New Year's Sermon

BTW, here it is:

This week’s portion is Vay’chi, the last reading from the book of Genesis. It wraps up the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs.

The portion’s name comes from its first words, which state that Jacob lived in the land of Egypt for 17 years before he died. The narration covers Jacob’s preparations for death and burial away from Egypt, and his blessing of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. After imparting his deathbed blessings to all of his sons, Jacob dies and is buried in Canaan. Joseph and his brothers return to Egypt, where Joseph also dies.

If we were reading this portion from the Torah, we would all rise at the end and say “Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazeik.” “Be strong, be strong, and let us be strengthened.” According to Rabbi Donin, this is “a cry of encouragement to continue with the reading of the next Book, and to return to this one again in due course.” The custom may have come from a Talmudic saying that people need to be strengthened in four ways: Torah, good deeds, prayer, and occupation.

We have also just wrapped up the year 2009, and the secular new year is as much a time for reflection and self-improvement as are the High Holy Days. Aren’t we Jews lucky? We get two chances to make New Years’ resolutions. [At this point, I read an article by a rabbi about a Jewish approach to New Year's resolutions:

Whatever one thinks about New Year's, New Year's celebrations, or the practice of making New Year's resolutions, they are all beautiful customs when done well and there is Biblical and Jewish wisdom which can help us make good on those important resolutions as we progress through the new year. Here are six tips to help you do so:

First, trust the power of your words. The words we say really can change our realties, and simply declaring that we hope to do things differently this coming year, can make a real difference in our lives. That insight is as old as Genesis itself. Recall the powerful story of things being brought into reality by declaring them e.g. "let there be light, and there was light".

Second, be modest in your aspirations. You don't have to fix everything at once, so pick one attainable goal and really pursue it. The Talmud teaches that when we grasp for too much, we end up with nothing at all. But, if we pick a goal to which we can really hold on, we need never let it go.

Third, just do it. Whether it's getting to the gym, eating healthier, spending less money, or any of the other popular resolutions, just start doing it and let your emotions about what you are doing catch up with your practice. In Hebrew, we call that na'aseh v'nishma, first we do and then we hear. It really works.

Fourth, don't go it alone. No different from communal worship or major building projects, when it comes to personal growth, there are heights which we can only attain with the support of other like-minded friends. Find a supportive community which will encourage you to keep going even when you want to give up on your resolutions.

Fifth, distinguish the practice from the desired result. Eating healthier and losing weight are two different things. While both may be desirable, you only have complete control over the first. Whether you lose weight or not, eating healthier is valuable in its own right (lishma in rabbinic language) and the same can be said for going to the gym and "looking better". Focus on the value of the practice, and whatever happens you will feel better and be better.

Sixth, give yourself time off for good behavior. Except for chemical addictions, taking an occasional break from our new practices can actually help us stay committed to them over time. Think of it as a Sabbath. But like Sabbath, if you find that your time off exceeds 1/7th of your time, you need to get back to your resolution, pronto!]

Then I continued: Let’s consider how the events described in this portion may guide us. Jacob senses that his death approaches, and he settles his affairs. Many of us would do well to follow his example, although our concerns probably differ. Jacob’s first concern is that Joseph buries him in the family burial cave. He then adopts Joseph’s first two sons as his direct descendants, to settle any questions of inheritance. Finally, he reassures his family that God will bring them back from Egypt to the land of their ancestors. This reassurance was needed, since the promise was that Abraham’s family would prosper in the promised land. But here they are in Egypt, far away.

After Jacob’s burial, the brothers come to Joseph in remorse and fear, to beg him to forgive them for selling him into slavery and telling Jacob that he was dead. And he forgives and reassures them, telling them that God intended him to be in Egypt, to save people from the famine. He also promises that he will provide for them and their families.

My question is, why didn’t the family head right back to Canaan when the seven years of famine ended? Jacob would still have been alive, since he lived 17 years in Egypt. I’m thinking that they were too comfortable. Since Joseph was the Pharaoh’s right hand man, the family had it made in the shade. Having been put in fear of their lives by the famine, they decided to stay in Egypt, where the living was easy.

Their choosing to remain in Egypt after the famine ended may have shown a loss of courage or some other failure of character that would help explain why God left them in Egypt for so long, to make staying there so uncomfortable that they’d be willing to pull up stakes, risk new challenges, and fight their way into the promised land.

May we begin January 2010 with the freedom to leave our own Egypts as we strengthen ourselves with the saying “Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazeik”

Massachusetts Election Undermines our D.C. Efforts

Four of us from the San Francisco Organizing Project joined with 150 other PICO network leaders and staff in D.C. on the 12th and 13th. We held an Affordability Summit in a House of Representatives committee room, at which we swapped stories with a dozen members of the House and gave each one a big cardboard key, to symbolize that affordability is the key to effective health care reform.

We then split up into state caucuses and met with senators, representatives, or their staff to tell our stories and give them their own keys. The Democratic leaders of the House and Senate were holding marathon meetings with the President to hammer out differences between the health reform bills passed by the Senate and the House. After we got back to San Francisco, it appeared that they had reached a compromise on one of the most contentious issues, how to pay for expanded health coverage.

But then, last Tuesday, a special election for the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy resulted in a Republican victory - which lost Democrats the filibuster-proof 60-vote majority we had so painstakingly cobbled together in the Senate. The political ramifications of the vote have had congressional Democrats all in a dither, and the future of health reform seemed cloudy indeed.

However, the need for comprehensive health reform remains as pressing as ever. Although some voters seem opposed because they fear it would add to the federal deficit, in fact both bills contain strong cost-cutting measures that would rein in the ballooning costs of health care, and shrink the deficit. Some people are opposed to the legislation, even though they are in favor of many of its components: e.g., expanding Medicaid, barring insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, closing the Medicare donut hole. This is because there has been a lot of deceptive advertising and outright lying about what the legislation contains. And, although the economy hasn't toppled off the cliff it was teetering on a year ago, the jobs lost in the recession aren't coming back in any hurry. So people are afraid and angry that the economic situation isn't all better. But the majority of personal bankruptcies result from medical bills, and the majority of those debtors have health insurance - for all the good it does them. All these bankruptcies aren't helping the economy any.

The only way forward is a way that doesn't require 60 votes in the Senate, because we don't have them anymore. And the only way to do that is by the House adopting the bill already passed by the Senate and adopting as much of the compromises reached by the leadership and the President that can be adopted using the budget reconciliation process, which requires only 51 votes in the Senate.

The main problem I'm hearing about is the House progressives who won't vote for legislation that does not include a public option in the insurance exchanges. However, the public option is only one way to ensure competition and keep insurance premiums reasonable. The compromise also seems to include a national insurance exchange, which should have enough clout to accomplish much the same result.

We've been working on expanding healthcare (this time around) for a full year, and have passed very similar legislation in both houses of Congress. We have come too far to give up now. Please folks, I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the only industrialized nation that does not have universal health care. Let's get our act together and make it happen.

The Too-Friendly Feline

Jan and I were walking to a Pleasanton restaurant in the winter evening darkness, when a dark tortoiseshell cat came up to us on the sidewalk. She came directly to me, and let me scratch her head, and bumped my ankles, and was really friendly. Jan thought she was her own tortoiseshell, Ava, and we picked her up to take her back home. We traded off carrying her, and she was just fine with me carrying her. This made me suspect she was not Ava, who doesn't know me that well. We put her under a streetlight and stared at what we could see of her coat, and just couldn't decide whether she was Ava or not.

Wouldn't you know it, when we got to Jan's home, her cats were nowhere to be found, but this cat - who we were starting to believe was not Ava, started growling, presumably at the smell of the resident cats. I couldn't stop laughing at how hard it was to tell one cat from another in the dark, and at the futile effort we had made to restore someone else's pet to her home. I named her Zsa Zsa (Eva Gabor's sister) while Jan flushed her cats, Ava and Chester, from under the house. Now having conclusive proof that we had carried off somebody else's pet, we tried to return her to where we found her - but she disappeared. We assume she found her way home.

Whoever owns that lovely and well-cared-for feline may be in danger of losing her, if she's that happy to go off with total strangers.

In the Air

Here's a little something I wrote on the plane:

So, I'm flying to D.C. with Jordan to rally and lobby for affordability in health care reform. Todd got us both aisle seats, and my row is otherwise empty.

The on-flight entertainment included a film I have been wanting to see, G-Force, which I enjoyed immensely. Although there purports to be free wifi, my itouch can't seem to connect to it. But there is a plug for recharging if it runs low on juice.

There's also a classical music channel with a variety of composers, and a menu for food service.

I've been remarkably calm about the trip, compared to the way I was before Mexico, and perhaps also Reno. Slept well last night, no headache, digestion doing OK. Eyes burning a bit, though. Time to lube up and close them for a bit.

D.C. or Bust

So I'm about to take my first cross-country flight since before 9/11. And I've only flown short trips a very few times since then. I'm a little bit anxious, and planning to take a good supply of tranquilizers with me.

But it's in a very good cause. I'm going with a group from the PICO community organizing network to lobby our legislators to pass health care reform with strong provisions for affordability. I've made several similar trips to the state capitol in Sacramento, so, aside from the weather, this shouldn't be that different.

Stay tuned.

Vacation Nearly Over

And I haven't managed all the items on my "to do" list, but did deal with many of them. And I accepted an additional responsibility - the Friday night service on New Year's Day. My sermon is pretty much together, but I'm having trouble persuading my newish printer to print it. First it was the wrong kind of paper - too glossy. Then it was the absence of the printer driver, and the inability to download it again through a firewall. Now I've got it reinstalled on this computer and managed to print a sample page.

However, now the problem is that the sermon is written in Word, which I don't have on this computer, and Microsoft Works, for all that it comes from the same company, appears to be incompatible with it. Guess I'll have to break down and buy it for this computer.

We Got Our Wings!

So, this time the adventure was my idea. I saw an ad for IFly Bay Area, an indoor skydiving facility that fits people into jumpsuits, goggles, earplugs, and helmets, and sticks them inside a wind tunnel with an instructor, and allows them to float on the air and do whatever maneuvers they are capable of. The ad said that anyone from 3 to 93 could safely do it, and I certainly qualify in that regard. And I'd seen actors doing it on an episode of House, m.d., so it seemed doable.

Jan and I went to the facility in Union City last night, driving at least partway in pouring rain. I was early and waited reading mind candy on my Kindle to distract me from my growing anxiety. I had images of me landing on my nose, or simply falling to the springy floor of the tunnel. But the ad said they could handle people who weighed considerably more than I do, so what the hey, I told myself; it could be fun, and then it would be over.

We went to flight school for 15 minutes, where we learned and practiced the position for belly flying. The upper body is in a variant of the cobra pose and the legs in a sort of locust pose - in yogic terms. These are among my weakest positions, but at least I knew what I was trying for.

My jumpsuit was red and black, with a cool embroidered design on the front band. Wearing my glasses along with the goggles was a bit of a problem - my glasses got fogged up - but I would have been really uncomfortable trying something new without my glasses, being so near-sighted that I'm legally blind without them.

The actual flying sessions - we got two, each lasting about 90 seconds - were challenging and fun. I got into the Superman (Mighty Mouse?) pose, and did my best to hold my position with minimal help from the instructor. The very fast wind coming at my face made me feel a bit like being in a swimming pool with the water coming up my nose. I was a hair light-headed at the conclusion of each flight.

On the second round, the instructor joined up with me and spun us around while ascending and descending in the tunnel. When I banked a little to make the turn, my right shoulder complained a bit, so I spread my fingers apart to try to ease the strain.

We were so proud of ourselves, and other people there of our vintage - who came to watch their progeny fly - were quite complimentary.

The next day, however, some muscles have joined my shoulder's heightened complaint. Don't think I need to repeat the experience without some prior physical conditioning.

But we did it, we flew like little birdies!