mazda horror story

once upon a time there was a car. this silver mazda 3 served its owner well. she commuted to and from school and synagogue, sometimes even making the trip over the hill into the wilds of the san fernando valley or down the coast to san diego. this car has seen the united states. a road trip from los angeles to warwick, ny with several stops in between and back again.

then this car made its journey to the country to the north. it took 74 days for the car to arrive from los angeles to toronto, on. the owner did everything humanly possible to register this california vehicle in the province of ontario including spending $500 on daytime running lights. alas, the forms from the DMV did not meet the province's ridiculous requirements. there is a balance in ontario of securing car insurance and registering one's vehicle and it seems that there is an expiration date on how long an insurance policy can remain valid without a subsequent registration in the province. therefore, this little silver mazda lost its insurance. this means that it now sits in a garage while its owner spends ridiculous amounts of money on a rental car. who wants to drive without insurance? no smart person. no ethical person.

and this is the story of the car that cannot be driven.

recognition when it's due!

http://www.forward.com/forward-50-2008/

i will cut the relevant part for ease of my readership (who are you by the way? who even reads this?)

"Denise Eger
When anti-gay marriage activists put forth Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative seeking to ban gay marriage, Rabbi Denise Eger wasted no time in organizing Jewish opposition to the measure. While the ballot initiative ultimately prevailed on November 4, Eger nevertheless demonstrated her ability to raise the profile of gay rights issues within the Jewish community and spur people to action. The founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami, West Hollywood’s gay and lesbian Reform synagogue, Eger shepherded efforts to pass a resolution by the Board of Rabbis of Southern California opposing Proposition 8. In a huge turnout by the board’s 290 members, 93% voted in favor of the resolution. Eger, 48, also helped organize the L.A.-based group Jews for Marriage Equality and was a founding president of L.A.’s Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual Clergy Association. A vice president of the Board of Rabbis for the past six years, Eger is next in line to assume its presidency. If she, indeed, becomes president — which could happen as early as next May — Eger would be not only the first woman to lead the Southern California board, but also the first gay or lesbian."

rabbi eger is my mentor. for two years she taught me all that she could so that i might be a better rabbi. at my ordination, she spoke to the congregation about me. in a few weeks she will travel to toronto to help in my installation at TS.

i hope that this recognition will be just a taste of the honor that rabbi eger receives for being who she is and leading the jewish people and the world in the struggle for equality for all. amen.

it was supposed to be happier

i am ecstatic that barack hussein obama will be the president of this country come january 20. i do not even know how to put into words my sadness, rage, frustration, disappointment that proposition 8 in california has not been called but 'YES' votes seem to be in the lead.

this is what prop 8 said...

Proposition 8:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME-SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

Changes California Constitution to eliminate right of same-sex couples to marry. Provides that only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Fiscal Impact: Over the next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments. In the long run, likely little fiscal impact to state and local governments.

i am angry that i was not able to do more than donate money and remind people to vote. i am frustrated that it feels like my vote didn't count, though i know it did. i am angry. i am sad. i am confused. i am praying that more ballots are counted today and that this proposition does not pass. please god!

si se puede!

tomorrow is it. the big day. the day when i am either hopeful for the future of the united states or lose most of my faith in humanity. based upon facebook friends, it would seem that there is no question that barack obama will be the next president. on the radio today i heard that sarah palin might blame any defeat on tina fey and saturday night live and the parodies of her. this is ridiculous. it is interesting to start placing blame before the polls even open.

my biggest fear is that people in california might forget to vote NO on prop 8. it makes me nauseous to think that someone might attempt to define marriage between a man and a woman when, clearly, this is a human rights violation. california, don't let me down!

gobama!

evernote is my new best friend

today i was part of a webinar put on by the ccar. saving time through technology was the subject and i learned some fabulous things. first there were the little features of outlook that i never took the time to learn. then there is this site that allows you to send out a variety of times and dates for a meeting to a group of people in order to determine which might be best. no more hundreds of emails going back and forth.

one other free program is evernote. i am pretty sure that knowing about this program changed my life for the better. evernote is usable on a variety of platforms. therefore i can use the program at my office on the windows machine and at home on my macbook. evernote allows you to tag things similar to gmail, save webpages including tags and folders, post pictures and tag them. the program is so savvy, you can search through the data you have saved on the site (which is like google documents but so much better) and even is able to understand the words in a picture and include those in the values given. this week i am working on two divrei torah. i have saved my notes in evernote as well as a few web pages i found with other divrei torah. i plan to write on my day off, and print on friday at the office. its amazing. i could also dramatically increase the storage to 500 mb/month for $45 a year or something. its ridiculously amazing.

now only if i had an iphone...

religulous

i saw this movie last week and thought it was hilarious. i don't think that it had anything to say about the streams of judaism, christianity, and islam that are not extreme. as a liberal jew i felt perfectly comfortable walking out of the movie and into synagogue the next morning. because i choose to live in the modern world and acknowledge the course of human history and adapt my religious practice as judaism has done since the destruction of the second temple, bill maher can make fun of religion all he wants. he just needs to find some capacity to tolerate me.

Merging: applying traffic rules to our lives

Rabbi Eleanor Steinman

Yom Kippur Morning 5769

Temple Sinai

Toronto, Ontario

********************

Traffic.  The word itself might raise our blood pressure and trigger a rush of hormones in preparation for radical movements to improve our position.  Many of us will plan our day around avoiding it.  I cannot think of one person who actually enjoys sitting in it.  But we live in a large city; traffic is a part of our reality.  Whether it is squeezing our way into a crowded subway or streetcar, or sitting on the 401 or Bathurst, traffic occupies a significant amount of time.  There is not much we can do about it, there are no good methods of dealing with it, it just is.  

Traffic has a negative connotation to it.  For much of the history of this word though, it meant something positive, trade and the movement of goods.  At some point, people and things became interchangeable.  Shakespeare describes, “the traffic of our stage,” in the prologue of Romeo and Juliet.  The progression from things to people makes sense.  Most of us do go from place to place for reasons of commerce.  Traffic, like weather, as if passive forces operating in the world outside of our control. 

I think we go about the world with constant traffic in our souls.  We are pushed and pulled between our responsibilities to our families, ourselves, our communities, our professions, our tradition.  On a day like today we know that we are suppose to be in synagogue atoning for our wrongs and remembering those who have passed away but for most of us, it is almost impossible not to think about work or school.  The assignments and tasks, the growing to-do lists.  Hopefully everyone turned their cell phones or blackberrys off, or better yet, left them at home, but how long will it take from the time you walk out after the sound of the tekiyah gedolah before turning it on and become consumed again? 

What we need is to be better mergers both on the road and in our lives to alleviate some of this traffic.  Picture it, we’re on the road and in front of us is a sign, “Lane Ends in 1 kilometer, merge right.” What do you do?  There are two types of drivers.  One set will merge almost immediately; we’ll call these people early mergers.  The other will wait until the last possible moment, these are the late mergers.  When there is light traffic this sign is ample caution.  We know to slow down a bit, to start looking in the mirrors and find our way into the lane to minimize braking.  A highway though, loses half of its capacity to process cars when it goes from two to one.  Inevitably a queue forms.  This causes more problems because the queue might be farther back than the original sign warning of a lane closure.  Those early mergers see the people going by them on their left as ‘cheaters’ because they do not wait like everyone else. 

According to Tom Vanderbilt in his book, Traffic:  Why we drive the way we do (and what that says about us) the creation of the late merge is transforming traffic by improving flow by 15%.  A late merge begins about a mile and a half from the closure.  The first sign says, “USE BOTH LANES TO MERGE POINT, then a ROAD WORK AHEAD or two, and finally, at the lane drop: MERGE HERE TAKE YOUR TURN.”[1]  The queue formed for the early mergers is cut in half because both lanes are being used until absolutely the last moment. Those of us already early mergers need to learn how to become late mergers, to use as much of the highway for as long as possible. 

We need to learn how to merge things in our lives, to be like the late merger who utilizes as much of the highway for as long as possible.  Work, family, synagogue, sports teams, it feels as though most of us run from one thing to the next. As we attempt to compartmentalize we use a seemingly logical organizational strategy to minimize the chaos, when in fact we just create a longer line of unrelated pieces to drive through.  We need to get better at merging.  Instead of keeping our lives separated we need to allow for more overlap, more opportunity for positively mixing the parts of our lives, otherwise we’re destined to crash. 

I remember when I was in grade one, going shopping with my parents at the mall.  There I ran into my teacher and I was completely confused.  Why would my classroom teacher be at the mall when she belongs at school?  As I went about my day in true six-year-old fashion the idea that people could cross over, that I could run into my teacher I saw at school five days a week on a weekend at the mall, was beyond my comprehension.  Growing up taught us to see people without the context of their places, we didn’t need to think that teachers lived at school. 

Similarly, after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem the scholars of the day hit a roadblock.  With no more Temple there was no means to offer sacrifices, thereby Judaism was headed to crash.  Instead scholars late-merged and were able to advance by establishing rabbinic Judaism to keep us moving on the highway.  We are inheritors of that Judaism and continue to seek to make our Jewish practice relevant.

The recitation of the Shema is another moment of merging within our liturgy.  The Zohar suggests that the verse, Shema Yisrael is an aspiration towards higher unity and Baruch shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va’ed is lower unity.  The editor of the Baal Hatanya, the masterwork of Chabad Hasidism, explains that, “according to traditional rules of Hebrew grammar, the alphabet is divided into groups of letters, such that the letters in any single group are interchangeable with one another.  The letters, alef, hay, vav, and yod fall into one group, permitting alef to be interchange with the vav.  The letters aleph, chet, hey, and ayin fall into another group permitting chet to be interchanged with ayin.  In this way echad (alef, chet, dalet) becomes va’ed (vav, ayin, dalet).  So, the echad of the Shema is the higher unity seemingly unattainable, but the va’ed is the lower unity, our bringing the oneness of God into our daily lives.”[2]  When we recite the Shema whether in community or privately we seek the merging of these two worlds, we seek a moment in the presence of God, of merging of the unities. 

Merging does not mean letting go of what was behind it is a process of integration.  Just like on the road we do not leave anyone or anything behind, we bring things together in a way that changes them that keeps life moving forward. 

It is time for us to merge our Jewish selves with everything else that we do.  We need to make four changes, two easy and two more difficult.

First, simply, when we give to charitable causes both Jewish and otherwise we need to call it tzedakah.  Whether or not the compulsion to give comes from the association with this Jewish value, the fact of the matter is we are Jews and it is a Jewish value to give to those who are in need and to causes we wish to support and Jews call this tzedakah.

This year, read at least one Jewish book.  All of the clergy here can recommend books that might be of interest.  In Reform Judaism magazine they always are making recommendations.  I am not saying one should sit and read a tractate of the Talmud in English.  I mean something that interests you.  Jewish history, Israel, theology, philosophy, prayer, poetry, I promise there is something that you will enjoy.  We can also do this with our children and grandchildren.  There are some wonderful age-appropriate books.

Now for the harder stuff—come home, come to Temple Sinai three other times this year.  Whether it is for the Renaissance Film Festival, Yizkor services on Shmini Atzeret or Passover, a Temple Sinai Social Club event, a speaker that interests you, daily minyan, the Brotherhood dinner draw, a Women of Temple Sinai speaker, a LOTSSY or Junior Youth Group event, Shabbat services, whatever your interest, come!   Rabbi Harold Kushner writes of one of his neighbors who told him, “I think of your synagogue the way I think of Massachusetts General Hospital.  I’m glad my life is stable enough that I don’t need it often, but when I need it, I’m glad there is a good one around.”[3]  I believe that if each of us found ways to merge Temple Sinai into our lives perhaps just three more times a year we might be able to cope more effectively with everything else we do. 

Finally, and perhaps most difficult of all, think about and figure out your present relationship with God and share that relationship with someone else.  Nothing that any of us thinks about God is wrong.  But, in order to merge better and keep traveling on the highway of life we need to know, at least for the moment, where and how God fits. 

Is God anything like the images and metaphors in our liturgy; our parent, our ruler, compassionate source of mercy?  Perhaps images like a force that operates in the universe unseen and unknown or a person sitting in front of a book writing names in the book of life.  Do you envision an old man with a long white beard or a mother earth type figure causing rain to fall and flowers to bloom?  We need to talk about God because we cannot have a meaningful relationship if we don’t know the terms.  If we start to talk about God, slowly at first, with someone we trust, we will open up the possibility for God in our everyday.  If we search and we don’t find God that is a Jewish answer.  We simply need to be open to whatever we might find. 

These High Holy Days are an opportunity to work on our merging.  We now know the best way to merge on a highway, as a late merger.  Starting right now we can all learn to be late-mergers.  We can stop separating our interests into nice, neat compartments and we can integrate all aspects of our lives so that this year might be one filled with blessings for us and those we love.  Ken y’hi ratzon.

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[1] Vanderbilt, Tom.  Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us).  47.

[2] Hoffman, Lawrence.  My People’s Prayerbook: The Shema, Nehemiah Polen and Lawrence Kushner, 94.

[3] Kushner, Harold.  Who Needs God, 11.