Author: Rabbi David Young

Categories
Convention

Convention is an Opportunity to Build Mikdashim

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם׃

Make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among you.
(Exodus 25:9)

וַיִּ֥בֶן הַבַּ֖יִת לַיהוָֽה׃

…and he built a House to Adonai.
(1 Kings 6:1)

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be a part of a lunch in honor of the launch of Six Points Sci Tech West. After we introduced ourselves, Rick Jacobs gave a D’var Torah where he compared the Torah portion, T’rumah, to its Haftarah, reminding us that we don’t often speak about the haftarah. He compared the building of the mikdash from the Parashah with the building of haBait from the haftarah. While he spoke, I was thinking about the comparison from a different perspective.

We spend much of our time focused on our permanent houses of worship. We think about our congregations where we spend most of our time and energy. Though we might not refer to our synagogue as a temple any more, it does serve to replace the Temple built in this week’s haftarah, in that we want our spiritual homes to be around forever, or at least for a very, very long time.

We fortunately do get the opportunity to build mikdashim from time to time, not in an attempt to replace or subvert our batim but to supplement them. Every year the CCAR Convention offers us a mishkan for a week of study, prayer, and socializing with each other that I look forward to every year. It is a place to compare notes with other colleagues going through the same triumphs and trials that we are, whether to commiserate or to learn from how they succeeded. It is a place of serious scholarship and brilliant models of best practices. It is a place where, because of our commitment to bettering ourselves and one another, God dwells. This year’s convention in Orange County, California will be a model of such a dwelling for the Divine.

Orange County is already an exemplar of community cohesion. If you need proof, look at the Real Housewives series from Bravo. Most seasons are named after a city: Real Housewives of Atlanta, …of Beverly Hills, …of Miami. But the season filmed in Coto de Caza, CA was named, “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” rather than taking its name from the city. As a county, we feel like a large, unified community more than a gathering of many independent cities.

That is exactly why this year’s convention is the perfect location to build our mikdash for the CCAR. It is an example of community and partnership that we should strive to model when we return to our permanent structures, and it is an inspiring atmosphere of fellowship. Not to mention the amazing weather!

Registration is open for CCAR 2018, and we hope that you are able to join our very own Betzalel and Oholiab (Daniel Septimus and Rick Kellner) for this fantastic opportunity.

See you in the OC!

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Rabbi David Young serves Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley, CA.

Categories
Social Justice

Putting the Mitzvah Back into B’nai Mitzvah

About two years ago, my friend and teacher Rabbi Peter Levi described his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah service. Instead of doing the early part of the morning blessings, they would sing a couple of introductory songs, leave the sanctuary, and enter the social hall for a social action project where they would pack boxes of grains and canned goods for the homeless. I admit that when I heard the idea, I was nonplussed. Seeing the look on my face, Rabbi Levi put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s called a Bat Mitzvah, not a Bat T’filah.”

My mind was opened.

He made me realize the whole issue I have with our B’nai Mitzvah rubric as it has been for years. We want to create engaged Jewish adults, and we are creating cookie-cutter kids who will be able to their their kids, “You’ll do it because I suffered through it, too,” just like we are telling ours. So after hearing Rabbi Levi’s simple sentence, I began to plan.

At Congregation B’nai Tzedek, we hold a semi-annual “B’nai Mitzvah Boot Camp,” where I gather the students who will become B’nai Mitzvah within the following nine to sixteen months. We discuss the four things a child has to accomplish before they can receive the title of Jewish Adult: Lead services, Teach through a D’var Torah, Commit to a Mitzvah, and Give Tzedakah. Lead, Teach, Mitzvah, Tzedakah. As much as this talk may inspire them, which I hope it does, it still leads to the same thing. The children lead a service, have a party, give tzedakah, and maybe remember to keep doing their mitzvah.

Some kids have an easy time with this they enjoy it, they love performing and they thrive on the bimah. Others struggle.

In thinking about Rabbi Levi’s words, I wanted to encourage our emerging Jewish adults to make their B’nai Mitzvah experience more personally meaningful. But first I needed a guinea pig.

I had known Jonas Holdaway for nearly four years when he and his parents sat in my office to discuss his upcoming Bar Mitzvah experience. I knew he was already a passionate giver of his time and resources, and I asked him a question. Knowing that the requirements of becoming a Bar Mitzvah are still Leading, Teaching, Mitzvah, and Tzedakah, is there one he would like to highlight over the others? Jonas chose Mitzvah. He wanted to make sandwiches for the hungry, and he already had an idea for his guests to participate with him. I asked him if he would like to cut out some of the prayers from the morning service and do that as a part of his Saturday morning celebration.

After a few months of planning and organizing, Jonas became a Bar Mitzvah on September 9, 2017. He did a spectacular job of reading Torah and leading some of the prayers, but the best part was when he started to teach after just two introductory songs. The look on the faces of the regulars was priceless. They were intrigued as to why he might be speaking at this point. He spoke eloquently about how important feeding the hungry is to him and his family. He spoke about volunteering at soup kitchens and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and then he told his guests that they would be making sandwiches and sack lunches for the hungry that very morning.

We ushered his guests into the Social Hall where Jonas had set up stations for packing bag lunches. One table made sandwiches, another decorated bags, a third put apples and cookies into bags, and there were boxes for collecting the finished lunches. Participants went from station to station, making two or more lunches, which Jonas took the following day to Someone Cares Soup Kitchen in Costa Mesa. After boxing up 346 lunches, Jonas led the congregation in the rest of the worship service, including reading beautifully from the Torah.

Jonas allowed us all to feel uplifted that Shabbat morning, showing us what it really means to be a Bar Mitzvah, a Jewish man committed to the commandments. The service Jonas led and the experience he had was much more of a revolution, and he has inspired future nigh-13-year-olds to have the same choice.

Instead of doing the same service their peers do, each student at CBT from this point on will be taught that the four things they need to do are Lead, Teach, Mitzvah, and Tzedakah, but whichever one they put at the forefront is up to them. If they want to break from services to organize a social action project for the community, or organize a longer lesson plan that allows us to dive deep into the weekly Torah portion, or even coordinate a fundraiser that will bring tzedakah to a cause about which they are passionate, any of these things can be the focus of their B’nai Mitzvah service. Of course, if Leading services is their passion, they will lead a great service. They will do what we did, but they won’t be dragged to it. They will take on the helm of B’nai Mitzvah with passion, and God willing, they will stay connected to the Jewish community by their own choice, because they will know that they are part of a revolution.

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Rabbi David N. Young serves Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley, California. 

Categories
News Rabbis Reform Judaism

Ham is Not Kosher: The Creationism Debate

Two weeks ago there was a nearly three-hour debate in the greater Cincinnati area. It went relatively unpublicized, but it was quite a site to be seen. Bill Nye the Science Guy went to Petersburg, Kentucky to debate Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum. If you want to watch the debate on YouTube, it will be an invigorating and infuriating two hours and forty-five minutes, but enjoy.

The debate was over the question, “Is Creationism a viable model of origins in today’s modern, scientific era?” In short, the debate went as follows: Bill Nye tried to rationally answer the question presented, and Ken Ham tried to redefine the terms used in the question. Ham spent his time presenting the theory that scientists had hijacked the word “science.” He suggested that there are two types of science: observational and historical. He further suggested that lumping both types into one realm is a disservice to Creationism, because Creationism is a historical science, while “Bill Nye and his friends” are focused on observational science. Condescension aside, Ham says that since Nye’s field is based on observation (what we can see, hear, feel, touch, etc. right now), it does not have the right to assume what happened in the past. Historical science is based in Creationism on the knowledge of what happened as we were told by God in the Bible, while in “science taught in our public schools” is based on “the ideas of man such as Darwin.” He makes it difficult to have a debate because instead of answering the question he creates more issues. He says, basically, “You can’t call my science anything but viable because I’m redefining science to force Creationism into validity.” He never answers the questions his definitions create, such as, “Isn’t reading the biblical account also an observation?”

I have been to the Creation Museum in Petersburg. The modus operandi of the museum is identical to how Ken Ham tried to debate this month. They present a series of events from the Bible and show how the biblical account “debunks” evolutionist theories. I blogged about our experience several years ago, but this is what I clearly remember: they try to use facts that we observe in today’s world to “prove” the truths found in the Bible.

Take Noah’s story, for example. The Creation Museum suggests that the immense pressure from the entire world being covered in water for forty days created layers of strata under the surface of the earth. The pressure also created the animals trapped under the sediment to be fossilized faster than they normally would have been, which tricked the “scientists” into thinking that each layer represents a different era. Bill Nye, during the debate, asks why the fossils trapped in each layer are constant to each layer. In other words, why didn’t any animals try to swim up in the flood?

There are two major problems with Ham’s presentation. First, he conflates truth with fact. Facts are about collecting data. Truths are beliefs. On a crisp February morning here in Southern California, my wife Natalie might tell me, “It is so cold today!” I might respond with, “It is 54 degrees outside this morning.” Natalie is speaking the truth, and I am speaking a fact. You cannot even determine by my response whether I agree or disagree with her truth. My response, therefore, is inadequate because it does not serve the purpose of the conversation she started with me.

Our Holy texts are not concerned with facts. The Torah does not serve our purposes if it is a historical account of the world from the beginning of time to the conquest of Canaan. If it is only about the past, it loses meaning. The Torah is about us, now, today. We call it Torat chayim because its ideas are ever-pertinent to the things we face in our daily lives. It is a compendium of truth, not facts.

The second problem with his presentation is that he focuses so heavily on children. Before the debate even begins the museum shows a commercial about how children get free admission in February. Inside the museum the animatronic displays and focus on dinosaurs and dragons are clearly geared toward wooing youngsters in to the museum. It is almost scary to see that Ham actively works to get the most impressionable minds to buy in to his truth, and even scarier that he presents it as fact.

Rabbi David N. Young is the rabbi for Congregation B’nai Tzedek of Fountain Valley, CA. He spends all of his non-congregational time with his wife, Cantor Natalie Young, and their children Gabriel, Alexander, and Isabella. They also have a fish that their daughter named “Rabbi Litwak.”

Categories
General CCAR Rabbis Reform Judaism

Mazel Tov, You Failed!

My kids used to love the Disney movie, “Meet the Robinsons.” The scene I love in this movie is where young inventor Will Robinson, at dinner with his future family, destroys a ketchup-and-mustard-gun, squirting them all over the table, walls, and people. He gets very embarrassed, and looks completely dejected until the condiment-coated cousins start singing about how well he failed.  They explain that their father is a great inventor, and he teaches them that in order to make any progress they have to “Keep Moving Forward,” and every time they fail they know they are a bit closer to their goal.

To put the same thought in the words of Michael Jordan, “It’s not about how many times you fall, it’s about how many times you get back up again.”

There is a story from the Babylonian Talmud (Taanit 25a), that tells of Chanina Ben Dosa and his wife while they are suffering great financial stress. In order to get through this hard time, Chanina, a known miracle-receiver, is asked by his wife to pray for a miracle. A hand comes down holding a golden leg from the table at which he will sit in olam habah (the world to come).  That night he dreams of how wife and himself in olam habah, forever condemned to wobble at an unbalanced table.  He tells her of the dream and he immediately replaces the golden leg, promising her that he will find other means to earn money rather than jeopardize their share of the world to come.

Like Michael Jordan and Will Robinson, Chanina Ben Dosa is able to get up and try something new, even after an idea that he thought was brilliant, fails.  This is our task as well. We often can trick ourselves into believing that the magical solutions we think of are the best way to fix our community’s issues. Sometimes we have brilliant, miraculous successes, and sometimes we can jeopardize our future with the mistakes we make. If we have the fortitude to get up, make amends, and dust ourselves off, our congregations will thrive as we keep moving forward.

Rabbi David N. Young is the rabbi for Congregation B’nai Tzedek of Fountain Valley, CA. He spends all of his non-congregational time with his wife, Cantor Natalie Young, and their children Gabriel, Alexander, and Isabella. They also have a fish that their daughter named “Rabbi Litwak.”