From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Laughter Really is the Best Medicine Follow this link to view the sermon and watch the live streaming version on our website https://www.templeemanuel.com/rabbi/rabbi-aliza-berger/laughter-really-is-the-best-medicine/

From February 13th, 2021.

If I had to pick a word that captures the place where many of us find ourselves, that word would be stuck.  S-t-u-c-k. Stuck. We are stuck in winter. We’ve been through December’s cold, January’s cold, this past week’s storm.  It’s early February, still cold, still icy.   In previous years we might go somewhere warm.  But not this year. We are stuck in month 11 of the pandemic.  While more people are beginning to get vaccinated, we still have such a long way to go.  We are so far from Israel’s experience with vaccines.  The wisest counsel that our wonderful health advisors give us is: be patient. We are in for a long ride, not clear how long, but long.  We are stuck for longer than any of us wants living a pandemic life. We are stuck without places to go and things to do.  A quiet and isolated Super Bowl, to go with all the other quiet and isolated holidays of this surreal year.

From February 6, 2021.

Let’s Sing the Songs We Love!!

From January 30th, 2021

This past Tuesday night, erev Inauguration, in a cold classroom with the windows open, and the January wind coursing through, I decided to get a sense of how our seventh graders felt about America.  So I gave each student a sheet of paper that had a prompt on it, and asked everyone to think about the prompt and write their response which they would then share. The prompt was: “America is the greatest country in the history of the world.”  Do you agree or disagree with this statement?  Please explain your reasoning. That prompt came from me, from my heart and soul.  I grew up believing it.  I went to college in the late 70s and early 80s, majoring in American history.  After studying American history,  I still somehow believed it.  Shira and I brought three children into the world, and I believed it. And taught it to my children.  I told Nat, Sam and Jordana many times, while they were under our roof, America is the greatest country in the history of the world–because it welcomes immigrants from all over the world.

From January 23rd, 2021.

From January 16th, 2021.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” In just a few words, Charles Dickens penned one of the most powerful and gripping opening lines in the history of literature. It is also, frankly, a questionable line. If you read the rest of the story, you will notice that A Tale of Two Cities does a glorious job capturing the grit and despair that Dickens describes as the “worst of times.” It is much harder to identify what makes it the best.

In the late 1990s, a young college student named Joshua Rothman caught the dot.com fever.  So did two of his close friends.  These three undergrads fancied themselves budding high- tech executives, entrepreneurs who were going to create some cutting-edge business in the new economy, sell it off for untold riches, and then do it again.  They worked and worked, they hardly slept, and out of their dorm rooms they created an early version of an internet dating service and insurance business.  Alas, having invested the better part of their college career in this business, the outfit that they hoped would buy it was not interested in it; they had no other suitors; they had bills they could not pay.  It was their senior year in college, they were graduating, and their business dreams came to naught.

There is an amazing new sculpture on Commonwealth Avenue. Carved out of a tree trunk, in mid-stride is a magnificent runner confidently bounding up Heartbreak Hill. I pass him every day on my way to Temple Emanuel and am always struck by how he never seems to run out of energy. A little more than 10 years ago, I ran a marathon. Well, “run” is perhaps too generous a word. I jogged for a super-long time until I crossed the finish line in what I had hoped would be under six hours. To this day, I am still not entirely sure what possessed me to do this. Every time I pass that tree trunk runner, I think back to my marathon. The tree trunk runner was carved to life in the middle of a global pandemic – at a time that the Boston Marathon has now been called off for a second season. The tree trunk runner is, by definition, rooted in place – stuck – on Heartbreak Hill, the hardest part of the route. Yet the sculptor filled him with eternal boundless positive momentum.

From December 19th, 2020.

It is the Shabbat of Hanukkah, typically a time when we give and receive gifts.  But this Hanukkah takes place in the tenth month of our pandemic. What is the right kind of gift to give in a pandemic? In his book Morality, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks  contrasts the happiness that comes from the market with the happiness that comes from a moral dimension.  When we try to find our happiness in the market, he puts it this way: we spend money we don’t have, on products we don’t need, for a happiness that won’t last.  By contrast, the biblical and rabbinic traditions emphasize a moral dimension.  Happiness is not what you buy or what you own.  Happiness is what you do, living a moral life, being a force for good in the world.

We all know the old Jewish teaching that if you save a life, you’ve saved a world.  We all know that each human on this earth is created in God’s image.  We are all holy.  And yet, all too often we forget the magic, the unique brilliance of every person around us.  All too often, we see people only for the functions they perform in our lives.  We see grocery delivery people and mail carriers, we see clerks and landscapers, we see employees and teachers, but we forget that within each person is a whole world of wisdom, life experiences, and love. Today I want to share with you the story of someone you may have seen but may not have seen. Drake Thadzi was born in 1964 in Lilongwe, Malawi.  The country had just been liberated from British rule and was settling into a new totalitarian state led by President Bandas which would last for the next thirty years.  There were death squads that would kill dissidents and everyday citizens had to carry id cards to prove their affiliation with the proper political party before they could ride the bus or access groceries.  Drake’s mother was murdered in front of his eyes and he became a fighter out of necessity.  At that time, boxing wasn’t a sport, it was a survival tactic.