Community Rabbi Meredith Cahn - Inspiring Jewishly

10/05/2024

May this be a better and sweeter year than the one past. Here's my Rosh Hashanah/High Holy Days drash, given at Spring Lake Village.

Hoping for Hope–Rosh Hashanah 5785 October 5, 2024 by Meredith Cahn Leave a Comment Preparing for tonight, I wondered what could I possibly add anything of value to how hard a year it’s been for so many of us? I could list the ways—as individuals—how many of us or our loved ones have been si...

06/22/2024

This was my drash tonight. One of those ones I needed to hear.

Complain Much? Be’aholatecha 5784 June 21, 2024 by Meredith Cahn Leave a Comment This was my drash (teaching) about this week’s Torah portion, given at Spring Lake Village. It’s long, because the topic really interested me… A story: One summer day, in the old country, there was a decrepit ol...

04/24/2024

This year for Passover, I made some significant changes to my family haggadah, because what is happening in Israel/Gaza seems to reverberate throughout the whole story.

There are two key elements in a traditional haggadah—first, that in every generation, someone rises up to destroy us, and second, it is the duty of every Jew to feel that we are in the story, part of the story, moving from slavery or degradation to freedom and gratitude.

I have never felt personally in my lifetime that someone was rising up to destroy us until now. Between Hamas and its patron Iran, it’s hard to miss. (Yes, I know that Hamas has wanted to destroy Israel (and Jews worldwide) since its inception. I guess I just didn’t think they had the strength, power, ability to do so. And yes, Iran. Again, not willing to wage a nuclear war.)

And the ability to feel myself in the story—I think that’s about being able to have empathy for everyone who is vulnerable. It’s about looking out for the people with less power. It’s about looking out for people who are hurting—as a people, or as each person. One thing I have observed this year is how the trauma of October 7 has blunted empathy for many people. What is happening to the tens of thousands of Gazan civilian, who are being used as human shields is heartbreaking.

This all unfolds within a long history of many righteous victims—of the Holocaust (and every generation…), of the Nakba and the oligarchy of the Ottoman Empire and the British protectorate. It’s complicated. It’s really complicated to figure out how two peoples are supposed to live together in peace and security and be able to be free in such a tiny land—way above my pay grade, for sure.

In her new book, The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous writes about the ninth plague: The Torah describes three full days of impenetrable darkness, so thick and dense that “no person could see another, or even rise from their places.” It is this detail that hints at the real terror of the ninth plague. More than physical discomfort, it brought spiritual anguish. “The deepest darkness,” wrote one rabbi, “is then one cannot even see his neighbor, and therefore can’t join him in his suffering and pain. Once a person no longer feels his neighbor’s pain, it renders him completely impotent.” When we are unable to support each other in our suffering, our lives are stripped of meaning. (I highly recommend this book.)

I wish you a happy Passover, a zissen (sweet) Passover, one that frees you from whatever narrow place you are in. May the hostages be released quickly, and the Gazans be liberated from the violence around them, caused by their leaders and Israel’s leaders.

05/20/2023

My drash tonight at Spring Lake Village....

I want to start with my story over the past couple of months…

Most of you know—or some of you know—that I got a cochlear implant about a year and a half ago. And it’s been amazing. My hearing journey—or lack of hearing journey—has been lifelong and kind of sad and frustrating and includes some family stuff…but I’d been wearing hearing aids since I was 24—when an ear doctor at UCSF said, “You know, we have hearing aids that work with your hearing loss” as opposed to the ear doctor when I was 14 telling us the exact opposite…

Many years of hearing aids, doing pretty well…Not great, but well. Moving to stronger and more powerful aids as my hearing failed, first in one ear and now the other.

The cochlear implant has been nothing short of miraculous. I hear 90% of words and sentences in the hearing booth now. 90%! I hear sounds out in nature that I need someone else to identify because I’ve never heard them before. I learned that my daughter hums a lot of the time. I never knew.

And then about a month ago, I had my evaluation for the other ear, because I knew it was pretty much useless. And I was right—I qualified for a cochlear implant in that ear as well.

So I’m deaf. When I take off the implant, I hear nothing. Nothing. Thank God for the technology. And, while there is never a time I don’t want to see clearly, there are definitely times when it is nice to be able to pull off the CI magnet and sit in silence. Like when there was construction happening outside my window at work. Or when the people in the next office are having a lot of fun while I am reading about a patient struggling with letting go.

But acknowledging that I am deaf has been harder than I thought it would be—there’s more grief involved than I expected. And dealing with the people around me who are entirely thrilled for me—which is wonderful—I love the support…well, I have found that I appreciate more the people who give me the space to also grieve.

Because life is complicated. It’s not this OR that, it’s more often this AND that. Dark and light. Sad and happy. Joyful and mournful. For instance, we found out the same week that Olya was pregnant that I had endometrial cancer (which is entirely gone minus the uterus and ovaries). A woman I met on FB shared that the same week she had confirmed that her hearing had failed her daughter learned she was pregnant after trying for a long time. Grief and relief and joy.

And Jewish tradition is actually pretty great about all this. We have rituals and sacred time that allows us to mourn and allows us to celebrate—that even commands us to be happy. And I think the way these rituals and sacred times work, they allow us to practice dealing with these feelings, get good at them, so when we experience something, we have the tools, the muscle memory to care for ourselves and for our communities and family.

Shavuot is coming next week, and at the end of it is Yizkor, the service and prayer for remembering our beloved dead, our martyred dead (it apparently heralds back to the Crusades, when Jews were slaughtered all along the route to the Holy Land…as a means to remember and honor them and help the living live with the horror…) We come back to Yizkor 4 times a year. On Yom Kippur and at the end of each of the Shelosh Regalim—the three pilgrimage holidays—Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. And we say Kaddish at every prayer service—I think partly to get us ready to say it when it’s our turn. Practice, practice, practice.

This week’s Torah portion, B’midbar—in the wilderness—the beginning of the 4th book of the Torah—reminds us that while we were liberated from slavery in Egypt, we were living in the middle of nowhere, in the wilderness, where we were rebuilding our lives and our community, as free people…

Imagine what living in that wilderness would have been like…supposedly 600K men, plus women and children—and cattle and other herds…spread out over—one hopes—miles and miles. And on the holiday of Sukkot, when we are supposed to relive those little huts we inhabited, we are literally told to be happy. Whether it was a happy time or not for your family, still, be happy now.

After all, you are here. We have survived, we are alive.

But think about the need for a reminder that in the face of challenges we need to remember to be happy.

And then there is Yom Kippur, when we work on forgiveness and self-forgiveness, where we also rehearse our deaths. (no eating, drinking, s*x, ablutions, shoes—all part of the rehearsal.)

And Passover—while retelling the story of our ancestors’ liberation—we are urged to feel like it is our story too, that we are moving from slavery to liberation, that we can process fear, and the need to leave a familiar place that is bad for us. It’s also about teaching our children—our literal ones and I imagine our figurative ones, including our inner child, how to process our stories, how to look at the bad with the good.

And there is Tisha B’Av, the holy day that observes the destruction of the Temples. Reminding us that we can live with such catastrophe.

Our sacred calendar contains so many opportunities to practice learning to process emotions and challenges, joys and disasters, loss, and creation. It’s as though they knew we’d need the practice, because life is complicated.

I had my second CI surgery last Friday, and it gets turned on next Thursday, because we need to let the incision heal. I’m doing really well, so far, in the healing department, considering a doctor drilled into my skull and threaded electrodes into my cochlea….

I think the day it’s activated will be a day that God will have made.

Which brings me to the question we posed to you, that Howard shared…

Have you ever had a moment in your life in which the whole universe seemed to open up? It could be a moment of sublime integration, truth piercing the heart, a moment when all is known, when the mystery unfolds. It might happen in moments of synchronicity – coincidences far outstripping their mathematical probability or a moment of mystical clarity and depth, of the world sparkling out a secret code.

If the answer is yes, please share it with us.

[People shared amazing stories of awesome experiences. Varied and beautiful. What’s yours?]

Now, let’s talk about how to “keep” the personal and communal holy days…My teacher, Rabbi Mordecai Finley, teaches that these moments of mystery and deep connection, are the moments our souls live for. And we turn these moments into holy days by first memorizing the moment—telling the story to yourself and others, in the same way we retell the Passover story each year.

Then, he suggests, we should create a memento, or a physical reminder of the moment. Like shabbat candlesticks from Adele, or seder plates or the kiddush cup you may have received for your b’ mitzvah…or your wedding ring…

Memorize the place, the before and after, what it meant to you. Memorizing the moment is also remembering the day—like Passover is the 14th of Nisan, and Tisha B’Av is the 9th of Av, and your birthday, your anniversary, the yahrzeit of a loved one… May we add all the days we can for celebrations! And may we use all the days we are offered—either by our tradition or by our experience—to learn to process our emotions.

Let us keep growing and deepening our connections—let us use these holy days—the personal ones, the communal ones, the national ones— to awaken our souls…to the mysteries we’ve experienced, to the challenges and joys life throws at us, so we can be ready for the curve balls and the home runs.

10/04/2022

Here's my High Holy Days drash.

High Holy Days Drash 5783 -- You Gotta Have High Hopes

Shana tovah.

A few friends of mine—two in my Mussar vaad alone—are dealing with Long Covid—the brain fog, the lack of executive function, the exhaustion, the reality that they can’t organize anything. One took herself to the Long Covid clinic at a leading hospital a couple of months ago, and they told her, after a barrage of testing, that there was nothing they—or she could do. It turned out this leading hospital was wrong. She pursued other treatments, where she was told that speech and occupational therapies, designed to help with word finding and brain organizing, could help her. The neuropsych evaluation had shown that while she was definitely impaired, much of her brain was still intact. And the evaluator told her—a deeply spiritual woman—that she needed to remember that Everything is One. Between that message and the referrals to therapies, for the first time since she got Covid, she felt hope.

We live in challenging times. But, then, as Rabbi George reminded us yesterday, I can’t think of a time that didn’t feel like challenging times. Enslaved in Egypt. Wandering the desert for 40 years. The destruction of the temples and exile. Deported from land after land. The advent of slavery in what is now the US. The Civil War. Jim Crow. Kennedy’s assassination, MLK’s assassination. The uprisings that followed. Watergate. Oak Creek. Sandy Hook. Charlottesville. Let alone the Holocaust, and all that has happened in Israel. And 9/11, and Katrina, and the Tubbs Fire. Uvalde. January 6. Covid. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. And the heat waves here and across the world that lets us know that climate change isn’t coming, it’s arrived.

It's always challenging times. Amid all that is going on today, where do we find hope?

Rebecca Solnit writes in her book, Hope in the Dark , “Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the 21st century has brought, including the movements, heroes, and shifts in consciousness…Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act…Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.” [1]

I’m personally not so good with uncertainty—When I got my cancer diagnosis, I lived with a certain amount of terror—for my family especially. But on the other hand, knowing that somehow things would be okay—treatment options existed, I was able to walk through the days until until the pathology report came back clean.

But the good news is: we are the people whose national anthem is HaTikvah—the Hope. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks contended that

“The whole of Judaism…is a set of laws and narratives designed to create in people, families, communities and a nation, habits that defeat despair. Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of [hu]mankind. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate.” [2]

And Edward Fleg, the 20th century French Jewish writer, wrote this in his statement of why he is a Jew: I am a Jew because whenever the cry of despair is heard, the Jew hopes. [3]

So a story from the Talmud about Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Akiva….

Rabban Gamliel was on a journey when he witnessed a shipwreck. Somehow, even from afar, he could recognize that this boat was the one his friend, R’ Akiva, had been a passenger on. He was plunged into grief, devastated by the loss of his friend.

Rabban Gamliel arrived home to share the terrible news, but instead, was stunned, a short time later, when R' Akiva appeared, ready to learn Torah as if nothing had happened.

“What happened?” Rabban Gamliel asked. “Who brought you up from the water?”

R’ Akiva explained that after the wreck, a plank from the broken ship floated by, and with all his might, he grabbed on to it. Holding tight, he said, he bowed his head with each wave that came toward him (Talmud Bavli, Yevamot 121a).

That boat plank that R’ Akiva held so tightly, in Hebrew the daf shel s’fina, didn't keep R’ Akiva from being pulled under the water, over and over. But it helped him make his way back up to the surface. It gave him the support he needed to catch his breath until he could gather his strength to swim back to shore.

We live in a time of intersecting crises. I think hope comes from recognizing that we may go under, but, like that daf shel s’fina, we likely can find support to bring us back up. With support—often available for the asking, we can catch our breath, reflect, and draw on our strength and light, when things seem the darkest, or the worst.

One way to do this is to celebrate the victories along with way.

We’ve won big victories, like the defeat of polio and smallpox, the invention of cardiac ablation, cures for some cancers.

But we can also celebrate the ones that show that the struggle is not over, but we’ve made progress:

While poverty hasn’t been eliminated, it has decreased. As recently as 1981, 42% of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10% of the world’s population now.

Child mortality, while still inexcusably high, has been cut in half in recent decades.[4]

While marriage equality has not ended homophobia, surely the night the Obergefell decision came down was a shabbat to celebrate.

While Kansas’ defeat of the referendum to take away the right to choose will not help women in Texas or Louisiana, it will help many women, and it showed the strength of support for choice: certainly, a victory worth celebrating.

When the first or second or third opinion tells us that a treatment is available for us or our loved one when none seemed possible, it’s a victory worth celebrating.

Finally getting your little one scheduled for their first covid vaccine—that felt like a real victory, didn’t it? Or getting the third booster or even the second.

On an even more granular level, every time a covid test is negative, it’s worth a celebration—or at least a prayer of thanks.

Because gratitude is another way back to hope.

When we can take a moment and notice the sun shining or the long-awaited rain falling—with some really awesome rainbows reminding us of the promise God made to Noah, or just reminding us of the awe-inspiring wonder of refracted light—all of that helps us to remember that there is good in the world for us. I have found, when I am talking and then praying with people in the hospital, if I remember to muster all my gratitude—for the day we are given, for the meeting with this person, for their love of family or friends—whatever the patient has mentioned, that they feel lighter than they did before I started the prayer. Pretty much every time.

Hope also changes. In the hospital, I’ve seen people initially hope for a full recovery. Later, the reality sets in and they hope for more time with family. Or to die at home rather than in the hospital and to die without suffering. But often, they find a way to hope, even as it changes.

Because often hope is indeed tied to reality. Not always, but often. Rather than staying in despair about long covid, or democracy, or the fate of women’s control over our bodies, hope seems to require some form of action to stay alive. Hope and action feed each other.

Because doing something to make things better I think always makes us feel better too. Hope, Solnit says, means “that you possess the power to change the world to some degree.., and uncertainty and instability thereby become grounds for hope.” Sitting around worrying just leads to anxiety and despair. And just complaining doesn’t make anyone happy, least of all the complainant. (I think, but that’s an arguable point.) As Rabbi Tarfon tells us in Pirkei Avot (2:21), we are not expected to finish the work, but neither are we allowed not to take it up.

I think he was encouraging us—do not be faint of heart, do not be overwhelmed. Just do the work, whether it’s yours to finish or not.

So, if your concern is of a political nature, write your legislators—letters. Morris Udall, former congressmember, said that when someone called his office, he assumed that the caller represented 1,000 constituents. When someone wrote a letter, he assumed that that person represented 10,000 people. And when someone presented a personal and factual argument, he was open to changing his mind.

So those of us who aren’t going to knock on doors have an option we can do from the privacy of our own homes. We can also write postcards, make phone calls. Encourage everyone we know, especially those in Red States to vote like their life depended on it.

An editorial in the Chronicle last week was headlined: “Want to fight global authoritarianism? Get active in local government,” because, it continued, “authoritarians do not teleport fully formed into national leadership. They first must learn how to rule anti-democratically, usually at the local level.” (SF Chronicle, 9/20/22) For some of us, getting involved in local politics is a given, for others a bridge too far.

But action can also be asking for the third opinion when the first or second doctor tells you there is nothing they can do. Or the still small moments of sitting at a friend’s bedside and just listening. Not running away from the fear. Or getting your next booster shot. Or smiling at someone who is lonely.

As Elie Wiesel said in an interview,
“One must wager on the future. I believe it is possible, in spite of everything, to believe in friendship in a world without friendship, and even to believe in God in a world where there has been an eclipse of God's face. Above all, we must not give in to cynicism. To save the life of a single child, no effort is too much. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope." (5)

Your choice. Let’s choose hope.

[1] Rebecca Solnit. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books, 2016. E-book edition.
[2] Jonathan Sacks. Future Tense: How The Jews Invented Hope. 4/1/2008. https://www.rabbisacks.org/archive/future-tense-how-the-jews-invented-hope/ Accessed 9/20/22.
[3] Rami Shapiro. Judaism without Tribalism: A Guide to Being a Blessing to All the Peoples of the Earth. Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Publishing Company. 2022.
[4] Nicholas Kristof. This Has Been the Best Year Ever. NY Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/opinion/sunday/2019-best-year-poverty.html. Accessed 9/20/22.
[5] Aron Hirt-Manheimer. On God, Indifference, and Hope: A Conversation with Elie Wiesel. Published on ReformJudaism.org (https://reformjudaism.org).

06/25/2022

My drash tonight...pre-empting the one I had planned to give...

Shlach Lecha After Roe 5782

I woke this morning with a migraine. And while I was waiting for the medication to kick in so that I could go to work, I heard the news about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe.

I remember another shabbat late in June, the one after the Obergefell decision, legalizing same s*x marriage, it felt like “This was a day God had made.” This Shabbat feels like a day when God, the Shechinah, is crying with me and most of the women I know.

I realized that the drash I had written was no longer the one I could give because my heart was someplace else, and I am sure I am not alone. And then I had to decide how much to disclose to you.

We knew it was coming. But even that knowledge didn’t prepare me for how I have felt all day—tears behind my eyes…

Because the news today, oh boy…overtook me with cascading memories. In 1971, as a high school student, I was terrified that I was pregnant. It turned out I wasn’t, but I had three days of terror. How would I face my mother and her rage and shaming? How would I face my grandfather? My classmates? What would it do to my boyfriend’s life and our relationship? (We’re still friends, but would we have been?) How would I afford an abortion if I didn’t tell my mother? But at least I was secure in the reality that New York State had legalized abortion the year before.

Seven years later, I was pregnant, and it was again not the right time to become a mother. It would have been a hellish choice, seriously. I loved the man, but he didn’t love me…or love me enough. He fell head over heels in love with someone right in front of me. And we all three lived in a commune in the Haight Ashbury.

But this time, I didn’t have to worry. My health insurance paid for the procedure at UCSF. Abortion was legal and not a big deal. And I don’t have post-abortion issues. As don’t most people.

I have always though that my story was barely worth sharing. First time, I wasn’t pregnant, just terrified. The second time, it was easy, in no small part due to Roe. And later we adopted our beloved daughter and raised my stepdaughter, and now dote on our grandson. I was lucky, in part because of my class privilege.

We know of stories much more life-changing and dramatic than mine. Maybe you have one.

As I commiserated with a colleague/friend today, she told me that earlier this morning her team had shared that each of them had grown up in poverty, and the only thing that allowed them to leave town and change their circumstances was education. And the only way to secure that education was to delay childbearing until they had established themselves. And this is something they had recognized as a necessity early on. And they are all younger than I am, so they all had access to legal, safe abortion.

This is so not about me and my cascading memories, but about women of childbearing age now, especially those with limited financial resources and information, especially those in states where it is illegal right now. How will they get to places where they can obtain a legal, safe abortion? Will they be able to get time off work, or have someone watch their kids, or have the gas money or air fare to travel there? Where will they stay and how will they afford it? How will they know to avoid the Pregnancy Crisis Centers that try to talk them out of their decision?

And as always, we can turn to our tradition…

And here we are at Shelakh Lecha, the fourth portion in the fourth book of the Torah, the book of Numbers, B’Midbar, In the Wilderness. We read the story of the scouts/princes Moses sent out (shelakh) to investigate the Promised Land. They returned with the message that the land did indeed flow with milk and honey, but the giants there would prevent our multitudes from entering the land safely.

As you may know, the Rabbis connected this story—the resultant hysteria that followed the scouts’ message—with Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av. This is the day both Temples were destroyed, in 586 BCE and 70 CE. This is the worst day in Jewish history, because bad things, terrible things keep happening on that hot summer day. In addition to the destruction of the Temples, it was the day the Romans finally crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE and plowed the site of the Temple. But also…

• The Jews were expelled from England on Tisha B’Av 1290.
• Germany entered World War I on Tisha B’Av 1914, which caused massive upheaval in European in European Jewry and whose aftermath led to the Holocaust.
• On Tisha B’Av 1941, SS commander Heinrich Himmler formally received approval for “The Solution.”
• On Tisha B’Av 1942 began the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto en route to Treblinka.

Not a good day for us.

And what do we do on Tisha B’Av?

We fast, we sit on the floor to show how low we feel, and we read Eicha, the Book of Lamentations.

Because our tradition, like so many others, recognized that sometimes the whole community needs to gather to lament. We have to grieve before we can act. Acting without grieving first can lead to poor decisions and moral injury. The grieving is not supposed to be the be-all and end-all, but it is the requirement before we can realistically find a viable solution. We need to practice self-care before we can effectively provide help.

So I am not going to issue a call to action here. I’m going to suggest that we take a page from Tisha B’Av and lament.

I know that not everyone in the congregation feels the need to lament and I would love at some later date to have a conversation with them…But as of now, women in at least 13 states do not have the right to control their own bodies.

And Jews have the right to observe OUR religion, because Judaism does not believe that life begins at conception. We do believe that ensoulment happens at birth and that the pregnant person’s life trumps the fetus’s life if a choice has to be made.

At the same time, women in California—and New York and Illinois among others—are safe. But do we only worry about ourselves, or do we extend our care to others who are vulnerable? Do we care for the orphan, widow, and stranger?

Okay, a rhetorical question. Of course we care about the vulnerable.

So tonight, all I ask is that we take time to lament, to grieve, to sit together with the pain that women are and will be suffering. With the feelings and memories some of us are feeling. With the pain that this decision will do to our country that is already so divided. Now that the shoe is back on the other foot, the burden carried by the vulnerable, and the people who care about them from near and far, and I wonder, really wonder what will happen.

As the prophet Jeremiah called at the destruction of the Temple, “Consider now! Call for the wailing women to come; send for the most skillful of them. Let them come quickly and wail over until our eyes overflow with tears and water streams from our eyelids.”

And so the skillful wailing woman will sing to us: Nachamu, nachamu, ami, Comfort us, comfort us (Isaiah 40:1).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0jCcC_WKYc

Shabbat shalom.

03/26/2022

It's been a while since I've posted anything here of my own... Here's my drash from tonight, when we celebrated women, at the end of Women's History Month, the weekend after the 100th anniversary of the first Bat Mitzvah ceremony, and 50 years of women rabbis...

Celebration of Women March 25, 2022 by Meredith Cahn Leave a Comment It’s a big moment in our parasha, Shemini, in the middle of the third book of the Torah, Vayikra, Leviticus: after a week of preparation, Moses and Aaron and his eldest sons, Nadav and Avihu, are consecrating the Mishkan and the ...

03/13/2022

Marcia Lee Falk's new Haggadah, Night of Beginnings, is gorgeous. Truly gorgeous. Listening to a webinar with her. Just so rich.