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Rabbi Brad Greenstein

Radical amazement for sunsets, sweet childhood memories and melodies that echoed the voices of an ancient people beckoned Rabbi Bradley Greenstein to pursue a career in the rabbinate. Early moments of connection spending summers at Jewish sleep away camp and backpacking through Israel contributed to the development of Rabbi Greenstein’s identity and initiated a spiritual journey that would fuse his love of music, Torah, nature and people.

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Moses as He-Man and the Strength of our promises.

You can say a lot of things about our ancestor Moses. For instance, he had anger management issues (think killing the Egyptian taskmaster, smashing the Ten Commandments, or excessively striking rocks with his staff.) Perhaps he had trust issues (he is known as a reluctant prophet unwilling to trust God at the burning bush.) However, one thing you can never say about Moses is that he didn't keep a promise. Within the book of Exodus we hear of Moses running around Egypt making sure he gathered the bones of Joseph.

Before all of the Israelites would leave Egypt and slavery, before the Almighty would split the sea and the Israelites would walk about dry land on their way to Israel, before any of this: we read of Moses making sure he had packed the bones of Joseph. You see Joseph, as he was on his deathbed many years earlier, made the Jewish people promise him that they would carry his bones out of Egypt to be buried in Israel among his forefathers.
As do many Jews today, Joseph considered Israel his home even though he did not always live there and so he desired Eretz Israel to be his final resting place and he made everyone he knew, and he knew a lot of people,
promise to carry his bones up to the land of Israel. Now Fast forward to our torah portion today, years later, the Jewish people are about to leave Egypt and Moses makes sure to keep that promise.
Our scroll reads "Vayeekach Moshe Et Atzmot Yosef Emo Ki Hashbay-ya Heeshbee-ya et B'nei Israel." Moses took with him the bones of Joseph as was promised by the people Israel.

On behalf of the Jewish people, Moses kept his word.

The most creative and imaginary form of Jewish literature and sacred text is called Midrash. A midrashic text will often teach a lesson through fantasy or parable and within an ancient book of midrash know as D'varim Rabbi, there is a beautiful description of Moses keeping his word to Joseph.

The midrash describes that Moses was looking for Joseph's bones, running all around Egypt for three days and three nights. Everyone else was busy packing their bags and getting ready for freedom and he was looking in every dark corner for the bones of Joseph because the Jewish people made a promise. And after three days and three nights he was exhausted whereupon a special woman found him and informed him that she knew where the bones of Yosef could be found. This mysterious woman took him to the banks of the Nile River. She told Moses to look at the dark water of the Nile because that is where Yosef was buried. She told Moses that Pharaohs' advisors and magicians and political leaders buried Joseph's casket deep within the Nile River and attached 5,000 weights to keep him deep beneath the rivers surface. As long as Joseph's bones remained buried and hidden the Israelite people would not be able to keep their promise and therefore could never leave. Upon hearing this Moses became very distraught and started pacing back and forth at the rivers bank. He shouted "Yosef, Yosef! The Israelite people are all ready to march towards freedom, the Compassionate One has freed us from slavery but you are holding us up!" At that moment the casket of Yosef floated to the top of the river and Moses took Yosef's casket along with the 5,000 weights and flung it over his shoulder and marched out of Egypt, through the splitting of the sea, towards freedom.

This midrash, however unbelievable or fantastical we consider it to be, still imparts the lesson of how very important it is to stand by the oaths and promises that we make

The midrash constructs a situation whereby Pharaohs advisors bury Joseph so deep in the nile, with so many weights attached, because they knew how serious our ancestors were about the importance of a promise. Pharaoh's magicians and political advisors are deliberately shrewd and they think: Since the Israelites promised to bring the bones of Joseph from Egypt to Israel and since we know they always keep their word, so long as we can keep Josephs bones hidden not even their God will be able to send them away from Egypt.
The imagery of this midrash is vivid as Moshe walks around Egypt for three days and three nights, as everyone else is preparing for the greatest historical event of their lives, frantically packing their bags and gathering scraps of gold and silver, preparing for the greatest revolution against slavery that our world has ever witnessed...Moses is busy running around town looking for bones because he made a promise

In our lives today we all make promises....to our spouses, to our children, to our friends. Our tradition takes very seriously the power of our words. Every morning we recite Baruch She-amar V'Hiyah Ha'olam, Blessed is the one who spoke and the world came into being. We are to learn from this blessing that just as God created the world with words so too can we create or destroy worlds with our words. Simply by moving our lips, with the power of our words, with the power of our promises, we can make another's heart beat fast with joy or turn their face into tears.

This past summer Sarah, Adirah, and I went to visit my hometown of San Diego and were welcomed by the southern California wildfires. After being in San Diego for a few days we decided to make our way back to Oregon where the air was clear. Not too soon after we had left my parents were told to evacuate their home. When I spoke with my mother and father I remember asking them if they were packing their favorite pieces of art, their television, I even suggested they take my beloved stereo system I had kept in the garage since college. My father informed me they would only be packing one thing: their collection of photo albums tracing our family's life together. Each of us must contemplate what we would take with us if we were about to leave our homes, if we were leaving behind the world we knew...what would you take?

We take with us what is most important to us. When Moses was leaving the world he knew he made sure he took with him the honor of his word, it was his most prized possession and I bless us all that we may merit to have such wisdom.

The Default Position of Joy

What has surprised me most about being a parent is not the sleepless nights or the discovery that sucking on a pacifier should be added to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what has surprised me most is a baby's utter capacity for Joy.

Surely, like most children my daughter cries, howls, whimpers, grunts, and gets fussy. However these are all intermittent against a backdrop of pure joy. I am by no means a child expert (in fact it is the opposite everything is entirely new), but it seems to me that happiness is the most complex and developed of emotions for this little one. Because she is so very new to the world she does not seem to feel (or at least make known) other feelings such as shame, acceptance, anger, courage, or any of the many other emotions that older children and adults outwardly experience.

She is tired or hungry so she simply cries, but when she is not crying her eyes smile with a deep joy and laughter. Her default position in life is joy and I only wish it will stay that way forever. It is much more difficult for adults to set our default positions in life to a place of pure happiness or wonder. Even when we are not respoding to something hurtful, we all too often subconsciously adjust our default settings to angst, anxiety, pain, or anger. For a baby, if there is no immediate hunger or exhaustion or pain what else is there but pure joy? Judaism encourages us to constantly refresh the lens with which we view the world.

Every morning we are instructed to pray Elohai Neshama She-natata Bi Tehorah Hee - The soul that You The One have given me is pure. We are reminded to reset our mental homepage from wherever it has strayed to a place of inherent joy and return to our own souls wonder of youth.

Blood Stained Torahs-Shabbat Morning Sermon 3/9/08

3 torah scrolls we read from today

3... this is very rare

One for the parsha of the week Pekude

One because it is Rosh Hodesh, the new month

And one because today is Shabbat Shekalim, the first of four special shabbatot leading up to Passover.

3 torah scrolls we read to today, as an expression of our simcha, our joy, because the month of Adar and Purim with all its joy is here.

yeshiva

But this was not a joyous week for the Jewish people, as students, teenagers who were sitting together studying torah in our sacred city of Jerusalem, were murdered by a man who walked into their yeshiva and opened fire. 15 year olds and 16 year olds, who were already growing up too fast - living in a land whose existence is always threatened - their lives were destroyed.

The students at this yeshiva were planning a Purim party but yesterday they planned instead a funeral. They thought they heard fireworks to celebrate the new month which brings in the celebration of Purim but instead were horrified to realize what they were hearing was by no means fireworks, it was gunfire.

And when I read about this account I thought of the poetry of the ancient author of psalms, I recalled a phrase we say so often in our services, and I have said so often in my own life calling out to God:

Hafachta Meespadi L'machol-Li - You turned my mourning, my grieving into dancing, - you turned my sackcloth into robes of joy-you turned my mourning into dancing

And I thought about how in this case it was the opposite for those young boys their dancing, their celebration was turned to death and mourning. And then the picture of other young boys dancing in the streets of Gaza celebrating the attack came into my mind and I could only feel how sick and sad it is that our mourning is their dancing, and their dancing has become our grieving.

Because the killing took place in a Beit Midrash, a house of study, the holy books of our tradition were found littered throughout the room. The eight students were buried with torah scrolls that were now no longer fit for use because they were stained with blood. What a haunting image...torah scrolls stained with blood. Torah scrolls- the narrative, the inspiration, the song of our people...

Buried into the earth.

And I can only speculate that is exactly what the murderer hoped to achieve.....to bury our torah, to bury and destroy and silence the living song of our people's story.

Today we have taken out of the ark 3 torah's.

Today, right now, we will sing the song of our people's life and history from three sifrei torah. Normally we take out and lift up high 1, today we lift and sing from 3 torahs, and so will our downstairs minyan, and we lent out a torah this weekend, and this morning our torah study group poured through the text..today is a day of torah.

There are many responses, so many political responses to argue about, and there are noble and vital responses of sending tzedakah and organizing local support.

But today on this Shabbat, our response must be to align our lives and enter into and deepen our relationship with the very thing this murderer sought to destroy, our Etz Hayyim, our living torah.

Yesterday it was buried

But today we take out and sing from 3 sifrei torah

We must commit to being in relationship with our torah, to make it come alive and be relevant for today...it is our parents torah, our great grandparents torah and most importantly it is our torah....and I don't mean only to sit and study, I mean to make real in our lives the ideals, the hopes, the values, the interactions between our ancestors and the mystery they called God that have been recorded in our scrolls. The words are not merely Hebrew letters on parchment but are symbols of relationship and love etched into the collective memory of Am Israel, the people Israel.

There are those who wish to bury it, to rid the world of our torah and our people.

But today we take out and sing from 3 torahs.

We commit to making this love song between God and man a reality in the lives we lead, we commit to manifesting the compassion and justice that the torah stands for into acts of compassion and justice and we refuse to allow our narrative of peace to go buried into the dust. May the memory of those lost forever be a blessing and may the knower of all souls send blessings of healing to those families in pain.

And we will pray to see as we are already witnessing today that our mourning moves to dancing, yesterday morning I sang songs with our foundation pre-school students who were dressing up for Purim and are blessed to not know headlines, today we daven and sing together and our Bat mitzvah leads us with pride and poise and sings out from our scrolls the message of our people, the message of our God, a message of peace and coming together as a community.....Shabbat Shalom.