לגדלו לתורה לחופה ולמעשים טובים

Mazel tov to Rabbi Levinger, Chaya and Yehuda on Yehuda’s bar mitzvah.  We wish them much mazal and brochos and yiddeshe nachas.

Mazel tov to Debra (Wasserman) Wosner and her husband on the birth of their son. We wish them joy and nachas for the future.

The 10 day trip to Israel with Mayanot Birthright is an exhilarating experience, connections and friendships are made. For many, the Birthright trip was their first chance to form relationships with other young Jewish adults. However, after the plane touches down on US soil, and the participants go their separate ways, it is often difficult to maintain that sense of togetherness and connection across the distances and the pull of everyday life. Mayanot Birthright is hoping to rectify this.

Although Birthright does cater to the larger Birthright community through initiatives such as the “Jewish Enrichment Centre” and “Next”, Mayanot is offering, through this new program, a service which is smaller and which is tailored to foster connections within the Mayanot family, which will work in conjunction and affiliation with these already established programs.

In order to help participants maintain and sustain the connections made on the trip not only to other young Jewish adults but to Jewish life and community, Mayanot has added a new member to our team, Sara Prinsky. Sara is our post-Birthright Program Coordinator; her time will be dedicated to organizing and publicizing events for Mayanot alumni and for Mayanot alumni together with the local Jewish community in the New York-Metro area, as well as coordinating events in other cities throughout the United States, and liaising with the other Birthright alumni organizations.

In this way, Mayanot alumni will be able to maintain the connection they established to their Jewish community, while also continuing the relationships with each other that they formed on their Birthright trip, and meeting other young Jewish adults who had the same Mayanot Birthright experience.  Mayanot ensures that we keep you connected.

Adam Weinstein explains that ‘Birthright has been tremendously successful and there are already some organizations focused on capturing that experience by offering post-Birthright programming. What we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re engaging the overwhelming majority of Birthright participants who had a positive experience, and taking that popularity and following through with programming in the New York area, which will hopefully grow elsewhere by offering unique content.’ Mr. Weinstein reiterated that he wants the program to recreate what people felt while on their Birthright trip as they reconnect with fellow participants and group leaders. Hopefully, with the rekindling of that feeling, they will ‘take it to next stage – whatever that means for them’ in terms of their Jewish association. Rachel Fertel adds, ‘Mayanot does so much for the Jewish community at large, that this seemed like a natural and crucial next step for them to take. Follow-up for a program like Birthright is so important, especially when helping young Jewish professionals and college students who are returning from such a meaningful and inspirational trip. It’s a great opportunity to have this forum and support system.’

Rabbi Kasriel Shemtov, the Executive Director of the Mayanot Institute of Jewish Studies, reiterated their sentiments, ‘everyone agrees that Mayanot and Birthright is one of the most powerful means of getting a student in touch with his or her own Judaism. We want them to keep the powerful inspiration Mayanot Birthright gave them and to nurture it so that they can inspire others around them.’

Initial funding for the program has been provided by the Kurt and Helen Feuerman Foundation and the Adam B. Weinstein Foundation. The program will kickstart after Pesach, Rabbi Shlomo Gestetner, Dean of the Mayanot Institute of Jewish Studies, calls it ‘exciting’ and is looking forward to the results that it will yield: this program reiterates that Mayanot Birthright is more than just a 10 day trip to Israel – it is a community in and of itself.

My family, baalei teshuva to Chabad from the FSU (former Soviet Union), never exhibited interest in the why. I suppose that’s a generational gap. Notice that in the Hagadah, it’s the child born post-exodus that asks the emancipated slave generation “why is this night different than all other nights?” The slaves never ask why because they do not have that right and it’s actually perilous to their existence. They are programmed specifically not to think too much about the why because that could lead to other “dangerous” thoughts.

The question that occupies the mind of the slave generation is “how?” “How do I get through the day without being arrested?” “How do I get out of Russia alive?” “How do I learn more about how to practice being a Jew?” Why doesn’t even begin. Only the generation born in freedom has the luxury and liberty to ask “why?” So as someone born and raised on the other side of the Iron Curtain, I was fixated on the “why”. And that “why” remained ignored and unsatisfied.

Then I grew up, got married and started building my own family and my own Passover sedarim and started exploring the “why”. And what I discovered with my husband was that all the “whys” of pesach come back to a common theme, to a single idea and image. It all comes down to dishes.

One of the most fundamental images that Kabbala conjures to explain the interaction between the spiritual and physical worlds is that of light and vessels. The light is the spiritual energy that animates and sustains physical life. The spiritual and physical have a symbiotic relationship despite having a hierarchy. The spiritual may be more powerful but its power is impotent without the physical to contain and convey it. Only water that is enclosed in some sort of receptacle can quench a person’s thirst.

While the physical world was created to contain and support the spiritual, it also has the potential to conceal it, just as any content is supported and simultaneously concealed by its container. The purpose of life, according to Kabbala and Chasidus, is to create numerous and fitting vessels by harnessing the facets of the physical world, to receive the Divine light. This is the point of mitzvos (commandments) – using that which obscures the Divine, to reveal it.

But not all vessels are created equal – some facets of the physical world are more spiritually opaque and seem to be counterproductive to the quest for spirituality. The human ego, for example, is one such vessel. Man can use his feeling of independence and empowerment to assert his G-d given capabilities and be a creative force in the world, or to eclipse and banish G-d. When the vessels separate from their divine raison d’etre, they actually become accomplices of evil and exile G-d from the world. Food can either be viewed as a gift from G-d, and when consumed, actually shift man’s focus towards his relationship with G-d; or if perceived as something solely physical/natural with no divine origin, it can become a means to gluttonously experience physical pleasure. If it is the latter, then it actually becomes a barrier between man and G-d.

This imagery is what guides the traditions and rituals of Passover. By switching our kitchens, changing the dishes, we’re actually reframing our approach to the physical world and how we choose to let it interact with our spiritual reality. (This is also the backdrop behind the counting of the Omer and its culmination with Shavuos.) Our dishes, our vessels, while tangible, have a more ethereal side and embody our contact with the spiritual world and our spiritual selves.

Many of the Chabad Passover traditions revolve around the concept of receiving light in complete vessels. It is a Chabad custom to be selective about which three matzahs are used for seder night. They must be whole, without a crack (if possible) and not flat, but rather concave in shape. In other words, they must look like a vessel. (According to Kabbala the six food-symbols we place on top of the three matzahs are six spiritual lights.) The matzahs must represent the ability to hold the lights properly.

In fact, the use of three matzahs on seder night also comes to illustrate the matzahs’ function as representing vessels. While there are several explanations for the three, one of the dominant ones is that each matzah represents a different tier of the Jewish people: Kohen, Levi, Yisrael. These tiers form the acronym KL”Y which is Hebrew for vessel. The Jewish people are the ultimate vessel for G-dly revelation in the world. What we are celebrating on Passover is not just succeeding to escape the discomforts of oppression but rather the commencement of our career as a physical nation that reveal G-d’s presence in the physical world.

One of the most important steps to creating efficient vessels is clearing away blockages that take up the space within the vessels, in Kabbalistic language otherwise known as shells/husks (in Hebrew klipot). On Passover this is what chametz represents – that which obstructs our ability to serve as vessels. The chametz of the soul is the various psychological states that obstruct one’s objectivity. Just as chametz can be made up of the five different grains, the soul too can have different types of chametz. These can be egotism, anxiety, anger, melancholy, fear. When these emotional states fill us, there is no room for anything else. They consume us and rob us of our capacity to make conscious decisions of how to use our abilities.

While one would testify that preparation for Passover induces these very states, it does so in order to make us take a good, hard look at our attitude towards these states and ask ourselves “what attitude do we want to have towards them?” Under pressure is where our masks come off and we meet the real us face-to-face. Do I justify myself when I lose my temper? Or do I want to get a handle on it? Does anxiety paralyze me? Do I want to break anxiety’s reign over me? According to Chasidus, these are the thoughts we are meant to be fixated on as we search for cheerios and pretzels in the cupboards and corners. That’s one of the underlying messages of the famous story about the Alter Rebbe and how his search for chametz in his one room home took all night. Every step he took looking for crumbs, prompted him to dig deeper to find the crumbs within.

While there is a concrete, legal definition for what constitutes physical chametz on Passover, the Chasidic customs widen that definition by taking spiritual factors into consideration. The Chasidic stringencies come not from some pedantic, hysterical notion but rather from a sensitivity to the immortal side of mere mortals. One of the ideas behind peeling the vegetables is destroying all the peels/shells. I’m not peeling tomatoes only because there may be residue of chametz on the peel (which is a rationale I heard once as a teen) but because the mystical (not legal/halachic) definition of the peel is chametz. As I peel the vegetables, I’m not doing it compulsively only because I’m afraid of some halachic infringement, but rather because I’m meditating on personal refinement and spiritual elevation, with each peel that falls away. As I’m peeling the potatoes for yet another potato kugel, I do not stand there as a slave cowering under a task master’s whip – and that task master may be resentment, bitterness or fear – but rather as a free woman who rejoices at the chance to free herself of the shells/peels that come between her and her G-d.

A friend vented to me “do you know how much time we waste on Passover on food and dishes?” I looked at her and said “i don’t think we waste that time. I think we invest it.” As we prepare the neverending list of whats of Passover, it is imperative that we make time to invest in the whys and hows. How am i treating my spouse and my kids? How do I respond to different pressures and why? How is this mitzvah making me a better human being? A kosher Passover is not only defined by the external whats and hows, but just as much by the internal hows and whys. An internally kosher Passover is a truly happy Passover. May every one of us merit to experience that happiness this year.

Here is a link to the rest of the gallery, http://www.flickr.com/photos/creagencypro/sets/72157629309039363/  , which includes many wonderful candids and group shots. If you would like to order photos from the reunion, please email mika@mayanot.edu

If you have photos from this event, or any Mayanot event, that you would like to share with the Mayanot community on this blog, please email them to mika@mayanot.edu

waiting for the starting gun

A few of Mayanot’s most intrepid students braved the cold and the crowds to take part in the Jerusalem Marathon! Congratulations to Bentzi Shemtov,  Shiliach for the men’s program, Wayne Smidt, part of the Executive Learning Program,  Sam Schubert and Max Trestman, two of our current students in the men’s program, and Andrea Laikin  and Devra Nussbaum, from the women’s program, for running the marathon. We can’t decide what’s more impressive – braving the rain and hail or running all those miles!

The starting line

ready…set…

Mazel Tov to Evan Adams and Tova Stark!

 Mazel Tov to Evan Adams and Tova Stark on their engagement. The Mayanot family wishes you all the best, and much happiness, for the future!