Temple Talks

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Klein

In thinking of my own Jewish education, I first learned to read Hebrew, and only much later got to a point where I could speak with any similar fluency to what I read. It took years in the making and maybe that's because it should have been flipped over—speaking before reading.

Dae Selcer

Exactly. And in fact, one of the real science-based practices is moving from speech to print, and that's actually the title of a very excellent book by Dr. Louisa Moats for anyone out there who's interested to dig in more. There's some technical stuff in there, but it's a little bit more accessible than reading an article in a scholarly journal. I highly recommend it. 

But yes, moving from speech to print is the way that we develop very strong readers.

And as you say, language is so important, and we should be thinking about reading as a manifestation of language. There’s a famous idea out there in the research called the simple view of reading which was proposed by Gough and Tunmer in the eighties. It says that good reading comprehension is the product of one’s ability to decode multiplied by your ability to comprehend language.

You need both those pieces, right? You need to be able to associate speech sounds to words, but you also need to understand the language that you're speaking.

You could probably teach me to read in Finnish pretty quickly because Finnish is a very regular language. However, I wouldn't have good reading comprehension because I wouldn't understand the words that I was reading. You need both. You need associating sounds with words and letters, but you also need deep comprehension of spoken language, which is something that's often neglected.

So bringing it back to the Jewish lens: what did the rabbis teach us about prayer? It’s not enough to just be saying the words, you must look at the words. But it's not enough to just look at the words, you must have that kavannah, that intention inside of you. And when I think about the science of reading, I think of that kavannah as really comprehending what we're reading.

We need to be skilled decoders, but we also need to be thinking about what it is that we're doing at the same time. 

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Zimmerman

We wanted to talk today about the swastika that you just sent to temple. And I opened it up recently and I guess I didn't expect my reaction to be so visceral. Not only is it a swastika, but there's wheat hanging out of it. It looks so innocent and yet it isn't.

So tell us the story of the swastikas, how you worked so hard to get them removed, and the whole St. Cloud story around the swastikas.

Rabbi Edelheit

They were on the outside of the building of St. Mary's cathedral in downtown St. Cloud.  The cathedral burnt to the ground and was rebuilt between 1927 and 1931. They used the plans of a third century cathedral Basilica in Rome. It had hakenkreuze, the broken cross, represented on five stone circular frames, and you're correct with wheat. These were on the upper part of the outside of the building. And they remained on the building, but now they were not hakenkreuze. They were swastikas because the swastika became the universally known recognized symbol of the national socialists after 1935. 

I want to make sure no one misunderstands the Catholic church did not put up swastikas. They put up a third century of the common era, old, old pre-medieval Christian symbol called the broken cross. That same symbol—used by Hindus and used by native Americans—became swastikas once the national socialists took over.

Rabbi Zimmerman

That is so important.

Rabbi Edelheit

When I retired from Temple Israel, I took a position at St. Cloud State, which was a part of a settlement of a tragic federal class action lawsuit, Zamora et al, where a group of faculty sued the single campus St. Cloud State and the state university system over allegations of antisemitism in employment practice.

That case was not litigated but settled. As part of the settlement, $1.5 million was set aside to create a Jewish presence on the St. Cloud State campus. Ari Zmora, an Israeli, was the named plaintiff in this suit. He brought Israeli television to St. Cloud and they televised the hakenkreuze swastikas on the church. So, Minnesota has Catholic churches with swastikas.  

There were a group of activists, professors from the human relations department who would take their students down to the church to protest these swastikas.

When your friend Joseph Edelheit was hired, one of the first things they asked is, can you do something about the swastikas? So I went and, as you well know, I knocked on the door and became friends with the priest, the rector of the cathedral. No one had ever talked to the priest or met with the parish council.

I established a relationship with him and he said, “apologetically and with shame, we know they have to come down. The parish has grown very small. We can no longer afford to replace them, take them down and replace them. We want to, but we can't do it anymore. How much will it take? He gave me a number.”

I made a few calls and raised 80% of it for him, from members of the Jewish community. He raised the rest. What was important was he invited me to teach a class to his church. It was the first time he had ever been in dialogue with a rabbi. They then planned and had five new outside pendants made to meet the standards of Rome and the hakenkreuze were taken down. I was given one of them as a gift for helping remove it.

I was also invited to participate in the service where the new pendants were sanctified by the Bishop. I was the first non-Christian ever to be asked to preach in the cathedral of St. Mary. 

Rabbi Zimmerman

So what did you say? What did you say to the congregation? 

Rabbi Edelheit

I talked to them about what it means to bear the burden of history.

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Zimmerman

I am a rabbi who cooks and I love being involved in your cookbooks. They're amazing because of the food and the rose water and all the beautiful tastes and smells that come from every one of your recipes. Now I’m wondering—we've gone through COVID. How has that changed the reality of food and gathering around food? What, what for you is essential about bringing people around the table in the time that we're living in right here, right now?

Yotam Ottolenghi

The key word there is essential because I think the way I’ve changed my perspective is about what are the essentials. We've all had that notion that certain things had to be done in one particular way, in another particular way. And that often applies in the kitchen, but I think what we've discovered is that there's many ways to do things. COVID forced us into this from the very beginning where there's a shortage of ingredients and in some supermarkets, we couldn't get what we wanted to, what we thought we needed.

All of a sudden we were stuck with things that were maybe a bit less glamorous, a bit less exciting. You know, like a can of chickpeas or a bag of short grain rice. We dug up things from the bottom of the back of the freezer that were never going to be that the stars of the party, right? I think that was a really wonderful wake up call because it means that you understand that you can create delicious meals with what you had. I saw that I could still create delicious meals with whatever was there. 

This thinking on your feet was a bit like people in previous generations used to do. They would go out to the shop every time they needed just a bit of fish or a fillet of beef. There was just not that kind of sense of abundance that we were used to now.

But this new situation has led a lot of creativity. In my home, I can tell you we served lots of curries because we just had lots of lentils and split peas and things like that. Or, with whatever vegetables that were around, often I would slow cook them into something. I would cook eggs into something a bit like a shakshuka, but with whatever was available. All of a sudden you make do because otherwise, you know, you're going to just sit around and pray for the day, pray to go back in time.

Now we are all thinking creatively, thinking on our feet, and just doing things slightly differently. This is one of the lessons of this time.

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Moss: What is your midrash—your interpretation, expansion, understanding, digging up and finding some gold—of the word Rimon and what it means for the organization today?

David Harris: Well, Rimon is the Hebrew word for pomegranate. It is one of our most ancient symbols. And of course, what is the pomegranate famous for? Its seeds! And the seeds have been interpreted in many different ways. For some, they are the 613 mitzvot.

But they also have a more general interpretation, which is of fertility, of creativity, of the multiplicity of ideas that spring from each of our heads. And so in Rimon, we've mostly looked at that symbol as an expression of what diversity is, what the full spectrum of art forms are. The many paths that artists walk; the many paths that communities walk.

So we look at the Rimon as inspiration in the sense of why variety is critical to how we understand ourselves and how we respect each other. 

Sometimes people like to bring it to my attention that in modern Israeli life, Rimon has another meaning, which I believe is a hand grenade. So it's something very explosive and let's face it, art can be explosive. It can absolutely tear open the status quo and make us see something we had never seen before. 

Rabbi Moss: And in a less violent, but just as visceral way, the pomegranate juice stains or dyes in such a deep way. That also can be the effect that art can have on us, leaving a permanent imprint in a vibrant color.

David Harris: That's beautiful. I should also say that the Rimon plays a role in how we decorate the Torah scrolls itself referring to its beautiful crowns which are called rimonim, the plural of Rimon, because they do look like pomegranates.

The rimon—it is explosive, it is beautiful. It stains our fingers. That’s exactly how art should be described. It is the stain that says with you after you’ve left the room. 

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Welcome to Temple Talks, the podcast of Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Zimmerman: So talk to me about the art of preaching, where you learned it, who are your role models and how you continue to work on it? 

Reverend McDavid: I'm grateful that I had old-school parents who took me to church every Sunday. I grew up in one of those houses where it just wasn't optional. Right. We may have missed church one Sunday a year. And so I was always hearing it: the amazing artistry that is the black preaching experience, right. 

I think my dad started to do something around the time I was in the middle school. He would take me to rank and chapel, which is on the campus of Howard university. But every week, Rankin chapel would feature a nationally known preacher from somewhere in the country. 

Wow, hearing some folk who just were masters of the craft, right. Men and women who were lauded everywhere for the work that they had done. That planted the seeds for my interests that would grow and develop at Morehouse. I really give credit to that space more than any other for really developing my abilities as a preacher, and for understanding what it means to search our texts and scriptures in the fullest way possible to find what is there that can speak to the present moment and the pain that individuals are carrying. My early teachers of preaching taught us that every moment of the pulpit is life or death; that you never know how weak somebody may be and how fragile they may be on that given Sunday or whatever moment you may be preaching. And that that time is valuable. And so never to waste a single word, sentence, or paragraph, because there is an opportunity for, through the power of God, for you to help save someone's life.

And so always think about that. It's just a huge privilege and enormous burden at the same time, but that's the beauty of the work we're doing. And so I was there at Morehouse under the tutelage of Dean Lawrence Edward Carter. He's been the Dean of the Martin Luther king chapel there for 40 years teaching and so it was beautiful to be there. And that's where I've found my circle. So many of the folks that you saw on that installation day shared in that lineage of coming out of Morehouse and that great tradition of preachers; others, I met along the way in seminary while I was at Union Theological Seminary. I got to study under Dr. Lisa Thompson. I was working under Pastor Michael Walrond in New York and Harlem. 

They and others mean so much to me because they took the hours of opening you up to a text and saying, okay, find the message here, find the meaning. What is this speaking to in our current predicament? You would have a sermon idea and they said, “that's not good enough drill a little deeper. You can go a little deeper. You can reach for it. Find what is the essence of what God wants to say.” 

So much of what I do, and this also goes back to my time at Union, is thinking about the psychology of religion. What are the tonalities psychologically in the texts that may relate to our current dilemma? 

We are such a busy people, right? And I think I had one person, one mentor who told me, you know, unfortunately part of the pastorate in the capitalist society that we live in is that you get paid to stop, sit, breathe, and think, so that you can come up with these sermons and these messages from God that other folk are too busy to hear.

Right, that everyone else is running and constantly on this grind, trying to keep up with the demands of the life that we live and that the goal of the pastor, priest, clergy, is to actually take time to seriously pause, breathe, listen, pray and hear from the spirit as to what needs to be said. 

It'd be great if we could all do that but our world doesn't allow for that. So we have to stand in that gap. 

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Welcome to Temple Talks, the podcast of Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Moss

What is Mussar?

Julie Dean

It’s no secret that character has become a huge topic of conversation in this country. How are we living? What are our values? How do we treat one another?

Character is this very important topic of how we’re choosing to show up in the world. In the Jewish world we used to refer to it as being a mensch, you know as simple as that. Am I living my values?

Mussar is a Jewish spiritual pathway that comes out of 19th century Eastern Europe. It contains the idea that at a certain point in our lives we can wake up and make choices about how we are in the world. For a while I’m reacting to the influences of how I grew up, and I cultivate certain character traits based on my experiences. And then I reach a certain point of introspection where I can go, “are those responses to the world really serving me and others as best they could.

Through a practice of learning, introspection, and creating small doable changes, I can make adjustments in how I respond to the world around me.

In essence, it is the ever-evolving practice of becoming a mensch.

Rabbi Moss

I love that definition. I’m currently in a class that you’re teaching, in which you are training myself and others to be facilitators of a mussar va’ad, a facilitated group that is one of the main modes of mussar practice. Julie, could you explain the way a va’ad functions as a seminal structure of mussar practice.

Julie Dean

Sure, so within mussar, there is the opportunity to be part of a va’ad--a small group of maybe 6-12 participants. We meet in small groups, whether on Zoom or in person, and we look at a certain character trait through a Jewish lens and through the lens of our own lives. We talk about where this midah, or character trait, shows up in our own soul curriculum. My life has all kinds of experiences that take place, and I can learn from those experiences. 

So in the va’ad, we take a given character trait such as patience, generosity, compassion, anger, honor, and many others. We study this middah, examine where it appears in our daily life, and ask where I could make a small change. What would be a small doable step to become more patient, for example? 

Being human is messy business. Judaism tells us that everyone is a holy soul. We hold these two ideas together. We’re not fixing something that is bad or broken in ourselves, but we’re currently working on our evolving development as people.

There’s good humor when we do this together as a group. And I can learn from another’s experiences and insights. Everyone is a teacher and a learner in a mussar group.

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Zimmerman

You’ve really taken up this artform of sofrut, Jewish scribal arts. How did you get into it? How did this intense passion emerge?

Rabbi Hornstein

Sofrut has been a powerful spiritual practice for me, as art too has always been. There’s something that happens when you’re doing something creative in that you become a vessel for and partner with the divine in a more embodied way. You get in that weird time warp when you get in the zone creatively. You say “wow I made that” but you also feel like you didn’t make it alone in a way.

Creation is something that happens all the time. When we do creative things we become part of that act in a more direct way. 

I discovered sofrut this past year from a friend at RRC, Rabbi Rebecca Richman. I was so interested in what she was doing with this visual medium. I was never so connected to singing the prayers. I found a way into prayer but it never was a natural fit like visual art was. So I was excited to find this visual and spiritual art form within Judaism of sofrut.

I got connected with a teacher and just found it all to be really powerful. There’s this rich tradition in Judaism of scribing and the laws surrounding it. I liked the idea that you could have a discipline within your spiritual practice and follow in the footsteps of people who have also connected to God in that way. What a lot of Jews find in prayer, I found in scribing.

I like that there are these rules with a whole theology behind it. The Keset HaSofer is a book that covers the laws for scribes. It opens up by basically saying, be careful scribes! Scribes can create worlds and destroy worlds! You have to really follow the rules. It is powerful, magical stuff here. 

There’s a big tradition in Judaism of letters really having power, and God existing in the Torah and in the written word. So it’s not something to take lightly that you’re bringing that into the world. 

If you make mezuzah it has to look like mezuzot have looked forever. And you know there’s all these rules for how to write the name of God because God is there in that name that you write. You have to be careful, pause, have an intention or kavanah. You have to say a prayer and really get into the mindset to bring God into the world. I like that mystical part of it too.

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Sandy Divack Moss 

At that time, the value proposition was that each generation had as much to gain from the other. It wasn’t about doing for the elderly. Of course, there was a lot of doing for the elderly, but there was also mutual learning. 

In my parents’ generation of American Jewish life, the focus was on assimilation. So my peers had so much to learn from the previous generation about how to live a Jewish life. 

Rabbi Moss 

What you’re talking about is something that drew me to the rabbinate and synagogue life in particular. I think in contemporary society, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for intergenerational connection. We don’t all live in a small town with a town center where you’re interacting across generations. But at the synagogue, like you’ve been saying, there’s so much for younger people to learn from older people, and vice-versa. 

Sandy Divack Moss 

I came up with the idea of conference call seders. It struck me that Passover is such an important thing, and there were these homebound people that couldn’t have a seder. I remember a particular woman who had MS and was bed-bound, but wanted to be part of a seder. 

So we delivered all the accoutrement, including of course a haggadah and a shankbone. 

At the time, the only way you could set up conference calls was to work through New York Telephone. So we’d give them, say, the 10 numbers we needed to hook together. And I got these young people to commit to run the conference call seders so the shut-in elderly would join together for a seder and then that eventually morphed into what still exists today at DOROT, a University Without Walls. 

So we pushed the conference call seders into other forms throughout the year on different topics. For example, everyone would watch Phil Donahue, which was like the Oprah of the time, and then would have the opportunity to talk together. 

Rabbi Moss 

That sounds like a precursor to what’s been happening during this pandemic. Many synagogues have always known in some way, but really realized and materialized during this period, that there are a lot of people who can’t come to the synagogue for a variety of reasons, and we can do so much more to meet people where they’re at and leverage technology—yours that existed since the 80s and now new tech today—to bring as much Jewish life to as many people as we can. 

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Dr. Rudnick

Should there be limits on what we should do or study? Are there questions we should not investigate or ask? What are you going to say when I tell you I know why this is true? Let’s say science could tell you, from an evolutionary standpoint, why there is yetzer hara (evil inclination) and yetzer hatov (good inclination). Is that going to diminish it for you?

Rabbi Glaser

I read the Yuval Harari books, Sapiens & Homo Deus. As I was reading them I thought, wow this guy is really pulling apart the universe into its component parts. He wants to explain scientific rationalizations for everything. When I finished it, I was both incensed and really mobilized. I was jazzed up. When I read it I thought, huh, yeah you do think that…but you’re wrong! There was something inside me that was arguing with his very practical consideration of everything.

So my answer to your question would be, no, we should not stop analyzing. There should not be limits. Keep doing it! But always have one eye on the people that have faith in certain aspects that might be unanalyzable. I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s good when scientists and theologians sit down together. In fact, it might be the only solution for the planet’s problems because if we look at what’s being done environmentally to this world, and we look at it only from a scientific standpoint, I’m not sure that’s going to suffice.

Dr. Rudnick

Right, in fact we know it’s not. We know, for example, with all the misinformation that we’re experiencing now, that just giving people more facts is not the answer. We need to understand something about them as human beings and where they’re coming from. Science can help with some of that, but cultural and religious understandings need to come into play as well to understand where people are.

Rabbi Glaser

That answers your question, doesn’t it? Don’t limit what can be studied, but also don’t put all your marbles in that basket.

Dr. Rudnick

I come into a similar conflict all the time. I go to services and read the liturgy, and we say things like “who causes the sun to rise in the morning and the moon at night.” First of all, it’s factually incorrect because the moon is up during the day as well, not just during the night. And we know why the sun rises and sets. Then there’s other things like, “who can count the stars?” Well, I can.

Rabbi Glaser

You can and you have!

Dr. Rudnick

So I have to just sort of relax, because the language means other things. And we have to simultaneously be people and be these analytic creatures that are trying to understand in this other way.

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 Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. 

Rabbi Hartman

Michelle, my understanding is that Appetite for Change really brings together your passions for cooking, food, and social justice. Tell us about how AFC and Breaking Bread got started.

Michele Horovitz

At the time, I wanted to use food as an organizing tool. To learn about what interventions or programs might be helpful, we really felt that we had to ask the community. I was able to partner with LaTasha and Princess, both African American women, both northsiders. 

Princess is from Chicago—she calls herself a refugee from Chicago—and LaTasha was born and raised on the northside. Even they felt like they couldn’t speak for the whole community. So we brought people together to cook, to meet at the cutting boards and at the stovetops, to have conversations about what change people wanted to see in themselves, in their families, in the community, centered around food. But because food touches so many parts of our lives, we also learned about what community members and young people want to see change in the broader society. 

Rabbi Hartman

If I remember correctly, you bring youth in to do gardening, work, and training. It feels like more than a restaurant, like it’s a community project.

Michelle Horovitz

Totally. Most people know us because of our Breaking Bread catering and restaurant but the Appetite for Change programming—our cooking workshops, our youth gardening and farming, the farmers’ market—that all came before Breaking Bread.

Regarding our community meal program, we used to do just a little bit of community meals for housing or for youth programs, now we are doing 10,000 meals per week through Minnesota Central Kitchen.

Our efforts have always been about leadership development, workforce development, getting people to a place where they can go out and make more money. If they’re interested, they can go climb this ladder which can be a great ladder to climb in food service management and hospitality. But there are more career paths than that coming out of this.

With the minimum wage rising in lots of cities, food services is a great place for people—youth, people who’ve been incarcerated, etc.—to have a first job or re-enter the workforce.

It is great how we can be a holistic resource for the community. We just built a greenhouse on the northside and are able to do some farming training for Black growers who are starting their business. It’s great to be working now so upstream. It is hard work what we do, but it is hopeful and uplifting.

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Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.