lifestyle – Page 23

Action plan for your health

(photo from libreshot.com)

Most people are super-excited about starting some sort of a nutrition and wellness plan, especially leading up to a celebration such as a new year, and after all of the holiday indulgences many of us enjoy over Chanukah. But, no matter the strength of our intentions, soon after we start and a few months into the new year, our commitment tapers off.

The Talmud teaches, “the blind eat but are not satisfied.” What does it mean to be blind when it comes to eating?

We should start with asking ourselves, why do we place such importance on food and why should we be planning for healthier nutrition, and better wellness habits?

Are we conscious that nourishment is for spiritual, mental and moral clarity, purity and holiness, as well as to physically strengthen the body?

Choosing nutrient-rich foods is the first step to providing our body – and mind – with the nutrients it needs. And the way our foods are prepared and eaten can influence how well those nutrients are absorbed and used by our body.

The average human brain contains 10 billion nerve cells. And there are many studies showing how our choices of food affect our moods and brain function.

People often say they need to lose weight but then quickly forget what they said if they have travel plans or holiday celebrations. The reality is that eating healthier is a habit that has to be taken seriously and one that has to be a habit all year round regardless of season, travel plans or celebrations. Eating consciously is vital to our health and longevity.

We also shouldn’t remain blind to the supernatural dimension of eating. There are many blessings the practice of Judaism provides, and this kind of daily gratitude can help us derive greater satisfaction from life, including from our food.

There are two dimensions to a person’s eating – sustenance for our body and sustenance for our soul. Our body seeks nutrients, as does our soul. Most people live out their lives without ever really grasping the idea of eating or balancing their nutrition, suffering physically from overindulging and missing the most important lessons from and a spiritual relationship with G-d.

When it comes to food, people bounce between extremes. We go all in for stuffings, creamy dressing salads and huge cuts of meat, but then cut out entire food groups to compensate. People all of a sudden start talking about gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free diets and, of course, the ever-so-popular detox. Our bodies are made up to be a perfect system so, unless some of these foods are causing you real health issues, there’s no evidence that eliminating foods completely is better for you.

What makes sense is an action plan.

With so many fad diets, it’s not always easy to differentiate between truths. There are many diets we hear about from friends or friends of friends, that such-and-such has worked for them. But adherence to most of these diets is short-lived because they aren’t based in knowledge and aren’t sustainable or convenient for the individual. In many cases, diets eliminate highly nutritious, essential foods from your meals. As well, if you follow a very restrictive diet and then change your eating habits when you reach your ideal weight, you might find yourself starting to overeat, as you crave the foods you had eliminated, and now satisfy even some of those cravings.

Although no two people are alike and everyone’s nutrition needs vary, when it comes down to it, weight loss is fairly straightforward. Making better food choices, cutting out bad high-fat foods, empty-calorie refined foods, cutting back on calories in general, and getting more exercise pretty much sums it up.

If your goal is to maintain your weight, lose weight or, in some instances, gain weight, calorie quantities need to be adjusted. These varied options will mean different amounts of proteins and overall calorie intake, which, when coupled with an appropriate exercise program, will help you attain your healthy weight – and, in the process, learn how to eat healthily as a lifestyle instead of as a fad or resolution that lasts only a few months.

In general, it’s important to eat protein for every meal, and to keep a pattern of three meals and at least two snacks per day together with eight to 10 cups of water. It’s not recommended to skip meals and then double up at the next one. More evenly spaced meals will help keep your energy level up, and protein at each meal, as well as afternoon snacks, will help keep you from getting hungry.

Remember that the right food is medicine for body and soul, and a balanced diet is one of the simplest ways to better health, and exercise is the least expensive antidepressant.

Marat Dreyshner has more than 25 years of culinary experience and a passion for health, wellness and nutrition. He joined Herbalife Nutrition in 2016, and he and his wife Ella work together as nutrition and wellness coaches.

Everyone can say yes to life

At risk of universalizing a book with a particular theme, The Aging of Aquarius: Igniting Passion and Purpose as an Elder is valuable not just for those who are retired or pondering it – though it has plenty of age-specific content for that demographic. At root, it is a book about living well, and that makes it a valuable volume for people of any age.

Author Helen Wilkes, a Vancouverite and member of the Or Shalom community, has penned an optimistic, uplifting book. But let that not deceive the reader, she warns early on, into misjudging who she is.

“Lest you think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth or that I am one of those insufferably cheerful people,” she writes in the preface, “permit me to introduce myself.”

She talks about being born to Jewish shopkeepers in a village in the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia that was among the first places occupied by the Nazis in advance of the Second World War.

“Our village fell to Hitler when I was still in diapers and, as a consequence, I have spent a lifetime with fear and negativity as my constant companions,” she writes.

Her childhood was lonely and her parents uncommunicative. Her marriage ended when her daughters were 3 and 4 years old.

“Divorce at the time was still so shameful that it took my mother several years to accept what she and her friends labeled as my ‘failure as a woman.’”

Yet Wilkes pivots to optimism.

“If, despite a childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust, and if, despite a lifetime of experiencing myself as an outsider with little sense of self-worth, I have found cause to hold my head high and to face the future with optimism in my retirement years, there is reason for others to hope,” she writes.

This is not a handbook on aging so much as an illustration by example of how to do it right. She does acknowledge, though, that a person has to make the effort to age well. Each section of her book ends with ideas and actions that might help on the path to success.

“Everywhere, there are opportunities to meet new people, yet surveys indicate that social isolation is a major problem despite the fact that simply joining a club is as good for your health as quitting smoking, exercising or losing weight,” writes Wilkes, who has a PhD in French literature. “The Vancouver Foundation reports ‘a precipitous decline’ in how many people made use of libraries, community or recreation centres in 2017, that only about one in four people took part in any kind of community or neighbourhood project.… And that, in a city as diverse as ours, only about one in four people attended an ethnic or cultural event put on by an ethnic or cultural group different than their own.”

Finding joy in the simple things – again, good advice for people of any age – is one of her key findings.

“Aging has made me a connoisseur of life,” she writes. “It has taught me to savour not what is rare or high-priced, but what is ordinary. The small moments that sometimes overwhelm me with heart-stopping joy. An incredible blue-sky day. The first sip of my morning coffee. The laughter of family and friends. Whenever I am walking in the woods with a boisterous dog, whenever I sit on a log at the beach while the sun dips slowly below the horizon and paints the sky with hues no artist could capture, whenever I stroll through a harvest market where farm-fresh produce overwhelms with its rich ripeness, whenever my grandchildren burst through the doorway to give me a hug, or whenever I am engaged in any number of absorbing activities, I so often have an overwhelming sense of not wanting to be anywhere in the world except exactly where I am at this moment.”

While she challenges the conceptions some people have of retirement as a time to sit in a hammock with a fancy drink, she does also acknowledge that, as Danny Kaye said, “to travel is to take a journey into yourself.”

She talks about an eye-opening trip to China, where she went as a chaperone to her 10-year-old twin grandsons. Having heard of the panoply of human rights abuses in China, she was shocked to see an English-language newspaper with a headline asking “How dare they?” above an article cataloguing racism and human rights abuses in the United States and other “free world” countries. Having heard about China’s reputation as a major contributor to global warming, she was pleased to see solar panels and wind turbines throughout the country. The rapid transit system they used to get everywhere contrasted with what she is familiar with in Vancouver.

“China held up a mirror that led me to reexamine the history I had been taught in high school and university,” she writes. “Day by day, it became more difficult to view the West as having brought enlightenment to backward Asians.”

Wilkes acknowledges that not everyone can travel to foreign countries and says there are ways to experience some of that diversity without getting on a plane.

“Next week, I anticipate attending a Hindu baby-naming ceremony to which I’ve been invited. Last week, I was invited for dinner at the home of a Muslim family from Pakistan. Being at their table, sharing our limited knowledge of one another’s culture, these to me are opportunities for much more than just personal enjoyment or emotional enrichment. They are occasions where it is possible to create a gram of kindness in a world where political and regional and religious differences tend to divide rather than link. I never fail to feel uplifted by experiencing our common humanity writ large. When I can no longer travel, I hope I will still reach out to people from other lands as graciously as people elsewhere have reached out to me,” she writes.

She speaks about another trip – this one to Berlin, for the launch of the German translation of her previous book, Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery, which explored her survivor’s guilt as she discovered, in adulthood, a cache of letters from family left behind in Czechoslovakia after she and her parents fled just after Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland.

“In Berlin, forgetting is impossible,” she reflects. “Over the years, Germany has made remembering an art as well as an official policy. Germany tells the world that it is only by remembering the past that we have any likelihood of avoiding similar mistakes in the future. The reminders are unavoidable. In Berlin, history is omnipresent. Even the sidewalks are studded with Stolpersteine, raised stumbling blocks inscribed with the names of Jews who once lived in the adjacent buildings.”

Since so many people’s identities are entwined with their profession, she writes, moving into retirement, for many people, can demand a complete reinvention of self. She proceeds to ask a litany of questions about what identity means, and even, as a member of a particular culture, what culture means.

“Such questions and many more continue to haunt me as I age,” she writes.

And, while she turns to books for answers, the process of asking questions may be an end in itself when addressing the existential issues the book confronts.

Among everything else it is, The Aging of Aquarius is also a very Jewish memoir. Both in her personal history and in the theological exploration she discusses near the end of it, her Jewish identity and experiences play central roles in the story.

At a book launch at Or Shalom on Nov. 4, Wilkes said she approaches the later years of life with many unanswered questions. But, as difficult as finding answers may be, she suggested responding affirmatively.

“I know it’s not easy, but if the answer to how is yes,” she said in conclusion, “let us all say yes to life. Yes to aging. L’chaim.”

Learning throughout our life

Isn’t life wonderful? It has such potential to deliver joy, beauty, poetry and music for every one of us. More’s the pity that so many of us get only a small fraction of that potential for our portion. Still, gratitude must be the order of the day because things could always be worse.

If we take the time to examine the simple pleasures that most of us benefit from, we should be able to swallow some of the less digestible bits with a little more grace. Nature is nearly everyone’s inheritance – sun, moon, sky and stars, the green around, with maybe a spot of colour. We breathe in and out, taste the sweet along with the sour, and sometimes hear a birdsong. And perhaps, from time to time, if we are fortunate, our lot allows us a warm embrace.

We start out as strangers in a world we know absolutely nothing about. We start out with only sensations: warmth, cold, discomfort, pain, or their absence, and hunger pangs. Our first lesson is the instinct to cry out in reaction to what we find uncomfortable. We soon learn whether our instinctive appeals for help are likely to be answered quickly or with an incomprehensible delay. Scientists tell us that this knowledge might play an important part in determining what sort of creature we will become in later life. (See, for example, “The Role of Parents in Early Childhood Learning” by Susan H. Landry, Children’s Learning Institute, University of Texas Health Science Centre, which was published online in 2008.)

Totally dependent on others, humans, like other mammals and many species, begin their lives in a precarious situation. We all know from our own learning that survival rates have markedly improved with living standards and advancing technology. An exploding world population provides solid evidence for that. So has the chance that the psyches present in adulthood will be healthier. By no means can it yet be said that such is a foregone conclusion.

We accept that our early years on this planet are the period when we consciously concentrate on amassing the information and knowledge that we need to negotiate our passage through life. In earlier times, that formal period of education, now increasingly financed in one way or another by the state, was much shorter than it has now become.

In the end, we often learn much more on the job, after formal education has ended, about what we must know to do our work. Life has become increasingly complicated though and even this learning will not suffice always, as the very nature of work is altered daily. Jobs disappear, never to return, and new skills become imperative.

I was born during the Great Depression. For a good number of years, my father never had a job. I don’t believe he ever had a formal education, arriving in Canada as a young man. Yet, hired as a labourer to feed coal into a boiler furnace, through self-study, he rose to be an engineer solely responsible for a vast industrial complex. He had some book-learning to get his papers, but mostly he learned his stuff from doing his work.

My degrees were in agriculture, but the only planting I ever did was in my home flower garden. I had four jobs in my career, but only one, the first, had any direct relationship with agriculture. Essentially, I became a manager and I never learned anything about doing that kind of work at school. If I learned anything at all during those years, it was certainly by doing things I had to do on the job.

So what is management? It has to do with trying to get thing done through other people. I know there are courses that try to give a head start on learning that, but I never had the good fortune to take any of them. I can’t say I was a good manager, but I certainly learned a lot about what not to do. And I am content that I learned enough to get all my work done well.

The truth is that learning on the job applies to almost everything we challenge ourselves to try and accomplish in life. This applies to parenting and partnering like everything else. This is not news to any of you out there.

What makes our current situation so much more challenging is the rapid rate of change we face in our lives. How can we give advice to our young when they know more about what is happening in our current reality than we can possibly keep up with?

Parenting may be one the most perplexing learning-on-the-job challenges we will face in our lives. And I don’t envy this generation of parents, who find their children more adept at the latest devices in every home than they ever will be. They will have to concentrate on the management skills they will have to pick up to deal with children who know more about important things in the world than they do.

From working to getting along with our partners to parenting and more, it fascinates me how much we have to learn on a continuing basis, throughout our lives.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Torah ’n’ This Old House

(thisoldhouse.com)

My kids have developed a fascination with the PBS TV show This Old House. They love watching how old houses are fixed, restored and cared for by these talented workmen. I have always liked this show, too, and, as it goes, this is a pretty safe way to share “adult” TV programming with 7-year-olds.

Over Thanksgiving, one of my boys decided that we should all sit on the couch. Mommy would help one boy with his knitting and the other with his crochet and we would watch this show. Well? It would be a great weekend. (This kid also suggested we eat potatoes, noodles and rice for dinner, thus creating the ultimate “couch potato” scenario!)

While this may just be a funny episode in our family life, it’s a good reminder that we’re all quirky folk. My family might be different but, in reading the weekly Torah portions from Simchat Torah onwards in Genesis, we learn that, historically, the Jewish people originate from interesting stock. So, if we look to our ancestors (way, way back) to inform our understanding of ourselves, that might be a good thing.

There’s plenty of negativity in Genesis (Bereishit) in terms of how people behave towards one another. It’s a reminder, without giving a list of every kind of licentious or bad behaviour, that we have the capacity to do each other great harm. There are murders and sexual assaults. There are also people held up as role models, despite their flaws.

There are Abraham and Sarah, who welcome in guests, make them bread and offer them hospitality, and then Sarah demonstrates that having a sense of humour goes a long way. When told she would give birth to Isaac as an old woman, she laughs. This was a great response in many ways – she has a healthy sense of both humour and skepticism about the world.

There’s Rebecca, who offers (more) hospitality to Abraham’s servant. Isaac is so respectful of his father that he follows him up Mount Moriah to do a sacrifice – even when it seems clear that he will be killed.

Genesis offers one story after another. Each one deserves examination. However, when doing a quick reading through several of these episodes, I saw how different the characters are from one another. Some individuals struggle with what they learn from G-d, and some are believers. Others, like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, are deemed irretrievably flawed, but Lot’s wife, who is initially saved, is too curious or doubtful, and turns to salt anyway.

I pondered some of this as we watched the guys from This Old House go to Texas to help after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. We described the terrible flooding from hurricanes and boat rescues to our kids in ways they would understand, so we talked about Noah and the ark. On another episode, we learned that one of the young apprentices on the show had passed away in his sleep, from a longtime medical condition. He was age 18. So we paused the TV show. We talked about how he worked hard and did a good job, and his family and the people he worked with – all loved him. That his death was a shock and very sad, but that we believe, as Jewish people, that when a person’s body is buried, his soul goes up to be with G-d.

There is no perfect way to talk about life-threatening storms or untimely death. Though we try to shield our kids from the hardest things in the news, truth be told, the gentle teaching of the craftsmen and parents on This Old House was just right for my kids to understand. Between very basic Torah stories and real-life events, we had a lot of help in talking about these hard issues.

Even as an adult, sorting through the stories in Genesis seems daunting, just as coping with the news has been. My husband and I have both lived in places where we’ve experienced tornadoes and hurricanes. I wish I could spare others the experience of waiting in the cellar until the storm passes. However, I’ve been struck by the commonalities I’ve seen between our weekly Torah portions and these challenges.

It’s important, when facing adversity, to offer generous hospitality and kindness to those around you.
It’s good to give respect to your elders and those who might be able to lead you through hard experiences.
Being a resourceful “maker,” someone who builds or creates what he or she needs during an emergency, can save a life or bring forth life.
A sense of humour can help us through really difficult challenges.

People who suffer through losing everything during life-threatening situations like hurricanes and tornadoes are just like everyone else. They’re individuals, who may be quirky or kind, who do good and bad things. It can be hard to relate to their situation and remember that beyond all our differences and preferences, they are just like you and me.

We read Genesis every year at synagogue. We revisit these ancestors and remember how they persevered through difficult experiences. It’s a chance to imagine yourself not just as Abraham or Isaac, but as Hagar, abandoned with an infant, or Keturah, a second wife. We can be Noah’s family in the flood, just as many hurricane survivors might have felt.

Religious traditions interpret these biblical stories in different ways, but in watching This Old House, we see people rebuild homes after a hurricane, and how they offer each other food, water, tools and other necessities. This reminds me that some lessons are the same for everybody. Hospitality, kindness, respect, resourcefulness and a good sense of humour – whether you learn them from Genesis or from fix-it shows on TV, they help bring us together in positive ways.

Joanne Seiff writes regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Talks on animals, ethics

Jeffrey Cohan of Jewish Veg speaks at a few local venues next week. (photo from Or Shalom)

There is no disputing the notion that God intended for us to eat a vegetarian diet, though eating meat out of necessity is permitted, according to Jeffrey Cohan, executive director of Jewish Veg, who will be in Vancouver next week for three presentations on animals and ethics.

Cohan’s father passed away at the age of 52 from a heart attack, when Cohan was 12 years old. “That’s always been in the back of my mind – what I can do to avoid the same fate,” Cohan told the Independent. “But, for the first 40 years of my life, I was a passionate meat eater and, although I was in good shape, I knew I needed a dietary change, as my cholesterol was up to 100 and I was approaching the age where my dad experienced heart disease.”

Cohan recalled a Simchat Torah when he was in his early 40s. The Torah reader came to a verse wherein God says to eat only plants and, for the first time, the possibility of being a vegetarian resonated with Cohan, and he and his wife immediately changed their diet. That was about 11 years ago.

“Then, I started researching intensively what the rest of the Torah and other Jewish texts said about this issue,” said Cohan. “I found out about an organization called Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA). I was very excited. It was getting word out that this is what the Torah and our tradition actually says. At the time, I was working at the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.”

Looking further into JVNA, Cohan learned, to his dismay, that it was run by only two volunteers, had an outdated website and no real relationships with the institutional Jewish community. This spurred him to go to New York to meet with these volunteers and a few others who were involved. He gave a presentation about what they could do to build up the organization. They asked him to become JVNA’s executive director – and Cohan said yes.

Since then, JVNA, which is now called Jewish Veg, has gone on to form relationships with some of the biggest Jewish organizations, said Cohan, including “those that deal with the demographic group most receptive to our message – young adults – partnering with Hillel.

“We created the first-ever vegan Birthright trips,” he added. “It’s been very gratifying. We are heading to Vancouver next, which is pretty exciting, being the first time we’ll give presentations in Canada…. Judaism, even when we were living in ghettos in Europe, does not exist in isolation. It is affected by external society to a great extent. Especially in America and especially in the 20th and 21st centuries in America and Canada, it’s been a two-way relationship.

“If you look at every social justice movement that has achieved success in the U.S. in the last 120 years – women’s rights, organized labour, the civil right movement, the LBGTQ movement – every one of these movements has had Jews involved in the leadership,” he said. “And this movement cannot be the exception. It goes back to the very raison d’être (reason for being) in Judaism, which is that we weren’t just given the Seven Laws [of Noah]. We were given a much higher bar to live up to. And, therefore, it is incumbent on the Jewish community, on this movement, to be at the forefront as we have been in other social justice movements. That’s exactly why Jewish Veg’s work is so important, because we’re mobilizing the Jewish community.”

According to Cohan, the work Jewish Veg is doing is inspiring the Christian community to follow suit. As an example, he said he was told by a longtime member of the Unity Church that they are creating a movement within their faith called Unity Veg.

Israel has become one of the most the most vegan-friendly countries in the world, said Cohan. “We actually … point towards Israel as an example for Canadian and American Jews to follow,” he said. “Jews speak on college campuses here [in the United States] about what’s going on in Israel and why they should be following its lead.”

While Cohan’s trip to Vancouver is the first for Jewish Veg in Canada, he is planning to soon speak in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton.

Cohan hopes all people will become vegetarian one day, but his current aim is to meet people where they are. “We have something called our Veg Pledge program, which you can see on our website, which helps people transition to plant-based diets,” he said. “We don’t just come in, love them and leave them. We give them an opportunity to use our free resources to transition to plant-based diets at the pace that works for them.

“The way it’s structured,” he explained, “is that you start with a pledge, which can either be sticking your toe in the water or diving in head first, based on your comfort level. We really believe that helping people with the how is just as important as the why.”

During his visit here, Cohan will make three presentations: one hosted by the Vancouver Humane Society on Oct. 16, 7 p.m., in the Alma Vandusen and Peter Kaye rooms at Library Square Conference Centre; one at Or Shalom Synagogue on Oct. 18, 7:30 p.m.; and one at the University of British Columbia on Oct. 19, 1:30 p.m., hosted by Hillel BC at a Schmooze & Schmear gathering.

“I think a question you’ll hear many Jewish people ask is, ‘How does the Torah apply to our modern lives?’” said Shelley Stein-Wotten, program coordinator at Or Shalom. “We found it fascinating that Jeffrey’s own path to going vegan stemmed from his study of Torah and we wanted to provide an opportunity for him to share his story and create a space to have an open dialogue around if, as individuals and as a community, we can establish a Jewish framework to address climate change and make healthful food choices, which have inherent connections.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Ends and beginnings

As we come to the end of the High Holy Days, we set ourselves on paths of new beginnings. On Simchat Torah, we mark both a beginning and an end. The cycle of Torah reading ends and then immediately begins again. It is said that we read the same passages of the Torah every week, every year, but the meanings change because we are different people year after year, experiencing life and the world with different eyes and, hopefully, with increased wisdom.

The Days of Awe are a time of critical introspection. This period of teshuvah invites us to recognize our shortcomings and commit to improvement. This mission is both individual and collective. As a people, we are obligated to repair the world, and this year calls on us with no shortage of issues to collectively confront: inequality and suffering, environmental degradation, inhumane treatment of animals, the pursuit of justice.

On the latter front, our cousins in the United States are absorbed in a drama around the appointment of the next justice of the Supreme Court and things that he may have done many years ago. The senators considering his nomination heard two irreconcilable narratives last week from the accuser and the accused. The testimony from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford echoes the testimonies of so many people, mostly women but also men, who have felt empowered, motivated or obligated to share their most personal experiences in what has become known as the “#MeToo era.”

Yet the senators’ motivations hinge on more than determining who is telling the truth. Political considerations – advancing President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee to the bench before the November midterm elections – seem to be the factor front of mind for some elected officials, regardless of Blasey Ford’s testimony. It seems clear that politics may trump justice in this case.

Politics in Canada is not as brash as that in the United States, but populist and exclusionary ideas may be finding a voice here that they did not have before. A new federal political party seems prepared to amplify views that, until recently, were more limited to online discussions and whispered conversations. Meanwhile, the party that won Monday’s provincial election in Québec mooted during the election campaign the idea of throwing out newcomers who do not gain an adequate grasp of the French language within three years of arrival. Unconstitutional as such a policy may be, even voicing such ideas brings us to a new chapter in Canadian public life.

Immigration and refugees are a perennial issue, with the nature of a society at the heart of the discussion. The groups of people at the centre of the discussion – immigrants and refugees – change generation by generation. In this era, Jewish Canadians have an opportunity to bring hard-learned wisdoms to the debate. The federal government is set to formally apologize next month for a most egregious historical example of exclusion: the rejection of the passengers on the MS St. Louis. Indeed, this memory should inform our reaction to the current discussion and the realities for the millions of displaced people and refugees fleeing conflict around the world.

Personal experiences inform our political ideologies. And, through our personal actions, we can affect political affairs. This can be in obvious ways – like showing up to vote in the municipal elections on Oct. 20 or in advance polls – or in more subtle but profound ways, like educating the next generation, modeling the values we hope to advance and creating ripples of goodness across our circles of influence.

In matters of public policy and in the more private ways we behave in our lives, the holy days remind us to take stock of our own role in advancing justice and a better world.

We may feel insignificant in the grand scheme. How can we affect the powers in the White House or in Ottawa or around the world? But Jewish tradition is clear. “It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either,” said the Mishnaic sage Rabbi Tarfon.

Inward reflection is the first and easiest step we can take as individuals to address faults in our world. Based on this reflection, we may choose to move to action. Where it will end, we cannot always tell at the beginning. But it is our job to get the ball rolling.

Looking for new Jewish ideas

By the time you read this, our big run of fall Jewish High Holidays will be over. However, I’m still gathering up bits and pieces about it. What did I experience? What worked out and what didn’t? This isn’t a yes or no question, it’s complex. It takes time to process the intensity of what I learned.

Like many parents with kids, I don’t attend a full complement of adult religious services. Even if I didn’t have younger children, we’d still have to find dress clothes for everyone and make sure holiday meals are ready, never mind actually working for a living. Every fall is a juggling act. Will it work out smoothly? Sometimes it is good planning. Sometimes, it’s luck.

This year, I managed to access several sermons, done by various rabbis I know and respect. Some were published to the internet on the day after the holiday. Others were live-streamed.

Via the internet, I read the Rosh Hashanah sermons of a Long Island rabbi with whom I have studied and become friendly over the past year or two. Rabbi Susan Elkodsi shared several of her sermons as blog posts after the holiday. One sermon covered the confluence of 9/11 with the High Holidays. The other talked about how we connect with our ancestors over the New Year period, and how the “who will live and who will die” metaphor becomes alive for many.

For me, both of these topics struck home. My family in New York City and in D.C. lived through 9/11. Also, every time I sing the holiday Kiddush, it is as though I hear my grandfather, z”l, singing it. He sang it at my family’s holiday table, and he taught me to do it as a young adult. On erev Rosh Hashanah this year, I could hear his voice in my ear, although he died long ago. Thanks to those sermons, I have some Jewish historic context for two strong emotional memories.

Elkodsi’s next blog post covered a “water-optional” version of Tashlich, when people gather to throw their sins or breadcrumbs into the water. She described how Tashlich might be the time to clean up or discard the things that are holding us back or for which we can no longer find a use. In a sense, it’s a “KonMari” cleaning method for our lives. This, too, found resonance with me. I used it as unconscious encouragement – my kids and I cleaned up their art shelf, play room and living room toys before Yom Kippur. This mess weighed me down. Together, we cast it off to have a better start to 5779.

This year, even though we didn’t travel there, we heard Kol Nidre, sung in Virginia, and saw my father, as a past president, holding a Torah on the pulpit of my family’s congregation. How did we pull that off?

On erev Yom Kippur, my kids got into their pajamas. We read stories and got ready for bed. At exactly 7:30 p.m. CT, we started live-streaming the Temple Rodef Shalom Kol Nidre late service. My kids worried that the Torah was too heavy for their grandfather. (I did, too.) Later, my mom told me that past presidents on either side of my dad were spotting for him, and that my dad also recognized that this would probably be the last year he could do this. Torahs are heavy. Nobody wants to drop one. We felt the power of connecting with family, seeing my father do a mitzvah, and something difficult, at a big holiday service.

My kids made it until about 8:15, staying up through the Kol Nidre prayer and the first part of the service before they fell asleep. Using headphones, I listened to the rest of the service until, for some reason, I couldn’t access the live-streaming anymore. By then, I’d heard about how we should see teshuvah (repentance) through the eyes of a failing U.S. criminal justice system. It’s hard to balance the needs of victims, cope with crime and also give people who’ve made mistakes a second chance. Rabbi Jeffrey Saxe, a victim of violent crime, gave the sermon. He explained his social action efforts to advocate for reform with an interfaith clergy group that meets with Virginia’s governor.

I’m mentioning the positive things I can fit in one column. Sometimes accessing diverse voices, from every movement, with different Jewish experiences, enriches our observance. There’s no way my body could have been in synagogue in Manitoba, New York and Virginia. The traveling would have been torture, never mind the cost! However, my mind traveled. This helped me think about new things for 5779.

Some say that the High Holidays are the most important days of the Jewish year, but I’d argue that they are the most intense. Shabbat every week is important. All the other holidays have value, too. The thing about rituals, traditions and observance is that they don’t have an on/off switch. If we shift ourselves just a little, attend a different Jewish service, listen to a new sermon or approach things differently, we can have a startlingly new experience.

Most people attend one congregation all the time, hear one or two rabbis’ sermons and rarely see something new. It’s a lot of effort to break routines. Change is hard. However, every day is an opportunity to look up and find new things in our Jewish landscape. Sometimes, a slight shift in how we see our rituals (dog walks, meditations, synagogue services) can change the way we see the whole world. It’s going to take me time to sort through what I learned and what changed. I hope you, too, can take that time to gain something new, to learn something about the Jewish world, through this kind of exploration.

Do you know your priorities?

During the months of Elul and Tishri, when we’re in the midst of the High Holiday season, things are busy. Kids are in (and out) of school and activities, parents are facing the fall rush of activities in their own work lives. Things are rushed. However, if you’re going to synagogue and have even a moment to reflect, you’re being asked to examine yourself. What have you done right this year? What’s gone wrong? What could you do better?

Some years, I’m thinking about my failings, or I get mesmerized by the long list of things that one could do wrong when we list the confession of sins. Other years, I’m so concerned by holiday meals or my kids’ behaviour that I sing along, but my focus is not really on the most important holiday tasks at hand.

Recently though, I got to thinking about this a different way. Instead of focusing exclusively on how we’ve gone wrong, or how we could do better, I wondered, of all the things in the world to fix, what are my top priorities? How could I focus on a few things that are most important?

When we wish people happy new year, we often wish them a happy and healthy year. It’s hard to work towards happiness – and, to be honest, I’m not sure I’d know when I got there. Working on health seems like a given to some people, and is completely ignored by others. What does it mean? Well, for some it means taking medicines, or being able to afford their medicines. For others, it might mean exercise or better food choices, or even being able to purchase healthy foods.

We also mention, in Jewish tradition, an effort to strengthen our commitment to Judaism. Maybe that means going to services more, doing more mitzvot (commandments) or doing more to help others. It might mean offering your kids tools so that they can learn about their faith. For some, it means helping others get to Jewish events – offering a ride, for instance, if the person is unable to drive or walk – or making them feel included and valued when they get there.

People also may have big holiday meals with family and friends. This can be wonderful, and trying. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes family gatherings force us to confront things that we’d rather not deal with. (Maybe it’s an uncle’s politics or a child’s misbehaviour, or the aging of a beloved parent.) Do you prioritize family? Do you commit to supporting and caring for your family, both those related by blood and those who you choose? Are you willing to travel long distances to see relatives? What about your family friends, those to whom you choose to feel related?

Awhile ago, I was chatting with someone about all my uncles and aunts. She expressed wonder at how many relatives I had. It took me a bit to realize what she meant. Where I grew up, in Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., many families had moved to work in the U.S. capital. It meant that they weren’t near their families, so we created extended families. All those aunts and uncles were close friends with my parents. I played with kids at those folks’ houses, ate dinner at their holiday tables and learned from them about what it was to be part of a loving family. Our Jewish customs varied, our DNA was different, but our effort included everyone.

The person I spoke with seemed alarmed and uncomfortable with the fact that I called all these people who weren’t blood relatives aunt or uncle. Yet, it was a time and place when many people didn’t live near family.

Some families had been decimated by the Holocaust, so it seemed entirely logical to us. In our circle, there were people who didn’t have grandparents – they had died in Europe. Some had no cousins, either. This was true among people I knew as a kid, and continues to be true. In my husband’s family, for example, I know people who lost many relatives and whose family structures, even in 2018, continue to resonate with that trauma.

This extended family friend concept is also related to our priorities. For me, personally, it’s key, and I choose to continue this practice. Why reinforce alienation for those who lack supportive extended family? My kids have a “tante” who made quilts for their beds and sends them gorgeous handmade gifts. She’s not my blood relative, but we’re part of her family. And we serve as honourary aunt and uncle for a 2-year-old in Montreal, as well.

Recently, I received an email that pointed out the Winnipeg Jewish Federation’s priority action areas for fall 2018, and I loved it. This action document lists many of our community’s Jewish concerns and priorities – many of which, no doubt, are similar to the Vancouver Jewish community’s concerns and priorities.

The Winnipeg Federation document is a good start. While some may think that the points are ambitious, other aspects are simply part of how a community – an extended family – should act. We should care about others, full stop. We should try to include everyone in Jewish life regardless of what they can afford. While it may seem like an enormous goal to “mitigate poverty,” it’s easy to pick an apple tree in the neighbourhood and donate the fruit to the food bank. Nor is it a big deal to bring your kids to visit an older person to help reduce their isolation.

Instead of focusing on the enormity of the individual points, we can instead point to our priorities for the new year. For instance: it improves our health to attend gatherings, socialize and engage in learning in multi-age settings.

I don’t know about expecting happiness, but we can adjust our priorities to include health, well-being and Jewish supports for one another. This is possible – and, to borrow Theodor Herzl’s phrase: “If we will it, it is no dream,” so make your priorities and dream bigger. It’s well worth considering. Happy 5779, everybody!

Change can’t happen in a day

Judaism is an aspirational religion that, while accepting the reality of failure, believes in the human capacity to transcend and achieve levels of excellence in our everyday lives.

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord God am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2) “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6) These are but two of the more potent examples of the aspirational quality of our tradition and its immense respect for the capacity inherent within the human being. As beings created in the image of God, there is nothing that we cannot do, a factor which created a tradition defined by commandment and expectation.

A significant manifestation of this future is the commandment of teshuvah. We expect people to honestly assess the content and the quality of their lives, regret and admit their failures, and commit to embarking on a new direction. This expectation is brought to a climax during Yom Kippur, where the Vidui (Confession), which lies at the nucleus of the Yom Kippur liturgy, places before us the realities of our sins and challenges us to honestly confront what we have done with our lives.

It is, therefore, deeply troubling to recognize the profound failure of Yom Kippur as a force for change. The passion, seriousness and devotion that accompany many of us throughout Yom Kippur peters out into a form of amnesia during the break-fast meal, as we return to our behaviour of yesterday.

Yom Kippur is a synagogue success story. More people show up than on any other day, pounding their hearts with great devotion as they cry out, “Ashamnu.” (“We have sinned.”) However, Yom Kippur’s impact on Jewish life seems to be marginal.

This is not a new phenomenon. It may be the meaning behind Isaiah’s critique of the Jewish people and their fast days: the people indeed fast, “starve their bodies” and “lie in sackcloth and ashes,” however, this is not the fast day that God desires, but rather a day in which we “unlock fetters of wickedness and untie the cords of the yoke and let the oppressed go free.” (Chapter 58) To paraphrase Isaiah, the quality of repentance is not judged by what one does on Yom Kippur, but by what one does afterwards.

The problem with Yom Kippur in the synagogue is that it is too complete and comprehensive. It creates the myth of putting all of one’s life and behaviour up for judgment, where we confront every one of our failings and repent for them all. The list of sins in the Vidui is too extensive to have any impact on the life of a real person. For a prayer, and within the isolated environment of the synagogue, it is fine. As a force for facilitating change in real life, the comprehensive nature of our service makes it impossible to be a significant factor in everyday life.

Change, growth and improvement are rarely radical epiphanies, but are rather slow and gradual processes. As Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed teaches us, radical transformation away from that to which one is accustomed is impossible. (3:32) According to Maimonides, God and the Jewish tradition had immense patience with the idolatrous, slave mentality of the people who came out of Egypt and did not require them to accept or adopt either beliefs or practices that were radically different from that to which they had grown accustomed. We must do the same both with ourselves and with others.

If Yom Kippur is to be the force our tradition aspires it to be, it must cease to be the culmination of the process, and instead serve as its beginning. The purpose of the all-inclusive lists cannot be to ask an individual to review all of his life, but to create a menu from within which every individual can find one dimension, one quality that they can commit to working on.

Yom Kippur must cease to be a forum for New Year’s declarations and instead become a catalyst for a new culture among the Jewish community, a culture that fosters individual responsibility, reflection and a commitment to being a teshuvah person. As a teshuvah person, one commits to the ongoing and difficult path of constantly aspiring more from oneself. As a teshuvah person, one neither views oneself as an ideal, nor fools oneself into believing in overnight conversions.

Our tradition teaches us, “It is not for you to complete the task, neither are you free to desist from it.” Nowhere is this saying from The Ethics of the Fathers more relevant than in the task of building a life of value. This year, let us take teshuvah out of the synagogue, disconnect Yom Kippur from its myriad rituals and place it at the foundation of our everyday lives.

Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of the 2016 book Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. Articles by Hartman and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.

Courage in a time of change

Rabbi Irwin Kula speaks in Vancouver on Sept. 16 at FEDtalks, the opening event of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign. (photo from JFGV)

The world is in a time of historic shifts and the way we interpret and respond to what is happening can make each individual a player in this civilizational drama.

This is the promise of Rabbi Irwin Kula, who will speak in Vancouver on Sept. 16 at FEDtalks, the opening event of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign. Kula is co-president of Clal, the National Jewish Centre for Learning and Leadership.

“We are living in one of the most dramatic, exciting times in human history,” Kula told the Independent in a telephone interview. “Whenever one lives in a dramatic transitional moment, the call to responsibility is also dramatic. The fear and the anxiety that we are feeling is all understandable. But managing the fear, managing the anxiety and, therefore, managing some of the loss that comes in these great moments of transition, is how we move on the journey.”

Kula promises audience members more than an interesting talk.

“Anyone who is going to be in that room, anyone who is willing to speak about it this way, really has an opportunity to be a part of not only the solution but one of the great adventures in the human drama right now,” he said.

At Clal, Kula is part of a team that is “reimagining Judaism for this era.”

“And not only Judaism, but religion in general,” Kula said. “What is religion and Judaism going to look like in an information age? In an age of globalization? In an age when the borders and boundaries of their identities are more permeable?”

Kula is an eighth-generation rabbi and holds a degree in philosophy. He has served congregations in Jerusalem and St. Louis, Mo., and, over the last 30 years, has been involved with Clal, which describes itself as a “do-tank” – “The thinking actually has to apply to people’s doing,” he explained.

Kula works “at the intersection of religion, innovation and human flourishing,” he said. “Those are the lenses I use.”

Kula analyzes how information, entertainment, media, retail and other components of society are affected by innovation. In his 2007 book Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, Kula considers the relationship between what we desire and how we live.

“Yearnings is a fancy word for desires,” he said. “The central insight in the book is that what animates us, what animates our lives, are our desires. They are sources of great wisdom for who we are as human beings. We know our most intense desires – our desire for love, our desire for the truth, our desire for meaning, our desire for happiness, our desire to be creative and have a purpose and to contribute.… The interesting thing about looking at our desires is, the more one can understand our desires, the wiser our lives are.”

Whatever the day’s headlines, Kula said, maintaining optimism is critical to making positive change in the world.

“Being an optimist doesn’t mean you have to be Pollyanna,” he said. “You can be an optimist and be 51-49 about it. The difference between being a 51-49 optimist and 51-49 the other way may be the biggest difference of all.”

And when the nightly news brings stories of authoritarian ascendancy or other alarming developments, the long view is an antidote.

“I use a long-term, macro-evolutionary take,” said Kula. “This is where Martin Luther King, I think, is right. The arc of history bends toward justice. But it doesn’t bend linearly. It’s not one plus one plus one plus one. It’s sometimes two steps forward and a step backward. We are in now a very, very significant moment of transition. There’s a lot of ways to talk about that transition – postmodern, information age, technological age – and all of the changes are hard to metabolize. So, it takes a very serious responsibility for elites and cultural creatives and people who experience themselves at the cutting edge of these changes to take very seriously the costs and pains and dislocation of these changes for different people. That is what I think we are all called to do.”

People may look at the state of the world and feel helpless or hopeless. But the better response, Kula said, is not only to acknowledge the ways in which we might affect improvements, but also to take individual responsibility for the situation.

“Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, said, in the face of trauma and in the face of political tragedies, the first thing to ask is how am I complicit in what is transpiring,” said Kula. “Not in a giant moral drama of blaming, because, if we are actually interdependent … then what’s happening with people with whom we deeply disagree is connected to us. It’s not some other, evil person over there.”

This is not to say there is not evil in the world, he cautions. But, asserting that those with whom we disagree are evil can potentially misallocate cause.

“In America, there aren’t 60 million evil people who voted for Trump that want America to be destroyed and become a homophobic, primitive, psychologically regressive place in the world,” Kula said. “It behooves us, says Maimonides, to address very seriously what have I missed and, therefore, perhaps been complicit in allowing this to emerge?”

Courage and a sense of adventure can help us navigate times like these.

“If we mitigate a little bit the fear and just stand at that burning bush and not be so scared, know there is tremendous possibility,” he said.

For tickets to FEDtalks, at the Vancouver Playhouse, visit jewishvancouver.com.