Rabbi Natasha Mann

  Between the Shtetl and the Web It is a brave new world. The community we interact with on a regular basis is bigger than it has ever been before. Our ability to interact, to seek information and communication, is broader than it has ever been before, and it is seemingly only getting bigger.  And yet… With more information at our fingertips, we somehow seem to know less. And with more people available to us for connection, we are somehow less connected. I’m sorry to say it, but we are increasingly isolated even though our ability to connect is also increasing.  This is the slipperiness of the web: it looks like it is expanding our world, but it is actually contracting it. We have more access to connection, and yet we are less connected.  There are multiple layers to how this has happened. More people means more anonymity. More time speaking online means less time looking into one another’s eyes. One reason I think Shabbat is so important in our world is that it requ...

  Not According to Plan… Probably the most famous Yiddish saying is: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Or, in sadly unrhyming English: Man plans; God laughs.  (Incidentally, if I ever write an autobiography, I think that would be the title: Mann Plans; God laughs. “Mann”, of course, with two Ns.) It’s a saying we often use to express something about the unpredictability of life. The later version from Robert Burns, perhaps more popular as an English phrase, is: “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” We spend so much of our time making plans, but have little control over the actual outcome. Though Burns has a different feeling to his statement: “ The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry / And leave us nothing but grief and pain. ” The Yiddish proverb, on the other hand, leaves God laughing at the idea that we set the plans in the first place - that we keep setting them, despite how little we can actually predict. It’s not presented as tragedy, but as a...

  The iron gates at the Crossbones Graveyard. What Makes Holy Ground  It is commonly understood amongst Jews that there are ritual items that we cannot simply throw away. A siddur, or a Torah scroll, or really anything that has the sacred name of God, must be dealt with in a special manner: we put it into a genizah for safe-keeping, and then we take those items and bury them. We do the same with certain ritual objects, even if they do not contain the name of God. It is logical, of course, that we are careful around objects that hold sanctity.  But what happens to something that's too big to put in a genizah , like a holy place itself? The Mishnah addresses this question directly, but I think the first thing that is useful to understand is the principle מַּעֲלִין בַּקּוֹדֶשׁ וְלֹא מוֹרִידִין - we go up in holiness, and we do not go down . We can make things more sacred, but something that is considered holy cannot then be used instead for mundane purposes. There is no ritu...

  Stained glass from the Or Torah Synagogue, Acre But Don’t Tell the Jews (A Sermon on Heretical Truths)           I’m going to share with you a strange piece of advice I was given once, by a very well-respected halakhic thinker on Kashrut. We were learning about materials of vessels - which materials receive the status of food, which don't, what happens with admixtures - and he had just said something that caught my classmates and I off-guard. We asked why everyone seemed to know a different, more strict version of that rule, and his response was this:           “This is the halakhah (the rule), but don’t tell the Jews.”  I think about that advice probably more than it warrants, certainly more than the actual halakhic question warrants. I understand what he was trying to say - that should we teach the more lenient-and-complex version, then people are more likely to end up doing it incorrectly. Sometimes, being stri...

  Helix by Godfrey Kurari The Great Helix of History           If I asked you to map out three Yom Kippur evenings – the earliest you can remember, last year, and next year – you would probably draw me a straight line. Back there lies the deep past, close to us lies the recent past, here we are right now – and over there somewhere is the uncertain future. That is the model of time that is the most apparent to us. Time, after all, is linear. There is a past, which is over, and a future, which has yet to begin, and we are perched in the ever-moving present, filtering the future into the past to be gone forever. However, this is not the model of time that was the most apparent to people in the ancient world. Many ancient cultures thought of the existence of time as a wheel. Everything that had happened would happen again, over and over, for all of eternity. This is a model that’s easy to see in nature: day becomes night becomes day, the tree gives a see...

  The God of Broken Spaces Rosh Hashanah 5786           I am searching, this year, for a God of the Gaps. Not those kinds of gaps. “God of the Gaps” is a phrase that usually refers to explaining gaps in scientific knowledge with miracles. That is not the gap I am looking to fill. I am seeking for something to hold together the fractures and great divides that exist between us in society, as they continue to broaden year by year, a continental shift in our understanding of one another.  It seems that the divides between us only keep growing, separating us from those whom we might otherwise love or at least respect. Our cultural environment encourages us to ignore the places of strength in our agreements. Instead, we are urged to peer ever more deeply for opportunities for disagreement, to look for reasons to push one another away, for ways to widen that gap. Too often, we create the cavern between us based on assumptions, on misuse and misunder...

Walking Through Time (Re’eh/Elul)           I would like to spend some time, today, thinking about time.  We are standing here at a meeting-point of two cyclical, calendrical moments. The first is our Torah portion, Parashat Re’eh, with all its anticipation for the Israelites entering into the Promised Land, and its call into its own future to return, again and again, to the Temple. The other is the moment of the year we are in. We are about to begin the Month of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh HaShanah, which has its own particular obligations. It is another kind of anticipation. With the High Holy Days and the sense of looming judgment, we are invited to spend the Month of Elul preparing ourselves: to reflect on the year we’ve had, the lives we’ve had - the decisions we’ve made along the way - and to do “teshuvah” with one another. Teshuvah is repentance - it is making up for ways we might have wronged one another - but the language we use, tesh...