Today I am an (old) man.

This is the D'var Torah I delivered at my (and Brian Weiss's) bar mitzvah service on 25 Elul 5770 (Sept 4, 2010):

Vayelech

I would like to thank all of you for being here today. Now you know the lengths we will go to get a minyan on Labor Day weekend.

Brian has just told us about the importance of choosing life; I am going to talk about death. Whether we like it or not, that is what the second parashah, Vayelech, is about.

These Torah portions, which unfold as Moses looks at the end of his life, coincide with my Hebrew birthday, and are portions that have special meaning at this point in my life. Most bar and bat mitzvahs are 13 years old and are looking ahead at a story that has yet to be told. I am 50, soon to be 51, so I am still a lot closer to my teens than I am to Moses’ 120 years, but I can understand where he is coming from on the last day of his life.

Moses did more than any of us can ever expect to accomplish, but the things that occupied his thoughts on his last day were the things left undone. He led a nation out of slavery, through the desert, and to the threshold of a new home and a new way of living. He spent more than 40 years preparing everyone for that moment, but now it is time to die and let a new leader finish the job.

Like many of us, his thoughts are not on the things he has done, but on those things he will never do, and a concern that what he had to offer was not really wanted, and would not be remembered. At every opportunity, the people have abandoned his teachings and yearned for the slavery he had led them out of. He knew that even in our own land, this would happen again and again.

When we hear the words “choose life,” most of us think of a life that is warm, predictable, and supportive. We have an idealized image of our families as the people who will never let us down, no matter what, and we feel let down and even abandoned when they fail to live up to that ideal. We may wonder what is wrong with them, or perhaps what is wrong with us.

As far as my own life, I have never married, and I have no children. My legal career, if you can call it that, seems to have ended before it ever began. I have no home that I can call my own. I have not seen my mother or any of my brothers in more than four years. I cannot afford to visit them, and none of them have come to visit me. I have two college degrees that I worked long and hard for, but with each passing year, it becomes less likely that I will ever be able to use them.

Like Moses, and like many of us, I look back at my life and wonder what impact, if any, my life has had, and like the children of Israel, it is tempting for me to long for the days when my responsibilities were fewer and little was expected. After all, in the ways that society measures a life well lived, mine does not measure up, and like our ancestors, I can find myself longing for Mitzraim: Egypt, the narrow place, the land of our enslavement.

So what does it mean to choose life? Are we chasing an ideal that can be seen but never realized, in the same way that Moses could see Canaan, but could never enter it? Is Moses telling us to choose something that is unreachable for most of us, perhaps for all of us? No, because this standard did not come from Moses or from the Torah. It comes from ourselves; it comes from our yetzer ha-ra, that inclination that leads us toward evil.

We measure ourselves against images of happy, healthy families who live in beautiful homes and are always there for each other and where everyone lives happily ever after. In the movies we watch, it’s always the sidekick who dies, never the hero. The hero triumphs and lives on, ready to fight the next battle. We see the hero as us, or more accurately, as who we believe we should be. Then, when our own lives fail to live up to those expectations, we feel like we have failed, that we aren’t living up to a standard that can be reached by anyone who is willing to work hard enough, and since we couldn’t reach it, there must be something wrong with us, either a lack of ability or a lack of ambition, or perhaps there is something wrong with the world.

The Torah paints a different picture. We look at Moses’ family and see an image that is much closer to our own reality. Aharon, Moses’ own brother, made the golden calf. His sister Miriam spoke badly about him. Moses’ ultimate goal of leading the people into Canaan was never realized, and completely due to his own bad judgment. That job passed to a younger man, and Moses went off to die alone.

If we compare his life to the standards that we place on ourselves, even Moses cannot live up to them. Our logical conclusion would be that despite all of his dedication and hard work, Moses was abandoned by his people, his family, and even his G-d, and there must have been a reason for that. By that measure, he was not much of a hero and his life story did not have a happy ending. But, if we take the Torah for what it is, not what we impose upon it, and if we choose life for what it is, and not what we impose upon it, then we can understand in our kishkes, in our gut, what it truly means to choose life.

When we choose life, we choose something that is hard, complicated, even cruel. There is so much of it that looks completely meaningless, both in the world and in our personal lives. But this is only what we see at the surface. Like Torah itself, life is complicated, with many layers and facets.

When we are commanded to choose life, it is not a command to chase the idealized version that society presents to us. That ideal certainly has its rewards, but it is not what Moses presented to us, it was certainly not the way he lived, and it may well be one of the false teachings that Moses warned us about.

On the last day of Sukkot, we will read the closing words of the Torah. As we do every year, we will read that there has never been a prophet like Moses, nor will there ever be again. As we read those words, we need to remember that the Torah also teaches us that Moses had disappointments in his life that were very much like our own. He lacked faith in himself. Others lacked faith in him. His own people didn’t seem to understand him at all. If anything, they were afraid of him.

Using the standards we try to impose on our own lives, we would note that Moses was a loner, the product of a dysfunctional family, was known to run from his problems, and failed at the ultimate goal of his life due to his own shortcomings. But by the standards the Torah provides, we see his life as one that was filled with meaning, and that no one will ever succeed at the level that he did.

So what makes Moses so different from the rest of us? Most important, he remembered the people’s goodness much longer than he remembered the parts that were not so good. As the Torah teaches us, G-d remembers our sins for no more than three generations, and remembers our goodness for at least a thousand generations. This was the standard that Moses applied to his own life. It is a standard that we should apply, and not just to others, but to ourselves.

We all remember Moses’ warning to the people that we will forget his teachings and suffer terrible consequences, but all too often, we forget his assurance that we will return, and the great certainty that he placed in that return. Torah confronts us with our weaknesses, but remembers our strengths, because both qualities are part of creation, and both have their place in a meaningful life.

As we move into the Days of Awe, may we remember that the commandment to be holy is not a commandment to conform to an ideal that we have placed upon ourselves. It is a commandment to be true to ourselves, to our community and to the Infinite.

Shabbat Shalom.

and so it goes...

From the GOP noise machine:

"If you get an e-mail from your neighbor and it doesn't sound right, send it to the White House?"said Sen. John Barasso, R-Wyo. " People, I think all across America are going to say is this 1984? What is happening here? Is big brother watching?"

Radio host Rush Limbaugh accused the White House of using heavy-handed tactics.

"They're looking for tattletales,"he said. "They're looking for snitches. They're looking for informants."

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, charged the White House with compiling an "enemies list."In a letter to the president, Cornyn urged Obama to provide Congress with more details on what the White House plans to do with anyone reported for "fishy"speech.

"I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed 'fishy' or otherwise inimical to the White House's political interests,"he wrote.

"You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program. As Congress debates health care reform and other critical policy matters, citizen engagement must not be chilled by fear of government monitoring the exercise of free speech rights,"he wrote.

What the White House actually requested:

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

In other words, they can't keep track of all the crazy rumors and outright lies being spread via email, so they would would like to know what is being said, so they can set the story straight. The people spreading the rumors would prefer that the stories stay under the radar, with no opportunity for anyone to correct them. Nothing in there about telling the White House who is spreading rumors, just a request to know what the rumors are. There is nothing Orwellian about that. After all, it is not like they are requesting that letter carriers, meter readers and delivery services spy on their customers as part of their daily rounds, because that would be creepy.

Health care: who needs it?

Instead of the usual dueling protests on College Avenue (pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war), today's topic was health care reform. On the west side of the street, supporters were waving signs. On the other side, opponents were waving their own signs. I wouldn't have noticed, but the east side of the road (whose demonstrators would describe themselves as "anti-socialist") was the same side of the street as the local Safeway, where I intended to buy a few groceries.

These champions of free enterprise had managed to fill the shopping center's parking lot with their own vehicles, making it difficult for both the businesses and their customers. After finding a space elsewhere, I asked one of the managers whether business was slow, and if they knew their parking lot had been monopolized. She said that they were aware of the situation outside, business was awful, and both the police and the organizers had been notified, but I didn't see anyone moving their vehicles out of the lot. Ironically enough, at least half of the people protesting government provision of medical care looked like they were eligible for (and most likely receiving) Medicare benefits. I can only assume that if the protest was advocating the elimination of ALL government assistance in health care (which would necessarily include the elimination of Medicare), most if not all of the older protesters would have been on the other side of the street.

If the demonstrators did not care about the way they were interfering with a private business and their customers, then it is difficult to believe this was really about the protection of the free enterprise system. If it was a heartfelt opposition to government provision of health care services, some of the signs should have been advocating the repeal of programs like Medicare and VA hospitals and clinics. If they truly were concerned about third parties getting in between themselves and their doctors, there would have been at least some demands to place restrictions on the power of private insurers to do exactly that.

Was it about protecting the quality of U.S. health care, or maybe about keeping costs down? That is what a lot of the signs said, but the facts and figures say otherwise. The United States has the highest per capita health care costs ($5,711 in 2003) and spends the greatest share of its GDP (15.2%) on health care. By far. If we are shelling out that kind of money for health care, we must be the healthiest nation on earth, right?

Wrong. We are 46th in infant mortality (6.26 deaths per 1,000 live births, two spaces below Cuba) and 50th in life expectancy (78.11 years, two spaces below Bosnia-Herzogovina). In other words, we spend more on health care than anyone else, and we die sooner and lose more of our children than at least 45 other countries.

So we have protesters, many of whom were happily receiving government-provided health care and retirement benefits, who didn't seem to care that they were keeping some of their neighbors from buying groceries or earning a living (remember the Safeway?), demanding that we keep a system in place that is more expensive and less effective than all those countries with "socialized medicine?" Why were they really out there?

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) was honest enough to give the real reason:
"If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

There it is. It's not about health. It's not about money. At least it's not about our money. It is about the GOP's prospects in the 2010 and 2012 elections, and in turn, the prospects of the large corporations who support them. It appears that they would rather see their fellow Americans die before their time and their hard-earned money thrown down an ever-growing rathole than see the GOP lose another election.

What has happened to our food?

A lot, and most of it isn't good.

From Convenience vs. ethics in food choices by Megan Nix at the Denver Post:

Three-quarters of the nation's antibiotics go straight to CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). Recently, the USDA's Agricultural Resource Service engineered a vaccine for sick, shipped cows, licensing it to pharmaceutical giant Schering- Plough. We now have two powerhouses feeding off each other and feeding us problems. All these pills and bills seem to be small bandages over our festering food wound.

...Grass-fed animals (the kind you can find on small farms, in the deli if you ask for it, or in the wild, where it still exists) are higher in all kinds of goodnesses: omega-3s, conjugated linoleic acid, Vitamin A. They are lower in fat, cholesterol and calories. The risk of E. coli is nearly nil. According to the American Grassfed Association, if a person switched from their average 66.5 pound consumption of feedlot beef to a grass-fed diet, they would reduce their yearly calories by 17,733.

The list goes on. The lesson is that when meat quality slides, it brings morality — the producers', the buyers', the quality controllers' — down with it. To eat well should not mean to live a privileged life. The FDA needs to make it easier for people who don't sustainably farm, hunt or fish to purchase from those who can.

For now, the solutions are to ask before you eat, to write to your representative and tell him that the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (HR 2749) makes little mention of factory farms or school lunches and should.

This story is part of an ongoing series at the Denver Post. The link will take you to the complete article, as well as links to the other stories.

Cell phones and driving

are a bad combination.


I don't care how much pride someone takes in their "multitasking" abilities. It all sounds a bit too much like the way that some my old friends used to boast about their ability to drive better with a few drinks in them than most other drivers did while sober. It's a nice story until you miss a traffic signal change and hit a pedestrian.

Clean Water Act takes a beating

The Supreme Court has held that mining waste can now be classified as "fill," as long as it contains enough solid material to raise the bottom of the lake, and is no longer the responsibility of the EPA. Specifically, the decision gives Coeur Alaska Inc. permission to dump 4.5 million tons of gold mining waste into Lower Slate Lake at a rate of 210,000 gallons a day, even though it would effectively sterilize the lake. Under a Bush-era expansion of the rules, permission from the Army Corps of Engineers is good enough.

There are two ways to stop this, and to restore the original intent of the Clean Water Act. The most straightforward way is for the Obama administration to reverse the current interpretation of the rule, returning authority to the EPA. A longer lasting solution is for Congress to act.

Something we can all do is contact the White House and our representatives in Congress and let them know what we think:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
202-456-1111
email: president@whitehouse.gov

To contact your Senators, go to this web page.

For House members, go here.