Category: Uncategorized

Parents are People, Too!

 

Have you forgotten what it feels like just to be human?

 

you do so much for others, but what do you do for yourself?

 

Rabbi Aaron Bergman is leading a program for parents who want to be happier people.

 

Spend a little time learning to relax and reduce stress.

 

 

The first session is 9/23 at 11:15 at Adat Shalom. We will end in time for Pickup.

 

There is no charge. Just show up.

Rabbi Nachman had a great understanding of human nature, and all its quirks and foibles. He did not look to solve them, but to celebrate them.

We will listen to some of his best stories, and discuss how to use them in our own spiritual practice.

This Sunday at 9:30 am at Adat Shalom. Everyone is welcome.

There will never be a moment in our lives that we feel completely settled and in control. Perhaps a few moments of clarity appear, but they soon fade. The Shema prayer is a roadmap to how to be happy during our journey, no matter what happens.

We will continue our discussion about the Shema this Sunday, 5/20, 11am at Adat Shalom. Even if you were not here for the previous session, don’t worry, we will get you up to speed quickly. Everyone is welcome.

The Shema is usually understood primarily as a declaration that there is one God, and that we have an obligation to serve that God. The Shema, though,  is really a brilliant structure that allows us to connect to our deepest spiritual selves and by doing so, liberate our selves to have happier relationships with others, ourselves, and maybe even to God, too.

We will meet this Sunday, 4/29, at 11am at Adat Shalom Synagogue. Everyone is welcome.

The Jewish mystics developed a wonderful meditative practice for learning how to integrate our physical and spiritual selves. It is based on the counting of the Omer, the period of time between Passover to Shavuot, the Holiday of the giving of the Torah.

We will study the different aspects of Kabbalah that relate to this sacred time, and learn to meditate on them, and develop our own meditative practices that will address the things we want to work on individually.

We will meet this Sunday at 11am at Adat Shalom Synagogue. Everyone is welcome.

Challenges in life can sometimes harden us more than is healthy. We become cynical. We avoid certain people and situations or even just truths about ourselves, because we just don’t want to deal with them. We cannot avoid them forever. Big family holidays, such as Passover, are often where a lot of the things that make us uncomfortable converge.

We will talk about, and do a guided meditation, on how to open and soften our hearts, and still feel safe and happy, especially as Passover approaches. We will discuss ways of actually enjoying each aspect of Passover, including the matzah.

Our session is this Sunday, 3/18, at 11 am at Adat Shalom. Everyone is invited. This is part of the larger hamakOhm series, but you did not have to attend the earlier sessions to come to this, or any in the future.

This is a very rhythmic track I wrote and produced based on a Yemenite Shabbat song.
This is the Day (Zehu Yom)

I have a lot of other tracks I created on the music page.

Sunday, 2/26 (tomorrow or today, depending when you read this) at 11am  is our last session discussing how to be friends with the Siddur and your own prayer experience. Everyone is welcome, even if you missed one or both of the other session.

This is not our last Sunday session, though. These classes are part of  hamakOhm, which is about developing interesting and usefull ways of developing ourselves spiritually. The next sessions will be dedicated to learning how to enjoy all aspects of Passover, including family.

Yitro 2012

The Revelation at Mount Sinai was very impressive. There was tremendous thunder and lightning. The experience was so overwhelming that the Torah says the people saw the sounds, that they had a synaesthetic experience. In fact, the Hebrew is in the present tense, Roim et hakolot, that seems to imply that they are still seeing the sounds today.

Right after this, God says to build an altar. You might expect Gold, silver, diamonds, at least some kinds of precious metals and stones.

Instead, God says take the rocks around you and make an altar. Take them exactly the way they are. Don’t shape them in any way.

Let’s go back to Egypt for a moment. The Egyptians were obsessed with symmetry and perfection. The Pyramids are made of precisely cut stones, each one fitting an exact part of the structure.. The bricks the Israelites were forced to make when building the cities of Ramses and Pitom, had to be perfectly sized and shaped. Each one was the same size as the other, or it would be discarded.

This is how Egypt saw the world. They would force not just materials to the shape they wanted, but people, too. All slaves were exactly the same to them, and they had usefulness as long as they did what Pharaoh wanted. If they did not or could not they were expendable.

Let’s return to the altar God wants us to build. The people were to take the stones as they were and make something holy out of them. Large, small, smooth, jagged, whole, broken. Each was critical.

Good metaphor for people. People come in an endless number of different shapes and sizes, intellectual and physical abilities, and personalities.

So much of our world today is to try to get everyone to fit our image of how they should be, instead of celebrating who they are right now.

Our educational system, from nursery school to graduate school is often about taking all different kinds of students, and then trying to turn them into the same kind of graduate. Standardized tests. People are not standard. Kurt Vonnegut used to say that all people living or dead were purely coincidental implying that each person is unique.

Forcing people into a limited number of acceptable standards not only frustrates many people, but prevents them from finding what they may be successful at doing.

Physical appearance has a narrow range of acceptable levels, too. There are only one or two models of model. Thin and thinner for women. Muscular and more muscular for men. This has lead to an incredible increase in eating disorders among girls and women, and steroid abuse among boys and men.

Families are not simple anymore. They can be blended and unblended. Single parent or multi parent households, multi ethnic and cultural. We have to make everyone and every family feel like they fit somewhere in the community.

It is not easy or simple, but it is worth it. Maybe we ourselves are the difficult one that does not fit.

God created us differently on purpose. Go wants us to be like the altar and find a way to celebrate all those differences.

This is how we can be the model of an Am Kadosh, a holy people.

This Sunday, 2/12, at 11am  at Adat Shalom is part two of Making Friends with the Jewish Prayer Book, the Siddur. You are invited even if you did not make it to the first session. The notes for the first session are a couple of posts down.