A Measure of Spice

I remember that as teenagers we used to philosophize and discuss the meaning and purpose of life. We somehow felt that wearing torn jeans or mini-skirts, or having Tom Jones-style sideburns or Afro hair-dos will help us get there. Well, later on we got busy with settling in America, school, family, work and responsibilities, and along the way forgot all about the meaning and purpose of life.

Quite frankly, after a hard and long day at the office or downtown, buying and selling this, that or the other real estate deal, or myriad other activities that we are all involved with (not to mention all the mehmoonis that we must attend), there is simply no energy or motivation left to amuse such ponderings as the meaning of life.

Spending quality time with our parents, grandparents and family elders, and visiting an old-age home and chatting with those who also at one time had busy lives will provide an instantaneous reality check as what is important in life. And of course, spending meaningful time with our own spouse, children and other loved ones, looking them straight in the eyes, and telling them that we love them, does not hurt either. I once heard that the founder of Wal-Mart said on his deathbed, something to the effect: "I blew it; I should have spent more time with my family". Imagine that.! The founder of one of the richest corporations in America is remorseful that he did not set his priorities straight.

The observance of authentic Torah-based Judaism provides a way of life that allows the observant to develop a crystal clear view of life's priorities. Rabbi Noach Weinberg of Aish HaTorah calls it the "5-Finger Clarity". Just look at your hand; you get the point. Torah, as the G-d given instruction manual for life, provides a practical system of maximizing one's true potential in all aspects of life. Meaning, any type of a person that you aspire to become, you will become that much greater if you live a Torah-centered life. Now, this is a big proposition, not to be taken lightly. Of course, the voice in the back of the mind cries out: "Come on, give me a break, are you telling me that shaking a bunch of plants and vegetables (the four species) inside a man-made flimsy hut that can hardly stand a breeze, or blowing into a sheep’s horn (shofar), will bring me closer to the Source of creation?” The answer is an absolute, a definite, and an unshakable YES!.

Our rabbis teach us that one of the fundamental reasons that we are born is to work on our character traits. That is each and every one of us is a soul which has certain deficiencies. The soul is put into a body and therefore given a chance to improve itself. All the life circumstances are tailor-made for each particular soul to give it ample opportunity to rise above each circumstance and better itself.

“Character Trait” in Hebrew is called “Midah” which means “Measure”, like a measure or quantity of spice that is added, say to your Gondi Shabbati! A little too much, or too little just ruins it all. You need a precise amount of each spice to get the perfect gondi. The idea is that all character traits (capacity to love, anger, strength, humor, etc.) are needed and are already present in a person in varying quantities, but it is our job in life to work on ourselves to adjust these quantities for our individual soul.

I submit to you, that our glorious Torah, the very words of the Creator which were spoken at Sinai, has instructions to help you work with that which you have been given, to adjust your spice-mix in order to become the best you that is humanly possible.

This idea is beautifully illuminated in the following story:

... concerning the famous violinist Itzhak Perlman. One evening, Perlman was in New York to give a concert. As a child he had been stricken with polio and getting on stage is no small feat for him. He wears braces on both legs and walks with two crutches. Perlman crossed the stage painfully slowly, until he reached the chair in which he seated himself to play.

As soon as he appeared on stage that night, the audience applauded and then waited respectfully as he made his way slowly across the stage. He took his seat, signaled to the conductor, and began to play. No sooner had he finished the first few bars than one of the strings on his violin snapped with a report like gunshot. At that point Perlman was close enough to the beginning of the piece that it would have been reasonable to bring the concert to a halt while he replaced the string to begin again. But that's not what he did. He waited a moment and then signaled the conductor to pick up just where they had left off. Perlman now had only three strings with which to play his soloist part. He was able to find some of the missing notes on adjoining strings, but where that wasn't possible, he had to rearrange the music on the spot in his head so that it all still held together. He played with passion and artistry, spontaneously rearranging the symphony right through to the end. When he finally rested his bow, the audience sat for a moment in stunned silence. And then they rose to their feet and cheered wildly. They knew they had been witness to an extraordinary display of human skill and ingenuity.

Perlman raised his bow to signal for quiet. "You know," he said, "sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much beautiful music you can still make with what you have left." Please consider studying the following excellent series of articles called Path of the Soul by Dr. Alan Morinis

Why Marry Jewish, really?

This is a reminder that the community-wide event in LA is occurring this Tuesday night, June 20 at 7 PM, Nessah Synagogue.

And if you think that this issue does not concern you, please look around and think again. The numbers are staggering and the odds are against you, your children, nieces, nephews and cousins to marry a Jew. In fact, according to 50% of American Jewry, the very proposition that a Jew should marry a Jew is considered racist!.

Please come out to the event , learn more and share your thoughts and experiences.

ATTENTION LADIES - Your chance to meet a wonderful person

There are those golden moments that you may have an opportunity to meet a wonderful person and be awed and inspired by their presence. You can then use this inspiration to help you advance your own greatness.

Such a wonderful person is Sara Yoheved Rigler. She is a graduate of Brandeis University and her spiritual journey took her to India and through fifteen years of teaching Vedanta philosophy and meditation. Since 1985, she has been practicing Torah Judaism. A writer, she resides in the Old City of Jerusalem with her husband and children. Her articles have appeared in: Jewish Women Speak about Jewish Matters, Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, and Heaven on Earth. Her latest article, “Holy woman, A Road Map” is featured here, and you can find all her articles on the Aish HaTorah Site. I really liked this one, in memory of her late father.

You have a real gem of an opportunity to meet her in person, since she is right now on a visiting tour of North America. Enjoy!

Comments on “Sexual Immorality Within”

PersianRabbi.com has an excellent article by Mr. Micheal Naim titled “Sexual Immorality Within”. I provided some short omments in the Comments Section of the article.

Here is the long version:

Many thanks to Mr. Naim who has clearly pointed out some important maladies of the Jewish Iranian community. Initially it seems that it is just about our community's pervasive double-standard that men can do as they wish, while women are restricted and held back, but in fact this article points out to much more. Mr. Naim has further elaborated on the bigger issue of social promiscuity among us.

It is self-evident that the double-standard of men’s relative freedom to do as they please is a moral blemish on our collective conscience. It goes without saying that the solution is not to lower the bar and encourage the women to follow their brothers, fathers and husbands. As Mr. Naim has so elegantly suggested, we need to reorient our moral compass.

He has pointed out that we the Jewish Iranians, along with our other Jewish brethren in Diaspora are sitting right at the very epicenter of the industry that promotes and produces free and tantalizing sex as well as eschewed moral values; Hollywood. He has asked the question as how we can fix the problem. Mr. Naim has pointed towards "our own traditional Jewish norms" as remedy, and has cited our biblical heroines and their heroes as role models that we need to emulate. I could not agree with him more.

The objectification of the female body and trivialization of human relationships have been going on since biblical time and are of course universal phenomena. The Torah has absolutely clear instructions on the type of permitted physical relationships. Further, our sages and rabbis have codified and expounded on Torah’s instructions to develop in the Oral Law the relevant halachot; complex and intricate, yet powerful, sensible and practical code of conduct that govern us Jews to live upright, modest, healthy and happy lives.

So, we can expand on what Mr. Naim refers to as "our own traditional Jewish norms", and re-emphasize that without adherence to Torah laws on permitted relations and modesty, and halachot on living moral and upright lives, our community will continue to accelerate on a path of moral decline and self-destructiveness. Teen pregnancy, drug abuse, suicide, obsession with weight loss and good looks, divorce, opting out of getting married all together, extra-martial relations, etc., are all symptoms of our ever sliding moral decline.

But why is it happening to us? A closer look at our life styles might provide some of the answers. I am only expressing my own opinion of course.

First, we have brought lots of baggage with us from Iran; the notion of “Mard Salari” is a major one, which can explain the first point that Mr. Naim pointed out to. We groom and encourage our boys to act in a certain way, which later on in life leads to tendency to become domineering and to behave in promiscuous manner. On the other hand, although we might preach virtue with our girls, in practice we send them mixed messages. For example, the practice of throwing lavish birthday parties from an early age and encouraging “Baba-karam”, “raghse’ shekam”, “gher”, “eshveh”, etc., instills in our girls a sense of objectification from an early age, and worst of all it erodes from within them, their God-given and innate sense of modesty.

Second, we are immersed in a Hollywood life style with all its physical trappings, and we do not live wholesomely with our Torah-based traditional values as our guiding principles. We are bombarded from all directions with messages that: life is too short and enjoy it while it lasts; the guy with the most toys wins; the boy with the nicest car and home takes the girl, etc. This life style has rendered our neshamas insensitive to spirituality and pursue of higher meaning, and in its place encourages the body to pursue pleasure and have a good time.

The above factors have resulted in many of the problems that we face in our community that Mr. Naim has alluded to. Of course, the mind has the power to rationalize and deny. I can almost hear the voice of sarcasm accusing me of narrow-mindedness and short-sidedness. I am not naive to suggest that one’s daughter’s birthday at age six has resulted in her drug problem or pregnancy at UCLA at 18! What I am saying is that the result of our collective behavior as a secular-traditional community, having put our emphasize and collective efforts on pleasure, comfort and material success, with minor emphasize on our traditional Torah-based values, is that we identify ourselves more as bodies and not as souls, and as a result we are more in pursue of physical than spiritual. The concept of identifying ourselves as souls and not as bodies is an established Jewish principle, for example, see here.

Observant Jews (the ones Mr. Naim refers to as “others, in this very town“) live their lives in such a way to de-emphasize the body and emphasize the soul, in a reasonable manner as prescribed by Halachah. One component to accomplish this is modesty. That is, modesty in dress, manner of speech, etc. And what is modesty? In brief, modesty is to conduct oneself in a manner in order not to invite unnecessary attention to oneself. For example, if your net worth is $100 million (and you should have even more), enjoy your money but do not go out of your way that the entire planet knows about it. And if you posses figure of a super model, stay covered and respect the holiness of the God-given body. This is a vast and complex subject and at the risk of being taken out of context, I will not say more. Suffice it to say however that modesty does not just apply to women, but it also applies equally to men. However, the domain where men and women need to exercise modesty is different. Please consider reading this insightful article about modesty. As is said in one of the comments on this article what used to be lingerie, has become appropriate fashion. How true!

Mr. Naim has suggested that we need “a Rabbi – a real Rabbi – to teach us the beauty of …”. In other words, we need to go back to our roots. We need to become curious about the wisdom of Torah and try to find out whether Judaism is relevant to us in 2006. Perhaps we do not have that real rabbi to teach us, but let us not despair. I think that we already have several wise, trained and capable rabbis in our community, but we probably do not appreciate them as much as we could and should. Perhaps since we have some pre-conceived notions about rabbis - part of the baggage from Iran where we called the rabbis “Molah Roghani” - we have not come to really appreciate what we have got. We have to work with what we have got. A community that does not value Torah scholarship cannot and will not produce Torah scholars. The ones, who have become rabbis, have succeeded on their own and despite of our community and not because of it.

Our community is probably one of the wealthiest immigrant communities in America, and I think that there has never been in the long history of the Jewish people, any group of Jews who were dispersed and managed to regroup and re-prosper in such manner as we have accomplished, Bli Ayin Hara. Therefore, let us take advantage of the God-given opportunity and put our good fortune to proper use. Let us support Jewish schools and Torah institutions and also give respect to our Torah scholars and those who want to pursue more serious Torah learning. Is it surprising that our community has produced so many doctors, dentists and successful business people? Not at all, because secular education and material success are what we value the most. And don’t get me wrong, we need secular education and material success as well. My point is that since we encourage our kids to take a certain path, and since secular education is primarily what we give respect to, this is the path that our children take, and this is what we produce as a community. As long as we don’t respect Torah scholarship and hold those who pursue it in high esteem, we will not be able to produce great home-grown rabbis.

So on practical level, let us start a spiritual revolution! Let us make study of Torah and Judaism fashionable in our community. How? Let us open our homes and invite rabbis and Torah scholars to teach us. Let us set aside one night, for example Wednesday nights and dedicate it to Torah learning in all Jewish Persian homes across all towns. Let us support and encourage our kids to get involved with Judaism and proper Torah learning. It is only through our collective and sincere efforts that we will be able, with the Almighty’s help, to become a model community and emulate our spiritual heroes and heroines. I believe this is the path that Mr. Naim charted in his article.

Now, these were my comments. I would like to invite every one to join in and participate in the dialog. As always, you can comment on the blog, or write to jewishirani@yahoo.com