Posts by Rabbi George Gittleman

I’ve been on sabbatical for over 3 weeks now – what a gift!

I spent a week with Laura mostly on the Sonoma Coast, 5 days on a silent retreat at Spirit Rock, a couple days with my father and his wife in Louisville, and now I am in New York City en route to Israel.

One of the gifts of sabbatical is extra reading time. The top of the list for Jewish fiction so far is Nathan Englander’s book of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The title grabbed me right away. It’s a play on Raymond Carver’s outstanding collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, one of my all-time favorites! I bought the book because of the title, curious to see what Englander does with this prominent Carver reference. I was not disappointed.

Carver’s brilliance was his ability, with the sparsest of prose, to drop you into the emotional climax of a person, a couple, or a family’s life; no varnish or sentimentality, nothing less than the brutal truth. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Englander manages to do the same thing with a different focus – contemporary Jewish life. Every story, in one way or another, cuts to the quick, laying bare a flash point of Jewish life today; Secularism, Intermarriage, Assimilation, Israel, the Shoah, you name it. Check out these links about the book:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/books/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anne-frank-stories-by-nathan-englander.html?_r=1  and http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/02/entertainment/la-ca-nathan-englander-20120202

It would make a great text for a discussion about Contemporary Jewish Life; y’all interested?

Another gift of Sabbatical is the ability to go to Shabbat Services somewhere else! This past Friday, Laura and I went to the famed Conservative Congregation, B’nai Jeshurun –  – for http://www.bj.org/ Kabbalat Shabbat Services.  Services started at 7PM that evening but we arrived early to beat the crowd; yes, they pack the place every Friday night!  What makes “BJ” so special? For us, it’s the music and the sense of community.  That night they had a small ensemble playing as well as a Cantor and two rabbis, one of which could really sing!  A few days since the celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut/Israeli Independence Day, services began with Lu Yhi, an Israeli song by Naomi Shemer (She wrote, “Yerushaliyim Shel Zahav/Jerusalem Of Gold”).

Lu Y’hi roughly translates to “May it be”.  It is a song filled with longing for peace; a time when we can just be, our own people, in our own land, celebrating Shabbat; nothing more, nothing less.  Lu Y’hi/May it be… The words washed over Laura and I; we felt deeply at home.  It was as if for a brief moment the universe was speaking for us, as if the “strangers on the bima” were playing our heart’s song:

May it be, may it be – Please – may it be
All that we seek – may it be.

May it be, may it be – Please – may it be
All that we seek – may it be.

http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?songID=176

Naomi Shemer wrote this song about Israel but the words could easily apply to my feelings for Shomrei Torah:

May it be, may it be – Please – may it be
All that we seek – may it be.

We mostly sang through the rest of the service as many of the melodies were familiar and some we use at Shomrei Torah.  I missed y’all, my regular prayer partners, but it was also lovely not to be in charge, and to be held by others for a Shabbat evening…

Thank you Shomrei Torah for the gift of Sabbatical. Next…blog in Jerusalem!

RG