat shook her head in dismay and went on her way. Then a larger ship happened by, and the captain shouted down to the man, who was clinging to what was left of his own ship. Again, he refused help. "No thanks! God will save me!" Finally, a rescue helicopter comes by and tries once again to offer the man help. Maybe they even held up a sign. Again, he refuses. "No thanks! God will save me!"

The man dies, and when he gets to heaven, he meets God. "God. What the heck? Why didn't you save me?"

God says, "What else did you want me to do? I sent a boat, a ship and a helicopter! You fool."

At Nei'lah, we come face to face with the big questions.

ARE
YOU
OK?

We are tired. We are hungry. We stand for the entire service, the ark open the Torahs revealed and standing witness to our final pleas. Dressed in white, a reminder of the burial shrouds we will all eventually wear, we confess our wrongdoings for a final time and try to squeeze in some last minutes of soul searching before the gates of heaven close to us.

We stand up, say what we need to, and voice our needs. Not in shouts, but in whispers.

Our religion is a smart one. We have specific rituals to deal with grief; we build sukkahs to house our joy; we have prayers and traditions and rituals for every stage of life and, seemingly, every human emotion. We have Yom Kippur, which is a time set aside for asking the big questions. What have I done in the past year that I regret? How have I fallen short? The picture we paint of ourselves is not always a fun one to look at. But in the end, when the light of Yom Kippur fades, we are really left with one question:

AM
I
OK?

We all have to be careful not to ignore the row boats, ships and helicopters in our lives. Today, when the total number of people unaccounted for in this terrible flood stands at over 200, we must also remember that sometimes there is nothing that can be done against the forces in our lives -- the forces of nature, the forces of the needs of the others; the forces of all those things that are bigger than ourselves. This is part of Yom Kippur, too.

Sometimes you are not OK.

Tonight I will turn some of my prayers to those who are not OK.

Families who have lost everything to the water.
Families who are still stranded on the mountain, waiting for their rescue.
Those who are missing, and those who are looking for them.
Children in Syria who have lost their parents, grandparents and siblings to war.
Parents in Syria who have lost their children.
Those around the world who are truly hungry.
To all who carry their own pain.

The gates of Nei'lah are closing.
But so many gates are opening.

And as your friend, I ask you sincerely...

ARE
YOU
OK?

Beautiful Fotos 10: The View from There

4 out of 5 of these photos were taken from a place other than Earth. How cool is that?

Teach Your Own Children?

If you truly wish your children to study Torah, study it yourself in their presence. They will follow your example. Otherwise, they will not themselves study Torah, but will simply instruct their children to do so. -- Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

To tutor or not to tutor? That is the question.

In our synagogue, the normal process for preparing a child for bar mitzvah is a team event. The kids attend Religious School on Wednesday and Sundays, as they have for years, but they also have private lessons with both the rabbi and a bar/bat mitzvah tutor. The rabbi studies the meaning of the Torah portion (and perhaps the meaning of life) with the student; the tutor goes over the mechanics of the service and chanting Torah. In the past, I've played both parts for other children's ceremonies.

When we didn't have rabbis on staff, I took on the role for several students. I loved those sessions of sharing and teaching and learning. The moment when something from Torah clicks and becomes relevant for a young student is precious and sweet. I've also served as the tutor, leading boys with cracking voices through the ups and downs of Torah cantillation, and though the material is prescribed, there are the same moments of discovery. Remembering how to start Hatzi Kaddish without prompting, or the first time successfully chanting without vowels and trope marks.

Now I'm the parent of that kid with the cracking voice, and I'm wondering where I fit in.

On the one hand, it's my job as a Jewish parent to educate my kids, and unlike a lot of other parents in this position, I have the knowledge to do so. That's a privilege.

On the other hand, it's good for kids to study with a variety of adults in the community. It connects them, builds relationships beyond the family, and exposes them to different perspectives on Torah and the service.

But on the other hand, would it be good for my relationship with my kids to study and prepare with them?

On the other hand, teaching your own kids often involves those interpersonal conflicts that don't exist with another teacher. It might be an easier road with someone else.

But on the other hand, isn't it worth overcoming and working out those conflicts for the sake of the bigger purpose? I used to be a much stronger hand in my own children's Jewish education, and those conversations about Torah, God and Judaism were holy. Why hand that off for one of the biggest conversations of them all?

On the other hand, it's not about me, and being his tutor feels like it's about me, not him.

On the other hand, this time to study together might be a once-in-a-lifetime gift.

On the other hand, lots of other parents in our community, including those who work as tutors for the community, do not tutor their own kids. What do they know that I don't?

On the other hand....

I'm getting nowhere with this back and forth. What do you think?

Countdown to Manhood. Bar Mitzvah Blog 1

My son turned 12 this week, so approximately one year from now we will be celebrating his becoming a bar mitzvah, a literal "son of the commandment(s)," a Jewish coming-of-age celebration. For the next year I plan to blog about our experiences as a family going through this process.

As a jumping off point, I'm sharing two articles about b'nai mitzvah that have appeared recently. I'll probably blog about them in more detail later, when Rosh Hashanah isn't bearing down on me and I've had some time to gather my thoughts. But together the illustrate the kind of trepidation with which I approach this process.

First, from the New York Times, an article about how how Jewish families are "... living in the religious school industrial complex..." which creates cookie cutter ceremonies and produces largely disinterested cookie cutter kids. Take the time to read the comments; it's a fabulous conversation. As a former member and driver of that system, I find the comments encouraging and depressing. (Click here to read the article.)

The second proposes turning the entire b'nei mitzvah process on its head by changing the age from 13 to 17. If more than 50% of kids drop out of synagogue life after their b'nei mitzvah  because they see it as the culmination, the graduation, move the goal post. (Click here to read the article.)  

In some ways, I've been planing my son's bar mitzvah since the day he was born, perhaps even before, and each one I've attended over the years has shaped and influenced what I envision as what to do and what not to do. 

But these articles are tempting me to blow the entire process wide open, kick tradition to the curb and see what we build. 

370-ish days and counting.

Oh, I've Seen Fire

My room smells of smoke, and not any sort of fun smoke either. Campfire smoke. Wood burning smoke. Forest fire smoke. About 15 miles from our house a 46,000 acre fire is burning in the foothills just west of Fort Collins. Over 100 structures have been damaged or destroyed, and one person lost her life. 1,100+ firefighters from many different states and Canada are fighting it round the clock, many of them in relentless 16-hour shifts...and they are losing.

I have multiple monitors at work, and for the past three days one of them was devoted exclusively to social media about the fire. I saw every Facebook status and photo posted by fellow Fort Collins folk and hundreds of tweets from the Larimer County sheriff, local papers, Denver papers, the Red Cross, national news agencies, acquaintances and darn near everyone who used the hashtag #highparkfire.

Facebook has become local and somehow remains decidedly global. My entire community of Fort Collins friends is posting about the fire, and friends far away give a look back into the normal everyday dronings of the world -- their work, their children, their jokes -- a world not focused on conflagration. 

I have overheard voices in the cube farm at work talking about their homes as they gaze at the most recent map and try to figure out if their property is on the right side of the red line. Like the smoke itself, the emotions of the fire -- anxiety, fear, worry, sadness, grief, hopelessness -- are seeping into everyday life. We are tired, snippy, and distracted. Our throats burn and we suffer headaches and sneezes. And we are lucky. Lucky that we live at 40°33′33″N 105°4′41″W and not a few meridians west.

Lightning started this fire and it's likely that Mother Nature will also be responsible for its end, but man is fighting as hard as possible to make a difference. I am in awe of the men and women putting up the fight with pick axes, chain saws, flamethrowers (fight fire with fire), bulldozers, airplanes and helicopters. 

The land will be devastated for years to come, and I am remembering our honeymoon in 1998. We visited Yellowstone a decade after it's 800,000 acre fire. There were signs of new life, but the scars remained, and I know this is the fate of our foothills... the backyard we've played in together for the past 18 years Homes will be rebuilt or not, but our children will be grown by the time the forest recovers, if it ever does... 24 years later, Yellowstone is still in recovery: Satellite slide show.


At the same time I am utterly fascinated by the power of this force knocks us humans flat on our asses with its power. I drove a couple of miles out of my way after work tonight to get the best vantage point for seeing as much of the mountains I could at once. This is the result. It was a lonely moment on east Horsetooth road, and I didn't/couldn't linger long. 

I am not/am no longer a faithful person, so I am a bit befuddled by the tweets and statuses that I see calling for prayer in times like these. I want to know, but have enough social grace not to ask individuals right now, exactly what difference prayer can make. if God can keep firefighters safe, why not obliterate the fire when it was 2-acres, or 2 feet, or keep the lightning out of dry forestland, or make the rains come Saturday? This is not a heartless position -- I too want the fire to stop and the houses to be saved and the firefighters to be safe, and for things not to have to get worse before they get better. If prayer is hope, maybe we are on the same page. 


I've seen fire... I'd like to see a little rain

Beautiful Fotos 9: Made You Blink

15 Things You Need to Give Up to be Happy -- The Annotated Version

I've been sent the article below a few times now, and each time I read it my irritation with it grows. My annotated version appears below. Comments are in red.

15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy

Here is a list of 15 things which, if you give up on them, will make your life a lot easier and much, much happier. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress and suffering – and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress free and happy – we cling on to them. Not anymore. Starting today we will give up on all those things that no longer serve us, and we will embrace change. Ready? Here we go:

1. Give up your need to always be right. There are so many of us who can’t stand the idea of being wrong – wanting to always be right – even at the risk of ending great relationships or causing a great deal of stress and pain, for us and for others. It’s just not worth it. Whenever you feel the ‘urgent’ need to jump into a fight over who is right and who is wrong, ask yourself this question: “Would I rather be right, or would I rather be kind?” Wayne Dyer. What difference will that make? Is your ego really that big? This suggestion completely ignores how often other people are wrong, and sometimes their being wrong has consequences for the "not wrong" people.  

2. Give up your need for control. Be willing to give up your need to always control everything that happens to you and around you – situations, events, people, etc. Whether they are loved ones, coworkers, or just strangers you meet on the street – just allow them to be. Allow everything and everyone to be just as they are and you will see how much better will that make you feel. 

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond winning.” Lao Tzu

Real life proves this wrong in so many ways. (See how I've already failed at #1?) "By letting it go it all gets done..." is just fine, if you don't really have anything to get done. However, those of us who are paid for completing tasks and projects can't just let it all go. Then nothing gets done and we get fired. 

3. Give up on blame. Give up on your need to blame others for what you have or don’t have, for what you feel or don’t feel. Stop giving your powers away and start taking responsibility for your life. From now on I will only blame others for the stupid things they do to themselves.

4. Give up your self-defeating self-talk. Oh my. How many people are hurting themselves because of their negative, polluted and repetitive self-defeating mindset? Don’t believe everything that your mind is telling you – especially if it’s negative and self-defeating. You are better than that. 

“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.” Eckhart Tolle

So my brain, the most powerful organ in the body (according to the brain) isn't smart enough to know when it's hurting itself. I need to use my mind to trick my mind into not listening to itself because the mind is unreliable and works against itself. 

5. Give up your limiting beliefs about what you can or cannot do, about what is possible or impossible. From now on, you are no longer going to allow your limiting beliefs to keep you stuck in the wrong place. Spread your wings and fly! 

“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind” Elly Roselle

Danger, Will Robinson! You cannot fly, and pretending you have wings won't help. I find that knowing your own limitations is quite helpful in life. I've been injured -- physically and emotionally -- by my own distorted views of my capabilities. We hurt our children when we tell them they can "be anything they want to be." 

6. Give up complaining. Give up your constant need to complain about those many, many, maaany things – people, situations, events that make you unhappy, sad and depressed. Nobody can make you unhappy, no situation can make you sad or miserable unless you allow it to. It’s not the situation that triggers those feelings in you, but how you choose to look at it. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking. Let me see if I get this straight -- we should hyperthink our emotional responses so that we control them. Situations don't trigger emotional responses. I call bullshit on this one, and I hate when people call on the "power of positive thinking". If you want to live an authentic life it won't all be positive, and applying positive thinking to everything sucks the life out of life. We learn by being unhappy and delving into the deep thoughts that arise from those moments, not from perpetually stopping ourselves from being unhappy. 

7. Give up the luxury of criticism. Give up your need to criticize things, events or people that are different than you. We are all different, yet we are all the same. We all want to be happy, we all want to love and be loved and we all want to be understood. We all want something, and something is wished by us all. So much fail on my part here, I agree that we all tend to criticize too much, and that high horse is remarkably easy to hop onto sometimes, but "the luxury of criticism" is important in the world of ideas. 

8. Give up your need to impress others. Stop trying so hard to be something that you’re not just to make others like you. It doesn’t work this way. The moment you stop trying so hard to be something that you’re not, the moment you take of all your masks, the moment you accept and embrace the real you, you will find people will be drawn to you, effortlessly. Meh.

9. Give up your resistance to change. Change is good. Change will help you move from A to B. Change will help you make improvements in your life and also the lives of those around you. Follow your bliss, embrace change – don’t resist it.

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls” Joseph Campbell

There are two separate ideas here: Follow your bliss, and change is good. First, following your bliss is for the privilege of the privileged. I'll argue this point in more depth some other time, but suffice it to say that someone needs to bankroll the bliss finding. 

Change is not always good, and making people feel guilty about being resistant to change, or disappointed after it happens, is just silly. We've all been through "bad" changes in our lives. Deaths, moves, jobs, relationships ending. Sometimes change downright sucks. 

10. Give up labels. Stop labeling those things, people or events that you don’t understand as being weird or different and try opening your mind, little by little. Minds only work when open. “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.” Wayne Dyer

This only goes so far, this opening your mind to things that are different from you -- Westboro Baptist Church is way different from me. Mind still closed.

11. Give up on your fears. Fear is just an illusion, it doesn’t exist – you created it. It’s all in your mind. Correct the inside and the outside will fall into place.

“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

If fear is an illusion so is happiness and your entire article is invalid. Just sayin'.

12. Give up your excuses. Send them packing and tell them they’re fired. You no longer need them. A lot of times we limit ourselves because of the many excuses we use. Instead of growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck, lying to ourselves, using all kind of excuses – excuses that 99.9% of the time are not even real.

I can think of a few good excuses for not responding to #12.

13. Give up the past. I know, I know. It’s hard. Especially when the past looks so much better than the present and the future looks so frightening, but you have to take into consideration the fact that the present moment is all you have and all you will ever have. The past you are now longing for – the past that you are now dreaming about – was ignored by you when it was present. Stop deluding yourself. Be present in everything you do and enjoy life. After all life is a journey not a destination. Have a clear vision for the future, prepare yourself, but always be present in the now.

First, there's no need to be so condescending. I'm sure every history scholar in the world would bristle at this item. If the past is so unimportant, why study it? In some ways, our pasts -- even more than our nows -- are all we have. My 40 years of experience on this planet is one of the best sources of information I have about myself, my friends, my children, my capabilities (an inabilities), and the rest of it. Being present doesn't mean ignoring the past, it requires integrating it.

14. Give up attachment. This is a concept that, for most of us is so hard to grasp and I have to tell you that it was for me too, (it still is) but it’s not something impossible. You get better and better at with time and practice. The moment you detach yourself from all things, (and that doesn’t mean you give up your love for them – because love and attachment have nothing to do with one another,  attachment comes from a place of fear, while love… well, real love is pure, kind, and self less, where there is love there can’t be fear, and because of that, attachment and love cannot coexist) you become so peaceful, so tolerant, so kind, and so serene. You will get to a place where you will be able to understand all things without even trying. A state beyond words.

I have such a hard time latching on to any concrete ideas in the above paragraph that I'm having trouble formulating a response. First, there is no state beyond words if you're good enough with words -- that's a shout-out to all my poet friends. Work harder at describing it so the rest of us know what you're talking about. Second, I think most of us know that love doesn't always work like this in the real world. I don't see the value in a truly selfless love where the love-er takes no self-interest. I'm also skeptical because the happiest people I know are not always peaceful, kind, tolerant and serene. If this is happiness, I don't think I want to sign up. Happiness and monkishness aren't equal in my book. (Although, to be fair, some monks do appear yo be very happy.) 

15. Give up living your life to other people’s expectations. Way too many people are living a life that is not theirs to live. They live their lives according to what others think is best for them, they live their lives according to what their parents think is best for them, to what their friends, their enemies and their teachers, their government and the media think is best for them. They ignore their inner voice, that inner calling. They are so busy with pleasing everybody, with living up to other people’s expectations, that they lose control over their lives. They forget what makes them happy, what they want, what they need….and eventually they forget about themselves.  You have one life – this one right now – you must live it, own it, and especially don’t let other people’s opinions distract you from your path.

I'm not sure how many people are living up to other people's expectations as much as they are living to meet their responsibilities. As I said above about "following your bliss," following your inner calling is often reserved for the privileged. I would absolutely love, introvert that I am, to go and spend 3 months out of the year in a cabin in the woods with nothing but a stocked e-reader, a good wi-fi connection and this laptop. And a guitar. I would write, play music, sing out loud. 

But there are other people to whom I am beholden, and it's not their expectations of my that make that connection -- it's my responsibilities to them as part of a family. To buy food, pay the mortgage, provide medical and dental care, buy clothing, etc. Following my bliss would be irresponsible and selfish -- and this is the real crux of my irritation with this article. We don't live our lives in isolation; we are part of many overlapping families and communities, and that they have expectations of us is not unreasonable. We also have expectations of them -- also reasonable. 

There is too much "me, me, me" in this article. Believe me, as a mom working full-time, I get the need for "me time" and as an introvert I really understand the need to direct focus inward. And I sure do like the idea of happiness and being happy, but not as a life goal, and certainly not at the expense of a full-spectrum life. 

Bliss...bah.