Shabbat shalom wonderful congregation!

Ready for invigorating Kabbalat Shabbat services tonight, April 13, at the regular time of 7 p.m. Warm smiles, heartfelt davening and connecting with friends old and new – a great way to end your week!

Shabbat morning services are this Saturday, April 14, at 9 a.m. Torah service at 9:45 a.m., children’s story time with Morah Shereen and lovely kidish lunch right after. Thank you to Bob Miller for sponsoring the kidush lunch in memory of his late, beloved, wife Linda Hildich z’l. May Linda’s memory always be for a blessing.

Only one week away, we will have a Friday night dinner April 20, in honor of Israel’s 70th Independence, Yom HaAtzmaut.

Kabbalat shabbat will be at the special time of 6:30 p.m. and an authentic Israeli dinner, with all the fixings, will be served right after. Shabbat friendly arts and crafts for the children as well as PJ library Israel books.

Sunday April 22, we will celebrate with Shalom Austin at the Dell Campus a community wide Yom HaAtzmaut celebration, fro 11 to 1 p.m.

Cantor Ben-Moshe’s Weekly Message:

This week we read in Parshat Sh’mini of the tragic deaths of Nadav and Avihu, the elder sons of Aharon. Many commentators have tried over the centuries to discern the reason for their deaths-were they drunk, were they disrespectful to their father and to their uncle Moshe?-but ultimately, the most poignant comment is in the Torah itself-“…vayyidom Aharon”, “…and Aharon was silent.” Sometimes there are no adequate words in the face of tragedy.
Wednesday night and Thursday marked the observance of Yom Hasho’ah V’Hag’vurah, the Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and of the Resistance. In Israel, the air raid sirens sounded, and the country came to a standstill-in silence, except for the wail of the siren, like the wails of Jews bereft of their families. May silence echo even in Heaven-and may such things never happen again, not to us nor to anyone else. Shabbat Shalom.

Sunday school meets this Sunday April 15 at 10 a.m. with our terrific team of morot and special guest Ms. Carol Rubin. More Yom HaAtzmaut fun! Also on Sunday, we will be continuing our filming of congregants and our special shul with Jeff Chagrin. Please come and share your thoughts about what makes Beth El special to you! Stop by anytime between 10 a.m and 2 p.m.

Shabbat candle lighting times are at 7:35 p.m.

PLEASE join us this Sunday April 15 at 2 pm at Austin Yoga Tree
with the wonderful Jonathan and Edith Troen, and our very own Chazzan Ben-Moshe, as we have a Jewish Spirituality and Yoga class. Free and Open to the Community.

Austin Yoga Tree is located at
10401 Anderson Mill Rd, Suite 105, Austin, TX 78750

https://www.austinyogatree.com/

WARNING:
YOGA MAY CAUSE INNER PEACE, HAPPINESS, AND JOY.
SIDE EFFECTS INCLUDE:
BETTER FOCUS, DECREASED STRESS AND ANXIETY, AND BETTER OVERALL HEALTH.

See the BERS at Sunday School this week right at 10!

When Weakness Becomes Strength (Shemini 5778)
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

Have you ever felt inadequate to a task you have been assigned or a job you have been given? Do you sometimes feel that other people have too high an estimate of your abilities? Has there been a moment when you felt like a faker, a fraud, and that at some time you would be found out and discovered to be the weak, fallible, imperfect human being you know in your heart you are?
If so, according to Rashi on this week’s parsha, you are in very good company indeed. Here is the setting: The Mishkan, the Sanctuary, was finally complete. For seven days Moses had consecrated Aaron and his sons to serve as priests. Now the time had come for them to begin their service. Moses gives them various instructions. Then he says the following words to Aaron:
“Come near to the altar and offer your sin offering and your burnt offering and make atonement for yourself and the people; sacrifice the offering that is for the people and make atonement for them, as the Lord has commanded.” (Lev. 9:7)
The sages were puzzled by the instruction, “Come near.” This seems to imply that Aaron had until then kept a distance from the altar. Why so? Rashi gives the following explanation:
Aaron was ashamed and fearful of approaching the altar. Moses said to him: “Why are you ashamed? It was for this that you were chosen.”
There is a name for this syndrome, coined in 1978 by two clinical psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. They called it the imposter syndrome.[1] People who suffer from it feel that they do not deserve the success they have achieved. They attribute it not to their effort and ability but to luck, or timing, or to the fact that they have deceived others into thinking that they are better than they actually are. It turns out to be surprisingly widespread, and particularly so among high achievers. Research has shown that around 40 per cent of successful people do not believe they deserve their success, and that as many as 70 per cent have felt this way at some time or other.
However, as one might imagine, Rashi is telling us something deeper. Aaron was not simply someone lacking in self-confidence. There was something specific that he must have had in mind on that day that he was inducted into the role of High Priest. For Aaron had been left in charge of the people while Moses was up the mountain receiving the Torah. That was when the sin of the Golden Calf took place.
Reading that narrative, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was Aaron’s weakness that allowed it to happen. It was he who suggested that the people give him their gold ornaments, he who fashioned them into a calf, and he who built an altar before it (Ex. 32:1-6). When Moses saw the Golden Calf and challenged Aaron –“What did these people do to you, that you brought upon them this great sin?”– he replied, evasively, “They gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
This was a man profoundly (and rightly) uncomfortable with his role in one of the most disastrous episodes in the Torah, and now he was being called to atone not only for himself but for the entire people. Was this not hypocrisy? Was he not himself a sinner? How could he stand before God and the people and assume the role of the holiest of men? No wonder he felt like an imposter and was ashamed and fearful of approaching the altar.
Moses, however, did not simply say something that would boost his self-confidence. He said something much more radical and life-changing: “It was for this that you were chosen.” The task of a High Priest is to atone for people’s sins. It was his role, on Yom Kippur, to confess his wrongs and failings, then those of his household, then those of the people as a whole (Lev. 16:11-17). It was his responsibility to plead for forgiveness.
“That,” implied Moses, “is why you were chosen. You know what sin is like. You know what it is to feel guilt. You more than anyone else understand the need for repentance and atonement. You have felt the cry of your soul to be cleansed, purified and wiped free of the stain of transgression. What you think of as your greatest weakness will become, in this role you are about to assume, your greatest strength.”
How did Moses know this? Because he had experienced something similar himself. When God told him to confront Pharaoh and lead the Israelites to freedom, he repeatedly insisted that he could not do so. Reread his response to God’s call to lead the Israelites out of Egypt (Ex. chapters 3-4), and they sound like someone radically convinced of his inadequacies. “Who am I?” “They won’t believe in me.” Above all, he kept repeating that he could not speak before a crowd, something absolutely necessary in a leader. He was not an orator. He did not have the voice of command:
Then Moses said to the Lord, “Please, my Lord, I am not a man of words, not yesterday, not the day before and not since You have spoken to Your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” (Ex. 4:10) Moses said to the Lord, “Look, the Israelites do not listen to me. How then will Pharaoh listen to me? Besides, I have uncircumcised lips.” (Ex. 6:12).
Moses had a speech defect. To him that was a supreme disqualification from being a mouthpiece for the Divine word. What he did not yet understand is that this was one of the reasons God chose him. When Moses spoke the words of God, people knew he was not speaking his own words in his own voice. Someone else was speaking through him. This seems to have been the case for Isaiah and Jeremiah, both of whom were doubtful of their ability to speak and who became among the most eloquent of prophets.[2]
The people who can sway crowds with their oratory are generally speaking not prophets. Often they are, or become, dictators and tyrants. They use their power of speech to acquire more dangerous forms of power. God does not choose people who speak with their own voice, telling the crowds what they want to hear. He chooses people who are fully aware of their inadequacies, who stammer literally or metaphorically, who speak not because they want to but because they have to, and who tell people what they do not want to hear, but what they must hear if they are to save themselves from catastrophe. What Moses thought was his greatest weakness was, in fact, one of his greatest strengths.
The point here is not a simple “I’m OK, You’re OK” acceptance of weakness. That is not what Judaism is about. The point is the struggle. Moses and Aaron in their different ways had to wrestle with themselves. Moses was not a natural leader. Aaron was not a natural priest. Moses had to accept that one of his most important qualifications was what nowadays we would call his low self image, but what, operating from a completely different mindset, the Torah calls his humility. Aaron had to understand that his own experience of sin and failure made him the ideal representative of a people conscious of their own sin and failure. Feelings of inadequacy – the imposter syndrome – can be bad news or good news depending on what you do with them. Do they lead you to depression and despair? Or do they lead you to work at your weaknesses and turn them into strengths?
The key, according to Rashi in this week’s parsha, is the role Moses played at this critical juncture in Aaron’s life. He had faith in Aaron even when Aaron lacked faith in himself. That is the role God Himself played, more than once, in Moses’ life. And that is the role God plays in all our lives if we are truly open to Him. I have often said that the mystery at the heart of Judaism is not our faith in God. It is God’s faith in us.
This then is the life-changing idea: what we think of as our greatest weakness can become, if we wrestle with it, our greatest strength. Think of those who have suffered tragedy and then devote their lives to alleviating the suffering of others. Think of those who, conscious of their failings, use that consciousness to help others overcome their own sense of failure.
What makes Tanakh so special is its total candour about humanity. Its heroes –Moses, Aaron, Isaiah, Jeremiah – all knew times when they felt like failures, “imposters.” They had their moments of dark despair. But they kept going. They refused to be defeated. They knew that a sense of inadequacy can bring us closer to God, as King David said: “My sacrifice [i.e. what I bring as an offering to You] O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Ps. 51:19).
Better by far to know you are imperfect than to believe you are perfect. God loves us and believes in us despite, and sometimes because of, our imperfections. Our weaknesses make us human; wrestling with them makes us strong.

[1] Pauline Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes, “The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, vol. 15, no. 3, 1978, pp. 241–247.

[2] There is a striking secular example: Winston Churchill had both a lisp and a stutter and though he fought against both, they persisted long into adulthood. Because of this, he had to think carefully in advance about his major speeches. He was fastidious in writing or dictating them beforehand, rewriting key phrases until the last moment. He used short words wherever possible, made dramatic use of pauses and silences, and developed an almost poetic use of rhythm. The result was not only that he became a great speaker. His speeches, especially over the radio during the Second World War, were a major factor in rousing the spirit of the nation. In the words of Edward Murrow he “mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.”

Shabbat shalom to our precious Beth El community. We would love to see you at 7 p.m. this evening for warm and familiar kabbalat shabbat services. Leave your weekday worries behind and uplift your soul and spirit.

BETH EL SECOND NIGHT SEDER – SATURDAY MARCH 31 AT 6:30 PM. Email us to save your spot! Details below.

Cantor Ben-Moshe’s weekly message:

This Shabbat is Shabbat Hahodesh, the first Shabbat of the month of Nissan, and also the first day of Nissan. This week we also begin the reading of Sefer Vayyikra, the Book of Leviticus. Vayyikra is sometimes called Torat Hakohanim, the Teaching of the Priests, as it deals mainly with the laws of sacrifices and of ritual purity. Our parshah begins with the laws of the ‘olah, the burnt offering, which could be a bull, a sheep or a goat, or a dove, depending upon the means of the person making the offering. For each type, the Torah describes the smoke of the sacrifice as being “a sweet aroma for Hashem”. The commentators note that if one is sacrificing a dove, one would hardly describe the smell of burning feathers as a “sweet aroma”, but rather that the offering of a dove by a person of modest means is just as sweet to God as the offering of a bull by the rich and powerful. While we no longer offer animal sacrifices as worship, the principle still stands, that before God rich and poor are equal, and equally beloved. As we draw closer to Pesah, the festival of liberation for formerly despised slaves, let us always remember that God is as close to the downtrodden as to those upon whom fortune has smiled, and may the day of liberation soon come to all of humanity. Shabbat Shalom and Hodesh Tov.

Opportunities to help with Beth El Passover Preparation. Please “answer the call” and let us know if you can help us prepare for the second night seder.

Sunday March 18 during Hebrew school 10-12
Thursday March 22 6 p.m. onwards.
Sunday March 25 Beth El Spring cleaning day and cooking – 12 to 2 p.m.
Thursday March 29 6 p.m. onwards

Sunday School this weekend, Sunday March 18.

Candle lighting in Austin is at 7.22 p.m.

Sunday school is this Sunday March 18 at 10 a.m.

SAVE THE DATE: Congregation Beth El’s 2nd Night Seder.

PASSOVER ACROSS AMERICA!

Saturday March 31 at 6:30 PM.

In partnership with the National Jewish Outreach Program, Congregation Beth El is proud to host a second night seder, open to the Austin Jewish Community. Please RSVP to save your spot for our fun and interactive second night seder, with delicious kosher food, wine and friends. Led by Cantor Ben-Moshe. info@bethelaustin.org

Congregation Beth El Sisterhood Book Club

Join us as we read By Light of Hidden Candles by Daniella Levy.

We will be meeting at the home of Gail Ellenbogen on Wednesday, March 21 to discuss the book and socialize.

The Congregation Beth El Sisterhood invites all Jewish women to join us for any of our events. Please bring a friend. It is our hope to provide programming to bring us all together. For more information about our events and becoming more active, please contact Shereen Ben-Moshe at shereen@homewyrks.com.

“True greatness is showing respect to the people other people don’t notice. The people who show respect win respect.” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

It was never my ambition or aspiration to be a rabbi. I went to university to study economics. I then switched to philosophy. I also had a fascination with the great British courtroom lawyers, legendary figures like Marshall Hall, Rufus Isaacs and F. E. Smith. To be sure, relatively late, I had studied for the rabbinate, but that was to become literate in my own Jewish heritage, not to pursue a career.
What changed me, professionally and existentially, was my second major yechidut – face-to-face conversation, – with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, in January 1978. To my surprise, he vetoed all my career options: economist, lawyer, academic, even becoming a rabbi in the United States. My task, he said, was to train rabbis. There were too few people in Britain going into the rabbinate and it was my mission to change that.
What is more, he said, I had to become a congregational rabbi, not as an end in itself but so that my students could come and see how I gave sermons (I can still hear in my mind’s ear how he said that word with a marked Russian accent: sirmons). He was also highly specific as to where I was to work: in Jews’ College (today, the London School of Jewish Studies), the oldest extant rabbinical seminary in the English-speaking world.
So I did. I became a teacher at the College, and later its Principal. Eventually I became – again after consulting with the Rebbe – Chief Rabbi. For all this I have to thank not only the Rebbe, but also my wife Elaine. She did not sign up for this when we married. It was not even on our horizon. But without her constant support I could not have done any of it.
I tell this story for a reason: to illustrate the difference between a gift and a vocation, between what we are good at and what we are called on to do. These are two very different things. I have known great judges who were also brilliant pianists. Wittgenstein trained as an aeronautical engineer but eventually dedicated his life to philosophy. Ronald Heifetz qualified as a doctor and a musician but instead became the founder of the School of Public Leadership at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. We can be good at many things, but what gives a life direction and meaning is a sense of mission, of something we are called on to do.
That is the significance of the opening word of today’s parsha, that gives its name to the entire book: Vayikra, “He called.” Look carefully at the verse and you will see that its construction is odd. Literally translated it reads: “He called to Moses, and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying …” The first phrase seems to be redundant. If we are told that God spoke to Moses, why say in addition, “He called”?
The answer is that God’s call to Moses was something prior to and different from what God went on to say. The latter were the details. The former was the summons, the mission – not unlike God’s first call to Moses at the burning bush where He invited him to undertake the task that would define his life: leading the people out of exile and slavery to freedom in the Promised Land.
Why this second call? Probably because the book of Vayikra has, on the face of it, nothing to do with Moses. The original name given to it by the sages was Torat Cohanim, “the Law of the Priests”[1] – and Moses was not a priest. That role belonged to his brother Aaron. So it was as if God were saying to Moses: this too is part of your vocation. You are not a priest but you are the vehicle through which I reveal all My laws, including those of the priests.
We tend to take the concept of a vocation – the word itself comes from the Latin for a “call” – for granted as if every culture has such an idea. However, it is not so. The great German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) pointed out that the idea of vocation, so central to the social ethic of Western culture, is essentially “a religious conception, that of a task set by God.”[2]
It was born in the Hebrew Bible. Elsewhere there was little communication between the gods and human beings. The idea that God might invite human beings to become His partners and emissaries was revolutionary. Yet that is what Judaism is about.
Jewish history began with God’s call to Abraham, to leave his land and family. God called to Moses and the prophets. There is a particularly vivid account in Isaiah’s mystical vision in which he saw God enthroned and surrounded by singing angels:
Then I heard the Voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8)
The most touching account is the story of the young Samuel, dedicated by his mother Hannah to serve God in the sanctuary at Shiloh where he acted as an assistant to Eli the priest. In bed at night he heard a voice calling his name. He assumed it was Eli. He ran to see what he wanted but Eli told him he had not called. This happened a second time and then a third, and by then Eli realised that it was God calling the child. He told Samuel that the next time the Voice called his name, he should reply, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ It did not occur to the child that it might be God summoning him to a mission, but it was. Thus began his career as a prophet, judge and anointer of Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David (1 Samuel 3).
These were all prophetic calls, and prophecy ended during the Second Temple period. Nonetheless the idea of vocation remains for all those who believe in Divine providence. Each of us is different, therefore we each have unique talents and skills to bring to the world. The fact that I am here, in this place, at this time, with these abilities, is not accidental. There is a task to perform, and God is calling us to it.
The man who did more than anyone to bring this idea back in recent times was Viktor Frankl, the psychotherapist who survived Auschwitz. There in the camp he dedicated himself to giving people the will to live. He did so by getting them to see that their lives were not finished, that they still had a task to perform, and that therefore they had a reason to survive until the war was over.
Frankl insisted that the call came from outside the self. He used to say that the right question was not “What do I want from life?” but “What does life want from me?” He quotes the testimony of one of his students who earlier in life had been hospitalised because of mental illness. He wrote a letter to Frankl containing these words:
But in the darkness, I had acquired a sense of my own unique mission in the world. I knew then, as I know now, that I must have been preserved for some reason, however small; it is something that only I can do, and it is vitally important that I do it… In the solitary darkness of the “pit” where men had abandoned me, He was there. When I did not know His name, He was there; God was there.[3]
Reading Psalms in the prison to which the KGB had sent him, Natan Sharansky had a similar experience.[4]
Frankl believed that “Every human person constitutes something unique; each situation in life occurs only once. The concrete task of any person is relative to this uniqueness and singularity.”[5] The essence of the task, he argued, is that it is self-transcending. It comes from outside the self and challenges us to live beyond mere self-interest. To discover such a task is to find that life – my life – has meaning and purpose.
How do you discover your vocation? The late Michael Novak argued[6] that a calling has four characteristics. First, it is unique to you. Second, you have the talent for it. Third, it is something which, when you do it, gives you a sense of enjoyment and renewed energy. Fourth, do not expect it to reveal itself immediately. You may have to follow many paths that turn out to be false before you find the true one.
Novak quotes Logan Pearsall Smith who said, “The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.” All real achievement requires backbreaking preparation. The most common estimate is 10,000 hours of deep practice. Are you willing to pay this price? It is no accident that Vayikra begins with a call – because it is a book about sacrifices, and vocation involves sacrifice. We are willing to make sacrifices when we sense that a specific role or task is what we are called on to do.
This is a life-changing idea. For each of us God has a task: work to perform, a kindness to show, a gift to give, love to share, loneliness to ease, pain to heal, or broken lives to help mend. Discerning that task, hearing God’s call, is what gives a life meaning and purpose. Where what we want to do meets what needs to be done, that is where God wants us to be.

Please consider a donation to Austin’s friendly neighborhood shul! Your tax deductible donation (T’rumah) helps us immensely. You can sponsor a kidish lunch for $100, co-sponsor Passover, or just help those in our shul who need an extra hand.
Every dollar does good! Every volunteer is treasured