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Dear Chaverim:
I. RCA Updates
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As our chaveirim are preparing their shul and school activity schedules for the year, they struggle to find new and interesting speakers and presentations. This week, I am reaching out for entertaining people with a special story or people that aren’t necessarily rabbis but have something special to say. Please send suggestions to my email mpenner@rabbis.org and I will, bli neder, share the results with the membership.
- Upcoming Executive Committee Meeting: Tuesday, August 27th
1:30pm Eastern
12:30pm Central
11:30am Pacific
8:30pm Israel
II. Member Updates (NEW!)
We would like to try harder, as an RCA family, to share our highs and lows together. This includes Personal happenings - Mazal Tovs, Refuah Shlaimah wishes and, r”l, Condolences - and Professional successes – new positions and significant achievements in your current positions. We need you – and your chaveirim who fill us in – to make this a shared family space.
- Mazel Tov to our chaver R. Jay and Sharon Weinstein on the birth of a baby boy
III. Chomer LiDrush – Ekev
1) Dream about yourself
You have seen the viral post on Twitter/X this past week featuring Grok, the company’s Artificial Intelligence creator, picturing our country’s last five presidents as “gedolim”. The pictures are a sight to see! The post garnered quite a bit of discussion as to who else should get the “rabbinic-filter” treatment – even Elon Musk found the spotlight! Perhaps that imaginative ambition is misplaced, though.
In an essay for our parsha, Rabbi Lamm zt”l writes “[if] a person is satisfied with [only] eating the grass reserved for his cattle, if that individual is satisfied to thrive on straw and hay, then certainly his goals are so low that he will be satisfied with the easily attainable idolatry. If this person's noblest goals are not as high as the stars in heaven, but as low as hay in the field, and if he is satisfied with this grass, then this individual's loftiest aims and ambitions in his entire religious life will be not the dedication to one God in heaven but the worship of a dozen cheap clay and wooden statues.”
A cute post envisioning American presidents as frum rabbis went viral on the internet, and it inspired other meme-rabbifications as well. Whom would we want to see as a prominent Orthodox Rabbi? But, in all seriousness, do we ever “rabbify” ourselves? Do we ever wonder – not “what would George Bush look like as a gadol” – but what would I look like as a gadol? Full piece from Rabbi Lamm (Derashot LeDorot, Devarim, p. 17 – 22) on the importance of ambition and authenticity in the service of God available here.
2) Grateful, Even When Full
Perhaps Birkas HaMazon is the only bracha midoraysa because the hardest thing is to recognize God when “satiated” - when we have it all. It is much easier to feel a connection with God – or a need to daven to Him – when we feel we are missing something - not when we have everything. Nevertheless, in our parsha, the Torah tells us to never take what we have for granted – certainly an important theme for us to feel here, during our summer in the diaspora, as the situation in Eretz Yisrael continues to grow difficult.
Connected to the above idea, Rabbi Sacks z”l appreciated that affluence, the sense of having, no less than slavery, can be a threat to continued religious worship. Excerpt from The Jonathan Sacks Haggada, p.46, below:
Early on in the Pesach Haggada, we read: “Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob: Pharaoh condemned only the boys to death, but Laban sought to uproot everything.”
Pharaoh and his people afflicted the Israelites, but “The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread” (Ex. 1:12). Laban did not afflict Jacob. To the contrary, while he was with Laban, Jacob grew rich. The danger was that he would remain with Laban and forget who he was. So it has been throughout Jewish history. The more Jews suffered, the more they prayed, studied, and kept the commands. The paradox is that the danger to Jewish continuity has been not slavery and suffering, but affluence and freedom.
So Moses warned at the end of his life: “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God…. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Deut. 8:11-14).
Interpreted this way the passage contains a powerful message: Do not think that the story of Pesach ends with the Exodus. It only begins there. It is one thing to believe in God when you need His help. It is another when you have already received it. Affluence, no less than slavery, can make us forget who we are and why.
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