28 years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take off from Cape Kennedy. I remember  one aspect of that that day very well: it seemed to me that everyone heard the news before I did. I was at lunch with a colleague, then in my car driving back to my office without turning the radio on. I sat in the office for an hour or two writing up a plan for a class when the phone rang. I was expecting a bat mitzvah student for a lesson that afternoon and her mother was calling to find out if I still wanted to meet. I asked her why. She said: “Haven’t you heard the news?”. That was how I found out what had happened hours before.

I mention this part of the story because one thing that I always think about when considering the Challenger disaster was how different life was even only 28 years ago. It would be absolutely impossible for someone not to hear the news almost immediately upon an event like this taking place today. We are bombarded by news and information in so many different forms and it would seem impossible to even imagine that so much time would pass before we would hear news.

But, that is just an aside. The most intense and important memory I have of that terrible day is the realization that what seemed so routine, so fascinatingly easy, was in fact terribly dangerous and unpredictable. Looking back that day, it struck me that the fact that this was the first time American astronauts had been killed while flying (remembering of course the tragic fire aboard Apollo 1 and the loss of three astronauts on the pad) was truly remarkable. While there had been “close calls” before, we had become accustomed to flights taking off and splashing down or landing and the astronauts, the heroes, climbing out perfectly healthy. This was such a shock but when looked at realistically, the real shock was that it hadn’t happened before.

These 7 brave men and women, including of course Christa McAuliffee, “teacher in space”, took such a great risk in the name of science and adventure and to this day, I can remember their names and see their faces as they appeared in the pre-flight photographs. They, as well of course, as the victims of the Space Shuttle Columbia are remember with respect and honor.

But, there is one other memory I have of that day and it is much more personal.

I remember thinking to myself as I watched the news that night: “Now, I will never fly in space”. I was 30 years old when I woke up on the day of the disaster and I honestly, truly believed that one day I would fly into space. Why not? Surely, the world was advancing technologically and while I never could have pictured a computer in my pocket or so many other advances of the 21st century, at that moment, I honestly believed that I would one day fly into space.

But, as I watched the news that night, I realized that space travel would never be easy, never be simple, never be available to all except the best trained and most daring, neither category applying to me. I realized at that moment that if I wanted an adventure, I would have to find it here on earth.

Losing those 7 brilliant men and women was a horrible loss to our nation and the world. But, I also felt a personal loss that day, not as important but every bit as emotional.

May their memory be for a blessing.

I regularly follow a Facebook post called: “Originally From Brighton 02135” which features pictures and stories from my old neighborhood in Boston. It is a great source of nostalgia and good memories.

The other day, a member of the Facebook group posted a picture of the fire station up the street from our house when it was dedicated in the early part of the 20th century. The picture immediately brought back memories, from my childhood and beyond.

We used to drive or walk by the fire station every day and I can still remember my mother, at that time a cub scout “Den Mother” taking my older brother’s cub scout group up there to meet the fire fighters and learn about the station. I was too young to be a cub scout but came along for the fun.

I also remember that the field behind the fire station was a great place to play baseball until construction of apartments forced us to move to other places to play.

Of course, as I grew older, the fire station became less interesting and when I left for college, I forgot it was there.

Then, many years later, I found it again.

When our son, Avi, was 5, he and I took a trip to Boston to visit my parents. He had been there with us before but this was the first time that just the two of us had gone together and I promised him we would do a lot of fun stuff. We went to the aquarium in Boston and several other places but the place that attracted most attention for him was the old fire station.

We live down the street from a fire station here in Ann Arbor and Avi and I spent many summer afternoons walking to the station and talking with the firefighters but this station was different, with an old bell system, with a higher pole to slide down and, most importantly, with a truck with a ladder that reached 5 or 6 stories. We spent several mornings during that trip hanging around the station, watching them test the ladders, waiting for the firefighters to come back from a call and just enjoying the atmosphere.

The picture on Facebook brought back memories of my youth but even more cherished memories of those moments with Avi.

Avi turned 21 this week. But, the memories are as vivid as always.

Happy Birthday Avi! Thanks for the memories and, God willing, for the many memories still to come.

I’m not a huge movie fan but when I find a movie that sounds intriguing, I try to get out to see it before it falls into the category of “I’ll see it when it becomes available on demand”. (That never seems to come soon enough.) It so happens that there are now 3 or 4 movies that I really want to see and last night, Ellen and I went to see the one that was first on my list: “Saving Mr. Banks“.

Having grown up in the era of  the film: “Mary Poppins” and still, to this day, being able to sing most of the songs by heart, I couldn’t wait to see the movie. Actually, I should mention here that not only can I sing the songs in English but I can also sing some of them in Hebrew as our division put the play on  in Hebrew at Camp Ramah in New England in 1980. I had forgotten much of the story- and that was unfortunate since remembering the story a bit better would have helped at the film last evening- but the songs are unforgettable and made me anxious to see the new film.

I’m not going to “review” the movie here. I don’t know how to do that without revealing the plot but I can only say that I found the movie to be everything I expected it to be- and more. In fact, truthfully, I didn’t expect it to be anywhere near the emotional experience it was. Go see it and, when you do, make sure you stay until the end of the credits.

But, I can tell you the basic premise of the movie without revealing any of the details. The story is about how Walt Disney convinced the author of Mary Poppins, P.L.Travers, to allow the movie to be made. As it turns out, there is so much behind the story of Mary Poppins and in the process of cooperating in the production of the film, the author is forced to confront much of the pain and sadness in her life through the story she had written. I’ll leave the rest up for you to find out for yourself- except to quickly add that the tears were shed during the movie Were both tears of sadness and happiness.

But, I want to point out one aspect of the movie that has motivated so much of my thinking about my writing, especially the sermons I write.

I believe that a sermon provides two functions, one much more important than the other. The first and the more important of the two, is to impart some information, inspiration or thought provoking material to the congregation. But, the other relates more to the writer than to the congregation.

I find that many of the sermons I write are inspired by stories that happened to me or conflicts I find within me and that the process of writing the sermon actually helps me find meaning in the stories or even, God willing, resolve some of the conflicts. Just as Mrs. Travers discovered about her book and Walt Disney helped her to see in the process of the production of the film, the sermons sometimes serve as a release or as an opportunity to write a different ending to something that is disturbing or just incomplete in my life.

I think this is true of anyone who delivers a sermon and I think it is what makes the whole process of writing such material so fascinating and so vital for those of us who have chosen this career or for those given the opportunity to deliver a d’var Torah or any kind of meaningful presentation.

I am hoping to soon complete a project I have been working on for several years: a book which will contain some of the stories of my life and the sermons that those stories inspired. The connections are sometimes obvious, sometimes more subtle but any writer writes from his or her heart and his or her experience but then tries to make the material stemming from those experiences meaningful to those who listen to his or her words.

Go see the movie Saving Mr. Banks and you will realize what a wonderful process it is to write from the heart.

Despite the fact that I am among those who have expressed deep concern about the violations of human rights which occur under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank,  I believe that the  recent decision by the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli universities because of human rights abuses  is misguided, inappropriate and offensive.

Singling out Israel for human rights abuses unfairly targets Israel. The fact that there are nations which have worse human rights records doesn’t release Israel from the responsibility of addressing those human rights issues and those of us who are concerned about those issues must continue to speak out against the occupation.  But, it makes no sense to me that an academic body would seek to “punish” academics in Israel (many of whom also speak out against the occupation) for the government’s human rights abuses especially given the state of the world in which so many people in countries not singled out by groups such as the ASA suffer deeply from government action.

I am opposed to what is called the BDS movement: Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. I do not believe that this is an effective way of addressing the situation involving Israelis and Palestinians. But, this particular boycott strikes me not only as being ineffective and biased but also as being illogical and simply wrong. Israel’s academic institutions which are open to so many have provided the world with such important scientific advances and academic research should not be the target of a boycott. There are  more effective ways of expressing opposition to policies of a government than to boycott educational institutions.

For our parents’ generation, it was December 7, 1941. For our children, it is September 11, 2001. For those of my generation, it was November 22, 1963, 50 years ago this Friday.

It was the day the world changed. It was the day our nation changed forever. Daniel Moynihan said it best when he said:  “We will laugh again but we will never be young again”.

And, those of us above the age of 55, will never forget that day.

For those who were old enough to understand the nuances of politics and society, it was an end to Camelot. The assassination of President Kennedy brought a sudden and abrupt shocking end to the young, smiling Presidential family which had seemed to corner the market on good looks and culture. But, they knew that it was more than that. It was also an end to the youthful, joyous, spring in the step early 1960s which had survived the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginnings of involvement in Vietnam.

For kids like me,  8 years old at the time, it was something simpler. It was the first time many of us saw our parents- and perhaps even more dramatically, our teachers- cry. It was the cancelled parties and games. It was the horror of watching, over and over again, the man who had made our parents and our nation cry killed on live TV. It was seeing the flags at half staff and having to ask why over and over again.

I saw President Kennedy in person  a few months before the assassination when he came to Boston College  to deliver an address. The motorcade  passed one block from  our house. The line was two or three deep but someone pushed me right into the front and he waved right at me. I will never forget his smile.

As I got to college,  with the memories of the motorcade and of November 1963 buried in the back of my mind, my interest in TV news and journalism in general sparked a fascination in the assassination. I suppose it  began in earnest when I heard Mark Lane speak at Brandeis. He was the first to make a name for himself in claiming that there was a conspiracy that was being covered up. He brought all his pictures and his films (but not the Zapruder film to be sure) and it was just what all of us wanted to hear, another thing to be cynical about in the era of Watergate. It was also a great detective story and I wanted to search for clues. And, it brought to the surface those emotions of that weekend, emotions which still felt fresh after all  the intervening years.

So, as the years have gone along, I have become even more deeply fascinated with the assassination. I have read countless books, watched all of the TV specials and in 1999, I finally made the trip I had wanted to make for many years, to Dallas, to stand in Dealey plaza and to visit the “6th Floor Museum”.

It was a pilgrimage in every sense of the word. I stayed in a hotel a few blocks away and walked towards the plaza and suddenly and sooner than I expected, I looked up and saw the Texas School Book Depository. I stopped in my tracks and just stood staring, as so many do. I did not expect to cry but I did. It was truly a cathartic experience to stand in that spot and I spoke about the lessons that I learned from that experience at Kol Nidre services the following Yom Kippur. If you’d like a copy of that sermon, just let me know at rdobrusin@bethisrael-aa.org and I’ll send it along.

But, through it all, through all of the studying and the watching and the speculating and through all of the realization of the impact this moment had on our nation and the world, the memories I remember today are the simplest ones: my mother leaning out of the 2nd floor window as I arrived home from school to tell me the news; my father taking me with him to pick up my grandmother who was at the movies and hadn’t heard (it’s interesting that they didn’t stop the movie) and hearing him say to the people gathering around him as he told my grandmother what had happened: “I’m not going to be a God damned town crier”; walking with the members of our synagogue which was the closest house of worship to Kennedy’s birthplace to lay a wreath at his childhood home; and most emotional of all: seeing my mother staring out the window into the darkness and then turning to tell me, with a tear in her eye, that it would all be all right.

I still think that there are some aspects to the story of the assassination that we just don’t know enough about and, maybe 50 years later is a good time to let those questions go. But, honestly, I still find them compelling and still think we may learn something new sometime in the future.

But, that doesn’t seem important today. The most important thing to remember today is that while it was a day that will live in infamy, as happened in 1941 and in 2001, our nation survived, sadder, perhaps wiser or at least less naive, still able to smile but not quite in the same way.

I wonder what the 60s would have been like had John Kennedy lived. I wonder what our world would have been like if we hadn’t cried that weekend. We will never know.

May the memory of John F. Kennedy be for a blessing. May we who remember that weekend continue to move forward while the memories stay with us.

We continued our Talmud class on the holidays of the year last evening and this class was dedicated to two issues relating to Pesach.

The first issue we discussed with the tradition of bedikat Hametz, searching for the hametz on the night before the holiday begins. We looked at the Talmudic section which discusses why the search is supposed to done by a ner, which we translate as candle, but probably in Talmudic times was a small lamp.

The tradition of using a ner is based on the reading of several Biblical verses which connect the words “search” and “find” and “candle” concluding with a verse from the prophet Zephaniah in which it is said that God will “search Jerusalem with nerot, candles” to determine the sins of the people. Then a verse from Proverbs is mentioned which says that God searches with a candle the innermost parts of a person.

There is then an interesting statement about why that extra verse from Proverbs is added. The text reads that one might think that God (being merciful) would choose to search Jerusalem with a ner in order not to discover the minor sins but only to see things which were very visible and therefore would be lenient towards minor indiscretions in judging people. This idea is then ruled out based on the verse from Proverbs which clearly states that God seeks out the innermost parts in great detail.

While the Talmud doesn’t state this clearly, it is apparent that the reason this discussion arises is because of those people who might think  that searching with a candle (especially the very small candles that are given to people today in “searching for hametz”packets) means that only the biggest pieces of hametz would be found. The text from proverbs is used to eliminate that approach in favor of the idea that using a candle allows one to see into the cracks in the wall and floor and eliminate even the smallest piece of hametz.

But, I believe that the fact that the interpretation based on Zephaniah that God searches only for the major sins is brought up does, in fact, justify this approach as legitimate. And the fact that the Mishna in other section points out the fact that at a certain point “eyn lidavar sof”, there is no end to Pesach cleaning if you go too far makes me believe that there is on some level a justification for seeing bedikat hametz, searching for the hametz, as more of a ritual than an actual cleaning and the use of the candle enables us to put a finishing touch on the major cleaning with a ritual which only focuses on big pieces of hametz. Don’t forget, following the ritual, we say a declaration that whatever hametz which we might have missed is “hefker”, ownerless like the dust of the earth.

I believe that the entire discussion in the Talmud can be read as reminding us that we need to be realistic about Pesach cleaning and not go overboard beyond what could be reasonably expected.

We then studied the section in the Talmud concerning the 4 cups of wine which are drunk at the Pesach seder. There is a tradition that, in fact, 5 cups of wine are drunk and that tradition is ascribed to Rabbi Tarfon although in our texts of the Talmud, Rabbi Tarfon does not refer to the 5th cup. Apparently there was a tradition that the text of Rabbi Tarfon’s statement has been corrupted and that he did in fact designate a 5th cup.

There are several interpretations as to the entire issue of the number of cups but the one that I like the best relates the 4 cups to the 4 Divine promises made in one short section of the book of Exodus: “I will bring you out”, “I will take you”, “I will redeem you” ” I will save you”. There is a 5th promise made in that same section: “I will bring you into the land”. According to this interpretation, there was a debate among the Rabbis whether that 5th promise had been fulfilled or whether it is referring to the ultimate redemption at the time of the Messiah. Those who felt the promise had not been fulfilled mandated only 4 cups. The others called for 5 cups.

According to this interpretation, a compromise was reached. There would be 5 cups but the 5th would not be drunk. That would remain for Elijah, the herald of the Messiah and the one who according to the Rabbis would answer all outstanding Jewish legal questions when he arrived (including of course the question of how many cups of wine should be drunk). So, we have Elijah’s cup not only to hope for the Messiah but to hope for an answer to the difficult questions of our lives.

I am proud to be one of 775 American, European and Israel Rabbis, Cantors and Rabbinical Students to sign a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu asking him to withdraw what is known as the Prawer/Begin bill which would result in tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel being forcibly removed from the land on which they live and being relocated to urban areas in the Negev. You can find the text of the letter at http://org2.salsalabs.com/o/5149/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=14782

This is a critical moment for Israel as this bill would result in the dislocation of so many citizens against their will.

At issue are “unrecognized” Bedouin settlements  in the Negev which do not receive government services. The government proposes to move the Bedouin residents of these settlements into urban areas where they can receive government services.

While on the surface this may seem appropriate and beneficial to the Bedouin in some ways, it must be noted the urban areas into which they would be moved already have high poverty levels and unemployment. In addition,  the plan does not take into account the desires of the Bedouin. There has not been consultation with the Bedouin themselves who deserve, as citizens of Israel, equal treatment under the law.

This is not to say that life for the Bedouin  can not be improved. It can. But, it can best be improved by developing a plan which works together with the Bedouin instead of one which imposes a solution on them. Respect for life style and for connection with land calls for Israel to work to deliver services to these people where they currently live.

There are many reasons for the plan and one of the reasons  is to allow Israel to further  economic development in the Negev. However, as the letter points out, allowing the Bedouin to stay on the land on which they live would still allow for plenty of room for growth in the Negev and for the establishment of industry and military bases as are needed.

This is clearly a very emotional issue and I urge you to watch a video featuring noted actor Theodore Bikel who likens the planned  expulsion of the Bedouin to the story of Fiddler on the Roof and the Jews leaving Anatevka. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLeWQ470G6o  This video puts this plan into a context which should concern all of us.

I urge you to learn more about this issue by going to Truah.org or rhr.org.il/eng  to read about the action taken by Truah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and Rabbis for Human Rights. You can also read more about the plan and the knesset debates in the Israeli press at jpost.com or haaretz.com

If you would like to write a letter to members of the knesset, you can do so by going to http://www.truah.org/issuescampaigns/bedouin.html  and clicking on “take action”.

One of the hallmarks of Israel has always been equal treatment for all citizens. The Prawer/Begin plan ought to trouble  all of us who love and care for Israel. Please take a moment to consider this issue seriously and make your voice heard.