The key line that defines for me the essence of James Cameron´s film Avatar is “what a beautiful brain”. The story tells us of how human beings have achieved technology to project themselves into genetically engineered alien bodies. As the human characters in the film use the genius of science and technology languages, we learn that the native species of the planet have achieved through other means, the same end. The “alien” natives of the planet, the 11 feet tall Na’vi, have the power, as well as most of the creatures that inhabit the planet Pandora, to interconnect physically with the mind of others. Other members of their species, other animals, and to what they consider the Tree of Life itself, the big brain of the planet, the source of life. The whole planet is interconnected in a visually clear way, giving the sensation that the whole planet is one giant organism, like a coral reef, a giant brain in which every creature, every plant, every thing, is a synapse, another branch of the brain lighting electrical discharges against each other.
I believe Beauty is in the power to interconnect, where the pure self becomes intensely aware of the other, where that illusion of “otherness” drops. Then you see yourself in a connection with what you thought was something separated. True empathy is created in this connection, and this connection can be a spiderweb of other interconnections ad infinitum.
The en vogue word and philosophy trying to spread around the world is to be Green. Green is saving the tree, but there has been for a while another movement. Blue. Blue is saving yourself through the awareness of the interconnectivity of this little blue planet, something so small and insignificant in the vast perspective of the universe, yet each of its parts so complex, so unique, so precious. For example, neurons in our head do some interaction at night, and from that this moving soul creates a story. This story spreads to the neurons of other moving souls. And they exchange an experience that was “imagined”. A simple spark caused by all the salts and chemicals in your body, made more connections than those stars in the universe out there, to those whose magnitude makes us feel so small. They illuminate and send these messages through the material construct that allows them to exist in the physical realm (i.e your flesh-made brain, with all its complexities and connections, and all the machinery that we maintain working through the conversion of energies borrowed from other existing things flowing with more of these sparks, some of us call them vitamins, nutrients, klipot, energy, calories, whatever you call or count them.
The beauty of how the actors themselves are avatars in this amazing new technology is almost awe inspiring. Cameron has always pushed the technologies with his movies (The Abyss, T2, Titanic, and his robotic submarine explorations in IMAX3D). He created his childhood dream-movie (remember, the guy who made the top-selling movie of all time, with this amazing imagination!) so they created a whole planet in the most realistic way possible.
The plot is criticized by some because it is “simplistic”. So is Titanic then “just” another love story. Poor guy meets rich girl, just happens to be in a sinking boat. People simplify stories when their content is primal, basic. They call it childish sometimes. These are the people who became so “adult” that killed their inner child, the inner Buddha, the pure part of your soul that stare you in the face and tell you “there is no spoon”.
For my part, I love basic, Jungian stories, and this movie tells many layers of a myth necessary for our times delivered in a beautiful, artistic way of moviemaking, the dream factory, the machine that we have created through language, in this case computers and cameras, and spread the stories we want to share, the dreams we make into reality, the avatar of our consciousness trying to come from dreamworld into this flesh reality. The movie carries many messages for the new generation, those who are always socializing through Nintendo DS, Facebook, Tweeter, etc etc. This interconnected generation needs to remember that their images are just avatars. There is a reality behind, as if the “real” world is just another “Facebook”, another place where we put our image, a representation of us, but not us. Not really, but almost.
AVATAR tells about the need to protect all the outer layers of interconnectivity, from the inner, dream-walker self, to the tribe, the extended surrounding, the society, the city, the planet, beyond. This masterpiece of 21th century movie making is here to teach us, just as the characters on the movie,about the interconnectivity of this electric signatures we call synapses, brain activity, personality, is connected on a much higher level.

Every time a catastrophe like this happens we find fundamentalists, Jewish, Christian, Muslims, spilling their twisted view on reality blaming the victims of the place for the cause of their afflictions. I`ve heard some of these religious leaders braying all kinds of nonsense: That hurricane Katrina happened because Mardi Gras, the Tsunami happened because of idol worshiping, even heard Jews saying that the Holocaust happened in Germany because that was the cradle of Reform Judaism. Now I hear comments about Haitian making deals with the devil  (voodoo).

Humans need answers to everything, even more when the sensation of being so small is so overwhelming and we need to make sense out of things. We need to assign name and causes to everything, and when the magnitude is so big, like in the case of this earthquake, our questions about God and God´s intervention in the world abound, and the answers can be, well, pretty stupid.

I don´t believe in this God that stretches God`s arm to punish, to see us like a sadistic puppet show.

This week we read in the parasha (weekly Torah portion) about the moment that for the first time God reveals God-self to Moses. Moses, as any other human, needs to give a name to this deity, something that can encapsulate the essence or nature of this god. You need names and concepts if you want to share this experience with other people. But the moment something infinite as God receives a name or a characteristic it immediately limits Himself into the limited realm, the realm of human language. The name God gives to Moses is Y-H-V-H, a word derived from the verb To Be that could be translated as “I am who I am”, “I will be who I’ll be” or maybe even “Be-ing”. Just Be-ing. God was, God is, God will be.

During the week we read the portion called Yitro (in which the ten commandments are given) we read the Haftarah (complementary prophetic reading) from the book of Kings. In it we find the prophet Elijah confused, looking for answers. He climbs up God’s holy mountain, in a way of emulating Moses’ revelatory experience. What he finds is an experience that through the years has become one of my favorite passages of the Tanakh (Jewish Bible).

It says:

God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of God, for God is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before God, but God was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but God was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

This is the God I believe in. I don’t find God in the earthquake, but in the silent whisper that prompts us to act, to help others. Y-H-V-H, a sound without vowels,the sound of breathing, the gentle whispers that moves our hearts and fills our heads with ideas. Ideas about love, about philanthropy, about brotherhood, about life, the universe and everything. Some people spend their days talking about how God hates homosexuals, other ethnic groups, people who practice religion differently, people with different economic statuses. They spend their time talking about how many angels can dance on the top of a needle, or counting  letters of texts or how many souls a specific human being has.

I encourage all of you to practice the following: Stay still, listen to the soft whisper and you will hear what is trying to tell you:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

The answer is blowing in the wind.

And then there is the side of me who spends so many hours reading not about the past but the future, the possibilities of how things can improve for the betterment of humanity and sometimes pointing us at warning signs to avoid pitfalls. If you know me by now you should have realized that I love everything that has to do with science fiction, technological gadgets, and the future. My favorite movie when I was kid was Back to the Future Part II, in which in the year 2015 we would be having flying cars and floating skateboards.
We are now entering the year 2010. For the last few years my adult dreams of the future were becoming 30 as a recently initiated rabbi working in a congregation.
HINENI. Temple Israel in Manchester New Hampshire. Just as the oracle predicted!
So technically the future is now. At least for my last big dream. Now what? What is my goal for this community that has embraced me so candidly?
I think we need to do a lot of collective reflections about what the future is going to be. I want to bring more events to different age groups, specially those who were born after man landed on the moon.
There are generational vacuums in synagogues not only through New Hampshire but all around the world. I want to share with you how the world is changing faster and faster and how synagogues are not updating or adapting to the pace or search for meaning in the new generations.
We need computers, a projector and many other tools that in my hands will be an alchemic blend of technology and the art of teaching. Incorporating so many of the different styles, sources and mediums I have shared with you through the last few months. If you build it they will come. We might be able to provide the best 21st century Jewish education for all ages.
We need to honor the past and at the same time learn from our tradition`s appreciation for what the juggling of dates does to your soul and to the human condition. But we need to know when to make way for the new generations. Perhaps their voices have not been heard.
I want to make Temple Israel the meeting point where generations can dwell together, honoring the past, living the present, and dreaming the future.
May the Force make You live long and prosper and give you peace.

Rabbi David

P.S: (I still hope that in the next five years my fantasy of having my own Hover-board will come true¡)

Maimonides on the Book of Job

by Rabbi David Cohen-Henriquez

It is not surprising that the great Maimonides´analysis on the book of Job would strip the supernatural elements of angels and demons to present us with a discourse on philosophy and understanding of life through the sciences.

The book of Job deals with the issue of theodicy that attempts to explain why is there pain and suffering in this world. The agonizing set of events that engulfs Job during the narrative is the result of a cosmic debate between God and Satan, one of his divine beings.

For a rationalist as Maimonides it is hard to believe the story in its literal sense. Therefore he explains the figures of angels and divine creatures are symbols of different forces of nature, are and represented in the Bible in an allegorical way. Therefore each angel represents a different element, force, emotion, intellect; angels are the representation of all that exists.

Yet it is the figure of Satan, the fallen angel, which is harder to describe. What does he represent? Is he the root of evil, and if so why does God let him exist?

First we have to understand what Satan symbolizes. If all the other angels represent something in the natural world Satan becomes the privation, lack or absence of the natural form of something in an object of creation. It´s the corruption of matter, its decay. The natural world, Creation, is unstable and decays, it falls.

We can understand from this that Satan is not only “the fallen angel”, but also the angel that makes things fall, draws them back to nothingness. It is also the reason in the story of Job it is said that Satan has come from roaming the earth. His place is down here, in the physical, decaying, limited Creation realm, and not in the Heavens, where things are eternal and pure.

Without privation and decay there would be no existence. In order for life to exist there needs to be a balance, a constant struggle between decay and aspiration towards the source of life. Decay and privation has to  happen to give change to new life to appear as well as to keep the current existing life form in a homeostatic point.

We can take as an example an organ of the body; if the cells in the organ start decaying too fast it creates malfunction and disease and eventually death. However, if cellular death never happened the growth would not be regulated and we would end up with a tumor, a saturation of the expansion of the life process of the cells.

It is our misunderstanding of this natural process of how things work in life that,  like the hero of our story, we human beings cannot fathom the reason why these things happen and we classify them under the label of Evil or Bad.

These types of “evils” occur in three different levels according to Maimonides:

The natural disasters, which is the most basic and raw manifestation of this entity.

The violence that humans cause others, which is the second level.

The harm that we cause ourselves, which is the level of diseases and internal pains caused by us voluntarily or by neglecting the needs of our bodies, falling into diseases according to Maimonides’ medieval understanding of medicine.

The book of Job comes to explain about the limitations that we humans have over knowledge and the ways of understanding the Universe that surrounds us, the visible and the invisible. If we follow Maimonides view the story teaches us about achieving a psychological level of understanding that would lead us to an immunity towards suffering, understanding and loving the world as well as the Creator, and avoid falling in desperation and depression when the limited world falls pray of the decay brought by privation.