eJewishPhilanthropy has over it's long (for a Jewihs internet outlet) existence developed a reputation for sharing a lot of news in the professional Jewish world - often in advance of the rumor mill. One of the things I have always loved about it (and it's founder) is the ability to find people who write brilliant opinion or thought pieces. They don't tell us about what has happened so much as make us think about what we ourselves might want to make happen, or about how we go about our professional or private lives. This ran last Thursday on eJP  (click here to see it on their site - and make your comments there as well to take part in the larger conversation).

My wife and I LOVED Luca. From a story point of view I think it clearly outshone Encanto. And I like the impact of this Bruno a bit more than Bruno Mirabel - although his song is wonderful and John Leguizamo is amazing as always. From a musical and capture-the-hearts-of-children perspective, the Oscar rightly went where it did. But I am all about the story. I would have written my own piece, but Ben Vorspan already wrote a better one than I could have. For now anyway. Enjoy. 

FILM APPRECIATION

The Jewishness of Disney’s ‘Luca’

By

Ben Vorspan

 April 7, 2022

Everything we say to others matters. In Judaism, every word has the potential to bring holiness or profanity into the world. How much more powerful then, are the words we say to ourselves? How can it be that we teach our children to be mindful of their words and language to others, but we often fail to support them when they have a nagging voice or worse, we model for them the toxic and limiting behavior of our own negative self-talk?

I recently enjoyed watching the magnificent and kaleidoscopic Disney/Pixar film “Luca.” The central story revolves around two new friends, one a slightly older street smart teen (Alberto), and the other a bright and curious younger boy (Luca). In their adventures, they collaborate to accomplish many things neither could do alone. At one point, when Luca is not feeling brave, he responds to Alberto’s invitation to join him, “Nope. I can’t do it. Never in a million years.” Alberto accesses his own grit, and says to Luca, “Hey, hey, hey. I know your problem. You’ve got a ‘Bruno’ in your head…I get one too sometimes: ‘Alberto, you can’t.’ ‘Alberto, you’re gonna die.’ ‘Alberto, don’t put that in your mouth.’ Luca, it’s simple. Don’t listen to (silly ol’) Bruno!”

SCREENSHOT

A frame from Disney's "Luca."

The simplicity of this scene is its brilliance. Since watching it with each of my sons, when they articulate self-doubt or worse, negative self-talk, I look at them, point and yell, “Silenzio Bruno!”  It is pure Disney-meets-self-help-guru-magic.  It breaks the tension, flips an intense moment into one of levity and allows us to connect and process whatever is on the mind.

Mindfulness practices and skills are essential at Jewish day schools. Whether through our social emotional learning programs or partnership with organizations like the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, these opportunities provide us with the tools to notice, interrupt and reframe negative self-talk. As someone immersed in this work, trust me when I say that there is no quicker way to integrate mindfulness into our own day, or that of our students or children, than using, “Silenzio Bruno!”

Once this tool is in the toolkit, we can go through the transformative steps of turning self-doubt into self-confidence. We identify the negative self-talk as negative, we “name” it (Bruno), and we take action and command it to stop (Silenzio!). This mindful process is an integral step in wellness and self-health.

As we move toward spring and Pesach, toward our holiday of the liberation of our people and nation, it can be a moment to break free from the Pharaoh’s voice within each of us. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that we can be a Pharaoh unto ourselves, that the true meaning of freedom is “the liberation from the tyranny of the self-centered ego.” In other words, while we eat the bread of affliction, we can embrace the virtue of self-compassion.  

May this Passover — one to remember as we move out from two years of Seders where we were chained to our own homes or our Zoom screens — be one of great liberation! May we each have a silent Bruno, and maybe instead, find and name that internal, affirming voice, full of compassion, love and encouragement.  Perhaps that name is none other than the one name Adonai, God of Compassion and Grace (YHVH El Rahum v’Chanun). That same compassionate voice we are so comfortable sharing with a friend, a student or family member… may we learn to hear it for ourselves.

Sing a Redemption Song

I alternate between Pesach and Sukkot as my favorite Jewish holiday. I love building and hanging out in our Sukkah. Feeding people I love and celebrating with them is my happy place – and so I love the seder as well. Passover is so much more than that though.

Geulah – Redemption – is much more than a moment in our history: the crossing of the Sea of Reeds on the beginning of the walk to freedom. It is a Jewish value. We invoke it when we participate in freeing someone from captivity or slavery. Some of us remember participating in the movement to free the Refuseniks – Jews in the Soviet Union who only wanted to be free to be Jewish, to teach Hebrew or go to Israel. That was Geulah. Natan Sharansky, a former Knesset member and leader of the Jewish Agency was perhaps the most famous Refusenik.

Many of you know that I have been a mentor for Jewish professionals who participate in the immersion program at Beit T’shuvah in Los Angeles. Beit T’shuvah (literally “house of repentance”) is a residential recovery facility for people trying cope with alcoholism or ay of a number of other addictions. The immersion program is designed to teach clergy, educators and communal workers how to better recognize and help addicted folks in their communities.

A scene from Freedom Song

A few years ago, we brought Beit T’shuvah’s Redemption Song to B’nai Israel. It is a piece of musical theater written and performed by people in recovery. It tells a story of families with addicted members against the background of Passover seders and the Exodus from Egypt. It was and is an amazing show.

Mark Borovitz, emeritus Rabbi of Beit T’shuvah, refers to Passover as the second High Holy Days for people in recovery. For them to achieve Redemption, they must go through the steps of Repentence (T’shuvah). They use the 12 Steps of Recovery to help them do that. The 8^th, 9^th and 10^th steps all look a lot like how we Jews are taught to atone during the period leading up to Yom Kippur:

1. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
   
   
2. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
   
   
3. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

So as we prepare for own Pesach seder – as we buy and prepare the food, set the table, plan how we will lead the seder – let’s also take some time to reflect. What do I need to do to make sure I reach the other side of the Sea of Reeds? How can I make sure I and the ones I love will find redemption? I suggest making a list, making amends and continue to look to our own actions. Through T’shuvah, we can find Geulah!

We all wish you a wonderful Pesach and a safe journey to Redemption. If you need any help in preparing, let me know!

L’shalom,

Ira    

The Neshama of Baseball - a New Season (again)

This was originally posted in 2017. Like the cycle of holidays, the cycle of life and the eco-cycle, Baseball is born anew each spring. With baseball opening today, I felt the need to repost it!

A busy winter has kept me away from the blog. But it is time for spring, Pesach and Baseball (although it looks like opening day is a wash for the Cubs and Cards. One of my favorite Cardinals fans is Stephanie Crawley, who is a rabbinic student at HUC-JIR and who interns at our congregation. This was a D'var Torah she gave on November 4, 2016, the week before the election and the week after the Cubs won the world series. She agreed to let me post it for opening day. Please enjoy!

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Each year at this time, Jews read the story of Noah, of the terrible flood, and of the miracle of the rainbow, which signified a better future for humanity. 

On Wednesday night, an estimated 40 million people sat on couches, on bar stools, and on stadium seats, witnessing the Chicago Cubs make history.

For Noah, It rained for 40 days, and 40 nights.

For the Cubs, I did the math, and turns out that if you count the days, their 108-season World-Series losing streak amounts to just about 40 total years of baseball played.

For 40 years of day games and 40 years of night games, it rained on the Cubs.

Earlier this week, when the Cubs were down 3 games to 1, it seemed like the deluge of despair wasn’t going to end.

Noah anticipated his salvation. He had hope, sending out a raven to search for dry land.

The raven never returned, but like the Cubs’ fans, Noah didn’t stop hoping.

Noah sent out a dove who returned with an olive branch,

and the Cubs came back to tie up the series 3-3.

Noah’s ark finally came to rest on dry land after 7 months, on the 17^th day of the month.

And the Cubbies finally broke their curse in the Game 7 of the world series, in their, wait for it, 17^th postseason game.

Coincidence? Almost certainly. Creative mathematics? Maybe.

Or, perhaps, a sign of the magic that baseball and Judaism share.

Wednesday night was the stuff of legends, a game for the ages, baseball at its best—two underdog teams battling it out in a fantastical, impossible journey to win it all in the end.

Hearts jumped in simpatico as we watched home runs, stolen bases, errors, and even… a rain delay.

We were attending, what the classic baseball movie, Bull Durham, poetically describes: “the Church of Baseball.”

For as long as I have been a Jew, I have been a baseball fan. I am not unique in this respect. Much has been written about the love affair between baseball and the Jews. This passion can be attributed to the history of an immigrant community hungry to be a part of American culture.

But it is more than just historical correlation. Rabbi Jonathan Cohen enumerates the numerous parallels between baseball and Judaism: “both venerate tradition, both emphasize community, both attach importance to special foods (think of ballpark franks, and don’t forget the peanuts and Cracker Jacks). Both have their rituals – e.g., the ceremonial throwing out of the first pitch, the seventh-inning stretch. There are even baseball “holidays,” such as the All-Star game and the World Series.”^[1]

One of my favorite jokes asserts that even God is a baseball fan. How do we know? Because the Torah starts with “In the Big Inning…”

But the most important commonalities have less to do with the superficial similarities like traditional foods or dates on the calendar. The parallels exist on a more spiritual plane. Love for a team, or a sport, like faith, can often seem irrational. A pure rationalist might look at the outpouring of tears and celebrations that took place on Wednesday night, or at today’s parade in Chicago and deem them “silly.”

                                   

“It is only a game,” they might say. “What’s all the fuss?”

My answer to that would be, that, at their best, baseball and Judaism are about experiencing the ineffable, about transcending the mundane. The religious or spiritual resides [in a domain beyond words.] In an age of gigabytes and picoseconds, we tend to live too quickly and to miss much that we might see. Baseball, as it turns out, can help us develop the capacity to see through to another, sacred space,” writes former NYU Chancellor, John Sexton, who taught a yearly seminar entitled Baseball as a Road to God, which he later turned into a book.^[2]

Baseball provides an opportunity “to transcend the mundane experience of everyday life…”^[3] Sexton writes.  “While the teams and players on the field may change each autumn, the game’s evocative power is continuous. Opening Day in the spring and the World Series in the fall are the bookends of baseball’s liturgical time, and within the rituals of each season, fans are converted to believers…and events become part of a mythology, forever remembered and repeated with the solemnity of the most beloved sacred stories. And inevitably, each season brings its moments of heightened awareness—divergent from ordinary time and place—in which some discover a connection to something deeper than the ordinary. Such moments are remembered not merely for what they literally were but for what they evoked in those who experienced them.”^[4]

If we just changed a little bit of the vocabulary, I could make this very same statement about Judaism.

Our team is Judaism. The worship-ers and synagogues may change over time, but every spring, Passover still arrives, and we still have Rosh Hashanah every fall, we repeat the same stories over and over, and add our own stories to Judaism’s sacred narrative. And from time to time, when it really works, we may experience moments of heightened awareness, some kind of connection beyond our ordinary experiences.

We need these rituals in order to experience moments of ineffable power. As much as we may try, we cannot rationalize the feeling of 100,000 people holding their breath as they wait to see if the wind will carry the long fly ball into the stands for a home-run.

Nor can we articulate the awesome power of hearing the blast of the shofar, or watching a Bar or Bat mitzvah chant from the very same book that our ancestors read.

This world series brought joy, comfort, and escape in a difficult time in our divided nation.

In his famous speech in the film Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones’s character declares the saliency of Baseball in our nation: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

I don’t know what the outcome of Tuesday’s election will be. But I take comfort in the fact that in 149 days, my beloved St. Louis Cardinals will repeat the sacred cycle, and have another chance on opening day.

There will always be another year, more awe-filled moments, and a reason to hope.

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^[1]Sermon by Cohen, Rabbi Jonathan. "Baseball and Jewish Values. http://www.mishkantorah.org/rabbi-jonathan-cohen/baseball-and-jewish-values.

^[2] Sexton, John, Thomas with Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz. Baseball As a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2013. p. 5.

^[3] Sexton, 9.

^[4] Sexton, 14.

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