Changing the Future: “Give From Wherever You Are Whatever You Can” (Vayechi 5782)

As we read in this week’s Torah portion about the biblical Jacob gathering his children to give a blessing, the Rabbis puzzle over whether his blessing is a prophecy for their future or affirmation of their present. The episode calls to mind Claire Levin. She is pictured here with a kid she befriended four decades before in her neighborhood. 

As Claire’s family recently marked her fifth yahrzeit (anniversary of death), I first learned about the transformative impact she had on that kid named Steve. He was growing up with no mother and no father. Steve’s future was so bleak that one babysitter pinned a note to him saying “this boy has no chance in the world.”

As if that weren’t bad enough Steve was in an abusive foster home from the age of 3 until 16. Apart from the physical and emotional privations Steve’s fosters also forbade him from reading in their presence.Steve was a third generation orphan seemingly destined to a life of total despair. Until he encountered Claire. 

As a mom of three boys Claire actively walked the neighborhood. She would see Steve sitting outside reading the same book day after day. One day Claire asked Steve about why he was always reading the same book. “Its the only book I have,” Steve told Claire. A few days later, Claire brought Steve a box full of books.

Claire’s kindness and encouragement ignited a passion for reading. Reading offered Steve an escape, an alternative reality to one he was suffering. Claire’s caring regard also was a beacon. In Steve’s words, Claire the first of several “human lighthouses” who shone a light toward a brighter future for him. 

Their light also inspired his perseverance and nourished his resilience through high school, college, and a career in corporate America. They lit a path that carried Steve (Pemberton) toward becoming not only the chief human resources executive for Walgreens but also a loving  spouse and father of three. BET.com calls him “a trail-blazing corporate executive.” His bestselling memoir became the inspiring 2018 film, “A Chance in the World.” 

Four decades after getting that box of books, Steve searched for Claire to thank her. Because without her and the other lighthouses who showed him care, Steve believe he would not have achieved more than living out his tragic destiny. 

At their reunion Steve asked Claire why she did it – what inspired her to bring him that box of books. Claire answered she was fulfilling her mother’s vivid encouragement, “Whenever you are able, give from wherever you are whatever you can.”

Steve’s extraordinary capacity to transform his future and the small, but essential, part that Claire part that played bring us back to that Torah scene of Jacob blessing his children. According to Rashi (11th century, France), Jacob wanted to give his children a prophecy. He wanted to foretell their futures. But he wasn’t able. (Rashi to Gen. 49:1; Pesachim 56a). 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks learns from this week's Torah portion that the future is not made by our destiny. Rather, “we make the future by our choices. . . . There is no fate we cannot change, no prediction we cannot defy. We are not predestined to fail; neither are we pre-ordained to succeed. We do not predict the future, because we make the future: by our choices, our willpower, our persistence and our determination to survive.”

Steve Pemberton is concrete proof of this. He succeeded because of his profound willpower . And because Claire Levin was inspired to “give from wherever you are whatever you can.” May we be inspired by each of them to defy any negative predictions that plague us, exercise resilience and grit to overcome our obstacles, and show caring regard to others whenever we can. Our regard might just be the lighthouse moment that changes the future.  

Laughter Lifts Learning (Ki Tavo 5781)

What an exciting first day of school we enjoyed this week. All students on campus at the same time for the first time since March 2020! The journey of a school year is so exciting. And anxiety producing. And confusing. And joyful. So many different feelings come together on that first day of school. 

As we gathered the whole JCHS school community this week in the theater ahead of our first classes of the day, I told the student body about a gift my mother handed me my first day of school one year. She gave me "101 Elephant Jokes" saying to me, "laughter lifts learning! If you start your day with a smile, the learning will be better." Wanting to tell some of my favorite riddles from that now tattered book, I put on a clown mask (see photo - because this year we are all masked indoors all the time in California schools), so my smile behind the mask could be seen outside the mask, then shared:

 

Q: What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence?

A: Time to build a new fence.

Q: Where do you find elephants?

A: It depends where you left them.

Walking to School (Ki Tavo 5781)

Our oldest granddaughter started kindergarten this week in Santa Monica right near where my mom walked me and my sister toward her first day of kindergarten.

As my mom walked us to school, she said, "Walking is special Not everyone is able to do it." I thought she meant some people, like my grandfather in a wheelchair, couldn't walk. Or maybe she meant you could pick flowers or climb trees or take hidden shortcuts while you walked.

Topsy Turvy Start to 2021 (Shemot 5781)

Photo by Christophe Dion on Unsplash

The start of 2021 has been topsy-turvy. This week at Jewish Community High School of the Bay, with permission from San Francisco Department of Public Health, we happily are piloting optional, in-person, outdoor experiences for students, but still are prohibited from learning indoors on Ellis Street. In the United States more than 500,000 have received a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, but we feel the pull of the pandemic’s spike accelerated by a potentially more infectious coronavirus variant. And in a period of just 15 days, Americans are experiencing the dislocation of a presidential insurrection and impeachment along with the exhilaration of a presidential inauguration. 

It is nearly overwhelming. Nearly impossible to keep in perspective. Calling on nearly every ounce of our resilience. 

This week’s Torah portion, Va’era offers guidance through the travails of Moses. This week’s parsha is focused on Moses' failure. Over and over again -- through six plagues -- Moses fails at his one job, liberating our ancient slave ancestors. But Moses isn’t swallowed up by these failures. Rather he seems to grow wiser and stronger through them. 

As my colleague, Rabbi Stephen Pearce once observed, Moses’ failures call to mind the great American figure who failed twice in business during the ‘30s; lost political races in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s; and suffered a nervous breakdown. But we remember him because he was elected president in 1860: Abraham Lincoln.

Reflecting on his three decades of failure and defeat, Lincoln said, “A [person] is about as happy as [they] make up [their] mind to be.” Perspective is everything. 

When the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked to reflect on Torah heroes, she picked five from last week’s Torah portion, Shemot. Each of these five overcame intense, external challenges: Yocheved (Moses’ mother), Shifra and Puah (the midwives), Miriam, and Batya (Pharaoh’s daughter who courageously drew Moses from the water).

Ginsburg observed, “these women had a vision leading out of the darkness shrouding their world. They were women of action, prepared to defy [corrupt] authority to make their vision a reality bathed in the light of the day.”

Ginsburg’s own life is a chronicle of resilience: enduring the barbs of Harvard law school where classmates and faculty felt she was taking a slot that should have gone to a man, any man; battling to find work in a law firm because she was a woman; being judged harshly as a wife and a mother for wanting to work. Like Moses and Lincoln, Ginsburg seemed to grow wiser and stronger through these challenges. As she reflected years later, “So often in life, things you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.”

In the midst of this topsy-turvy start of 2021, I encourage all of us to lean on each other for the strength and wisdom needed to generate the perspective and resilience that will guide us from darkness to light.  

Destructive Power of Being Anonymous (Ki Tavo 5780)

 

In responding the COVID19, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly has said universal mask wearing is crucial to blunting the pandemic. Yes! But there is a very different kind of mask wearing, that is corrosive to society: The mask of claiming anonymity online. 

A few years ago a number of students created a Facebook page to collect anonymous comments about other students. Shielded behind the cloak of anonymity, students were emboldened to post coarse and demeaning comments about each other. While some posts were benign, others were offensive. Many posts were intrusive or violated the privacy of others. 

This week's Torah portion takes a firm position against this type of anonymity. "Cursed is the one who strikes down their neighbor in secret." (Deuteronomy 27:24) As to understanding what Torah means by "striking down," commentators, for example, Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (8th century, Babylonia), say it means "slander." 

But why does our Torah verse add "in secret"; isn't it enough for condemn any kind of slander? Public slander distorts what is on the outside. Being on the outside we can see the distortions and work to correct them. But secret slander corrodes from the inside. In this way Torah is warning against the hidden fractures of society. Their danger is increased because we cannot see them well enough to fix them. We can address public mistakes more easily than hidden, secret ones.  

Making anonymous posts is a kind of secret keeping. Research shows how keeping secrets adds stress to our lives and makes us feel worse about ourselves. Keeping secrets corrodes our personal sense of authenticity (that is, the opposite of acting in ways that align with who we feel we really are). Research has linked secrecy to increased anxiety, depression, and poor health. The curse of secrets, it seems, is not only the hard work of keeping something secret, but also the added stress of living with our secrets, thinking about them.  

Rabbi Kenneth Brander (Rosh Yeshivah of Ohr Torah Stone) observes in the context of this week's parsha that cyberbullying can be more corrosive than face to face bullying because the bully is camouflaged behind a screen. He writes, "Because of this physical disconnect from their victims, studies show that cyberbullies exhibit less remorse than physical bullies." 

As a school that empowers students to develop the integrity and moral courage to express themselves openly, we actively discourage students from posting anonymously. We have seen too often how hiding behind a screen stimulates cruelty and cynicism. Our school community thrives on constructive engagement with each other. Openly. Authentically. May each of us have the courage to demonstrate care and compassion in private and in public. 

Nothing Artificial About Responsibility, Generosity, Empathy (Ki Teitzei 5780)

Last night was our first-ever, virtual Back to School Night as we started the JCHS school year in Campus Mode #4 (All Out, 100% Distance). It capped a first full week of online classes filled with much curiosity, lots of laughter, many questions, refreshed learning, and tremendous resilience. Here is the message I shared with parents and students at the end of this week . . .

We’ve been away from our campus on Ellis Street for so long (this is the 25th Shabbat in a row since COVID19 moved us into our homes), it’s easy to overlook things that happened last March. One likely overlooked March 2020 headline headline announced a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. AI researchers in China and the United States finally bested real people on the benchmark used to measure sentence comprehension and sentence-pairing. 

Seeing that headline triggered a vivid memory of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gray, presenting our class with a very modern, machine looking box. As she set the big box on the table in front of her desk, she lifted the lid to reveal a set of illustrated story cards side by side with a range of color-coded question cards. It was called the SRA Reading Laboratory. Mrs. Gray said we’d be using it to deepen our 9-year old reading comprehension skills. I bet a lot of you used that or later versions of the SRA reading boxes. 

I loved that SRA box. I could move at my own pace. I was competing just with myself. It was very growth-mindset oriented. 

But -- and I share this part of the story because it is the season of reflecting on and assessing our past mistakes as we prepare for the new Jewish year that starts in three weeks -- I messed up. My 9-year old self began getting focused on moving through the box in order to look smart to Mrs. Gray and my classmates. Seeming smart on the outside became more important to me than being understanding what I was reading. 

How to Find What We Are Seeking This Summer (Shelach 5780)

As this summer opens our country is reeling from the corrosive impact of centuries of racism from which many of us have looked away too often. The shadows of anger, resentment, shame, and fear are long. Those shadows cross with the more recent, shorter ones of anxiety and disruption coming from a worldwide pandemic. Alone or taken together these shadows threaten to swallow the light of summer. 

Perhaps an insight taken from this week’s Torah portion, can help us find light in the midst of these shadows. The Torah portion is suffused throughout with a single Hebrew verb latoor -- to explore, scout, or seek out. The Torah portion describes the assignment of selected scouts to confirm the divine promises awaiting our ancestors as they come close to crossing into Canaan.


The great scouting mission of Torah, however, fails to confirm the promises. Instead a huge majority of the scouts return from their mission terrorizing the generation of the Exodus about what perils await across the border. Their fear is so crushing they wish themselves dead, erased, zeroed out. Because of this botched scouting report our ancestors are set to wandering in the wilderness as punishment -- one year for every day of that failed 40-day mission. 

As a result, we sometimes ignore the Hebrew verb in this week’s Torah portion as a basis for naming the scouts. Instead we look toward the end of the Torah to find a different root word for the scouts. There Moses reflects on the scouts’ behavior this week by using the word la’regel. When put into noun form, it becomes “spies.” 

Which is it, “scouts” or “spies”?!?